A Distant Shore

A DISTANT SHORE

by Caryl Phillips

 

Nominations: Booker Longlist 2003, Dublin Longlist 2005, National Book Critics Circle Finalist 2003, PEN/Faulkner Finalist 2004

 

Date Read: August 22, 2022

 

Two next-door neighbors from very different backgrounds meet and become unlikely friends. Their reasons for ending up in their small village are very different from where they set out to be and their ending is as sad as their pasts.

 

You can tell from the get-go that Dorothy isn’t quite right in the head. She communes with her parents as if they are still alive and refuses to believe that her sister, Sylvia, has passed away. Not only can she not accept her death, she cannot accept Sylvia’s admission that their father sexually abused Sylvia.

 

For all of her bizarreness, Deborah manages to conduct several liaisons. After her husband, Brian, abandons her for another woman, Dorothy manages to have an affair with the married owner of her local bodega and with a married substitute teacher. Both times, Dorothy oversteps boundaries and ends up contacting their wives. I just can’t figure that one out. Did she want these affairs to end?

 

Solomon, the next-door neighbor from Africa, is trying his best to embrace his new life in the quiet English village where he inadvertently lands. The circumstances of him settling there is a result of a harrowing escape from his home country via planes, trains, buses and ships. When he finally arrives in England, he is accused of rape by the father of a girl that has befriended him.

 

In order to escape the misconceptions about him, he changes his name and moves north. Along the way, he meets Mike, a lorry driver that changes his life in every way. Mike’s parents take him in and help him get settled as the night watchman. They try to warn Solomon about the locals’ racism but they never come out and overtly state this. 

 

Almost immediately, Solomon begins receiving death-threat letters and vandalism to his house. For all of the trials and tribulations of his journey to save his own life, he ends up losing it in the safe-haven he believed England would be.

 

As for Dorothy, she winds up in either a mental institution or an old folks’ home. It’s never quite clear, although you can tell she’s several cards short of a full deck. 

 

My heart went out to both of these characters, even if their actions were often inexplicable. Solomon murdered a man to escape his country. Why is Felix’s life expendable but Solomon’s isn’t? Why does Dorothy sabotage the rare relationships that come her way? Why doesn’t Dorothy go to the police when Claire admits it was her boyfriend that caused Solomon to drown? I still have more questions than answers.

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