Another Man in the Street 

Photo by Howard Grey

Caryl Phillips

(Bloomsbury, 2025)

Review by Max Farrar

This intensely moving novel refuses to ratchet up the reader’s feelings while telling us more about the trauma provoked by migration than almost anything else that I have read.‘Man, England is good, but . . . [it] ain’t easy,’ says Earl, the Caribbean father of the protagonist of In the Falling Snow, and in this, his twelfth novel, Phillips shows how troubling life turns out to be for all three of its main characters, only one of whom is Caribbean.

In 1962, long after Empire Windrush docked, Victor Johnson arrives in London from St Kitts and both his backstory (‘I just want a chance to start over without people judging me’) and his career path undermines any notion of a ‘Windrush Generation’.

Victor is a black man who cannot be pigeon-holed. He’s intensely shy, and we hear almost nothing from him during his first couple of years while he works as a handyman in a ‘melancholy’ West London pub. 

As if to emphasise his silence, ‘Lucky’, as they call him in the pub, appears through the unnamed barman. Phillips’s shifting narrative stances in this novel is one its many intriguing points: the barman narrates a whole chapter; mainly, Phillips utilises the stance of the omniscient narrator.  

The barman’s chapter provides clues about another worker in the pub, the white, aspiring actor Charlie. My hunch is that Charlie is the ‘man in the street’ of the novel’s title. He’s an orphan with a ‘soft spot for everybody’. He thinks that women are ‘a source of weakness’. Phillips cleverly makes us wait till the end of the book to understand his significance.

Racism is the novel’s understated backdrop. We hear from the barman that ‘Lucky’ has been evicted from his hostel: its manager no longer wants any ‘coloureds’, and we hear that Molly, an Irish migrant working in the pub, is ‘uncomfortable’ around Lucky. The point, however, is that the ‘nigger-lover’ barman takes Lucky’s side, and Molly acutely reveals to the barman that he has stereotyped Lucky, just as the Irish are by the English.

Peter Feldman is a customer at the pub who has swerved the extermination of Polish Jews. As Phillips deftly takes us backwards and forwards in time, it becomes clear that Peter’s story is as important to this novel as Victor’s. Peter has a burgeoning career as a landlord, buying properties in Notting Hill and letting them out to ‘coloureds’. 

Victor spends two years as his rent collector.  He wants to help Lucky because: ‘We’re brothers, Victor. English orphans. In this country we have to work hard and make it on our own.’  Peter has concluded that life is a ‘performance’, ‘some kind of theatre’, and he was just trying to speak his lines as best he could. The novel implies that’s how it is for all migrants.

In presenting Peter Feldman, it’s possible that Phillips is reconfiguring the career of Peter Rachman, notorious in the British press in the 1960s. But Feldman mainly serves to emphasise an abiding theme of all of Phillips’s work: the essential role of kindness and compassion in all human affairs. 

‘Be kind to people and they will be kind to us,’ he says. In the stunning, almost-final chapter, Peter’s late career as the ever-helpful doorman of a Manhattan apartment block is set out in heart-warming detail. 

White, English Ruth, from Sheffield, first taken in by Peter and then by Victor, is the third major character of this novel. Peter won’t touch her, and Victor, who has merely ‘sexed’ Lorna, might be the man who ‘would actually reveal something about himself and actually desire her’. Victor knows she will be an asset in his broadsheet job; Ruth knows he’s ‘out of his depth’ in that role. Ruth is yet another of the people in this profound novel who is almost crushed by disappointment.

This novel is brimful with emotionally-rich characters, including Victor’s St Kitts’ sweetheart Lorna, gently descending into mental illness, their wayward son Leon, and Claude Westcott, the washed-up editor of Race Now, who gives Victor the start he needs for his last career as a broadsheet journalist. 

Victor finally provokes respect for his silent life. In hospital, he says ‘Even when I wasn’t quite sure of what I was doing, I was always trying to hold on to some dignity.’ He never ‘played the part of the grateful coloured man’. He had tried his best ‘to be me’, but ‘I’m too bashful for this place’. All you white people ‘see the colour, not the man’. His dying words speak for all unsettled migrants, of every colour: ‘I want to go home’.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/another-man-in-the-street-9781526678638/