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London Trilogy #1
The Lonely Londoners
Looking for a better life a group of West Indians face harsh conditions in London, including racism, bad weather, loneliness, and hard times
126 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1956
379 people are currently reading
13850 people want to read
About the author
Sam Selvon
27 books148 followersSamuel Dickson Selvon was born in San Fernando in the south of Trinidad. His parents were East Indian: his father was a first-generation Christian immigrant from Madras and his mother's father was Scottish.He was educated at Naparima College, San Fernando, before leaving at the age of fifteen to work. He was a wireless operator with the Royal Naval Reserve from 1940 to 1945. Thereafter, he moved north to Port of Spain, and from 1945 to 1950, worked for the Trinidad Guardian as a reporter and for a time on its literary page. In this period, he began writing stories and descriptive pieces, mostly under a variety of pseudonyms such as Michael Wentworth, Esses, Ack-Ack, and Big Buffer. Selvon moved to London in the 1950s, and then in the late 1970s to Alberta, Canada, where he lived until his death from a heart attack on 16 April 1994 on a return trip to Trinidad.
Selvon is known for novels such as The Lonely Londoners (1956) and Moses Ascending (1975). His novel A Brighter Sun (1952), detailing the construction of the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway in Trinidad through the eyes of young Indian worker Tiger, was a popular choice on the CXC English Literature syllabus for many years. Other notable works include Ways of Sunlight (1957), Turn Again Tiger (1958) and Those Who Eat the Cascadura (1972). During the 1970s and early 1980s, Selvon converted several of his novels and stories into radio scripts, broadcast by the BBC, which were collected in Eldorado West One (Peepal Tree Press, 1988) and Highway in the Sun (Peepal Tree Press, 1991).
After moving to Canada, Selvon found a job teaching creative writing as a visiting professor at the University of Victoria. When that job ended, he took a job as a janitor at the University of Calgary in Alberta for a few months, before becoming writer-in-residence there. He was largely ignored by the Canadian literary establishment, with his works receiving no reviews during his residency.
The Lonely Londoners, as with most of his later work, focuses on the immigration of West Indians to Britain in the 1950s and tells, mostly in anecdotal form, the daily experience of settlers from the Caribbean. Selvon also illustrates the panoply of different "cities" that are lived in London, as with any major city, due to class and racial boundaries. In many ways, his books are the precursors to works such as Some Kind of Black by Diran Adebayo, White Teeth by Zadie Smith and The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi. Selvon explained: "When I wrote the novel that became The Lonely Londoners, I tried to recapture a certain quality in West Indian everyday life. I had in store a number of wonderful anecdotes and could put them into focus, but I had difficulty starting the novel in straight English. The people I wanted to describe were entertaining people indeed, but I could not really move. At that stage, I had written the narrative in English and most of the dialogues in dialect. Then I started both narrative and dialogue in dialect and the novel just shot along."
Selvon's papers are now at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin, USA. These consist of holograph manuscripts, typescripts, book proofs, manuscript notebooks, and correspondence. Drafts for six of his eleven novels are present, along with supporting correspondence and items relating to his career.
Selvon is known for novels such as The Lonely Londoners (1956) and Moses Ascending (1975). His novel A Brighter Sun (1952), detailing the construction of the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway in Trinidad through the eyes of young Indian worker Tiger, was a popular choice on the CXC English Literature syllabus for many years. Other notable works include Ways of Sunlight (1957), Turn Again Tiger (1958) and Those Who Eat the Cascadura (1972). During the 1970s and early 1980s, Selvon converted several of his novels and stories into radio scripts, broadcast by the BBC, which were collected in Eldorado West One (Peepal Tree Press, 1988) and Highway in the Sun (Peepal Tree Press, 1991).
After moving to Canada, Selvon found a job teaching creative writing as a visiting professor at the University of Victoria. When that job ended, he took a job as a janitor at the University of Calgary in Alberta for a few months, before becoming writer-in-residence there. He was largely ignored by the Canadian literary establishment, with his works receiving no reviews during his residency.
