26 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel
whose aesthetic properties and content have clearly been shaped by
the major events of their respective historical periods, but which echo
each other in their themes of exile, displacement, and human suffer-
ing. The term “polyphonic” here, it should be noted, is used in the
Bakhtinian sense, whereby characters and narrators are “possessed of
their own consciousnesses” and “no individual discourse can stand
objectively above any other.”^10 Such attributes feature in a number
of Phillips’s novels, such as Cambridge , which is bifurcated into two
narratives: that of an early nineteenth-century slave and a young
English woman, both living in the colonial West Indies. However,
these narratives are themselves fragmented into different textual
modes, such as journal entries, letters, and more conventional first-
person forms of prose. In Crossing the River , Phillips enlarges the
parameters of the storytelling process by weaving three narratives
from different epochs that recount stories of loss, homelessness, and
despair and feature an emancipated slave on a doomed mission to
bring “civilization” to Liberia, an elderly African American woman
fleeing slavery at the end of the nineteenth century, and a pair of
ill-fated lovers: an African American serviceman and a white British
woman during the Second World War. There is also the inclusion of
the transhistorical prologue and epilogue, which are voiced by the
“African father” figure. In Higher Ground, we have the story of a
West African ex-slave, now working as an interpreter for his former
owners; an African American convict who chronicles his steady psy-
chological decline in the midst of the civil-rights struggle; and Irene,
a young Jewish refugee trying to adjust to a life of exile in London
following the Second World War.
In The Nature of Blood, we find the same thematic patterns of
pain, deracination, and psychological trauma. The protagonists in
the novel comprise (among others) Eva Stern, a Jewish Holocaust
survivor who emigrates to Britain after the war but fails to “inte-
grate” into society and eventually succumbs to mental illness and
suicide, and Stephan Stern, who leaves his home and family in
Germany to help found the modern state of Israel. Another link
to this story comes in the form of Malka, a Jewish Ethiopian who
emigrates to Israel some 50 years later and meets the much older
Stephan while working as a prostitute. Further complicating this