Thirty years ago Pink Floyd sang ’...hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way’. There is a literary genre that focuses on sadness, disappointment and unfulfilled lives, which is particularly English: I’m thinking of Anita Brookner, Philip Larkin, Morrissey and others. The French have a way of making social isolation sexy, but both approaches have their merits.

In A Distant Shore, Caryl Phillips takes as his starting point the embryonic relationship between Dorothy, a divorcee and recently retired school teacher, and Solomon, her curious African neighbour. Dorothy keeps herself busy by giving private music lessons, while Solomon seems oddly preoccupied with keeping his car clean.

The novel opens with the sentence ‘England has changed’. This is the first of many ambiguities. It suggests a state of the nation novel, but equally it is the familiar refrain of the old and middle aged. The structure of the novel is unusual and caught me by surprise. Parts are narrated by Dorothy and others by Solomon. There are flashbacks, dream sequences, and events told from different viewpoints. Indeed parts one and
two (of five parts), stand independently of each other as something like short stories.

Phillips is known for his big themes of race, displacement and what he has called rootlessness. A Distant Shore is genuinely moving and and affecting in parts, but Dorothy and Solomon do have a spectral quality. Solomon, it turns out, is seeking asylum in England having escaped from a brutal conflict in Africa. Dorothy has found herself cut adrift and living on a housing development in the middle of nowhere (somewhere in the North). More specificity of time and place would have helped to consolidate the characters.

As commentators on our times both Dorothy and Solomon are unreliable; Dorothy because of her fragile emotional state and Solomon because of the traumatic events that have led him to England. Nonetheless, Phillips touches on a diffuse array of ‘issues’: migration, asylum, exile, bereavement, betrayal, the decline of civility, abandonment, homelessness, class, racism and sexual abuse. Perhaps Phillips is saying that increasingly we are becoming atomised.

I think that Phillips conflates the private and the public spheres. It is not possible to legislate away bereavement, relationship breakdown or unhappiness. However we can campaign against immigration controls and the bogus distinction between asylum seekers who need our help and those who don’t. Possibly Phillips is encouraging us to be more compassionate, but the politics of compassion have lead from one humanitarian war to another, and the victim culture often serves the most able advocates rather than those most in need.

That said, I admire Phillips’ humanity and subtlety, he is an important writer who deserves a wide audience.