I am a little perplexed as to why Allison & Busby, George Lamming's British publishers, would issue this reprint of his only work of nonfiction, published initially in 1960, for its has not worn well in the intervening twenty-five years. I hesitate to use a more precise term than “work of nonfiction,” as The Pleasures of Exile is, among other things, part autobiography, part travelogue, part literary criticism, and part a retelling of the story of Toussaint L'Ouverture. If anything holds this jumble together, it is not the title theme of exile but Lamming's recurring use of Shakespeare's Tempest as a myth of the West Indian situation he wishes to invert and overturn. Such an overturning can be a powerful artistic strategy, as Tayeb Salih's rewriting of Othello in Season of Migration to the North has shown. It isn't powerful here, however, at least for me, and Lamming's rewritten Tempest seems a grotesque oversimplification of what he wishes to represent. Even if Lamming (see WLT 57:1, pp. 38–43), as a black, wishes to identify with Caliban and see the excolonialists as Prosperos who have lost their magic, to represent the complex reality of the West Indies one needs many more roles not found in Shakespeare. Lamming neither supplies those roles nor shows any awareness of their necessity.

V. S. Naipaul (see WLT 57:2, pp. 223–27) has written that the great weakness of the black American writer is that his only subject is his own blackness. Whatever the truth of this may be for American writers, it has not been true for the best black West Indian writers—Wilson Harris, Roy A. K. Heath, Derek Walcott (see WLT 58:1, pp. 19–23, and 56:1, pp. 51–53 on Harris and Walcott respectively)—who, like Naipaul, have represented the rich mixture of cultures in the West Indies and found in that their subject. In The Pleasures of Exile Lamming attacks what he calls Naipaul's “castrated satires” precisely for ignoring the multiculturality of the West Indies. Lamming's critique is far more applicable to his own stance here, however. Despite some references to the East Indians, the Chinese, and the other peoples of the region, his real subject here is his own blackness, the role, as he presents it, of Caliban. This focus on blackness comes out in the long (and admittedly perceptive) tirades about racism in Britain and in the travel sections set in Africa and in the United States. The problem with it as a theme is that it is at complete cross-purposes with the announced aim of the book. Lamming starts out by saying that what he hopes to do is explain why his generation of West Indian writers all found it necessary to move to England; hence the “pleasures of exile” of the title. His use of The Tempest as a subtext, on the other hand, and his stress on black and white not meeting mean that, far from explaining this phenomenon, he has rendered it absolutely inexplicable. Why would Caliban accompany Prospero back to Milan? What pleasures would such an exile hold?

We need more accurate, more complex, and less divisive myths than Lamming provides to explain the West Indies, West Indian writing, and the phenomenon of expatriation as a whole. We need a perspective that would truly be able to see the pleasures of exile; despite his title, Lamming can show us only the pain.