The 1960s may have been swinging for London’s Carnaby Street crowd, but elsewhere in the city, change of a very different sort took place: Caribbean immigrants came to Britain to fill job vacancies in hope of a better life. One such immigrant is Victor Johnson, the central figure in Caryl Phillips’ Another Man in the Street. The novel traverses half a century, and, like much of Phillips’ work, is a thought-provoking examination of colonialism and its repercussions.
Like Phillips, Victor left the Leeward Island of Saint Kitts to move to England. In Victor’s case, he leaves his parents, two older sisters and his wife, Lorna, when he’s 26 to endure two weeks packed onto a rumbling banana boat. Not content to be a cane cutter like his father, Victor has dreams of becoming a journalist and craves “a chance to start over without people judging me.”
That plan doesn’t go as Victor had hoped. When journalism jobs prove hard to find, he takes a gig as a handyman at a Notting Hill pub where he suffers racist comments from a white waitress, while living in a run-down hostel whose owner hates Black people.
Things appear to improve when Victor gets a job as a rent collector for a property owner named Peter Feldman, work Victor describes as “bullying people.” In the spare, formal prose typical of his style (“She closed her eyes, for she could see it all too clearly now.”), Phillips charts Victor’s dealings with Peter. Victor also begins a relationship with Peter’s secretary, Ruth, a woman desperate to figure out “what on earth she might do to make life more tolerable.”
Victor eventually finds his way into the world of England’s broadsheets, but life’s challenges prove as rough as that banana boat ride. Among them are health issues; a son in Saint Kitts who is often in trouble; Ruth’s adult daughter, Lucy, with whom she has an “uneasy relationship”; and the fallout from Ruth’s discovery of Lorna and Victor’s life back home.
Transitions aren’t always clear, primarily at the beginning, but Another Man in the Street builds quiet power with its deep exploration of Phillips’ characters. Like The Lost Child, his excellent take on Wuthering Heights, this book is absorbing in its investigation of the impact of the strictures of colonial rule in the Caribbean.