The Lonely Londoners, as with most of his later work, focuses on the immigration of West Indians to Britain in the 1950s and tells, mostly in anecdotal form, the daily experience of settlers from the Caribbean. Selvon also illustrates the panoply of different "cities" that are lived in London, as with any major city, due to class and racial boundaries. In many ways, his books are the precursors to works such as Some Kind of Black by Diran Adebayo, White Teeth by Zadie Smith and The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi. Selvon explained: "When I wrote the novel that became The Lonely Londoners, I tried to recapture a certain quality in West Indian everyday life. I had in store a number of wonderful anecdotes and could put them into focus, but I had difficulty starting the novel in straight English. The people I wanted to describe were entertaining people indeed, but I could not really move. At that stage, I had written the narrative in English and most of the dialogues in dialect. Then I started both narrative and dialogue in dialect and the novel just shot along."
Selvon's papers are now at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin, USA. These consist of holograph manuscripts, typescripts, book proofs, manuscript notebooks, and correspondence. Drafts for six of his eleven novels are present, along with supporting correspondence and items relating to his career.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,058 reviews
May 30, 2020
Oh, the lovely, lonely Londoners! What a charming surprise!
Expecting a bleak story of the harsh reality of Caribbean immigrants living in London in the 1950s, I was delighted to discover so much more than that, a colourful study of the city as seen through the lens of a group of newly arrived people, with plenty of dreams and plans and experience to compare with London life. It is the story of a group of West Indians trying to find a decent life for themselves in a hostile (social) climate, where they are immediately recognised and treated as second-rate foreigners, both because of their skin colour and because of their specific language.
But at the same time, it is a panorama of individual characters, both good and bad, strong and weak, minding their own businesses and meddling in that of other people, hungry for food and entertainment and meaningful ways to pass the time:
“Everybody living to dead, no matter what they doing while they living, in the end everybody dead.”
They face racism, and reflect on how differently it is expressed in Britain compared to the American segregation of the 1950s. The painful experience of being either too visible, or invisible, comparable to Ellison’s New York version of Invisible Man in the 1930s, is expressed in an inner dialogue between one of the characters and the colour Black:
“And Galahad watch the colour of his hand, and talk to it, saying, ‘Colour, is you that causing all this, you know. Why the hell you can’t be blue, or red, or green, if you can’t be white? You know is you that cause a lot of misery in the world. Is not me, you know, is you! I ain’t do anything to infuriate the people and them, is you! Look at you, you so black and innocent, and this time so you causing misery all over the world!”
They deal with cultural clashes and misunderstandings, and the trouble arising when one Caribbean is behaving badly and the whole community is blamed. But the story is also about adjusting to a new culture, learning to cruise a big city, to appreciate living in a multicultural, adventurous environment, and to cope with hardship while keeping hope in the future alive, about connecting to new traditions while cherishing own heritage. It is about sexual freedom and modern life style, clashing with old, traditional domestic violence and outrageous misogyny, both within and beyond the Caribbean community.
What makes this story delightful to read, despite its sad context of loneliness, isolation and alienation, is the colourful expressiveness of the characters, all individual and typical at the same time. Everybody is likely to have a relative similar to Tanty, who comes to London as an old woman and takes over the environment she lives in immediately, forcing her will and her charisma on the London working class road just like she would have done in Kingston. She masters public transportation despite her anxiety that the far too tall buses may capsize, and she dances at parties, whether her involuntary dance partners like it or not. From the moment she arrives at Waterloo Station, she adds colour to London life, gathering her family for a picture, after being interrogated by a journalist on the reason why she, and so many others, leave the West Indies to live in cold, foggy London.
She does not have a definite answer to that question, and neither does any of the other characters, but as they walk the streets of London, they fill them with new life, and shape their surroundings as much as they are themselves shaped by the big city. Many, many communities within the big city are growing at this time in history, and they form their own cultures, quite distinct from one another:
“London is a place like that. It divide up in little worlds, and you stay in the world you belong to and you don’t know anything about what happening in the other ones except what you read in the papers.”
At the same time, all Londoners, new and old, share the famous streets, meeting places and corners that are well-known all around the world. Galahad, one of the characters, is happiest when he has a date at a spot that makes him feel that he belongs to a bigger context, and he loves life when he can say, with dignity, that he is meeting someone at Piccadilly or Charing Cross, repeating the words for effect. Then he belongs, whether he is welcome or not.
A charmingly positive short novel on a time when London was changing fast into a global city, a declaration of love for the city despite the shortcomings of its inhabitants. Recommended!
Expecting a bleak story of the harsh reality of Caribbean immigrants living in London in the 1950s, I was delighted to discover so much more than that, a colourful study of the city as seen through the lens of a group of newly arrived people, with plenty of dreams and plans and experience to compare with London life. It is the story of a group of West Indians trying to find a decent life for themselves in a hostile (social) climate, where they are immediately recognised and treated as second-rate foreigners, both because of their skin colour and because of their specific language.
