Invisible Men

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The New York Sun

In a 2000 afterward to his remarkable “The European Tribe” (1987), an account of his travels exploring the continent’s racial attitudes, Caryl Phillips testified that in the intervening years, there had been undeniable changes for the better. Blacks were increasingly visible in sports, politics, and the arts. Even so, bigotry remained overwhelming, he wrote, so much so that it made him wonder “just how deeply Europe is wedded to inequity.”

In “Foreigners,” his affecting but uneven new book of historical fiction (Knopf, 256 pages, $24.95), Mr. Phillips uses characters based on a trio of tragic real-life figures to look back across 200 years of that unhappy marriage. Even in its title, “Foreigners” declares its central characters, three black Englishmen, to be outsiders: Francis Barber, the Jamaican manservant who was “given” to Samuel Johnson and eventually became the great writer’s heir; Randolph Turpin, the mixed-race boxer who stunned the world in 1951 by defeating Sugar Ray Robinson, and David Oluwale, a Nigerian immigrant who was killed by policemen in 1969.

Despite their differences, their lives, as Mr. Phillips presents them, are similar enough in wretchedness and isolation. Each man was, for a time, the best-known black man in England. Each died in poverty. And each man, after initial bouts of rebellion, wanted to belong, to find a way to fit into society. But each failed because of his own intractable sense of self and the resistance of a country that didn’t want him or didn’t know what to do with him. In case anyone might miss the point, Mr. Phillips’s subtitle for the British edition of “Foreigners” is a sly poke: “Three English Lives.”

Foreign and English. Mr. Phillips has a penchant for such boundary crossings. He’s fascinated with the outsider inside the local, with mixing fiction and nonfiction, with liminal characters and mixed-genre stories, with people and fictions that are hybrids. Hyphenates.

Of course, this describes the prolific novelist, essayist, and playwright himself: West Indian-born, British-raised, and currently a New York resident. Inevitably perhaps, cultural displacement and racial identity have been concerns of his, but though inspired by the African-American literary tradition, Mr. Phillips has worked to forge a personal and literary identity separate from it, too: black and English.

This enterprise draws on a thinner history, however. African slaves were forcibly injected into the American experiment by the millions. This may have burdened African-Americans with W.E.B. Dubois’s famous “dual identity,” but it also meant that from its political inception, America has been a mixed-race nation. In contrast, “Foreigners” points out that there were Africans in England with Julius Caesar. But until the 20th century, their numbers were so few, one could hardly call them a “community.” “Negroes?” an innkeeper wonders in Mr. Phillips’s first story. “Around here?” Even in the late ’60s, Oluwale was probably the only homeless black man in all of Leeds. Defining oneself as both English and black is all the tougher with such a tenuous history.

Collectively, these stories represent an effort to deepen and examine that history. Yet what also links them, besides their subject matter, is that each life is presented as witnessed: We see the men through others’ eyes, through different forms of fictionalized reporting, each suited to its historical period. “Doctor Johnson’s Watch” is based on a 1793 report about Frank Barber in Gentleman’s Magazine. Years after Johnson’s death, a fringe member of the doctor’s circle comes to Lichfield asking after the dying Barber. Through Mr. Phillips’s class-conscious, 18th-century-style prose, we sense the narrator’s kindliness, which doesn’t hide his wish that all blacks in England should be repatriated. The boxer Turpin’s life, meanwhile, is presented as it might be in a straight-ahead piece of modern sports journalism. And when we reach Oluwale, he is glimpsed through a storm of viewpoints, a collage of eyewitness accounts and ugly police reports.

Throughout his career, Mr. Phillips has often experimented with such hybrids of fact and invention. His extraordinary novel, “The Nature of Blood” (1997), intertwines several stories from the Holocaust all the way back to Othello — a favorite archetype for Mr. Phillips — then forward again to Israel. When spun together like this, the intelligence and poetry of Mr. Phillips’s stories are only amplified, and the history of European prejudice becomes a long hallway of bitter echoes.

But while hybrids are bred to fuse the strengths of two species, they can also turn sterile. Sometimes, as in “Foreigners,” Mr. Phillips’s biographical re-imaginings feel unstable despite the brilliant writing. Of the three, Turpin’s story is the most affecting, partly because it seems less filtered and formal than Barber’s, partly because Turpin’s rise and fall are so violently meteoric.

Oluwale’s story, on the other hand, is often horrific: He was dragged from the streets of Leeds, drugged and dumped in mental homes. Parts of Mr. Phillips’s account are addressed to Oluwale like a letter; others read like a clueless city history — “cloth continued to occupy a special place in the Leeds economy.” The result is a story that, instead of summing up, feels scattered.

“Foreigners” tracks the history of English racial attitudes — from condescension and ignorance to a conflicted jumble — and very successfully, too. But here’s where journalism parts company with fiction. Fiction doesn’t merely reflect; it creates and shapes. Oluwale and his tale are given no settled meaning: Is he a heroic martyr or a Bartleby-like victim? This jigsaw puzzle portrait may reflect our unresolved racial tensions, but it does so by neglecting the focus and impact of art. For all of Mr. Phillips’s insight and skill, when “Foreigners” reaches the present day, he leaves us in the same blizzard we can find on the evening news.

Mr. Weeks is the former book critic for the Dallas Morning News. He has a Web log about books at Artsjournal.com.


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