GEORGE LAMMING has achieved what few in this country would have thought possible. His novel In the Castle of my Skin elevates our common speech to poetry and our common lives to literature, infusing it all with a gentle humour that allows the reader to “laugh off the licks.” It is a bildungsroman in the usual style, the story of a boy becoming a man, but companioned with the story of a people moving from infancy and dependence to maturity and self-determination.