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BOOK REVIEWS

WELL WRITTEN BUT OBSCURE

NATIVES OF MY PERSON. By George Lamming. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., New York. 345 pages. $7.95.

FRANKLY, I didn't want to review this novel because I am not at all certain I understand its contents well enough to comment on the quality of the work. It left me somewhat less than satisfied. Natives Of My Person, because of the form and language in which it is cast, is not an easy book to read and fully understand the import of its story and theme. How was I going to attempt a critical assessment of such a book? Of course, it is easy enough to launch into a heavy-handed criticism of a writer's work but that doesn't seem to be the positive function of a review. An author labors long and hard at his desk with no guarantee that his creative efforts will prove either worthy of his spent energies or successful at the book-seller's counter. He is one of mankind's magnificent gamblers.
    
My sympathies are with the writer because I know something of his ordeal and the high purpose of his creative bent, nevertheless, his work has to suffer the assault of critical appraisal whether it is complimentary or not. George Lamming's new novel however poses other questions besides a comment on the quality of the work. Put simply, it is an original, well-written but disappointing novel that fails to create the kind of excitement in the reader necessary to even sustain his interest in the story's outcome.
    
Natives Of My Person is an allegorical novel and presumably it is a comment on the question of power and the consequences of its ruthless acquisition. A ship has set sail from the land of Lime Rock on a mysterious voyage to a place called Black Rock, a mission fraught with peril as well as filled with the possibilities of gold and wealth. The strange, picaresque crew seem not to fully understand their Commandant nor what he is really up to but their unquestioning loyalty betrays them into putting their fate completely at his disposal. The Commandant is a strange, brooding man whose reflections are burdened with sundry experiences, personal and historical, much too profound to be discussed openly with his men. His visions as well as his reflections are heavily philosophical excursions into great moral wastelands of man's past and the human predicament-presumably.
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---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-16 12:52:18