Middle Passage

To evade both the law and an insistent woman, a newly freed slave becomes a sailor. After the ship sets sail, he discovers he has signed onto a slave ship enroute to Africa to capture members of a legendary tribe. This is one of those unfortunate circumstances in which the novel itself is the cause for the audiobook's failure. The use of twentieth- century language in a novel taking place in the nineteenth century is jarring to the ear and disconcerting to the narrative flow. Even the expert tones of Dion Graham's narration can't keep this production afloat. P.R. (c) AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine

June 5, 1990
A savage parable of the black experience in America, Johnson's picaresque novel begins in 1830 when Rutherford Calhoun, a newly freed Illinois slave eking out a living as a petty thief in New Orleans, hops aboard a square-rigger to evade the prim Boston schoolteacher who wants to marry him. But the Republic , no riverboat, turns out to be a slave clipper bound for Africa. Calhoun, a witty narrator conversant with the works of Chaucer and Beethoven and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, hates himself for acting as henchman to the ship's captain, a dwarfish, philosophizing tyrant. Before the rowdy, drunken crew can spring a mutiny, African slaves recently taken on board stage a successful revolt. Blending confessional, ship's log and adventure, the narrative interweaves a disquisition on slavery, poverty, race relations and an African worldview at odds with Western materialism. In luxuriant, intoxicating prose Johnson ( The Sorcerer's Apprentice ) makes the agonized past a prism looking onto a tense present.