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  • Chapter 17 - George Lamming

  • from Part III - 1945–1975
  • Edited by Rachel Potter, University of East Anglia, Matthew Taunton, University of East Anglia
  • Book:
    The British Novel of Ideas
    Published online:
    05 December 2024
    Print publication:
    12 December 2024, pp 292-307

  • Summary

    George Lamming’s novels (1953–1972) are legible as novels of ideas in at least three senses. All six devote substantial space to exchanges of ideas or solitary philosophical reflection. All feature characters who allegorize ideas or serve as vehicles for their enunciation. And all are narratively propelled by figures intensely devoted to an aspiration, cause, model, or imagined destiny. Lamming’s own remarks on his attraction to the novel of ideas, along with his representation of Toussaint L’Ouverture in the nonfictional Pleasures of Exile, underscore how in Lamming ideas are not (as has been asserted of other novels of ideas) decorative or disconnected from mundane existence. Rather, they emerge from the enduring matrix of colonialism in a way that renders obsessives different in degree, rather than kind, from (post)colonial subjects whose daily experience shapes them in less evidently striking ways.