Another Man in the Street by Cararyl Phillips

Published by ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux on January 7, 2025

Another Man in the Street is a story of migration that proceeds on multiple fronts. The character who links the others emigrated to England from the West Indies. Years later, he makes good on a vow by bringing his wife and son to England, but they might have been happier in Saint Kitts. Another significant character made his way to England after being released from a displacement center in Germany when the Second World War ended.

The primary protagonist is Victor Johnson. When he is almost 27, Vincent defies his father by moving to England with the hope of finding a job at a newspaper — an ambition sparked by his newspaper delivery job in Saint Kitts. Vincent leaves his wife Lorna behind but vows to send for her, as well as his son Leon.

On the voyage to England, the ship’s captain sets in motion a recurring theme of British resentment of colonials of color. The captain is convinced that the “coloureds” should remain in the colonies. “We make things all nice and easy for you, don’t we? Cheap passage to England, no questions asked. Loose women and lots of jobs. But have you any idea how many of you coloured scroungers are already in England? It’s the sixties now and we’re still letting you in.” Racist attitudes about immigrants pop up on other occasions but are underplayed. Perhaps that was a wise decision, although it prevents the divide between white and Black or between immigrants and British nationals from becoming a defining theme.

Victor gets a job “lifting and moving barrels” at a pub in Notting Hill where the owner calls him “Lucky” while letting him stay with the rats in the pub’s basement. A fair amount of attention is devoted to a barmaid named Molly who cheats on her boyfriend with a bartender, but it isn’t clear why she’s in the story. Perhaps her most important role is complaining about her discomfort at working with a “coloured” staff member.

Narration shifts to the point of view of the white bartender who is shagging Molly. The bartender is stealing liquor from the pub but allows the owner to believe that Victor is the thief. The bartender patronizes Victor when, on a lark, he asks Victor to take him to his “coloured hostel” where they can smoke some weed. These are a few examples of white entitlement that set the story’s tone. Shortly after Victor leaves his job, the white bartender gets his comeuppance, perhaps because of Victor, but any drama that arises out of that incident quickly dissipates.

Victor next works as a rent collector for Peter Feldman, who believes his Black tenants will be less inclined to dodge a Black rent collector. Peter came to England as a child to escape the Nazi persecution that destroyed his family. Like Victor, he feels himself an outsider in a society that doesn’t accept him without reservation.

Peter’s secretary Ruth has an extensive backstory that includes giving up a daughter for adoption at her parents’ insistence. Ruth eventually moves in with Peter for the convenience of living near her job. She is vaguely aware that Peter is Jewish, but “she didn’t really know what this meant, other than some people didn’t like them.” She doesn’t know why Peter won’t talk about his history. More distressing to her is Peter’s lack of interest in sex, although he never shares the history that might help her understand his circumstances.

After Victor makes good on his promise to bring Lorna and her son Leon to England, he grows disenchanted with Lorna’s nagging. Victor takes a liking to Ruth, who shares a residence with Peter, but neglects to tell her that he is living with Lorna and Leon. To meet her need for sex, she begins sleeping with Victor, only to discover that he already has a family.

Lorna narrates a brief chapter. Her grievance amounts to: “Some people just have sex, but you wondered if you might also discover love, so that sex and love might arrive like twins, but this didn’t happen. He simply sexed you.” When Victor finally abandons Lorna for Ruth, he is unapologetic. “No doubt he thought he could go further in this world with a white woman on his arm,” Lorna thinks, but it isn’t clear that Victor thinks about much about race at all.

Along with Lorna and Leon, the daughter Ruth gave away for adoption returns to the story to cause friction. Ruth struggles with the guilt of giving away her daughter while Victor remains estranged from Leon. The larger point seems to be that the lives of immigrants, like the lives of most people, take unpredictable turns and inspire harsh judgments by others. Immigrants are no less likely than long-term residents to live soap opera lives. Readers who enjoy stories of broken or breaking families will find much to like in Another Man in the Street.

Victor begins to realize his ambition to be a journalist when he gets a gig writing for a paper that caters to immigrants from the West Indies, then takes a job writing for a serious paper as the voice of England’s coloured population. As a coloured journalist, Victor is only allowed to cover coloured stories. He at least has made progress toward his ultimate goal, but nothing is easy for Victor and the journalism gig is just another job that he won’t keep.

We follow Victor’s life to its conclusion, spending significant time with collateral characters along the way. The story has moments of insight into the varying experiences that migrants might experience, depending on the cause of their migration and their skin color. On the whole, however, the story lacks vigor. Any energy it builds dissipates as the focus shifts among characters.

To the extent that Cararyl Phillips attempts to find an overarching theme that draws the storylines together, the theme seems to dissipate before the novel cruises to its conclusion, leaving a collection of characters and their disparate stories that never quite cohere. Notwithstanding that criticism, the characters are fully drawn and provide interesting contrasts of migrant experiences in England during the decades that followed World War II. My sense is that the story could have been more carefully focused, but it always held my interest.

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