Book Review: Cambridge by Caryl Phillips

This is the first of this kind of book for me.


The back of the book reads: Cambridge is a powerful and haunting novel ..that is the story of Emily Cartwright, a young woman sent from England to visit her father's West Indian plantation and Cambridge, a plantation slave educated and Christianised by his first master in England and now struggling to maintain his dignity

Cambridge is a historical fiction novel set in the West Indies in the early 1800s. The book provides an insight into a time when the world was debating the morality of slavery.
There are 2 narratives here, one by the Emily mentioned above - a 'refined' English woman, sent by her father to report the conditions of his West Indian Sugar Estate cultivated by slaves - one of whom is Cambridge. Emily's narrative seems to drone on and on - more because its written in the style of a diary maintained by someone who thinks of herself as a refined Englishwoman amidst the animal instinct driven crude slaves.

The second part is a short commentary by Cambridge himself - a devoutly Christian slave who has a profound view of the world he is placed in and the life he has lived. This part of the narrative is quite powerful and very different from the chatter that Emily pens.

Overall, the book is a bit hard to read tho - it takes much too long to finish for 184 pages. The language not something I'm used to - I also did not understand why some of the words were italicised in the book.

rating: 3/5