The Emigrants (Paperback, New edition)

George Lamming's successor to In the Castle of My Skin concerns itself with a group of emigrants traveling from the West Indies to England in search of a "better break". On shipboard, cast adrift from their home anchorage, they look to England with varying degrees of grim hope and sureness- there is no place else to try. In London, their life at the hostel holds them together for a time, and later as they experience, one by one, their disillusionment and self-realization in their own way, their paths crisscross in a labyrinth of entwining incident. Among the group are Collis, a writer who protectively loses a sense of differentiation; Dickson, an increasingly paranoid school teacher whose fears become fact; Higgins, who is left defenceless when his proposed ambition to be a cook is denied; the down-to-earth Tornado and his woman Lilian, who so far from home achieve a sense of reality - conjugal love and everyday living on the islands; the provocative Queenie, who dies at the hand of Ursula Bis, who needs to express herself in a free action; Ursula who has run from Trinidad where a calypso has immortalized her affair with a white man who deserted her; the Governeur, a man of weight and affairs who sets up a club with the African doctor Azi; Phillip, the young student whom Azi befriends; the Strange Man who haunts the Governeur's undertakings and successes and who provides the final irony in accepting the offered friendship of the Governeur and turning up with the Governeur's ex-wife. There is much that is individual here - the evoking of mood, the power in presenting characters separately in a group; there is also much evidence of Joycean and Existentialist fraternity which may eventually merge into the author's thought and style less obtrusively. Perhaps the ambiguity which filters through the book is necessary to the sense of groping, almost a wooziness, which encircles the reader. A book of serious intent. (Kirkus Reviews)

The Emigrants is an elaborately conceived novel, dense with dynamic characters and evocative details. First published in 1954, it focuses initially on the emigrant journey, then on the settling-in process. The journey by sea and subsequent attempts at resettlement provide the fictional framework for Lamming's exploration of the alienation and displacement caused by colonialism. This is the epic journey of a group of West Indians who emigrate to Great Britain in the 1950s in search of educational opportunities unattainable at home. Seeking to redefine themselves in the "mother country," an idealized landscape that they have been taught to revere, the emigrants settle uncomfortably in England's industrial cities. Within two years, ghettoization is firmly in place. The emigrants discover the meaning of their marginality in the British Empire in an environment that is unexpectedly hostile and strange. For some, alienation prompts a new sense of community, a new sense of identity as West Indians. For others, alienation leads to a crisis of confrontation with the law and fugitive status. There is a wealth of information here about the genesis of the black British community and about the cultural differences between the black British and West Indian/Caribbean.

General

Imprint:	The University of Michigan Press
Country of origin:	United States
Series:	Ann Arbor Paperbacks
Release date:	May 1994
First published:	July 1994
Authors:	George Lamming
Dimensions:	203 x 133 x 28mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback
Pages:	298
Edition:	New edition
ISBN-13:	978-0-472-06470-0
Categories:	Books > Fiction > General & literary fiction > Modern fiction Promotions
LSN:	0-472-06470-3
Barcode:	9780472064700

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