But at the same time, it is a panorama of individual characters, both good and bad, strong and weak, minding their own businesses and meddling in that of other people, hungry for food and entertainment and meaningful ways to pass the time:
“Everybody living to dead, no matter what they doing while they living, in the end everybody dead.”
They face racism, and reflect on how differently it is expressed in Britain compared to the American segregation of the 1950s. The painful experience of being either too visible, or invisible, comparable to Ellison’s New York version of Invisible Man in the 1930s, is expressed in an inner dialogue between one of the characters and the colour Black:
“And Galahad watch the colour of his hand, and talk to it, saying, ‘Colour, is you that causing all this, you know. Why the hell you can’t be blue, or red, or green, if you can’t be white? You know is you that cause a lot of misery in the world. Is not me, you know, is you! I ain’t do anything to infuriate the people and them, is you! Look at you, you so black and innocent, and this time so you causing misery all over the world!”
They deal with cultural clashes and misunderstandings, and the trouble arising when one Caribbean is behaving badly and the whole community is blamed. But the story is also about adjusting to a new culture, learning to cruise a big city, to appreciate living in a multicultural, adventurous environment, and to cope with hardship while keeping hope in the future alive, about connecting to new traditions while cherishing own heritage. It is about sexual freedom and modern life style, clashing with old, traditional domestic violence and outrageous misogyny, both within and beyond the Caribbean community.
What makes this story delightful to read, despite its sad context of loneliness, isolation and alienation, is the colourful expressiveness of the characters, all individual and typical at the same time. Everybody is likely to have a relative similar to Tanty, who comes to London as an old woman and takes over the environment she lives in immediately, forcing her will and her charisma on the London working class road just like she would have done in Kingston. She masters public transportation despite her anxiety that the far too tall buses may capsize, and she dances at parties, whether her involuntary dance partners like it or not. From the moment she arrives at Waterloo Station, she adds colour to London life, gathering her family for a picture, after being interrogated by a journalist on the reason why she, and so many others, leave the West Indies to live in cold, foggy London.
She does not have a definite answer to that question, and neither does any of the other characters, but as they walk the streets of London, they fill them with new life, and shape their surroundings as much as they are themselves shaped by the big city. Many, many communities within the big city are growing at this time in history, and they form their own cultures, quite distinct from one another:
“London is a place like that. It divide up in little worlds, and you stay in the world you belong to and you don’t know anything about what happening in the other ones except what you read in the papers.”
At the same time, all Londoners, new and old, share the famous streets, meeting places and corners that are well-known all around the world. Galahad, one of the characters, is happiest when he has a date at a spot that makes him feel that he belongs to a bigger context, and he loves life when he can say, with dignity, that he is meeting someone at Piccadilly or Charing Cross, repeating the words for effect. Then he belongs, whether he is welcome or not.
A charmingly positive short novel on a time when London was changing fast into a global city, a declaration of love for the city despite the shortcomings of its inhabitants. Recommended!
June 5, 2024
2.5
The Lonely Londoners is a small novel that is really made up of several short stories about different West Indians who come to London in search of employment and with dreams of a better life. I think Selvon captures a sense of loneliness in these characters as he shows what it's like to be miles away from anyone who cares about you in a city full of white people who automatically believe you're a criminal. I love London, but I can easily see how it's the kind of city that can be exhilarating or sad depending on the circumstances it finds you in.
This story is set in the 1950s, a time when Britain opened its doors to all citizens of British colonies and invited them to come to the country without needing a visa. At this time, there were more jobs available in Britain than could be filled and these employment opportunities were advertised to many West Indians. In response, thousands accepted the invitation only to discover that they were not being welcomed with open arms when they arrived. The vast majority were young men who came alone, often with the intention of finding a home and a steady job so they could send for their family later.
The main problem with The Lonely Londoners for me was that it needed to be about double the size and perhaps focus on less characters. Though this latter may not have been a problem if the book was longer and allowed room to fully explore each individual's story. As it was, I felt like I read four prologues, they were all missing something, they seemed incomplete. I understand the necessity to tell a few different stories because not every immigrant during this time would have had the same experience, but none of the stories were told fully enough to properly engage me with any of the characters. Like I said, four prologues.
