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Amazon.co.uk Review
Going back to the origins of black fiction in 18th-century slave narrative, A Harlot's Progress tells the story of Mungo, an elderly slave engaged in dictating the main events of his life to the Abolitionist, Mr Pringle, who is "authoring" his autobiography. Unfortunately, the true history of Mungo's life--both as a slave and as an African-keeps on going missing in Pringle's attempts to transform that life into a moral emblem or fable of savage innocence preceding the fall into slavery. In fact, that life refuses to confirm to any of the versions white Europeans--whether in the guise of the painter Hogarth, Mungo's "owners", Lord and Lady Montagu, or Thomas Thistlewood, the captain of the slave ship responsible for "blooding" him, both sexually and otherwise--try and project onto him.
Employing a variety of plots and narrative perspectives, Dabydeen explores the instability of the slave's image in European representations of Africa and Africans. However, the idea that fictions are irresolvable and, ultimately, irretrievable, gives way, in the final brief section of the book, to sentiments of love and redemption which are seemingly exempt from the whirl of illusion, myth and ironic fabrication that precedes it. Like the sections on Africa that open the novel, authentic love seems to lie beyond the deconstructions and lies of history, a moment of truth, both comprehensible and shared. --David Marriott --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
Review
"David Dabydeen's new novel takes as its starting point Hogarth's painting of 1732...and sets out to release the people it represents - prostitute, merchant, quack doctor and slave boy - from easy moralism, both the artist's and our own... Dabydeen has an imaginative mastery of the period, and can render it a hundred ways." - "Observer"
"Exhilarating...Beguiling and provocative." - "The Times"
"The best of the younger generation of Caribbean novelists." - Penelope Lively
"Exhilarating...Beguiling and provocative." - "The Times"
"The best of the younger generation of Caribbean novelists." - Penelope Lively
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Dabydeen's retelling of the experiences of Mungo, an African slave, uses the novel form to its fullest possibilities. Mungo's exploited existence is finally made his own as he narrates his life contradictorily and creatively. Never allowing the reader to recognise a coherent construction of events, he seizes his exploited existence and ironically makes his slavery, his own. Yet, astonishingly, in such an appropriative narrative, Mungo rarely relies on cliché and forces the reader to at least understand even the most despicable of characters. Continually seducing the reader with possibility of consistent truth, he offers the stranger and more immediate truth of silences, incongruity and contradictions.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This text holds extremely valid points and writes them in a very complex way. Although this complexity is admirable I found it very confusing.
I think the subject Dabydeen has chosen to write about is very important. We must not dust slavery under the carpet to be part of a forgotten British history. It is a subject very close to the writer and once again I give the writer my admiration for writing about it.
I however found it an uncomfortable read, maybe because I am studying it so i have to read it through knowing how it ends, and most definately because the subject of slavery is not comfortable. Also because of the way it's written, with several authors, ghosts from the past speaking through Mungo and Mungo's name changing three times through out the book, i found it all a bit confusing. I really struggled through it the first read through, and the ending left me feeling empty. This text did provoke a lot of emotion through out because Mungo's story is so painful and I think it is an important subject for a modern day novel to be based, however it wasn't really for me, but everyone is different.
I think the subject Dabydeen has chosen to write about is very important. We must not dust slavery under the carpet to be part of a forgotten British history. It is a subject very close to the writer and once again I give the writer my admiration for writing about it.
I however found it an uncomfortable read, maybe because I am studying it so i have to read it through knowing how it ends, and most definately because the subject of slavery is not comfortable. Also because of the way it's written, with several authors, ghosts from the past speaking through Mungo and Mungo's name changing three times through out the book, i found it all a bit confusing. I really struggled through it the first read through, and the ending left me feeling empty. This text did provoke a lot of emotion through out because Mungo's story is so painful and I think it is an important subject for a modern day novel to be based, however it wasn't really for me, but everyone is different.
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