Reviews for Foreigners

The average rating for Foreigners based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-04-25 00:00:00 Jamie Gillis Three historical figures, black or mixed-race, living at very different times in England, are the subject of Caryl Phillips's latest book. Two of them had come at a young age from the West Indies and West Africa respectively, the third was a son of an immigrant father and a white English mother. They have in common their belief that England is their home and their yearning to fit into the society of their time. All three marry into English families and raise families of their own. However, as a result of changing circumstances, they each end up in misery and hopelessness. In a merging of fictional reportage, memoir and description of historical facts, the author retraces their lives and the gradually more hostile environments leading to their unhappy end. Francis Barber came to England as a young slave, gained his freedom and became the long time servant and companion of Samuel Johnson, the famous 18th century literary figure. Randolf Turpin turned into a national boxing hero around 1950, culminating in his briefly gaining the middleweight world championship. Finally, David Oluwale arrived in England in 1949 from his native Nigeria as a young stowaway and settled in the industrial region of Leeds. He became known as the first victim of racially motivated police brutality leading to his death in 1969. Each story is self-contained - unconnected to the others. The links are the underlying themes of a black British subject's struggle to belong to "his" country. As an outsider in the "home" country, they must come to terms with a society that they inadequately understand and that is less than helpful in easing their adaptation and integration. In attempting to place the stories in their true context, Phillips applies a different narration style to each tale. Barber's story is told in the voice of an 18th century gentleman journalist and his stilted language makes this story deliberately awkward and irritating reading. The narrator professes his liberal views, claiming to correct the general poor regard people have for Barber following his master's death. His stated empathy with his subject does not hide the deeply felt prejudices against blacks of the time. Turpin's anonymous biographer shows more sympathy for the man and the challenges he faced and goes into great detail describing them. Brought up in very modest circumstances by his widowed mother, "Randy" followed his brothers into a boxing career. His surprise rise to fame and title, brought sudden wealth to a young man, completely unprepared for a life of luxury and the management of his affairs. His numerous sudden "friends" exploited his generosity and kindness. His aggressive side, which led him into boxing in the first place, was particularly evident in his treatment of his women. The fame and fortunes, however, were short-lived and the poverty and misery that followed eventually broke him, despite the loving support of his young family. In the third story, the author takes a very different narrative approach. The case of David Oluwale is a mosaic of a multitude of voices - time witnesses, each giving their own personal view and perspective on the man and his life in Leeds. They include a young girl, a social worker, another Nigerian immigrant, a doctor and, of course, the police. Nobody knows him well enough, yet the views vary from "quiet, educated, well-dressed and polite" to "unkempt, violent, sub-normal and savage". It is up to the reader to draw their own picture. Interleaved with the David's personal story, Phillips, who was born in Leeds, goes into disproportionate length and detail about the city's history through the ages and its role in the industrial revolution in Britain. While it adds some context to the narrative, it does divert the reader's attention away from the primary topic of the story. David's death led to a trial against two police officers known to have pursued and haunted him consistently. The tragedy of a life, started with great hope and idealism, ends after numerous periods in police custody, years in a mental institution and finally living on the street. Phillips presents his readers with detailed portraits of the three men and their circumstances. While their stories are colourful, in describing them from the perspective of contemporary, yet outside observers, he sidesteps any discussion of the inner turmoil his subjects must have experienced. At a general level, his narrative expose problems of racial integration that have relevance today, yet he avoids specifics, except for the last case. In many ways, David's story is the most moving of the three, yet also devastating in its implications for the society at the time and since. Overall, the author remains in a grey zone between fact and fiction. The details of Turpin's story appear to be a factual account of his life without many creative elements beyond it. It is also unclear, for example, whether the statements by witnesses at the trial after David's death refer to actual quotes or imagined comments to fit the author's interpretation of David's profile. Phillips doesn't provide any sources or references to further reading on the three individuals. In the case of David, that could be seen as a serious omission as the research by Kester Aspden was well underway. Nationality Wog: The Hounding of David Oluwale.