The Final Passage
First edition (p/b)
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| Author | Caryl Phillips |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Faber and Faber |
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Publication date
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London, 1985 |
| Media type | |
| ISBN | (1985 paperback edition) |
| OCLC | 11399626 |
| 823/.914 20 | |
| LC Class | PR9275.S263 P473 1985 |
The Final Passage is Caryl Phillips's debut novel. First published in 1985, it is about the Caribbean diaspora exemplified in the lives of a young family from a small island of the British West Indies who decide to join the 1950s exodus to the mother country. They arrive in London full of hope, but their hopes are thwarted while new challenges, if not opportunities, never thought of before, seem to arise.
The year is 1958. Leila is a 19-year-old woman who has to care for her very sick mother. She has never known her father, and her mother, who is only 40, has even refrained from telling her about him. As her skin is lighter than that of most of the other islanders she believes that she was the product of an affair her mother must have had with a white man. That, she thinks, would also explain her mother's distrust of white people, an attitude she has always tried to pass on to her daughter. Leila has a very good friend in Millie, who is more down to earth and knows much better what she wants to achieve in life.
Leila's boyfriend Michael, who is in his early twenties, is an irresponsible young man whose main interests are sex and drink. He does odd delivery jobs on his scooter for his friend Bradeth, but most time of the day the two men can be seen outside one of the small bars getting drunk on beer. Michael has fathered an illegitimate child but has not made any real effort to move in with its mother. Rather, as his own parents are dead, he still lives in his grandmother's house.
Rather than wait for Arthur, who has declared his love for her but left the island promising to come back soon, Leila has set her eyes on Michael, who before long agrees to become her husband. However, their marriage gets off to a bad start and cannot even be patched up when their son Calvin is born, whom Michael at first does not even come to visit. One day Leila is shocked to find her mother gone. A letter informs her that on her doctor's advice she has left for England in order to seek medical treatment there.
Leila finds life on the small island increasingly unbearable, and her wish to emigrate to England and to reunite with her mother becomes stronger and stronger. It turns out that Michael is not averse to the idea, and so Leila arranges everything for her young family's "final passage." Bradeth and Millie, who are also a couple now expecting their second child, cannot be persuaded to leave with them:
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