(Secker & Warburg, £12.99)
If Caryl Phillips believes that the racial dynamics described in his new novel, Dancing in the Dark, have been superseded by a brave new world of integration, he should watch some music television. The new black is still the old black in the world of popular American entertainment. MTV is currently showing a series called Wanna Come In?, in which ultra-cool rap stars talk geeky white boys through seducing beautiful women. The black Cyranos struggle to inject some sexual magnetism into their stammering protégés, but are left in despair at the climax of every episode. These big virile black guys—the show implies—would have no trouble talking their way into any white girl's boudoir and, once there, driving Miss Daisy wild.
It is not clear from Dancing in the Dark whether Caryl Phillips set out to describe the beginnings of this kind of cultural performance or whether his story of the early 20th-century Manhattan music hall is supposed to be read with purely historical interest. He absents himself from the narrative, leaving it up to his characters to thrash out the historical details. These were the years when America hauled itself out of the economics of slavery and into a botched racial settlement, and Phillips shows black and white America getting together to test out new versions of old identities in the playground of Broadway vaudeville. This is a record of a society on the turn, a time when "coloured men of the theatre were rewriting the rules of what it means to be a Negro in America." These years marked the slow beginning of the end of segregation, but at the same time, and more depressingly, another more nuanced story about being black in America was just starting to take hold in these halls and theatres on the east coast.
Phillips's hero, Bert Williams, was a real figure. Although he had to take his after-show drinks at the other end of the bar from his white co-stars, Williams was extremely successful at making his white audiences feel comfortable with his blackness. He and his partner, George Walker, developed a double act—"The Two Real Coons"—and made the jump from sharing the boards with acts billed as "The Merry Wops" and "The Sport and the Jew" to starring in their own Broadway shows. More Little And Large than Al Jolson, their kind of entertainment was soon being performed at piers throughout the land, when the barest bones of a plot provided the excuse for some song and dance and a lot of patter. Phillips eagerly describes one of these performances: "Every evening Mr Williams wanders aimlessly, but despite his size there is elegance to his movement. When the audience raises its collective voice and asks him to reprise a song, Mr Williams acts as though he is first shocked and then somewhat embarrassed that they should be stirring him out of his befuddled anonymity. Of course, this is all the more comical to his audience for they have never before witnessed a Negro performer affecting such indifference in the face of such… approval."
For several years, Phillips has protested that he should not be read primarily as a writer about race. As if to prove it, his last novel, A Distant Shore (2003), was written largely from the perspective of a middle-aged white woman—one whose lonely life was equated with that of an African asylum seeker. In a string of books, he has covered the experience of the African diaspora, and now in Dancing in the Dark he cuts right to the heart of any standard history of race in America: Harlem in the early 20th century. This is ground that has been well trodden—Toni Morrison defined the territory for many readers in Jazz—and Phillips knows it. But he doesn't let it bother him. His Harlem is quite unlike Morrison's syncopated ghetto. It is more like Leeds in the 1970s—where Phillips was raised: quiet men soak their cares in corner pubs while lonely wives stare out of dusty windows. Phillips can't deny that he always writes about race. This is the ubiquitous theme of his work, and he is an authority on black literature. But what really interests him is loneliness.
In his great collection of travel essays, The Atlantic Sound (2000), Phillips mapped out the triangular circuit of the slave trade—west Africa, the southern US, Britain—by following it himself, on cargo boats, in small planes and taxis, mostly alone. His writing there was at a perfect pitch; never showy, it focused tightly on his journey, and he repeatedly bore witness to the isolated figure of himself at the heart of the narrative. Anyone reading the book was made constantly aware of the spectacle of the young black man in his various contexts: watching them, watching him, watching us. Phillips took his own isolation as emblematic of the slave trade and its subsequent reimagining in the history of Caribbean emigration to Britain. On board a banana boat sailing from Guadeloupe to Dover, Phillips becomes withdrawn to the point of nervous hysteria, and discovers how his mother must have felt as she crossed the Atlantic: "lonely."
This is the loneliness of the outsider, the black boy in Leeds, the Leeds boy at Oxford, the Oxford man in New York. Phillips's isolation is effective in his non-fiction, where it gives his observations an ice-cold acuity. In his fiction, however, where each character in turn tells his or her story, either in the first person or via an indirect narrator, the loneliness is all-pervasive, giving the impression not of a lonely man in a world that bustles around him, but of a lonely world.
