Cambridge

by Caryl Phillips. (1991) Published by Vintage International. 184 pages.

Reviewed 11 November 2007
This is a novel about two topics that interest me a lot: colonialism and slavery. The first, and longest, portion of the book deals with Emily, an intelligent young woman in the19th century whose father owns a sugar plantation in the West Indies. After a short prologue in the third person, the rest of this section is made up of entries in Emily’s diary. She’s en route to her father’s plantation. She describes everything in language that, at first, seems a little too flowery, always searching for the most roundabout ways to describe her experiences. It’s a little off-putting; to the reader it was as if the author is straining to create an authentic 19th century sound, getting a good handle on the intricacies of the language, but missing the simple bluntness that writers of that time were capable of.
But as we get to know Emily better, the pretentious and overwrought tone makes more sense. She’s a young person of great intelligence and greater ambition. After her trip to the Caribbean, she has little to look forward to besides an unappetizing arranged marriage; the only thing that might add an element of variety and freedom to her life would be a career as a lecturer, traveling about England and sharing her experiences, observations and vision on the future of British colonialism. It all hangs on her intelligence, her verbal agility, and her ability to ferret out the truth.
This makes for excellent reading. The author bestows Emily with such a richness of vocabulary and wit that it’s possible to see in her prose all the complex mechanisms of 19th Century hypocrisy. One senses that, had she been born in another era, Emily could easily concoct a first class exposé about the inhumanity of slavery and the essential wrongness of the exploitative sugar trade. But she’s endowed not only with a journalist’s innate appetite for the truth, but also with an aristocrat’s instincts of self-preservation. She knows that her life of luxury is supported by the exertions of slaves who daily perform labors in the cane fields that would kill an ox or horse. She knows that her future career as a lecturer will only bear fruit if she stays well within the boundaries of what the English public is willing to hear. So she succumbs eagerly to all the fundamental lies of the planters’ culture. She allows her formidable wit to be eclipsed by an even more powerful cowardice.
That we’re able to witness all this so clearly is a tribute to Phillips’ masterful talents as a writer and a scholar. Voluminous research went into creating Emily’s account of her voyage, and Phillips strikes the perfect alchemical balance, transforming historical details into a young woman’s living perception of a world alive with promise and intrigue.
Standing on its own, the first part of “Cambridge” is the best thing I’ve read since starting this blog. It isn’t just the historical flair that makes it so much of a pleasure to read. Also there’s the way Phillips builds the plot of sexual tension. Emily gradually comes to realize that, as the daughter of an absentee plantation owner, she has the status of royalty without the limitations. She takes a sadistic pleasure in frustrating the ambitions of her less satisfactory suitors, none of whom have the wit to win her favor. Only the plantation overseer, Arnold Brown, is able to seduce her by gradually adopting a more gentle persona toward her, while still continuing to be cruel and wicked to his slaves, particularly to the enigmatic Cambridge, a strong and obdurate man whose self confidence and mastery of scripture makes the white slave drivers distinctly uncomfortable.
The second portion of the book belongs to Cambridge. It’s an autobiography of his life from the time he was captured in West Africa to the days shortly before his death. It’s a much more sweeping narrative than Emily’s diary, and yet it feels much less real, much less gripping. I got the feeling reading this portion of the book that Phillip’s was actually a little bored by the whole prospect of the firsthand experiences of a man enslaved. Whereas the Emily portion of the book was overflowing with descriptions of the various luxuries of colonialist life and the peculiarities of the plantation setting, Cambridge’s account seems very much a lifeless, dutiful exercise in connecting point A to point B through an extremely circuitous route. Whereas Emily’s transatlantic voyage as a privileged passenger is described in great detail, Cambridge barely goes into depths about his experiences being transported in the belly of a slaver. There are a few horrifying details, but they somehow seem obligatory.
In his first experience of being enslaved, Cambridge is taken to England, where a rather ineffectual “owner” allows him to get an education and marry a white servant girl. On the “owner’s” death, Cambridge becomes a free man, traveling around England and lecturing for various abolitionist groups. Cambridge embraces the Christian religion as a doctrine of universal freedom and human rights, but we never really get to see the evolution of his thought process. This creed of universal human dignity is what his abolitionist tutor believed, and this is simply the belief that Cambridge adopted. When Cambridge is eventually taken into captivity again (during a voyage to Africa, to make a series of abolitionist lectures there) the effect is unnaturally comic. He seems to take this new and tragic twist of fate as just a big misunderstanding, an inconvenience. “Isn’t this just my luck?!” When he arrives at the sugar plantation in the West Indies, he holds himself aloof from his fellow slave laborers. Only the schizophrenic Christiania earns his attention, and as she seems incapable of lucid speech, she never seems to have her own mind, her own voice.
In order for the novel to work, we need a sense that as sophisticated an intellect as Emily is, Cambridge is ten times as sophisticated. I think this is the story that Phillips wanted to tell, and I think it failed because of the limitations of the tradition of historical fiction he abides by. Whereas there’s an abundance of firsthand source material by colonialists, the voices of those who labored for them as slaves was largely kept silent because slaves were forbidden much formal education. This in itself constitutes one of the great tragedies of history. In order to recover the voices of those who were forbidden to record their own histories, a writer must take a powerful step into the realm of imagination, speculation. This means being willing to make huge mistakes, even to resort to lies.
I think this is foreign to the current trends in historical fiction, which becomes ever more methodical, ever more scholarly, ever more dependent on the carefully woven safety net of official, documented truth and ever more reluctant to go out on a limb in the way that only fiction can.