The final passage

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Front cover illustration shows a Caribbean seaside landscape viewed through a porthole.

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Notes:: Pentagram was the cover designer; Henry Iles did the cover illustration. Thought to be the first novel of Phillips' generation dealing with the emigration from the Caribbean in the fifties, The Final Passage serves as an interesting companion piece to the now classic work of so many of the boom generation writers about the emigration: especially George Lamming (The Emigrants, 1954) and Samuel Selvon (The Lonely Londoners, 1956). Phillips' look back over thirty years yields an even bleaker picture of the fate of the Caribbean emigrants in England as represented by the character of the protagonist, Leila, whose immaturity and naivety compound the ill effects of poverty, racism and isolation leading to the complete dissolution of her life in the coldest season of the year, Christmastime in England. Phillips' first novel (and the only one in the Carberry Collection), The Final Passage immediately establishes his unique novelistic voice: the spare, elegant prose and the use of shifting structural devices that set up temporal disjunctures and colliding encounters.