Volume 51, Number 7 · April 29, 2004

Forbidden Knowledge

By Neal Ascherson
A Distant Shore
by Caryl Phillips

Knopf, 277 pp., $23.95

The middle-aged woman looks out of the window of her new house. She is a music teacher, recently obliged to accept 'early retirement.' The little house stands in a new housing development, on the fringes of a dreary post-industrial village in northern England. Dorothy is alone when she looks out of the window; she has nothing particular to do with her life except to go for checkups of her sometimes troubled mental condition. Outside the next house, the caretaker's bungalow, she sees a 'somewhat undernourished coloured man' cleaning a car. He cleans it



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