Ostensibly, Natives of My Person is about a voyage undertaken by a slave ship, the Reconnaissance, which sets sail from Europe during the seventeenth century in defiance of the law and with a few ulterior motives rankling in the breasts of captain and crew alike. Beneath this story—and not all that far beneath—lies an historical lesson, a political theory and a network of emotional paradigms; and the notion of those barely hidden depths is given substance in George Lamming's style—a prose of discovery which is effortful, uncolloquial, and almost always mannered, especially in the case of dialogue:

FIRST VOICE: The South is not the North. That is a fact.

SECOND VOICE: Give us another fact.

FIRST VOICE: The East is not the West.

THIRD VOICE: You are a man of facts.

FOURTH VOICE: He allows no contradiction when he speaks.

It's a pretentiousness which spills into straight narration, too; when the ship's boy laughs, Mr Lamming records that he “… gave sound to his delight”; it sounds rather like a crossword clue, circumlocutory and strangely systematized like much of the dialogue.

The effect of this is to reduce those on shipboard to mere mouthpieces in the author's philosophical costume drama. To speak, as the blurb does, of “the tortured introspection” of the ship's officers and crew is to grossly understate their capacity for self-examination and sheer loquacity. They talk and talk with the tireless efficiency of loop-tapes: formally organized conversations broken only by a muscle-bound narrative style which invests love scenes with a ripe, incantatory prose and turns meals into acts of deliberate carnage. If the book's real intention is, as seems likely, to be radical in its approach to both politics and personal emotion, it is difficult to see how Mr Lamming could have better obstructed his task.