[Below, Bery calls The European Tribe "an uneven, thin-textured book."]

Caryl Phillips's novel A State of Independence deals with the dilemma of a man who goes back to the Caribbean after twenty years in England, only to find his assumption that he would be able to settle easily into life on his native island shaken by his experiences. Phillips, who left St Kitts at the age of twelve weeks, also made a journey back, but, as he explains in the introduction to The European Tribe, "still felt like a transplanted tree that had failed to take root in foreign soil". He travelled around Europe for nearly a year in an attempt to understand the forces that had helped to shape him; this book comes out of that period.

Phillips finds that "there is one story and one story only": the reality of the racism he sees almost everywhere in Europe. During his travels he encounters responses ranging from insufferable self-satisfaction to outright hostility; his account is rounded off by a polemical conclusion which explores the consequences of European colonialism and angrily attacks the continent for its bigotry and its deficient sense of history.

There are plenty of things to be angry about, incidents of a sort that can be paralleled in the lives of many black people, and Phillips describes some of them powerfully; Norwegian customs officials single him out for interrogation at Oslo airport; a London publishing house editor refers to him as a "jungle bunny". Europe, he concludes, is indivisible, united in its exclusive attitude towards blacks. The anger is real and abundantly justified, but it also seems to shut him off from some of his experiences.

There is a compulsive, driven quality about his actions which he never explicitly acknowledges. Like the Ancient Mariner, Phillips is always leaving places and people, hurriedly passing from land to land, from city to city, sometimes for obvious reasons, sometimes impelled by more obscure urges. After seeing Rocky II in a Casablanca cinema (though why he should want to do this in Casablanca remains a mystery), he is so disgusted that he has to leave Morocco. The vulgarity of Torremolinos repels him; there are sudden departures from Dresden and Frankfrut; and a meeting with a drunk, unhappy Trinidadian woman in Tromsö—where Phillips has gone to test his "own sense of negritude", expecting to be the only black person around—is summarily ended when she invites him home.

This kind of abruptness is a symptom of a wider failure: he engages only intermittently with the people he meets, the countries he passes through, and even with himself. The impression is reinforced by an odd mixture of materials: personal encounters are encased in a doughy mass of statistics, routine descriptions and elementary historical, geographical or social information. Much of the book exudes dutifulness. Spain, for example, is described in lame guidebook fashion as

a beautiful and large country, second only to the Soviet Union in Europe. Of all its disparate parts Andalucía is probably the best known, the most often written about, and the most romantic. The climate is good, food and drink cheap, so it has always attracted writers….

Later, an account of Dresden-Neustadt railway station is snuffed out by a copywriter's cliché: "The atmosphere was bleak, haunting, and strangely beautiful."

The result is an uneven, thin-textured book, with the secondhand material continually interposing itself between Phillips and his experiences. It could have been different: in his final paragraph, he describes himself standing on the Rialto, unmoved by the culture of which Venice is a symbol, excluded from a Europe which denies part of its history, the part he represents. It is an eloquent image, worth much of the hackneyed description which he has felt obliged to include.