Another thing I disliked was the narrative voice. I'm sure this won't bother some people and I know why the author did it - to make it sound authentically like a West Indian speaking English when they are not that familiar with the language - but it bothered me because the novel is written in third person. If it had been written in first person it would make sense for the narrator to speak/think in this way: "He had was to get up from a nice warm bed and meet a fellar that he didn't even know."
The narrative voice aside, if someone had presented me with this and told me it was a prologue to a novel then I would be interested in reading the rest. On it's own, though, I think it is lacking. The one thing I can say for definite that it did do was communicate the promise in the title of loneliness. There is something very sad about being alone and Selvon's characters are on their own in an unfamiliar world that doesn't want them.
The Lonely Londoners is a small novel that is really made up of several short stories about different West Indians who come to London in search of employment and with dreams of a better life. I think Selvon captures a sense of loneliness in these characters as he shows what it's like to be miles away from anyone who cares about you in a city full of white people who automatically believe you're a criminal. I love London, but I can easily see how it's the kind of city that can be exhilarating or sad depending on the circumstances it finds you in.
This story is set in the 1950s, a time when Britain opened its doors to all citizens of British colonies and invited them to come to the country without needing a visa. At this time, there were more jobs available in Britain than could be filled and these employment opportunities were advertised to many West Indians. In response, thousands accepted the invitation only to discover that they were not being welcomed with open arms when they arrived. The vast majority were young men who came alone, often with the intention of finding a home and a steady job so they could send for their family later.
The main problem with The Lonely Londoners for me was that it needed to be about double the size and perhaps focus on less characters. Though this latter may not have been a problem if the book was longer and allowed room to fully explore each individual's story. As it was, I felt like I read four prologues, they were all missing something, they seemed incomplete. I understand the necessity to tell a few different stories because not every immigrant during this time would have had the same experience, but none of the stories were told fully enough to properly engage me with any of the characters. Like I said, four prologues.
Another thing I disliked was the narrative voice. I'm sure this won't bother some people and I know why the author did it - to make it sound authentically like a West Indian speaking English when they are not that familiar with the language - but it bothered me because the novel is written in third person. If it had been written in first person it would make sense for the narrator to speak/think in this way: "He had was to get up from a nice warm bed and meet a fellar that he didn't even know."
The narrative voice aside, if someone had presented me with this and told me it was a prologue to a novel then I would be interested in reading the rest. On it's own, though, I think it is lacking. The one thing I can say for definite that it did do was communicate the promise in the title of loneliness. There is something very sad about being alone and Selvon's characters are on their own in an unfamiliar world that doesn't want them.
January 15, 2019
It’s all in the title. I think Selvon is a very clever writer. He has created a vivid picture of London through the eyes of Caribbean immigrants in the 60s. These men were by themselves, for the most part, when entering the big city. They were met with prejudice and alienation. It’s all rather moronic because not only did some of these men fight in the war for the allies, but they also filled a massive gap in the job market that the casualties left. Yet they are alienated.
What a thankless people the British were.
The vivid picture is also a moving one. The plot doesn’t stay in the same place nor does it follow the same two characters in a straightforward story arc. It provides brief glimpses, glimpses of these men who wanted so desperately for London to become their home. Cap was by far the most entertaining to read about. However, for all his likability, he and men similar to him give the rest of the West Indians a bad name. Cap was lazy; he didn’t go to work and all he did was built up debt with everyone he ever met. He spent most of his free time perusing various white women, drinking booze and smoking expensive cigarettes, so living up the illusion of London life. He was only ever after one thing with the women, and when he got what he wanted he would quickly flee. He may sound like a typical guy, but when in unison with his attitude toward money, his skin colour, his aura of nonchalance and roguishness, he only helped to create a negative stereotype. His exploits were rather entertaining though. He did have it a little rough in London though; they all did.
“Put big headlines in the papers every day, and whatever the newspaper and the radio say in this country, that's the people Bible.”
And what Seldon was trying to say, by portraying so many differing men, is that not all of these guys were cut from the same cloth. The differences are at the forefront of his narrative; he was really trying to make this explicit. It seems a little obvious and perhaps even unnecessary in today’s world, but when this was written it was a story that needed to be told. The language is great as well; it makes it feel very authentic. But the random streams of consciousness towards the end were a little out of place; it was like the author was just shoving in some modernism in a book that portrayed no aspects of it. It was weird, random and out of place.
