SOURCE: “George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin: Finding Promise in the Land,” in Ariel, Vol. 22, No. 2, April, 1991, pp. 43-53.

In the following essay, ten Kortenaar discusses his displeasure with In the Castle of My Skin, finding fault with Lamming's wordiness, insufficient character development, and lack of plot cohesiveness.

Sandra Pouchet Paquet in her authoritative book on the novels of George Lamming analyzes In the Castle of My Skin as a sociological and political study of Barbados. She finds that the narrative reproduces the historical process whereby a feudal mercantilist economy gave way to a capitalist market economy. But in treating the novel as a sociological study, Pouchet Paquet ignores what is distinctive about the book: its ungainly style and its erratic narrative, aspects that longtime students of Caribbean literature no longer see but every undergraduate coming to In the Castle of My Skin for the first...