The Mystic Masseur Caryl Phillips Analysis

Caryl Phillips is a novelist, playwright, and scriptwriter who was born on the Caribbean island of Saint Kitts in 1958. He and his parents moved to the United Kingdom when he was four months old. Phillips was raised in a working-class area of Leeds, where life was harsh in general and especially hard for a black child. As he said, in the area he lived in the sixties and seventies there was a problem of racism and prejudice toward black migrants and the nationality of the British black community was frequently questioned by the white population. Due to this frustrating experience the Kittitian-British novelist has written throughout his career of his permanent feeling of unbelonging. In order to evade or escape this tough world where he lived

Nonetheless, the most impressive feature of Caryl Phillips is his versatility and multifaceted persona that he is, because he has been actively involved and attached throughout his whole career to a vast range of different cultural activities as a talented thinker and writer. Examples of his diverse talents are the production of several plays, scripts for television, radio and cinema for instance the screenplay for the film adaptation of his own novel The final passage or the film adaptation of V.S. Naipaul’s The mystic masseur is one of his productions. Phillips is also a talented essayist; he is the author of several essays such as A new world order: Selected essays (2001) in which he focus on notions such as home, belonging and identity in an increasingly international society, The European tribe (1987) in which there is a sharp of European racism, and The Atlantic sound (2000) which is concerned with the slave

This new interest contrasts with the dismissive way in which earlier writers and artists from the first half of the same century behaved toward their predecessors the Victorians, as Chris Baldick asserts “Modernist literature is characterized chiefly by a rejection of nineteenth century traditions…” (The concise oxford dictionary of literary terms. New York: Oxford UP, 2001, pag 159) therefore, according to him, Modernists struggled to escape from the Victorian conventions. But we have to make distinctions in order to specify what makes a novel Neo-Victorian, therefore it is important to say that not all the novels written from the twentieth century onward and that deal with elements of the Victorian age can be included into this, according to Heilmann and Llewellyn, one of the features that difference Neo-Victorian writers from others is the deliberate “act of (re)interpretation, (re)discovery and (re)vision concerning the Victorians” (Heilmann & Llewellyn, 2010, p.4) when they produce their fiction. In other words, Neo-Victorian fiction inspects present-day worries and problems that originate from this specific past