Foreigners: Three English Lives

CARYL Phillips. Foreigners: Three English Lives. London: Harvill Seeker, 2007; New York: Knopf, 2007. Pp. 261.

This book disappoints. Structured as a type of literary triptych, it portrays, after a fashion, the lives of eighteenth-century Francis Barber, Samuel Johnson's servant and companion; mid-twentieth-century Randy Turpin, briefly the middle-weight world boxing champion; and later twentieth-century Nigerian émigré David Oluwale, a stubbornly silent victim of police brutality. One of the book's difficulties arises from the opaqueness of the characters presented, which perhaps results from the difficulty of fictionalizing historical figures yet with the constraint that biographical fact may place on imaginative reconstruction. This, at any rate, would offer a gentler explanation than the work seems to deserve.

For the reader of The Age of Johnson, "Doctor Johnson's Watch," the section dealing with Barber and his wife Betsy, should have paramount interest. Unfortunately, I believe it the weakest part of the book for several reasons. First, the paucity of factual matter concerning Francis Barber and his wife in the Life of Johnson and in Redford's edition of the letters -a dozen or so of substance in the former and about fifteen in the latter, not all of which refer to Barber or his wife in their persons but as legatee or wife, and the like -do not offer much for Phillips to work with. This leads to the insertion of potted biography, not of Barber but of Johnson, which serves to lengthen the section, still significantly the shortest of the three, but hardly renders it the most engaging as the reader should like to see Barber's story get on. Then, too, Phillips has created a narrator-a minor, nameless member of the Literary Club -who lacks both affect and style, writing a bland sort of prose that might get him run out of a lesser group. His ineffectual unhappiness with the attitudes toward and treatment of Barber renders, I suppose, the kind of stumblingly ineffectual humaneness which the author desires to present.

The narrator has stopped in Lichfield with the idea of writing a brief biographical note to advise readers of Barber's present situation and has the idea of returning to him Johnson's specially made watch; it ultimately will go to Mrs. Barber, though the idea, and not the...