Cosmopolitan Vision of Home, Subjectivity 61“truth” of the events, contrasts with Phillips’s novel, which encour-
ages the reader to challenge the prejudiced ideology and epistemol-
ogy of the narrator and move toward a more conciliatory, humanist,
and, indeed, cosmopolitan perspective.
While succeeding The Nature of Blood in order of publication , A
Distant Shore is, stylistically and formally, a more conventional piece
of work. The technique of interweaving historically distinct narra-
tive voices (as used in Higher Ground , Crossing the River , and The
Nature of Blood ) is replaced by one employing a twin-voiced nar-
rative anchored within a single epoch. Yet, in spite of the temporal
setting of the narrative being more fixed, A Distant Shore is still very
much preoccupied with the relationship between the individual and
their position within a specific sociohistorical moment.
For Stephen Clingman, The Nature of Blood and A Distant Shore
represent “mirror images of one another, [with] their relative struc-
tures reversed. [... This is because where,] across the faultlines of
varied national settings, The Nature of Blood creates a transna-
tional setting, A Distant Shore shows transnational faultlines within
national space.”^82 The fault lines of A Distant Shore that Clingman
refers to are brought about by the clashing of two highly dissimilar
modes of seeing and belonging. This is achieved through the some-
what unlikely friendship that blossoms between Dorothy, a middle-
aged, private-school teacher from northern England, and Solomon,
an asylum-seeker from a war-ravaged African country. Given
their greatly different experiences and sociocultural backgrounds,
Clingman argues, the friendship between the two protagonists (a
common theme in the author’s oeuvre) constitutes the disruption
of a singular national narrative, one which would otherwise eclipse
alternative modes of seeing the world. Although Clingman’s analy-
sis offers a valuable insight into the transnational and cosmopolitan
direction of the novel, in this discussion I demonstrate that Phillips’s
critique of belonging also operates beyond the national–transna-
tional model he proposes. For Walkowitz, A Distant Shore does this
by critiquing “several scales of belonging,” from the immediately
local to the larger regional and national levels of community.^83
This different focus reveals a key distinction in orientation that
exists between cosmopolitan and transnational theories. Although