Critical Essay | Critical Review by Reed Way Dasenbrock

Critical Review by Reed Way Dasenbrock

SOURCE: A review of Natives of My Person, in World Literature Today, Vol. 61, No. 4, Autumn, 1987, p. 669.

In the following review, Dasenbrock admires Lamming's attempt at the blending of historical fiction and allegory, but finds that Lamming's narrative fluctuates too often between the two genres to be considered a successful novel.

Natives of My Person, a 1971 novel now reprinted by Allison & Busby, is certainly George Lamming's most ambitious and probably his most significant work to date. It is above all an attempt to come to grips with the peculiar history of the West Indies, peculiar not just because most of its inhabitants were brought there unwillingly as slaves, but also because though now in many ways a backwater, three hundred to four hundred years ago it was at the center of a world geopolitical struggle primarily between the Spanish and the English; the victors in...
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