SOURCE: "Out and Back," in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4275, March 8, 1985, p. 266.

In the following review, Montrose finds little to fault in The Final Passage, noting that Phillips "has clear potential as a novelist."

Caryl Phillips's first novel [The Final Passage] opens in 1958, with its young black heroine, Leila Preston, queuing on a Caribbean dockside. Along with Michael, her husband of twelve months, and her baby son, she is about to leave the unnamed island of her birth for England. As the voyage begins, a long flashback retails the events which brought her to seek "a new start after the pain of the last year".

The cause of that pain has been Leila's ill-advised marriage. Michael is unreliable, selfish, a drunk and a layabout; a noted philanderer, too. While courting Leila, indeed, he continued his long-standing affair with Beverley, the wife of a man working in America. Michael is...