Alison's review
status:
Read in February, 2008
I'd be lying if I said I really understood what was going on in this book; when I finished it last night I reread parts of it to try to find coherence, but I rather think that the obliquity of the connections between the stories was the point. There's the narrative by the white English woman who's traveled to the West Indies to visit her father's sugar plantation and to discover the "truth" about slavery; there's the much shorter narrative by one of the slaves there, a former missionary who's been kidnapped and sold back into slavery; the brief crime narrative; and the strange epilogue in which something odd has happened, and what happens there is what makes it difficult for me to understand the book as a whole--why does Phillips take it to that place? I guess I'd say that, while in "The Nature of Blood," which I loved, Phillips juxtaposed seemingly dissimilar narratives to find common thematic threads, in this one, he's juxtaposing narratives that are all part o...more
I'd be lying if I said I really understood what was going on in this book; when I finished it last night I reread parts of it to try to find coherence, but I rather think that the obliquity of the connections between the stories was the point. There's the narrative by the white English woman who's traveled to the West Indies to visit her father's sugar plantation and to discover the "truth" about slavery; there's the much shorter narrative by one of the slaves there, a former missionary who's been kidnapped and sold back into slavery; the brief crime narrative; and the strange epilogue in which something odd has happened, and what happens there is what makes it difficult for me to understand the book as a whole--why does Phillips take it to that place? I guess I'd say that, while in "The Nature of Blood," which I loved, Phillips juxtaposed seemingly dissimilar narratives to find common thematic threads, in this one, he's juxtaposing narratives that are all part of the same story in order to reveal how simultaneous versions of the same incident can fail to have anything in common with each other. And that's especially true in the ending, whose extremities make a hash of the assumptions I'd been making up until then.
* * *
Okay, I just brushed my teeth and figured it out. The ending is a way of shattering assumptions (so you think that you understand slavery now?!?), yet at the same time, and this is the key point, providing us with an analogy, which, in general and in his writing in particular, brings us to a closer understanding of what slavery *might* be: something that is unlike anything else, something mind-blowing, something that defies you to make any analogies. But it's the analogy itself that brings us to that understanding....less
Cambridge 
