Disparate lives shaped by pain, place

In New Age-speak, author Caryl Phillips undoubtedly qualifies as an “empath.” Beginning with his first novel, “The Final Passage,” and on through five more prize-garnering fiction titles, he has demonstrated a remarkably fluent ability to inhabit characters whose perspectives on life presumably differ radically from his -- differ, that is, on the presumption that attributes such as gender, age, ethnicity and geographic and historical loci all conspire to mold and circumscribe people’s hearts and minds.

In particular, Phillips’ sensitivity to the nuances of dialect and dialogue lends believability to a span of characters that includes an illiterate slave and an ignorant slave owner on a 19th century plantation (“Cambridge”) as well as a Jewish woman who survives Nazi death camps (“The Nature of Blood”).

Though other voices and destinies play critical parts, the ruling personality in Phillips’ new novel, “A Distant Shore,” is a middle-aged white Englishwoman. Exemplifying working-class origins and moderate upward mobility, the young Dorothy succeeded in trading grim poverty for a degree in classical piano, an “impressive posh boy” of a husband and a job teaching in government schools. En route she willingly paid the traditional price of gradual alienation from the family left behind.

Dorothy’s counterpart is Gabriel: an African refugee of generic, bloodstained statehood, determined to surmount the horrors of massacres he both suffered and perpetrated in his war-ravaged homeland in the hope of being reborn into a life of democratic peace and rationality. Gabriel endures hellish perils before reaching the longed-for shore. But don’t be misled: “A Distant Shore” is about as far from a pluck-and-luck Horatio Alger tale as any story can get.

The novel’s opening lines lay down a sweeping judgment: “England has changed. These days it’s difficult to tell who’s from around here and who’s not. Who belongs and who’s a stranger. It’s disturbing. It doesn’t feel right. Three months ago, in early June, I moved out here to this new development.... “

And soon, “whenever I go into town it’s the homeless people who annoy me the most.... There are dozens of them living beneath the underpass ... with their matted hair and their bottles of meths.” At first this sounds like your standard Archie Bunker rant. But the confiding voice turns out to belong to a returned native trying to shrug off the sting of communal rejection, not a man but a woman, feisty Dorothy -- long since divorced, depressed, mourning the recent death of her only sibling and shunted by the bureaucracy into an early retirement in the sort of sterile, warehousing beehive the First World builds all too well. The one person she takes to and even begins to seek out is Solomon, “the somewhat undernourished coloured man in the small bungalow next door.... He’s the caretaker.... Like me, he’s a lone bird.”

A formally simple structure of five parts belies the complexity of Phillips’ narrative approach. Dorothy’s self-introduction is followed by Gabriel’s nightmare flight and its bitter aftermath, told in the third person, with multiple shifts in place, time and tense. For all the vividness of his ordeal, Gabriel remains something of a cipher -- a soul-scarred Third World Everyman. Next, in part three, an omniscient narrator homes in on Dorothy’s more recent past. The remorseless portrait of a proud, sensitive woman entering middle age alone is painful to read, impossible to pull away from. If only by contrast, the two closing sections, in which Gabriel and Dorothy complete the arc of their respective narratives, unroll rather dutifully.

All five sections are compellingly readable. In the end, however, one is left to wonder how the tangential connection between Gabriel and Dorothy, or even the thematic counterpoint of their respective sad lives, fuses to create a sum greater than the parts. Arguably, the parts here outshine the sum.

This year’s fiction Nobelist, J.M. Coetzee, wrote in a 1997 essay on Phillips: “[H]e has preferred [recently] to assemble between the same covers three or four short narratives ... thematically linked novellas.” On the evidence of “A Distant Shore,” Phillips continues to believe in and explore the possibilities of a novel, in his own words, “fragmentary in form and structure, polyphonic in its voices.”