In the Castle of My Skin by George Lamming

First published: 1953

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Bildungsroman

Time of work: 1930’s-1940’s

Locale: Creighton’s Village, Barbados

Principal Characters:

• G., a young Barbadian who is nine years old when the novel opens and seventeen and on the verge of emigrating to Trinidad when it ends
• Trumper, a teenage friend of the narrator who emigrates to the United States and returns on the eve of the narrator’s own departure
• Bob, a friend of the narrator and Trumper
• Boy Blue, a friend of the narrator and Trumper
• G.’s mother, a strong, disciplinarian village woman
• Ma, an elderly woman in the village
• Pa, Ma’s husband
• Mr. Slime, a teacher in the village school at the beginning of the novel
• The Shoemaker, a villager who appears throughout the novel
• Mr. Foster, a villager who appears throughout the novel

The Novel

In the Castle of My Skin is an autobiographical novel by a young native of Barbados living in England. The novel’s plot covers the years from the time of a great flood when the narrator is nine years old to the eve of his departure for the larger island of Trinidad at the age of seventeen.

The virtually unnamed narrator, G., clearly is a surrogate for the author, though Lamming’s narrative strategy of alternating first-person and third-person narrators has the effect of submerging G.’s identity beneath the larger collective identity and situation of the inhabitants of Creighton’s Village. The larger intended effect of the occasionally confusing alternation of narrators is that two mutually reinforcing stories are told within one narrative frame. The first is the story of the ostensible protagonist’s coming-of-age and the dawning of his political awareness. The second story concerns the great social upheavals that occur over the years, especially following the sale of the village by Mr. Creighton, the landlord, to a group of men including Mr. Slime, the populist leader who betrays the villagers’ trust.

In the Castle of My Skin begins during a rainstorm on G.’s ninth birthday, a reference to an actual flood that afflicted Barbados when Lamming was a child. The early scenes of G.’s disappointment and his mother’s response (she “put her head through the window to let the neighbour know that I was nine, and they flattered me with the consolation that my birthday had brought showers of blessing”) effectively establish the setting as well as the sense of collective identity, awareness, and suffering that are crucial to the novel’s purpose. The first-person narrator makes this explicit as he describes his mother visiting with two neighbor women:

Miss Foster. My mother. Bob’s mother.

It seemed they were three pieces in a pattern which remained constant. The flow of its history was undisturbed by any difference in the pieces, nor was its evenness affected by any likeness. There was a difference and there was no difference.

In the domestic geography of the village, he conveys a naturalness and innocence that surely will not last to the book’s end:

In the corner where one fence merged into another, and the sunlight filtering through the leaves made a limitless suffusion over the land, the pattern had arranged itself with absolute unawareness.

The important third chapter, written in the third person, achieves a skillful segue from a general depiction of a boy’s school and a Queen’s Birthday celebration to a subtly crucial plot element involving a potential scandal for a teacher, Mr. Slime, who resigns and later becomes a populist leader. The short fourth chapter features a discussion by Ma and Pa, an emblematic, chorus-like elderly couple, of Mr. Slime’s new projects, the Penny Bank and the Friendly Society. Referring to the migration of many West Indians early in the twentieth century to Panama to work building the canal there, Ma says: “’Tis a next Panama we need now for the young ones. I sit there sometimes an’ I wonder what’s goin’ to become o’ them, the young that comin’ up so fast to take the place o’ the old. ’Tis a next Panama we want, Pa, or there goin’ to be bad times comin’ this way.”

Much of the heart of the novel is nearly plotless, though not purposeless. The narrator and his friends Trumper and Boy Blue engage in adolescent ruminations on the beach. Many of the ideas expressed by the three boys, about the sadness and loss of growing up, about sexual awakening, about their place in the village and their wonder at the opportunities of the outside world, are hardly specific to the Caribbean. These universal themes establish In the Castle of My Skin squarely in the tradition of the bildungsroman.

The narrator goes off to the High School, establishing an unwanted distance between him and his friends. A riot—like the flood, the fictional counterpart of a historical event in Barbados—jars the villagers into an uneasy awareness that times are changing. Trumper emigrates to the United States. He returns just in time to tell the narrator about that country. The novel ends with the narrator on the verge of leaving for Trinidad and the community on the verge of ruin from the landlord’s sale of its land to a group including the apparently treacherous Mr. Slime. Mr. Slime’s complicity in the land sale is not narrated explicitly but can be supposed from strong hints.

The Characters

In the Castle of My Skin is a very oddly structured novel. Its alternation of first-and third-person narrators seems undisciplined (the author was, after all, only twenty-three years old when he began writing it) but is, in fact, a bold and considered device for conveying a sense of the village’s communal identity while simultaneously narrating G.’s coming-of-age and his eventual, inevitable emigration. Lamming, using the first-person narrator, the ostensible protagonist, as his surrogate, intends the same effect in this novel as in his collection of autobiographical literary essays The Pleasures of Exile (1960). Critic Sandra Pouchet Paquet’s remark about The Pleasures of Exile could be said with equal justice about In the Castle of My Skin: “Autobiographical values are determined by the narrator’s acute and pervasive sense of participating in a great historical moment. His valuable life surrenders its meaning in a gesture of collectivity.”

