As an international man of letters, Caryl - 'Caz' - Phillips is more Anthony Blunt than Austin Powers, better at covering his tracks than singing about his track record; although he leads the kind of life most writers dream of. With six novels, numerous films, plays, essays and anthologies to his name, he's that rare thing, a 'professional writer' who makes a living from his pen. Yet despite his Booker-shortlisting for Crossing the River, and being named one of Granta's best young British novelists in 1993, his writing has never achieved the popular recognition it deserves. Is this because he writes, unremittingly, about being black?
Over a couple of pints in a drab west London pub he plays hide-and-seek with this question. He cuts an elegant figure in jeans and a black sweatshirt, although the lager shandy may be a mistake. A young 45, his roving accent maps his journey from St Kitts, via the backstreets of Leeds and the ivory towers of Oxford, to New York.
'As soon as you put a black character into a book in any Western society,' he begins, 'the novel will be perceived through a prism of race.' So his books aren't about race? 'I don't really think so. The fiction I write is intensely personal. There's a lot of isolation, there's a lot of thwarted ambition, there's a lot of obstacles which have to be surmounted, there's a lot about class. I could put in all sorts of signifiers about loneliness, or about worry, or about hope, but a lot of commentators would look at it and think, well it's about race.'
When I tell him that David Beckham has just been declared the most prominent black male icon in Britain he cracks a wry smile: 'I would be happy about that but he plays for that scum Manchester United. As a Leeds fan I can only respond tribally.'
Phillips may be a Leeds fan, but, as a lecturer in modern British fiction at Columbia, he hasn't spent much time recently at Elland Road. And even in New York, he admits, his colleagues are 'a bit pissed off' that while they're busy teaching, he's secreted with his writing.
He is an intensely private man, and even in his literary friendships he keeps his cards hidden. He's close to the poet Glyn Maxwell, and has a longstanding friendship with Graham Swift, yet neither of them knew anything about A Distant Shore (Secker & Warburg £15.99, pp312) until it was finished. On reading the novel, Maxwell's only words were: 'I love it but it's bleak.' It's a pithy assessment of a book that encompasses civil war, a motiveless killing, child abuse, madness and despair, but which is also gripping and compassionate and terribly moving.
A Distant Shore juxtaposes two worlds in an English cul-de-sac. Dorothy and Solomon are neighbours who find an awkward intimacy when Solomon begins driving Dorothy to her weekly doctor's appointments. She - a retired music teacher, disgusted by the decay of manners around her - is impressed by his driving gloves. He - a refugee from an African civil war, employed on the estate as nightwatchman - is beguiled by the pride which holds her apart from their more vulgar neighbours.
This pastiche of Driving Miss Daisy is haunted by the threat of miscegenation, for which Dorothy and Solomon are eventually punished by their bigoted community. She is quietly cracking up, and when she takes a demented trip to the coast to visit her dead sister, Solomon is beaten up and dumped in the canal by the village thugs.
This is a bleak world all right, but to Phillips's mind it's not without hope. 'Dorothy and Solomon driving in a car together to the hospital: you know people are looking at them and thinking, "What is this 30-year-old African dude doing with this 55-year-old white woman?" But because we're in the novel, it hasn't occurred to us that we might stare at them if we saw them, and the reason we're with them is because we understand their stories.'
Through their stories, which take up the body of the novel, we discover that Dorothy is just as rootless as Solomon. Both are seeking asylum; he from his country, she from hers. Which character came first? 'She did, because to my mind there's always been a great number of white British people who feel out of tune in as profound a way as any immigrant; who don't feel that their history has been explained to them adequately.'
Phillips has some sympathy for the racists of his childhood who had lived on the same cobbled street all their lives only to wake up in the Sixties and find a Pakistani corner shop and a West Indian club down the road. 'They're as detached from their own country and are as puzzled by it as the people who are arriving. They're equally marooned.'
He grew up in Leeds surrounded by people like Dorothy - 'to be honest, completely surrounded by people like that, who were kind and who had discipline as well' - against whom I sense a lingering anger. No, he insists, never anger: 'I don't think anger is a very useful emotion, certainly not for a novelist. Frustration is a very useful emotion because it's often the engine room out of which writing begins. You have to understand and that's why sometimes I have to listen to fictional people who I don't want to have a drink with.'
I ask what he heard when he was listening to Dorothy's deranged voice. 'Loneliness does some strange things to people. There's a certain degree of mental illness in loneliness. There's a certain generation, certain people who feel isolated, who lose touch with reality. I saw it and I feel it and I have some sympathy with it, but you begin to get the idea that English history, which is supposed to begin in 1066 and all that, is no longer as confidently sequential; either for people who look like they're traditionally English - confident, people of linearity - nor for the people who arrive, for the newcomers, the immigrants.'
Postcolonial theorists adore Caryl Phillips for statements like this. As one lecturer explains to me, Phillips is 'good to teach' because 'he seems to take theoretical propositions and say, "We'll just fill up this idea".' A typical paper on his work is titled 'Ambiguous Visions of Home: The Paradoxes of Diasporic Belonging', but when Phillips visited its author, Bénédicte Ledent, in Belgium, he was dismayed by the lack of fit between his creativity and her criticism: 'I went to a bar in Liège and she'd got a number of her PhD students sitting there, and it took them a couple of drinks before they started asking me shit I could not answer.' He's deeply politicised himself, but wants to retain a private space for his fiction. 'I sometimes feel like a butterfly that's been pinned down, examined, probed.'
He has made a career out of turning the personal into the political, but now, finally, he's returning from the political to the personal. He's been looking into the history of Leeds, and loves the fact that when he walked to school he was following a route travelled by the earliest Celtic settlers in Britain. This made him rethink his apparently alien upbringing. He believes now that migration defines Leeds, which has been hosting immigrants for thousands of years. And as he explains, whether writing about St Kitts or Ghana, Leeds was in there somewhere.
'I never lost sight of England, because it's very central to who I am, not only as a human being but as a writer. It's like waves of concentric circles: you go out and out to try to hold the whole thing together historically, but you come back to Dorothy and Solomon living next door to each other and they don't understand each other's narrative. But I feel I do, because 20 years of writing has helped me to understand them both.'
