An emigrant ponders the nations his people built

The 500-year rape of Africa is one of history's tragedies and possibly the West's most shameful collective crime. St Kitts-born, English-raised novelist Caryl Phillips has long been preoccupied with notions of home and belonging. Author of The Final Passage, A State of Independence, Higher Ground, Cambridge, the Booker shortlisted Crossing the River and The Nature of Blood, who better than he to plot the endless journey of the black diaspora? Billed as a personal quest, this interesting book is his attempt to define and explain a cultural dislocation perpetrated on generations of a people upon whose slavery was built the wealth of many nations.

Their descendants remain caught in a restless cultural chaos. It quickly becomes apparent, however, that the Oxford-educated Phillips is far more inclined towards sardonic travelogue interspersed with sequences based on historical research than he is to a passionate odyssey.

That said, there is a great deal to be learned from his cool, careful and episodic study, hampered though it is by his irritatingly formal, often wordy prose. Lavish with his observations, Phillips proves miserly with his feelings, although there is a powerful moment when standing in Liverpool's massive Town Hall, itself a monument to the immense wealth of the 18th-century Liverpool trading merchants: "The exterior of Liverpool Town Hall, although undeniably grand, gives absolutely no hint of what is contained inside. I discover the building to be a truly spectacular repository of marble, crystal, oil paintings and gilt. I pad my way from one room to the next, feeling increasingly glutted with the visual evidence of excess, until I finally succumb to a strange feeling of disgust."

A prologue which is intended to set the scene for his mission sees Phillips preparing to set off for England from Guadeloupe aboard "a banana boat" that takes other cargo and passengers. A friend is apprehensive. "I do not want to have to explain to him that forty years ago my parents travelled by ship from the Caribbean to England with me, their four-month-old son, as hand luggage." The humourless Phillips soon reveals that as a narrator he lacks Jonathan Raban's idiosyncratic genius for rendering the smallest fact memorable. Whereas a complaining Raban can be hilarious, Phillips is merely peevish. His time on board is spent hiding from the other passengers, a small but significantly unattractive bunch. Having taken to sleeping by day and touring the boat by night, he recalls once asking his mother what she did on the ship to England in 1958. She figured out how to get to the life boats, while holding her baby and keeping her eyes closed - in case disaster should strike in the night. As for how she passed the rest of the voyage, "she looked blankly at me". Looking out over the water, Phillips begins to understand her and all the other emigrants. "They felt lonely."

It is one of the few personal moments in what is an overly detached, emotionless account. Phillips concedes he has never felt apprehensive about arriving in England. For him arrival has always meant returning home to a place he knows so well. He follows his subdued prologue with a long historical sequence which plots the experiences of a young black man who has been despatched to Liverpool in 1881 by his former patron, now father-in-law, to deal with a Liverpool merchant who has cheated the family out of a new boat he was supposed to order on their behalf. Written in a convincing period pastiche, it not only evokes the bustle of the Victorian port, it catches the unease of the tentative young African as he passes time waiting for the court case to begin. All in all, it is a fine short story. And if not thematically out of place, it is somewhat out of tune with the rest of the book.

A shift in time brings the setting to present-day Liverpool as Phillips arrives in Lime Street Station, where he is struck by "its satanic quality". Again there is a strange dryness about his observations. For him Liverpool has always been equated with racism since the days he stood as an 11-year-old on the terraces watching his team, Leeds United, play Everton. The Liverpool side, was, he writes, "the last of the elite football teams in Britain to sign a black player". Mulling over the city's recent reputation for violence in the name of football, Phillips meets the young man he has asked to act as his guide to the city. Stephen has his own theories and has decided to blame the plight of the Liverpool blacks on the Jews. "Everywhere they go they just take from the black community and they give nothing back . . . they were involved in the slave trade. They used us back then, and they're still using us now." Phillips does not accept the young man's simplistic arguments and their tour arrangement effectively collapses.

Later, while visiting the Maritime Museum which does not conceal the gains made by the African slave trade, Philips overhears an elderly woman remarking, "Oh dear, there's a lot to be ashamed of, isn't there?"

At the heart of the book is his trip to Ghana to attend "Panafest", a government-sponsored jamboree which amounts to a haphazard venture into cultural tourism for diasporans. The strongest fact emerging from this is the overpowering complexity of what exactly being African means. Phillips notes the presence of African Americans who, despite being dressed in native clothes, remain Americans in Africa. The essence of Africa appears to prove elusive to everyone in this book, including Phillips. This is surprising, considering the emotive force of much of his fiction which has always been drawn to themes of displacement. A desire to be fully African has brought black Americans and Caribbeans to an Africa where they are obviously outsiders. So too is Phillips, who has never before seemed so English. "A rush to overstatement" is his main criticism of the many chaotic efforts at self-definition he witnesses.

This search is more heart-rending than he allows. On visiting the 2,000-strong African American community camped for the past 30 years in Israel's Negev Desert in the belief they are the original Hebrew Israelites, Phillips reports: "They tell me they have come home. To a world that does not recognise them. To a land they cannot tame." He seems determinedly wary rather than understanding of Afro-centric thinking and the projects which sustain these particular victims of displacement. At least he does admit "there is nothing I can say" before deciding, "it is futile to walk in the face of history".

Earlier, he had visited Charleston, South Carolina, the main processing centre for the slave trade. "Almost one-third of all the Africans who entered the North American world in captivity passed through the gateway of Charleston," he writes. Phillips is drawn by the story of a famous judge, J. Waties Waring, who had become a society outcast more for the scandal surrounding his second marriage to a Yankee divorcee than for his views on white racial tyranny - which were frank. It was Waring who informed an audience in New York: "We don't have a Negro problem in the South: we have a white problem." In this sequence, as through the entire book, there is a sense of Phillips wandering and wondering. He has information - the problem is how to shape it into the thesis he is planning.

Ultimately, for all its fascinating historical detail, observation and objectivity, Atlantic Sound is a random, impressionistic, over-intellectual and inclusive exercise which reveals far more about the history of slavery than it does about emigration. Most serious of all, there is little to nothing about Phillips, who is himself a product of the 20th-century version of emigrant displacement which transformed Britain from plundering pirate to a reluctant motherland with no further interest in her diverse children.

Eileen Battersby is a critic and Irish Times journalist