SOURCE: “Symbols Ahoy,” in Times Literary Supplement, No. 3,693, December 15, 1972, p. 1,521.

In the following review, the commentator voices his displeasure with Lamming's circumlocutory writing style.

Ostensibly, Natives of My Person is about a voyage undertaken by a slave ship, the Reconnaissance, which sets sail from Europe during the seventeenth century in defiance of the law and with a few ulterior motives rankling in the breasts of captain and crew alike. Beneath this story—and not all that far beneath—lies an historical lesson, a political theory and a network of emotional paradigms; and the notion of those barely hidden depths is given substance in George Lamming's style—a prose of discovery which is effortful, uncolloquial, and almost always mannered, especially in the case of dialogue:

FIRST VOICE: The South is not the North. That is a fact.

SECOND VOICE: Give us another fact.

FIRST VOICE: The East is not...