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Jul 20, 2018nellybells rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
A magnificent novel. First read it 20 years ago and all I remembered was the outline of the story and that I couldn't put it down. Again I couldn't put it down. What I had completely forgotten was the pidgin English of the final 100 pages. Brilliant, OMG absolutely brilliant. How Unsworth was able to deliver nuanced and sophisticated ideas spoken by the people in the pidgin dialect that developed over time. The development of pidgin languages has happened all over the world when people of different languages are thrown together. There is so much to this novel--historical versimilitude, the reader really understands how commerce ruled the western world and it was all on the backs of enslaved Africans. A commenter below felt the pidgin was demeaning to black people. Not so, not so. This is exactly how people of diverse languages communicate in specific settings. Trade, commerce, ports of entry. I am reading a WW2 novel now and on the ships are men from Portugal, Norway, Holland, Morocco and India. There is not one common language among them and they communicate using a pidgin English of about 300 words. The ship's work gets done!