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-08-22 00:00:00 Kari Nord Foreigners comprises three novellas. Each deals with a real life. The first, "Doctor Johnson's Watch", reveals the life of Johnson's Black manservant, Francis Barber. The second, "Made in Wales", relates the main events in the life of the Black boxer, Randolph Turpin. And the final novella examines the case of David Oluwale, a Black immigrant worker persecuted by the police. The three works span from 1752 to 2006 and chart, with some irony, the extent to which a Black individual is always a foreigner within the diaspora. Their content is biographical, without a doubt, but Phillips is interested in something more than biography. His concern throughout the three novellas 'or is this a novel?' is the narrative voice and the truths that it might tell. In 1967, one of the great experimentalists of the last century, William Golding, published a novel as three linked novellas. This wasThe Pyramid. In essence, Foreigners is a set of linked narratives. They spark off one another, rubbing like flints, opening flickering questions. In each, the narrative voice is key. Foreigners is a fine fictional experiment. The first novel is a finely crafted masterpiece. Written in the style of the C18 novel, the life of Francis Barber is told with clarity. Stylistically, the pitch is exact, presenting the arrogant and unified voice of its narrator through an English that never falls into pastiche. "…there were soon few within the doctor's circle, who found either sympathy or concern for the negro's welfare. Within a few years of his arrival in Lichfield, the careless Barber, had also, much to the dismay of his few remaining supporters, managed to fully deplete the capital which had been set aside to provide him with an annuity." (p.21). Such measured prose could be belong to either Equiano or Fielding, yet what betrays its narrator continually as White is his emphasis on capital and the racist assumptions of the C18: Barber lacked the rational guidance of the White race. This section of Foreigners builds towards a sentimental gesture worthy of Sterne. The first novella, in Foreigners, closing at it does with the severe illness of Frances Barber, brings the point of writing to around 1800. Historically, the reader is at a liminal point, as one century becomes another. The second novella recreates a similar borderline. It closes with a mention of a statue erected to the boxer Randolph Turpin, in 2001, and a 2006 interview with his daughters, Annette and Charmaine. The style in this second section is typical of C20 journalistic prose, rather detached, without character, but is transformed in the final pages as Turpin is seen through the eyes of his family and the daughters are allowed to speculate on the statue erected in his honour. One tantalising aspects of Golding's novelist technique was the reversal of perspective at the last minute. And this thought would appear to be in Phillip's mind in the first two novellas: narrator one is presented with a meeting that could have transformed his understanding, yet he falls back into the prejudiced beliefs of his time: it would have been better for Barber to become Quashey once more and have returned to Jamaica because England was unsuitable for the Black temperament; narrator two begins to see that his narrative of Turpin is a cliché and emotionally deeper than he has described. Written from the outside, the two novellas are the opposite of the form that Phillips has avoided: the emotional first-person slave narrative. They look upon two enslaved (though supposedly liberated) lives to investigate the consciousness of the narrator and the kind of fictions that different centuries favour. In the final novella, there is a deliberate lack of unity. Unity of voice is what the narrators in the first two novellas achieve. A comparison between Kesper Aspden's Nationality:Wog and "Northern Lights", which deal with the same material, helps to illustrate the interests in the closing of Foreigners. Aspden's factual work is written as a piece of crime investigating, a surveying of evidence, from which a portrait of David Oluwale emerges. The book is intelligently and sympathetically written. But more interests Phillips than the case of David Oluwale: his interest is in history and the dislocation that occurs when personal history collides with it. Just as the first two novellas were held together by a unity of voice, so the third novella becomes a collection of fragmented voices, all of which struggle to cohere as they mime the problem of identity and coherence within the diaspora. Reading the third novella is like reading vocal points in time'from scattered islands. The voices range from the emotional "I" of the opening character: "I remember he always used to wear a big black coat…" (p.167). To the distanced, sympathetic voice of a narrator: "David, do you remember this girl? This is a creative, narrative voice, liberated in a way that the voices in novellas one and two were not: "Leaving home. Yoruba boy. With your dreams of being an engineer locked up in your heart." (p.173) The sea, which is a constant image throughout Foreigners (Barber is forced onto HMS Princess Royal, Turpin crosses to America on the Queen Mary), becomes an image of dramatic terror. At the most extreme, there are the voices from crime reports, journals and historical accounts. A welter of voices'even the voices in street graffiti'becomes a tide of questions. The de-centering of the final narrative is a piece of triumphant post-modernism, though that triumph is continually questioned as Phillips pursues questions about identity and the kind of identities that fiction might create. What makes Foreigners a great work of fiction is the thoroughness of its research and how fact is liberated into fiction. Or more accurately, how Phillips studies how fact can be liberated into fiction such that new, living perspectives arise from old prejudices.