Caryl Phillips, In the Falling Snow.

According to Random House, In the Falling Snow is “Caryl Phillips’s most powerful novel yet.” There is the blurb machine at work, as ever, doing its best to convince the reader. Invariably, the higher the level of persuasion, the less true the claim. In the Falling Snow isn’t Caryl Phillips’s “most powerful” novel: it is closer to being the most ineffectual novel among his oeuvre.It is also worth noting how the book is marketed via its covers. The USA edition suggests a contemporary tale of urban youth Britain. The UK edition intimates a nostalgic tale of human relationships. There is little gritty urban detail in the novel, however, and the relationship between father and son, Keith and Laurie, is not very well realised. In an in interview 3 months before the publication of this novel, Stephen Moss of The Guardian notes a contradiction that is the central problem of this novel’s conception:

“The irony of his new book is that it is a densely detailed English novel written by a Briton who has spent much of the last 20 years at US universities…”

Looking at reviews (across blogland), In the Falling Snow has been well received, yet the origin of these reviews and their focus say much. The enthusiastic reviews come from North America and vibrate with typical terms. So, one blogger is reading the book for university, for his “hybridity-class”. (What the hell is a hybridity- class?) Another thinks it is a “super timely look at racial identification.” (That is an incredibly problematical term). As a novel set in the United Kingdom, viewed from the United Kingdom, studying the United Kingdom, In the Falling Snow does not seem to warrant these powerful assertions.

The plot is fairly simple: Keith Gordon, who heads a section of a Race Equality unit, has a double affair with colleagues at work. His marriage collapses. He has a middle-age crisis. His bi-racial son, Laurie, is torn between aspiration/university and desperation/gang culture. His ex-wife abandons her shared cultural identity and positions herself with the green-wellington White middle class. The race equations are formulaic and the novel invites readings related to race. The novel might fare well in a “hybridity-class”, but it does badly as a novel. Yes, the novel is replete with fine writing. Phillips is such an elegant creator of sentences. But apart from an emotional climax, a soliloquy from Keith Gordon’s father (that could exist as a short-story), the imagination, external and internal, is inadequate. During gardening leave, Keith sets about writing an analysis of Black music. The reader waits for insights, writing as rich as Paul Gilroy, waits for dissection and relevance, but as Keith is a failed writer as much as he is a failed father and husband, nothing much happens. The relationship between Keith and Laurie is depicted in similar terms. The reader waits for something penetrating, for class, gender, race, to be ripped apart. Nothing emerges, however, but platitudes. Keith rails against the racist education system, he doesn’t like the ineffectual Head-teacher, his son needs to knuckle down and work harder to achieve the same as his white friends. There is no awareness of the complexities of Laurie’s life in relation to education, what an inner-city comprehensive school, for example, is really like or what dynamics, as outlined with precision by Tony Sewell in his discourses on education, trap and hinder Laurie.

Phillips’s recent fiction has dealt with fragmentation of identity in relation to race. In the Falling Snow, carries on with this theme, but the narrative is so dull and seedy that the snow does not sparkle and the result is a grey kind of imaginative slush. The novel lacks intellectual effort, which is odd for Caryl Phillips. It skates over the ice with beautiful swirls, etching ideas, but never exploring them or doing what a novelist should do: offer creative insights, thoughts that transmute. The reading experience is pedestrian, a slow trudge, the result…disapointment.