SOURCE: "Sudden Departures," in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4384, April 10, 1987, p. 396.

Below, Bery calls The European Tribe "an uneven, thin-textured book."

Caryl Phillips's novel A State of Independence deals with the dilemma of a man who goes back to the Caribbean after twenty years in England, only to find his assumption that he would be able to settle easily into life on his native island shaken by his experiences. Phillips, who left St Kitts at the age of twelve weeks, also made a journey back, but, as he explains in the introduction to The European Tribe, "still felt like a transplanted tree that had failed to take root in foreign soil". He travelled around Europe for nearly a year in an attempt to understand the forces that had helped to shape him; this book comes out of that period.

Phillips finds that "there is one story and one story...