The main thing I took up form this was the how detrimental false perceptions can be. These guys thought that London was going to be great. Instead they were met with stark reality in all its horribleness. Nobody wants their dreams crushed. Nobody wants to be stuck in a place from which there is no foreseeable escape. And nobody wants to read a four page long sentence; yes, a four page long sentence. The book went downhill after that, but I did enjoy the most of it.
What a thankless people the British were.
The vivid picture is also a moving one. The plot doesn’t stay in the same place nor does it follow the same two characters in a straightforward story arc. It provides brief glimpses, glimpses of these men who wanted so desperately for London to become their home. Cap was by far the most entertaining to read about. However, for all his likability, he and men similar to him give the rest of the West Indians a bad name. Cap was lazy; he didn’t go to work and all he did was built up debt with everyone he ever met. He spent most of his free time perusing various white women, drinking booze and smoking expensive cigarettes, so living up the illusion of London life. He was only ever after one thing with the women, and when he got what he wanted he would quickly flee. He may sound like a typical guy, but when in unison with his attitude toward money, his skin colour, his aura of nonchalance and roguishness, he only helped to create a negative stereotype. His exploits were rather entertaining though. He did have it a little rough in London though; they all did.
“Put big headlines in the papers every day, and whatever the newspaper and the radio say in this country, that's the people Bible.”
And what Seldon was trying to say, by portraying so many differing men, is that not all of these guys were cut from the same cloth. The differences are at the forefront of his narrative; he was really trying to make this explicit. It seems a little obvious and perhaps even unnecessary in today’s world, but when this was written it was a story that needed to be told. The language is great as well; it makes it feel very authentic. But the random streams of consciousness towards the end were a little out of place; it was like the author was just shoving in some modernism in a book that portrayed no aspects of it. It was weird, random and out of place.
The main thing I took up form this was the how detrimental false perceptions can be. These guys thought that London was going to be great. Instead they were met with stark reality in all its horribleness. Nobody wants their dreams crushed. Nobody wants to be stuck in a place from which there is no foreseeable escape. And nobody wants to read a four page long sentence; yes, a four page long sentence. The book went downhill after that, but I did enjoy the most of it.
September 21, 2021
I loved the voice of our chatty narrator here. Like all his characters he talks in 1950s West Indian English. It’s a cool salty breeze of a voice, bending and buckling the rules of grammar until they become a distant memory. This is a window into a long gone world, it’s about all the Jamaicans and Trinidadians who came over to London after the war, and their roguish ways, and their comical capers, and he throws in the odd melancholic observation about the English :
It have a kind of communal feeling with the Working Class and the spades, because when you poor things does level out, it don’t have much up and down. A lot of the men get kill in war and leave widow behind., and it have bags of these old geezers who does be pottering about the Harrow Road like if they lost
So I was thinking that this short novel would be a solid 4 star but I gradually realised
a) He gives us a string of characters who are way too similar, all guys who have no jobs, little income, but still drink a lot and chase a lot of women in a dull repetitive way
b) There is not going to be a story in this novel; it’s simply this was my wacky chum Cap and his ribtickling ways, and this was my jolly old pal Galahad and his hilarious scrapes
And
c) This novel should come with a warning sticker for feminists : MAY RAISE BLOOD PRESSURE because if the women aren’t being demeaned and ripped off and physically beaten they must be somebody’s grandmother.
He feeling sort of shame to bring the girl in that old basement room, but if the date end in fiasco he knows the boys would never finish giving him tone for spending all that money and not eating
I know, you can't expect modern attitudes blah blah, but it does get wearing.
Also, there is a most peculiar 8 page unpunctuated stream of consciousness section for no apparent reason, as if Sam Selvon had just finished one of the early chapters in Ulysses and thought I gotta have me some of that.
Lot of good and not so good things here.
It have a kind of communal feeling with the Working Class and the spades, because when you poor things does level out, it don’t have much up and down. A lot of the men get kill in war and leave widow behind., and it have bags of these old geezers who does be pottering about the Harrow Road like if they lost
So I was thinking that this short novel would be a solid 4 star but I gradually realised
a) He gives us a string of characters who are way too similar, all guys who have no jobs, little income, but still drink a lot and chase a lot of women in a dull repetitive way
b) There is not going to be a story in this novel; it’s simply this was my wacky chum Cap and his ribtickling ways, and this was my jolly old pal Galahad and his hilarious scrapes
And
c) This novel should come with a warning sticker for feminists : MAY RAISE BLOOD PRESSURE because if the women aren’t being demeaned and ripped off and physically beaten they must be somebody’s grandmother.
