Social History:Caryl Phillips's new book shares half a title with Robert Winder's recent history of immigration into Britain which, however, added the most common adjective used when immigrants were being discussed - Bloody Foreigners, writes Dermot Bolger.
But if Bloody Foreigners was a historical overview of the arrival of thousands, Phillips's provocative blend of fiction and reportage focuses on just three figures who felt themselves to be both outsiders and insiders, as evidenced by the deliberate apparent contradiction between his title and sub-title.
This is a triptych of lives that initially appear to have little in common, beyond being black in a time where this was a rarity in Britain. The link is that each man sees England as his home, anxious to fit in while resolutely remaining himself. The men's lives end abruptly in failure. History recalls them in different ways.
Former slave Francis Barber enjoys a modest footnote in Samuel Johnson's life. A loyal servant and friend to Johnson, the doctor left Barber a considerable bequest, to the disgust of his executors.
Randolph Turpin is only the second black man (the first being Mandela) to have a statue erected to him. Growing up in the only mixed-race family in Leamington Spa, Turpin learned to defend himself and became a national hero by unexpectedly defeating Sugar Ray Robinson in 1951 to give Britain a World Middleweight Champion. His reign lasted two months before Robinson regained the title, sending Turpin into a tailspin of despair and debt that culminated in his suicide in 1966.
David Oluwale is commemorated with no statue, but in the Leeds that he tried to make his home his name lived on after his brutal death in graffiti on walls: "Remember Oluwale".
Phillips recounts their lives in contrasting styles. Barber gets a well-meaning if dim-witted narrator on the fringe of Johnson's circle, who seeks out the vanished black servant in Johnson's native town of Lichfield, where Johnson had mistakenly believed that Barber would be cherished. Barber's descent into the workhouse has been hastened by his own weaknesses, but chief among these has been placing his trust in white men who exploited his innocent belief that he would be treated as fairly by them as he was by Johnson.
This 18th-century pastiche gives way to a factual documentary style for Phillips's account of Turpin's life. Again the author does not diminish Turpin's own flaws, his incessant philandering and an early propensity for domestic violence. He also had a weakness in common with Barber before him, namely an unsuspecting willingness to trust white businessmen and a generosity of spirit which meant he helped everybody who crossed his path with a sob story.
Turpin at least enjoyed brief adulation. The peak of David Oluwale's material success was renting a damp bedsit in Leeds while working in a foundry, with dreams of becoming an engineer. In this final section - set in the Leeds where Phillips grew up, having arrived from the West Indies - the book truly soars, with a jagged narration splintered between fictional cameos by people who glimpsed Oluwale and extracts from records of prisons and court proceedings.
As a Nigerian stowaway in 1949, Oluwale's first experience of England was serving a jail sentence for illegally arriving. A loner, who tried to dress well and loved to dance, he stood out in Leeds, an easy target for racist elements in the police. He was stubborn and never backed down, even when he was incarcerated again and lost the bedsit he called home. He was homeless but also resolutely British in his dignified wish to be a burden to nobody. The only homeless black man in Leeds, he wanted simply to be left alone to bed down in a shop doorway. He became a plaything for two police officers, someone they could kick and beat and dump in the middle of nowhere at night. He could have hidden from them, but Oluwale refused to yield.
Repeatedly he returned at night to the shop doorways that he knew, that - as an Englishman - he had come to regard as his home and his castle, refusing to be forced away until his battered body was found in the river.
All three men stood out for being black, all died young, having never found a way to fit into the land to which they felt they belonged, even if it never felt the same about them. An immensely talented writer, Phillips resurrects their thwarted hopes in this subtle meditation on identity and belonging, which explores how impossible it is to define the composition of a nation.
Dermot Bolger is a novelist and poet.
His new sequence of poster poems about commuters in south Co Dublin can be downloaded from http://incontext.southdublin.ie/
Foreigners: Three English Lives By Caryl Phillips, Harvill Secker, 263pp. £16.99