SOURCE: "Tracking the African Diaspora," in Manchester Guardian Weekly, Vol. 148, No. 22, May 30, 1993, p. 29.

In the following review, Jaggi relates Phillips's own comments on Crossing the River.

Graham Greene once said childhood was the bank balance of the writer. For Caryl Phillips, the source goes deeper: "For writers who are black, and working against an undertow of historical ignorance, it's our history that's our bank balance."

Phillips's novel Cambridge (1991) exposed the lasting psychological legacy of slavery through layers of irony in the twin accounts of Emily, a 19th century Englishwoman visiting her father's plantation in the West Indies, and the eponymous slave she encounters there. It won him last year's Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award, and has been a huge seller in the United States, where the author is Visiting Professor of English at Amherst College, Massachusetts.

His new novel, Crossing the River, spans 250 years of...