The Better Break
The Emigrants. By George Lamming. (Michael Joseph. 15s.) IT is not often that a book of the power and scope of The Emigrants 93mes the way of the reviewer. I would say unreservedly that this is one of the finest pieces of prose literature that I have come across for a long time. The Emigrants is difficult to classify; it is too clearly based on personal experience to be regarded as a work of Pure fiction. Yet very little of it is written in the first person and Mr. Lamming is passionately concerned not with his own predica- ment but with the predicaments of every kind of man who leaves the West Indies to find 'a better break' in England. The book is divided into three parts—`A Voyage,' Rooms and Residents' and 'Another Time.' Mr. Lamming does not restrict himself to straightforward narrative and description but, at moments of extreme tension, moves into dramatic dialogue, into poetic incan- tation and into the sort of stream-of-consciousness writing that Joyce has made us familiar with. But the point is that whatever vehicle Mr. Lamming uses he never loses grip: his writing is always supple, always assured. The section of The Emigrants called 'A Voyage' introduces most of the characters—Tornado, Collis, Dickson, the Governor, Miss Bis, Higgins and many others—whose lives are to be explored further in the two other parts of the book. Mr. Lamming has brilliantly depicted the restlessness, the doubts and the aspirations of emigrants.
Few modern writers have understood so well or evoked so beauti- fully the feeling of isolation: If each had been turned into a mere object it would not have mattered whether there was a place called England. But it was clear from their talk that it was a matter of terrible importance. Each suffered in his loneliness the fear of disaster.
So powerful indeed is Mr. Lamming's treatment of the theme of emigration that the feeling of vulnerability which the emigrants experience seems to be transferred to the reader. Mr. Lamming peels off, as it were, several of the layers of skin with which we usually protect ourselves from too much emotion, and lays bare our nerves. To be able to do this without either arousing disgust or effecting the reader's withdrawal is evidence of this writer's extra- ordinary hypnotic power. We feel ourselves intimately involved in the lives of his characters.
In the 'Rooms and Residents' section Mr. Lamming shows us what happens to his group of characters when they reach England. Higgins, who had hoped to be a cook, becomes a half-mad vagrant, the Governor starts a night-club, Phillip studies to be a lawyer, and Tornado, the saxophone-player, finds his own kind of simplicity: The only criticism I would make of 'Rooms and Residents' is that perhaps Mr. Lamming has tried to cram too much into one short section. In it he depicts many violent episodes that took place at different times and in several places; because these episodes are so compressed they do sometimes appear too melodramatic. But this is a small fault when set beside Mr. Lamming's abundant gifts.
Few young writers know both when to write simply and also when to write with all the strength and richness in their power. Mr. Lamming always knows. He is capable of extremely vigorous descriptions of dancing or of the most bizarre sexual experience, yet he can also write most subtly and deliberately of human relation- ships. The scene in which Collis visits some English people, the Pearsons, wonderfully recreates the feeling of estrangement and lack of contact:
There was a coarse certainty about Mr. Pearson. He was one who quickly defined the other, calculated the responses which he should present and having done that, proceeded to make social intercourse an encounter between a definition and a response.
But not least of Mr. Lamming's gifts is the power of his visual imagination. He is especially good when he describes the emigrants taking their siesta on the deck of the boat: Sprawled on the deck the bodies seemed not to register any feel. The wind passed over them and the sun varying its impressions with every disturbance of cloud simply shone.
Mr. Lamming is also finely attuned to the deepest human sym- pathies and it is perhaps his compassion for people, allied with his amazing literary virtuosity that will make The Emigrants endure. It is not often that one can commend a book wholeheartedly; this is one of the few. In Mr. Lamming's hands the particular dilemmas of the emigrants take on a wider significance and his book makes its impact not only as a story but also as an allegory of the htiman situation.
ELIZABETH JENNINGS
Previous page
