Lamming, George (Vol. 4) - Lamming, George 1927–
Lamming, George 1927–
Lamming, a Barbadian novelist, created San Cristobal for the setting of two of his novels. His fiction is praised for its powerful and poetic prose.
[Of Age and Innocence] is a novel which somehow fails, I feel, but its failure tells us a great deal. The novel would have been remarkable if a certain tendency—a genuine tendency—for a tragic feeling of dispossession in reality had been achieved. This tendency is frustrated by a diffusion of energies within the entire work. The book seems to speak with a public voice, the voice of a peculiar orator, and the compulsions which inform the work appear to spring from a verbal sophistication rather than a visual, plastic and conceptual imagery. Lamming's verbal sophistication is conversational, highly wrought and spirited sometimes: at other times it lapses into merely clever utterance, rhetorical, as when he says of one of his characters: "He had been made Governor of an...
[The entire page is 2031 words long]
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