The Atlantic Sound
Caryl Phillips
Faber, £16.99, 240pp
Buy it at BOL
Going on holiday with Caryl Phillips would be a curious experience. His intellectual curiosity leads him to fascinating parts of the world, often in interesting ways - across the Atlantic in a banana boat, for example. But his socially conservative nature denies him all sorts of adventurous possibilities when he gets there. He avoids verbal contact with strangers (if it were not for the interviews he set up before he left, you wonder whether he would speak to anyone at all), frets about air conditioning and bans music from the car for fear that it will distract his driver.
A fortnight of such fastidiousness in foreign parts would drive you insane. You imagine a sweaty standoff in a sun-baked street: Phillips pleading for a return to the hotel for a poolside nap, you screaming: "If I'd known you were going to be like this we would have gone to Tenerife."
For all that, The Atlantic Sound is, for the most part, impressive. The writing is clear and elegant, the pace varied and the thesis underpinning the project engaging. At its heart lies an exploration of various notions of "home" through a series of visits to pivotal points in what has become known as the Black Atlantic - the once financially lucrative and still culturally resonant triangle that linked Africa, the Americas and Britain in the trade of slaves and other goods. It starts with Phillips retracing the journey he made as an infant in his mother's arms by boat from the Caribbean to Britain, then moves to Liverpool, Ghana and South Carolina; a peculiar and incongruous trip to Israel is added as an epilogue that feels like an afterthought.
Phillips is at his strongest when narrating other people's stories. He relates with compelling style the life of Mohammed Mansour Nassirudeen, a Ghanaian who was arrested, imprisoned and deported from England for being an illegal immigrant after a string of poorly paid dead-end jobs and aborted attempts to study. He approaches with sensitivity Mansour's frustrations at the drifting life of unemployment in Ghana, but remains critical of his determination to flee his native land again in search of illegal life in America.
Similarly engaging is his depiction of the white South Carolinian judge J Waties Waring and his wife Elizabeth, who risked and lost both their social and political standing in Charleston's high society when they made their stand against segregation. Through the political self-exile of the Americans and the partially self-inflicted economic displacement of the Ghanaian, we begin to understand the complex relationship that individuals have to negotiate - between where they are from geographically and where they are going intellectually.
Phillips is at his weakest when telling his own story. He recites his actions in what feels like real time, so that what looks like attention to detail reads as a laborious account of the banal. He tells us when he is opening books, consulting maps and supping inconsequential pints. A four-page account of waiting for a delayed plane followed by a non-conversation with a drunk fellow passenger is rarely the stuff of which good travel writing is made.
In common with most literature of this genre, the book is deliberately disjointed in sequence and style - like the collective consciousness of the black diaspora itself, it shifts between the past and present, the personal and polemical. It is a style which Phillips has mastered in his fiction, particularly The Nature of Blood and The Final Passage, but in The Atlantic Sound it occasionally jars. The account of an African trader's stay in Liverpool, where he attempted to recoup money swindled from his father by a corrupt Liverpudlian, begins as abruptly as it ends, making Phillips's account of his own time in the city feel like an adjunct rather than a complement to the 19th-century story.
Yet when humour emerges - as in a visit to a festival in Ghana centred around the "return" of westerners of African descent to "Mother Africa" - the writing throws up comic scenes that expose the tensions within the diaspora: a row between Ghanaians and African-Americans about who should be responsible for the slave fortresses on the coast; the Jamaicans who give an African concierge a patronising lecture on the benefits of ensuite facilities and are finally ejected from the hotel because they want to smoke marijuana in their rooms. To add insult to injury, they have picked the lemon grass planted to keep mosquitoes away and made tea out of it.
The Ghanaian festival is a gathering of people for whom Africa has become a psychological crutch - the practitioners of "quick ethnic fixes and cheap pseudo-solidarities" that Paul Gilroy, in his recent book, refers to as "an inadequate salve for real pain". The reader is left in no doubt as to what Caryl Phillips makes of these confected identities. What is not clear, however, is what impact these travels have had on Phillips's own sense of self. As a journey around the globe the book is intriguing; but as a voyage of self-discovery it never quite arrives.
Gary Younge is the author of No Place Like Home: A Black Briton's Journey Through the American South, published by Picador (£16).
