Foreigners

Perhaps the first sign of trouble about Caryl Phillips’s Foreigners is the cover, where the publisher blandly refers to it as “a new work.” Does that mean a novel? Narrative nonfiction? It turns out to be a little bit of both. Vaguely similar to his fascinating Dancing in the Dark, a fictional retelling of the life of minstrel star Bert Williams, Foreigners recasts the stories of real-life black people as fiction. What’s different about Foreigners is that the mixing of fact and fiction is consistently muddy and disappointing; his characters just aren’t very interesting, and his storytelling style feels forced instead of intuitive.

The book is divided into three parts, each recounting the triumphs and defeats of black men in a white world. The stories, it turns out, get better over the course of the book. In “Doctor Johnson’s Watch,” the story of Samuel Johnson’s Jamaican manservant Francis Barber, Phillips adopts a pastiche of 18th-century writing whose awkward styling constantly annoys. “Made in Wales”—the story of Randolph Turpin, Britain’s first world-champion boxer—is so laden with facts that it deadens what could have been a heartfelt tale of a man’s downward spiral from triumph to poverty and depression. “Northern Lights” is the best of the lot, featuring a graceful narrator who recalls how Nigerian David Oluwale’s death at the hands of police forced late-1960s Britain to face racial unrest. But even here Phillips falls too much in love with his research to develop protagonists that readers can actually care about.