He feeling sort of shame to bring the girl in that old basement room, but if the date end in fiasco he knows the boys would never finish giving him tone for spending all that money and not eating
I know, you can't expect modern attitudes blah blah, but it does get wearing.
Also, there is a most peculiar 8 page unpunctuated stream of consciousness section for no apparent reason, as if Sam Selvon had just finished one of the early chapters in Ulysses and thought I gotta have me some of that.
Lot of good and not so good things here.
Want to read
December 17, 2023great title alert
May 3, 2014
I’m reading a biography of V S Naipaul at the moment and reading about his Caribbean Voices period reminded me of this book, which I’ve been meaning to read for some time. Like Naipaul, Selvon was from Trinidad and was trying to make a living as a writer in Britain in the 1950s.
This is a record of the Windrush generation who came to Britain to work after the Second World War; their trials and tribulations, searching for work, trying to make ends meet (the section about the pigeons and seagulls is hilarious), finding somewhere to live, dealing with racism, living and loving.
The novel switches between characters with a central narrative voice and uses the slang of the time. There are some remarkable passages and some telling descriptions of relations between communities and the sense of being alien. It is a series of snapshots written in an almost stream of consciousness way. It describes the disillusionment and broken dreams with a sharp humour. The descriptions of the English summer are very good. The attitudes to white women were illuminating and troubling; black women were almost invisible (apart from the wonderful Tanty).
There is a great rhythm and musicality to this book and even when times are hard and life is struggle, there is a sense of optimism. It is a window into another world and for me could have been longer. It is a novel of great warmth and heart and it opens a window onto pivotal time in London’s history. Highly recommended.
This is a record of the Windrush generation who came to Britain to work after the Second World War; their trials and tribulations, searching for work, trying to make ends meet (the section about the pigeons and seagulls is hilarious), finding somewhere to live, dealing with racism, living and loving.
The novel switches between characters with a central narrative voice and uses the slang of the time. There are some remarkable passages and some telling descriptions of relations between communities and the sense of being alien. It is a series of snapshots written in an almost stream of consciousness way. It describes the disillusionment and broken dreams with a sharp humour. The descriptions of the English summer are very good. The attitudes to white women were illuminating and troubling; black women were almost invisible (apart from the wonderful Tanty).
There is a great rhythm and musicality to this book and even when times are hard and life is struggle, there is a sense of optimism. It is a window into another world and for me could have been longer. It is a novel of great warmth and heart and it opens a window onto pivotal time in London’s history. Highly recommended.
April 17, 2018
I'm posting this today (although I read it years ago) as news surfaces about the threatened deportation of the 'Windrush' Caribbean migrants. I had forgotten how much I relished Selvon's writing with his colourful cast of characters, and this one was my favourite.
August 24, 2022
The Lonely Londoners is wonderful. Sam Selvon beautifully evokes immigrant life in 1950s London for various characters who have come to London from the West Indies for work and opportunity.
The tale is narrated by kindhearted but homesick Moses Aloetta who introduces us to some marvellous characters: newly arrived Galahad, ladies man Cap, Tolroy whose family have arrived en masse, Five Past, and many many more. The whole book is written in patois and it is this technique that brings it all to life - it flows like the best prose, is beautifully written and even the moribund slang sings. There's not really a story as such, just a flow of vignettes that touch on discrimination, the weather, relationships, friends, family, feuds, humour, 1950s London, and so on.
A really interesting, enjoyable and important book. Despite being rooted in the 1950s I suspect it contains universal truths for all people who seek a new life in a different and alien place.
4/5
The tale is narrated by kindhearted but homesick Moses Aloetta who introduces us to some marvellous characters: newly arrived Galahad, ladies man Cap, Tolroy whose family have arrived en masse, Five Past, and many many more. The whole book is written in patois and it is this technique that brings it all to life - it flows like the best prose, is beautifully written and even the moribund slang sings. There's not really a story as such, just a flow of vignettes that touch on discrimination, the weather, relationships, friends, family, feuds, humour, 1950s London, and so on.
A really interesting, enjoyable and important book. Despite being rooted in the 1950s I suspect it contains universal truths for all people who seek a new life in a different and alien place.
