Walking in and out of time zones

RACISM, and the private tragedies of outsiders penalised for being different, are central to the fiction of the West Indian-born, British-based writer Caryl Phillips. Displacement and notions of freedom have always featured in his increasingly impressionistic, disjointed work, which tends to play with daring, often irritatingly superfluous time scales and multiple first and third person narratives.

As a writer Phillips invariably gives the impression of setting out to write for posterity. His profundity is too often diluted by artistic pretensions which are seldom original, never mind convincing, and by his habitual melodrama. He writes with a weighty intent which drags down the natural lyricism of his prose. This is literary fiction at its most laboured; but the nature of his chosen subject matter inevitably raises the question of the good versus the important.

His episodic sixth novel, The Nature of Blood (Faber, £15.99 in UK), may be his most ambitious to date in that he is availing of material too important to dismiss, yet it also offers quite an array of his many weaknesses, particularly his lack of humour and narrative limitations.

Booker short-listed in 1993 for Crossing the Riwei, Philips quickly moved on from the theme of immigration which had dominated his promising early novels, The Final Passage (1985) and A State of In dependence (1987), to arrive at more universal questions. History provides him with an excuse for walking in and out of time zones and juxtaposed stories which are not interwoven. In fact this book is a combination of several sketchily.drawn narratives, spanning the story of Othello to the horrors of the Holocaust, echoes of Anne Frank's diaries and the daunting resettlement of European Jews in Israel. The result is a loose web of flashback, shockingly fragmented memories, random facts and loosely-interconnected individual stories.

The book opens on a beach in southern Cyprus. "The new kindling snapped and the flames rose higher and illuminated the boy's face. He spoke quietly. `Tell me, what will be the name of the country?'

`Our country', I said. `The country will belong to you too.'

The boy looked down at the sand, then scratched a short nervous line with his big toe.

`Tell me, what will be the name of our country?' I paused for a moment, in the hope that he might relax. And then I whispered, as though confessing something to him.

`Israel. Our country will be called Israel.'"

This opening sequence is like a play, the characters attempting to set the scene through dialogue much as players would on a stage. Phillips is creating an atmosphere of wary new hope. The narrator speaks with the near-biblical rhetoric of a seer, a tone common to Phillips. Still speaking to the young boy, the narrator announces: "Like you, Moshe, I too once left a country behind."

The scene abruptly changes and a new voice describes the scene as liberators, "men who are bursting with health", drive into a concentration camp to be met by skeletal survivors. The speaker is a young girl. The situation is different but the voice, with its defined sense of an interior life, is not. Phillips enters the mind of the young girl, incapable of speaking to the soldier who asks her if she has a family. "If I say this. Instead, I shake my head"

INTERIOR monologue such as this barely convinces. It is difficult to accept that any person who is effectively still living in the hell of concentration camp-life - "I have no strength to be happy. My thin bones would shake and fall apart were they subjected to such an emotion" - would worry that a complete stranger might interpret failure to answer a question as rudeness.

Eva is as close as one might come to a three-dimensional characterisation. Drawn by the soldier's interest in her she makes her way to England and, in testing him, resolves her own dilemma. There are. moments of sharp, almost cinematic clarity, though. In a flashback which describes looking through an old family album with her mother and sister, Eva. remembers her mother's failure to identify the people in the photographs. "The fact she could remember neither these people nor their names clearly disturbed her." Near the novel's end the narrator who had initially acted as a supporter for the newly arrived survivors presents himself as yet another refugee - albeit one on the run from his own emotions.

Back and forth the predictable narrative leaps, awkwardly, like a circus ringmaster attempting to control too many animals. The narrative is at the mercy of the author's preoccupations and outrage. When the scene switches to an examination of the ostracised Jewish community in 15th-century Venice, alienated by its own rituals, one might begin to wonder if Phillips is going to use his study in the context of the atrocities inflicted on this race in tube war-time death camps.

Thence switches to an Othello besotted by a dangerous love. The characters speak in isolated statements. A father puts the question "What do you want. In this life?" to his daughter. A suicide is heard to ask rhetorically: "Did you think of me that morning as I stumbled naked and shivering towards my death?" The voice of the Othello character declares: "with none of my kind or complexion for company ... I know leadership to be lonely and painful." Othello is defined to us as "a play by Shakespeare". Venice and the word ghetto are also explained. Throughout the novel he continually juxtaposes variations of the Jewish experience.

Important? Possibly - although Phillips is hardly the first writer to explore the Holocaust theme. Few readers could doubt his passion, but nor are the many pretensions of this slight, certainly worthy but heavily burdened novel of theatrical fragments easily ignored.