Caryl Phillips was born in St Kitts, raised in Leeds and educated at Oxford; he now divides his time between London and New York. His work is driven by similar transitions. His heroes tend to "wander between two worlds", as Matthew Arnold put it - one dying and the other "powerless to be born". For Phillips, the burden of post-colonial experience is a specific instance of a more general condition: it has offered him an insight into other kinds of dislocation and disaffection, among characters ranging from African American slaves (in Crossing the River, shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize) and Polish immigrants to European Jews and aristocratic Englishwomen. He deals in as many forms as cultures: besides his novels and non- fiction, he has written successfully for stage, screen and newspaper.
In characteristic fashion, Phillips's new novel connects disparate experiences through a common concern: the decline of manners in modern England. The two protagonists - Dorothy, a divorced music teacher, and Gabriel, an African immigrant - live briefly along the same quiet crescent of a new housing development outside a northern village. One has had too much happen in his life - civil war, the murder of his family, the horror of his journey from a distant shore; the other too little, or at least, too little of her own making, apart from an unhappy marriage whose break-up she cares little about. But they share a sense of propriety, and the belief that the dignity of manners matters. This cuts them off from everyone else around them, and fatally inhibits even their own hesitant intimacy.
The book is a carefully constructed exercise in frustration. Dorothy's stories alternate with Gabriel's; and though Dorothy tells her own tale, Phillips applies the same narrative device throughout: the answering silence of his protagonists when the world demands explanations from them.
Dorothy's nerves are overwrought by the turn her life has taken since the death of her parents and sister. Again and again, her narrative elides what matters; all revelation is postponed until after the fact, by which point chances have been lost, and she has had the time to twist whatever happened to her own justification.
Gabriel's silence seems at first more sympathetic: the natural reticence of a foreigner in the presence of native suspicions. Phillips's description of Gabriel's passage north is wonderfully economical - from the seatless plane that takes the homeless men out of Africa to the succession of crowded trains, buses and boats that carries him to England. He cannot quite believe the drabness of arrival. An unresolved episode with a helpful schoolgirl lands him in prison, and the reader strains at his silence when he refuses to answer the questions of a friendly solicitor. But even the simple questions are hard: he can't remember, nor can the reader work out, such basic facts as how many nights he has spent on the road.
But A Distant Shore is not exactly a lesson in sympathy. And Gabriel's silence is not only a question of forgetfulness and suspicion. Both Gabriel and Dorothy look upon the world with disgust. Worried neighbours bang on Dorothy's door in a way that "suggests bad manners". Gabriel trembles with anger at the schoolgirl who brings him food and bandages; he "finds her manner irritating, and her appearance, with her dirty, unwashed blonde hair, and her skirt riding up her thigh . . . unacceptable".
The silent commentary of their abused sensibilities runs through the book. Dorothy recognises that her story contains the single word, abandonment. Curiously enough, she realises that it seems "unconcerned with the word 'love'". The pair come no closer to love than in their own awkward encounters with each other; but if anything, Phillips has evoked the misanthropy of their world too well for us to believe in its sunnier moments. And their liaison is duly broken off, first by Dorothy's mannered games and then by the violence of yob culture taken to its bigoted extreme.
Dorothy's voice has something in common with the striving lower middle-class heroines of Alan Bennett, but they at least dress brightly in their cliches: Dorothy carefully selects the plainest and least committal of commonplaces. Gabriel's natural dignity is greater, his voice stranger and more beautiful. Perhaps the bleakness of this novel is too unrelieved, but Phillips excels at involving the reader in the lives of people we cannot quite bring ourselves either to like or dislike.
Benjamin Markovits's novel, The Syme Papers, is published next year by Faber and Faber
