The Half World

THE EMIGRANTS (282 pp.) -- George Lamming--McGraw-Hill ($3.75). Seen from a ship or an airplane, the islands of the West Indies look like the approaches to paradise. Ashore, the tourist quickly learns that many of the most intelligent natives spend a lot of time figuring out ways and means to escape from their Eden. The best fictional intro duction in years to their state of mind was Barbadian George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin (TiME, Nov. 9, 1953), a poetic memoir of island youth that plotted the colored man's course from careless innocence to gnawing discontent. In The Emigrants, a boatload of the discontented are on their way to England and a better break. For most of them, the break comes in the heart. Aboard their slow ship, the islanders have plenty of time to talk things over. Many of them expect to study and learn trades. For, as Higgins, a former stoker, puts it: "Education an' qualification an' distinction is the order o' de day." Higgins is heading for a cooks' school, hopes to wind up in the galley of the Queen Mary. Collis wants to be a writer. Dickson expects to get a teaching job. But one Trinidadian, known simply as Strange Man, scoffs at education as a "rope they givin' you to hang yuhself wid." His own reason for emigrating is simple: "Well, 'tis simply because ah little tired. Ah sick, bored." London, for these island innocents, becomes the arena of a bitter struggle for survival. They face race discrimination, a housing shortage, a shortage of jobs. Before long, the air is heavy with bitterness. Says one Jamaican: "If ever there's any fightin' in our parts o' de world, we'd be nastier to the English than to any one, because we'd be remembering that for generations an' generations we'd been offerin' them a love they never even try to return." Author Lamming himself has done better than most Indies emigrants. Not yet 30, he has been a BBC broadcaster, his writing has been widely praised, and he is now in the U.S. on a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Emigrants fails to get the most out of its characters and a world they never made. But it is rich in atmosphere and a sense of tragedy, again proves that Author Lamming has a virtuoso's ear for catching the rhythms of island speech. Half-white, half-Negro himself, he knows better than most writers what it means to live and dream in a half-and-half world.

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