Another Man in the Street, by Caryl Phillips

The life of a West Indian migrant is explored in this all-too-human novel.

It’s the 1960s, London. West Indian man Victor Johnson is sailing on a boat from St Kitts, a Caribbean island. He’s leaving behind a girlfriend, Lorna, in the hope of making something of himself in England. When he arrives he finds work in a pub. The owner, who can’t be bothered inquiring into his real name, calls Victor “Lucky”. At the pub he meets all sorts of characters, most notably Peter Feldman, an unscrupulous landlord. Peter has an interesting backstory too, a German-Jewish war refugee, he has lost his home and parents. Victor starts work with Peter as a rent collector, chosen for the job because his boss thinks he will have a better chance of extracting money from fellow West Indian migrants who tenant his substandard properties. While working for Peter he takes up with Ruth, a white working class girl who had to give up her daughter for adoption. The two set up a home together of sorts, but the relationship is plagued with challenges and insecurities. Despite all of Victor’s difficulties, he does experience a degree of success as a journalist, writing up articles on the West Indian migrant experience.

Caryl Phillips is an award winning Kittian-British writer who has published plays, essay collections and novels since the early 1980s. Another Man in the Street, his latest novel, addresses issues of class and race in England from the 1960s up to today. The novel is written from many perspectives and intimately fleshes out the experiences of working class and coloured people, the prejudices they face, and how this shapes not only their destiny, but how they see themselves. Victor is presented as a deeply flawed man, as are the other characters, including his girlfriend Ruth and former boss Peter. All three have a great degree of self-awareness about their limitations, which makes their portraits all the more painful and filled with pathos. Ruth constantly tries to re-imagine her life, torturing herself with what-ifs, while her daughter treats her like a moral outcast. In a harrowing chapter Peter ends up as a doorman in a New York apartment building, routinely humiliated by the entitled residents. And finally, Victor is haunted by regrettable scenes from his life.

Difficult subject matter sensitively handled in a tightly written narrative about broken people. For readers of Elizabeth Strout and Claire Keegan.

Another Man in the Street, by Caryl Phillips. Published by Bloomsbury. $22.99