SOURCE: Burnett, Paula. “Ocean Views.” New Statesman & Society (2 September 1994): 36–37.

In the following excerpt, Burnett offers a negative assessment of Signals of Distress.

Two years on from the 1492 quincentenary, the Euro-American past still haunts British minds. Not only has the infant 23rd in line for the throne improbably been named Columbus, but London publishing has delivered four new novels addressing the shared transatlantic experience. Three of them have voyages at their heart. All revisit the guilt and suffering of the past, and all hold up to the light the racial encounters and moral conflicts of Atlantic history. …

But Jim Crace's new novel, Signals of Distress, includes a figure absent from both: the African American. His book shows the American world set in motion by Europe coming back to roost in Britain. Otto, a slave shipwrecked on the south-west coast of England in the period between Britain's abolition of slavery...