CROSSING THE RIVER

By Caryl Phillips
Alfred A. Knopf (1994)
$22.00 237 pages
Reviewed by J. Douglas Allen-Taylor

For his fifth novel, African-British writer Caryl Phillips has chosen to paint a story of epic scale: the slave trade's scattering of Africans into the diaspora, sweeping them into all the far and foreign lands of the earth, lost and alienated from their ancestral home. It is a huge story...a monumental story. It is a story that demands a canvas as grand as an East Los Angeles mural wall or as staggeringly vast as Italy's Sistine Chapel. It is a story that demands broad strokes and deep colors to drive its details along.

Unfortunately, to paint this grand epic, Mr. Phillips has only brought along a handful of light pastels and some touch-up brushes. "Crossing The River" misses the sweep and scope of its own great subject and so, on that point alone, it fails. This is a bad novel.

It's a shame, too, because Caryl Phillips seems to be a good writer. His strengths are in the use of a muted subtlety of tone and in holding up a mirror to his subjects from unlikely angles. But here, without the rush of a good story line to carry them along, those talents are wasted.

"Crossing The River" starts off, encouragingly enough, with an African father selling off his three children to slave traders. "A desperate foolishness," he says by way of opening explanation. "The crops failed."

One wonders what type of psychological devastation this might have wrought on the children themselves, and how this would have affected their lives in slavery and their relationships with their own offspring. However, we absolutely never hear from them again. Instead, the father's spirit hovers in guilt and self-afflicted torture for the next 250 years, tracing his family line among the "many-tongued chorus" of the progeny of the slave folk, picking out three of his own descendants whose lives help him "rediscover [his] lost children."

The story of one of these descendants, of Martha, who escapes from slavery after traveling to Colorado, contains the best writing of the book, such as her memory of the breakup of the plantation where she lived, and the selling away of her daughter:

"My Eliza Mae holds on to me, but it will be to no avail. She will be a prime purchase. And on her own she stands a better chance of a fine family. I want to tell her this, to encourage her to let go, but I have not the heart. I look on. The auctioneer cries to the heavens. A band strikes up. A troupe of minstrels begins to dance. Soon the bidding will begin. 'Moma.' Eliza Mae whispers the word over and over again, as though this were the only word she possessed. This one word. This word only."

Had the book concentrated in this area it would have been a good book, a very emotional and moving book, a book that would have given us a better understanding of the terror of these times. But Martha's story is the briefest of the three descendants, and she is, unaccountably, the only one of the three who is allowed to talk for herself.

The other two descendants (Nash, who returns to Africa in the 1830's as a Liberian missionary, and Travis, an American soldier stationed in World War II England) are presented only as adjuncts (important adjuncts, yes, but adjuncts, nonetheless) of the life stories of the white people with whom they come in contact.

We see Nash reflected, opaquely, through the eyes of Edward, his former master. Two or three times are we allowed to hear Nash's voice, in letters sent to Edward. But Edward remained his benefactor after his manumission, setting him up as a Liberian missionary, and it is clear that Nash's letters to Edward do not reflect all of his secret thoughts. In the place of some sort of insight into the life of Nash who, after all, is supposed to be one of the subjects of this book, the author provides page after page of Edward's rheumy ruminations, such as this account of his walk on the nighttime streets of Monrovia, the capital of Liberia:

"Certain that further sleep would elude him for some hours yet, he dressed quickly, pausing only to inspect his aging body and to listen as a rat ran across the thin boards of the ceiling. Then, satisfied that he was attired in a proper d out into the streets in search of some innocent amusement. In this Africa it appeared that both dawn and dusk were brief and ambiguous, as though there were little time to waste, and Edward soon found himself enveloped in gloom. In the distance, he heard the quiet engine of the sea continually renewing itself..."

And so on. On this walk, Edward drinks a tankard of beer and encounters a sick-eyed dog and an Irish prostitute. The dog and the prostitute give Edward the shivers by looking at him as he passes by, and neither of them have the least bit more to do with Edward, with the story, or with the descendants of the African man who sold his children into slavery.

The section on Travis, the American soldier, is similarly poorly conceived, with the author trying to be far too cute and clever. This section consists of the first person, singular, commentary of a woman in a village in World War II England. Is she a descendant of the father who sold his children? The reader is led to assume so, given the fact that the woman is generally ostracized by the other people of the village, but since she never gives a description of herself, we don't know for sure.

Thirty pages into the section--if close attention is paid--the reader discovers that an American soldier the woman had met had hair "like thin black wool." If you missed that reference, it is 60 pages later that the woman first identifies the soldier, Travis, as one of the "Coloureds." Perhaps Phillips believed that such a mystery would keep the reader's interest. It did, for a time. But a reader who goes through 70 percent of this section being led to believe that the woman protagonist was of African descent (and thus a direct tie to the characters of the rest of the book) would probably feel a little bit betrayed and misled by the author. I did.

And if this were not enough unnecessary baggage for the book to drag around, Phillips also decided to include portions of the journal of the slave ship's captain to whom the father sold his children. The author appears to have gone to great lengths to make this an accurate reproduction of a ship's journal, including all of the tedious notations of a real expedition and ocean journey. You ever research one of these actual historical documents? I got bad flashbacks of dust and sneezing in the basement of one of the UC Berkeley libraries.

It is only at the end of 25 dreary pages of "[o]n this morning discovered William Barber, Cooper, guilty of broaching a cask of ale reserved for cabin use and filling it with water. Put him in irons and, the facts being fully proved, ordered 12 lashes" that the slave-ship captain buys the three children in question, a transaction that is only mentioned matter-of-factly, in passing. He never appears to come in contact with them again.

Friends who have read Phillips' previous work, especially the novel "Cambridge", tell me that he is an accomplished writer, and should be given another chance. I'll go for that. He certainly needs another chance, since he blew this one.