In the novel, then, as in the book of essays, the unusual, unexpected main character is the community at large. This fact establishes Lamming’s political and social values and sympathies. The tragedy of the land sale near the novel’s end is the community’s communal tragedy. At the same time, the individual protagonist, the first-person narrator G., is separating himself from the community by emigrating to Trinidad. Although he does not yet know it as he prepares to leave, his emigration is preparatory to the writing of the narrative.

G. is not well prepared for the outside world. His academic achievements are modest and disappointing to his mother, who is tenacious and fiercely ambitious for him. “She would talk about pulling through; whatever happened she would come through, and ’she’ meant her child.” At the same time, by virtue of his education at the High School, he no longer belongs in the village. He is caught between two worlds. Of his friends he writes: “Whether or not they wanted to they excluded me from their world just as my memory of them and the village excluded me from the world of the High School. . . . It was as though my roots had been snapped from the centre of what I knew best, while I remained impotent to wrest what my fortunes had forced me into.”

Trumper, Bob, and Boy Blue, G.’s friends, serve to throw the narrator’s predicament into relief. Ma and Pa, the old couple, are wise, sad commentators on the changes taking place. Other characters, such as the Shoemaker, Mr. Foster, Miss Foster, and Bob’s mother, are given individual identities, though always carefully within a structure that limits their awareness of the world and their own roles to those of villagers. The outside world impinges on the novel through Trumper’s departure for and return from the United States and through the narrator’s later awareness, as he writes, of the political and historical significance of events such as the riot, the land sale, and his own emigration.

Critical Context

The important African American novelist Richard Wright wrote, in his introduction to the first American edition of In the Castle of My Skin, “One feels not so much alone when, from a distant witness, supporting evidence comes to buttress one’s own testimony.” Wright went on to refer to “Lamming’s quietly melodious prose.” This was high praise coming from a very distinguished voice very early in Lamming’s career. Sandra Pouchet Paquet writes that “The novel was very well received and has held its own as a classic of modern Black writing.”

Having written five other novels and The Pleasures of Exile by 1993, Lamming achieved recognition as the most important novelist to have emerged from the English-speaking Caribbean, perhaps barring V. S. Naipaul. C. L. R. James, the patriarch of West Indian writers, said in 1972, “I do not know at the present time any country writing in English which is able to produce a trio of the literary capacity and effectiveness of Wilson Harris, George Lamming, and Vidia Naipaul.” James was prone to effusiveness and bold remarks, though not to irresponsible claims. Critic Daryl Cumber Dance asserts that in making such a sweeping assertion James “was guilty neither of exaggeration nor of nationalism.”

Ian H. Munro, in a summary of Lamming’s career and the critical reception of his books, quotes novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o as calling In the Castle of My Skin “a study of colonial revolt” and “one of the great political novels in modern ’colonial’ literature.” Munro notes that “Much of both the praise and the criticism of Lamming’s novels after Castle revolves around his obvious preoccupation with showing his characters and their actions as a product of historical forces outside their ken. Lamming’s works are all symbolic to some degree: his characters frequently embody themes and act out roles appropriate to their place in the symbolic scheme.” This tendency of Lamming is obvious in In the Castle of My Skin. As Munro also stated, “the political goals and issues of the novel ultimately bulk larger than the individual life of its characters.”

Bibliography

Buhle, Paul. “C. L. R. James, West Indian: George Lamming Interviewed by Paul Buhle.” In C. L. R. James’s Caribbean, edited by Paget Henry and Paul Buhle. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992. An interview with Lamming by the biographer of C. L. R. James, the first important West Indian to publish abroad, and in later life an influence on radical activists and critics of society in Britain and the United States, as well as on younger Caribbean writers, including Lamming. The interview concerns the subject of James’s influence on Lamming.

Dance, Daryl Cumber. Conversations with Contemporary West Indian Writers. Leeds, England: Peepal Tree Press, 1993. A collection of interviews with West Indian writers, including Lamming. Other subjects include the Caribbean literary and political patriarch C. L. R. James, the Nobel Prize-winning poet Derek Walcott, and the prominent female novelist Jamaica Kincaid.

Lamming, George. The Pleasures of Exile. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. A collection of autobiographical, interrelated essays on the perspective and concerns of the postcolonial writer, specifically in the West Indian context. Lamming discusses his own fiction and poetry as well as William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611) and C. L. R. James’s classic history of the Haitian revolution, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938). The Ann Arbor Paper backs edition includes a helpful, lucid foreword by Lamming scholar Sandra Pouchet Paquet of the University of Pennsylvania.

Munro, Ian H. “George Lamming.” In Fifty Caribbean Writers, edited by Daryl Cumber Dance. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986. A biographical and critical essay on Lamming and his work, with helpful citations of critical studies of In the Castle of My Skin and Lamming’s other books.

Paquet, Sandra Pouchet. Foreword to In the Castle of My Skin. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991. An excellent discussion of the novel, most fruitfully read after having read the novel.

Paquet, Sandra Pouchet. The Novels of George Lamming. London: Heinemann, 1982. The first book-length study of Lamming’s work.

Wright, Richard. Introduction to In the Castle of My Skin. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1954. An enthusiastic introduction to the novel’s first edition, by one of the most prominent African American novelists.