ANOTHER MAN IN THE STREET by author Caryl Philips is the story of an immigrant, of people away from their homes with a feeling of displacement in their hearts. Set in England in the early 1960s where the protagonist Victor leaves his island home in St. Kitts behind and arrives with a dream of being a writer.
His early years are spent doing odd jobs and living in terrible hostels for the recently arrived immigrants. A few years later his perseverance pays off and he lands a job at a newspaper for coloured people; covering events in the lives of immigrants with their increasing presence in 1960s England. Victor, though from a humble, blue-collar background has dreams of making it on his own as a high-flying journalist. Despite his humble beginnings, he feels entitled to the life of a revered writer, one who people flock to.
The story captures how a person feels at the end of the day about their life and how the choices they make affect their lives. It is the dark, yearning, gnawing moments in their golden years that render their past a disappointment and memories of how it should’ve been, haunting them. We see how the little moments of lies, choices made by self or made for us play a devastating role in the big picture. The characters give a glimpse of how our silence sometimes means we end up in a dreary, co-dependent relationship void of love and affection.
We see these feelings play out in most characters we meet in the story like Victor, his employers, and even his partner Ruth. The story has a general feeling of displacement, missed opportunities, complacency layered with regret, heartbreak and wanting to leave it all behind.
For me, it was an okay story that had some shining moments showing us the dreary, darker truths of human life. It especially showed us how choices, entitlement and abandonment haunt us when we least expect them to. It is a story of people having lived a life but not having much to write home about despite their dreams of wanting the opposite. A story of living with what life gives us and simply surviving by keeping our dreams aside or even forgetting about them altogether.
Caryl Phillips, who "pits himself against any kind of received wisdom” (London Review of Books), gives us a hypnotic, heartbreaking novel lit by the bright and changing lights of 1960s London.
In London's swinging sixties, Victor Johnson, a young immigrant from the Caribbean, arrives in Britain with dreams of becoming a journalist in the "mother country." Instead, he finds work collecting rent for Peter Feldman, a landlord equally kind and unscrupulous, and then falls into a relationship with Peter’s lonely secretary Ruth, herself a migrant from the north of England.
Spanning nearly half a century, and set against the backdrop of a country which is slowly, reluctantly, evolving into a modern, multiracial society, we discover the truth of both Peter's tragic background and Ruth's agonizing secret, and witness Victor, out of his depth, adjusting to the painful realities of life in his new country.
Both epic in its sweep and devastatingly intimate in its portrayal of damaged lives all caught between two worlds, Another Man in the Street lays bare the traumas that often overtake personal relationships in the wake of transforming societies, and the high price of attempting to reinvent oneself.
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