[In the following review, Burroway considers Crossing the River "a brilliant coherent vision" and "a book with an agenda."]

"The past is never dead," William Faulkner observed. "It's not even past." This perception is brought home in Caryl Phillips's fifth novel, Crossing the River—which, although it plays with disjunctive time, presents a brilliantly coherent vision of two and a half centuries of the African diaspora.

The main body of Mr. Phillips's novel consists of four taut narratives—two white voices, two black; two male, two female. But its structure is poetic, built on a single refrain: "Why have you forsaken me?" The voices are richly counterpointed, and the forsakings are as various as the author's extraordinary imagination can make them.

In the prologue, a nameless' African father, his crops having failed, sells his children to the master of a slave ship. Haunted for 250 years by "the chorus of a common memory," he discovers "among the sundry restless voices" those of his lost children: "My Nash. My Martha. My Travis." Gradually, as the stories in the main text unfold, we realize that this father has taken on the mythic proportions of the continent of Africa, that his abandonment represents the irreversible history of entire peoples.

In the first section, set in the early 1840's, we follow Nash Williams, the gifted freed slave of an abolitionist Virginia tobacco planter. Having undergone "a rigorous program of Christian education," Nash is sent as a missionary to the west coast of Africa, under the auspices of the American Colonization Society. His letters back to Virginia, a mélange of stoicism and plaint, are interleaved with narrative concerning his adoptive white father and onetime master, Edward Williams. A bitter former favorite makes his way into the story; it also appears that Edward's prudish wife, now dead, intercepted Nash's letters. Such information comes piecemeal and aslant, but when the sources of the bitterness and the interference reveal themselves the events seem inevitable.

Nash disappears, "lost somewhere on the dismal coastline of Africa," and Edward sets out to find him. In the sort of paradox that persists throughout the book, Nash—who has been "bettered" by his Christian education and thereby become a leader among a group of Liberians—is ultimately demoralized by his life in Africa and in turn demoralizes his new community. When paternalistic Edward appears among them, the Liberians see only a purposeless and strange old man, an emblem of abasement.

Skip to the end of the century. In the next section, an old black woman named Martha Randolph, hired on as a cook but now too weak to travel, is abandoned by a wagon train in the snowy streets of Denver. Sold away from her husband and daughter in Virginia, her second man and her business in Colorado lost to white violence, worn out by long days of washing and ironing, Martha has spent her life creeping westward. She entertains fantasies of her daughter, Eliza Mae, in finery on the California coast.

As she draws toward death, Martha is befriended by a local white woman who takes her home. Martha has throughout her life been "unable to sympathize with the sufferings of the son of God when set against her own private misery," and has fought the arbitrary imposition of identity. Now, ironically, when Martha dies without disclosing who she is, her benefactor reflects that "they would have to choose a name for her if she was going to receive a Christian burial."

Reel back a century. In the most spectacular accomplishment of the novel, Mr. Phillips produces the journal and letters home of one James Hamilton, captain of the slave ship Duke of York on its voyage from Liverpool to "the Windward Coast of Africa" and thence across "the river" that is the Atlantic.

Like Edward Williams, the 26-year-old Hamilton has reason to go searching in Africa: his father died there, and the death is shrouded in mystery. The elder Hamilton was without religion, perceiving that his profession of slave ship captain was incompatible with a profession of faith. There are hints that he "traded not wisely" and that he "cultivated a passionate hatred, instead of a commercial detachment," toward his slaves.

The young Hamilton's log is terse, businesslike, admirably controlled. His letters to his wife are tender and full of delicate devotion, longing. He suffers the intransigence of his first mate and the death of his second; he faces insurrection, rats, rising prices, raging fevers. He is resilient and honorable; he absorbs recurrent hardship with fortitude and grace. But in that stunning myopia that can attend such honorable men, he buys, feeds, punishes, worries about, loses to sickness and washes down the walls after his load of black flesh: "This day buried 2 fine men slaves, Nos. 27 and 43, having been ailing for some time, but not thought in danger. Taken suddenly with a lethargic disorder from which they generally recover."

Throughout, Hamilton is perplexed by the mood of his cargo, who "appeared gloomy and sullen, their heads full of mischief." Just before departing from Africa, he is "approached by a quiet fellow" from whom he buys the "2 strong man-boys, and a proud girl," of the prologue.

Fast-forward two centuries. In the book's final section, a working-class Yorkshire woman named Joyce, whose father died in World War I, makes a bad marriage with a black-lung lager lout on the eve of World War II. He is safe from the draft, but that damages his manhood, which he bolsters by punching her. He is jailed for trafficking in the black market—"a vulture picking at the carcass of his wounded country," as the judge puts it—and Joyce drags through her war, her life, until an invasion of Yank defenders sets in her path a shy black soldier with hair like fine wool, combed shiny from a razor part. Joyce is an image of possibility in the novel. But when her lover, Travis, like her father, abandons her by dying, she in turn forsakes their child, giving him up for adoption in the great machine of British do-goodery.

Identity, in both individuals and peoples, is composed of the story that we tell ourselves of the past. That story is necessarily partial and selective, but if it deliberately omits significant events the resultant self is inauthentic. One of the values of fiction is that it can tell the story anew, can go back and include a neglected truth. Crossing the River does this and is therefore a book with an agenda. Mr. Phillips proposes that the diaspora is permanent, and that blacks throughout the world who look to Africa as a benevolent fatherland tell themselves a stunted story. They need not to trace but to put down roots. The message, however, is neither simply nor stridently conveyed. Mr. Phillips's prologue strikes it as a stately note, and its resonance continues to deepen; only in the epilogue does it become uncomfortably literal. Mr. Phillips's theme sounds throughout, perhaps most poignantly in the laconic notation of Captain Hamilton:

"We have lost sight of Africa."