4/5
February 27, 2014
Aahhh what a sweet read this is. It brings back to you the joy of having ends meet, stress off, self respect on and sun in the sky:
*sharp craft/nice piece of skin = young woman
I laughed out loud many times on the tube reading. Everything is lightly, comically rendered, even when the material is deprivation, racism, grey malaise and violence (this reminds me of the persistently comic tone framing grim events and thoughts in The Brothers Karamazov, which I’m reading now too).
The world Selvon calls up of young West Indian men in ‘50s London revolves loosely around the appropriately named Moses, gruff in manner, with not a whiff of saintliness or self-satisfaction about him, yet ever heartfully helping his fellow ‘boys’ to find housing and work in the mildly, complicatedly hostile city. Young men everywhere perhaps, have a capacity to live from week to week, ministering to their few needs, but I don’t remember another story that makes that ease of being into a prompt for self interrogation so deftly: what do I really need? What do I really want in life?
One of the things the ‘boys’ want from life is sex, and London apparently yields it up to them fairly plentifully. There are some amusing (and biting) reflections on their exotification by White women who ‘only want one thing’ and demand that they perform the white supremacist myth of black male hypersexuality, and a refreshingly respectful attitude towards sex workers (I like their word ‘sports’) but the most depressing aspect of the book is the treatment of black women.
‘a spade* wouldn’t hit a spade when it have so much other talent on parade don’t think that you wouldn’t meet real class in the park’
*spade = black person
This institutional desirability of white women, so devastating and wide-ranging in its consequences is still very much maintained by white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, and Selvon contributes here to exposing its history. Black women as marriage partners are targets of routine domestic violence, which white women (though routinely objectified) are likely to escape. When a white woman becomes ill in his flat, Moses is petrified and seeks help instantly to get her out, in blood-chilling terror of police intervention.
Tanty, a sympathetic older black women character, offers sharp criticism of this preference for white women, as well as shelter to abused black women. She is also an agent of change in local white-owned institutions, and shows her joie de vivre when she dances with young men at a party. She is no purveyor of respectability politics, which are ridiculed gently through the character of Harris, while Bart is a vehicle for critique of shadeism.
The West Indian English Selvon shares his tale in deserves slow, savouring reading. Its bounce & sway rhythm is pleasure like dancing, and its power to frame and re-shape the living of London is strong. It invites us; it's hospitable, easing us up to receive a dose of hard truth along with the fun. It makes me nostalgic for my own native inflection: I want to call my mum and let my consonants drop, my vowels spread and flatten northwards.
So, cool as a lord, the old Galahad walking out to the road, with plastic raincoat hanging on the arm, and the eyes not missing one sharp craft* that pass, bowing his head in a polite ‘Good evening’ and not giving a blast if they answer or not. This is London, this is life oh lord, to walk like a king with money in your pocket, not a worry in the world.
Is one of those summer evenings, when it look like night would never come, a magnificent evening, a powerful evening, rent finish paying, rations in the cupboard, twenty pounds in the bank, and a nice piece of skin* waiting under the big clock in Piccadilly Tube Station. The sky blue, sun shining, the girls ain’t have on no coats to hide the legs.
‘Mummy, look at that black man!’ A little child, holding on to the mother hand, look up at Sir Galahad.
‘You mustn’t say that, dear!’ The mother chide the child.
But Galahad skin like rubber at this stage, he bend down and pat the child on the cheek, and the child cower and shrink and begin to cry.
‘What a sweet child!’ Galahad say, putting on the old English accent, ‘What’s your name?’
But the child mother uneasy as they stand up there on the pavement with so many white people around: if they was alone she might have talked a little, and ask Galahad what part of the world he come from, but instead she pull the child along and she look at Galahad and give a sickly sort of smile, and the old Galahad, knowing how it is, smile back and walk on.
*sharp craft/nice piece of skin = young woman
I laughed out loud many times on the tube reading. Everything is lightly, comically rendered, even when the material is deprivation, racism, grey malaise and violence (this reminds me of the persistently comic tone framing grim events and thoughts in The Brothers Karamazov, which I’m reading now too).
The world Selvon calls up of young West Indian men in ‘50s London revolves loosely around the appropriately named Moses, gruff in manner, with not a whiff of saintliness or self-satisfaction about him, yet ever heartfully helping his fellow ‘boys’ to find housing and work in the mildly, complicatedly hostile city. Young men everywhere perhaps, have a capacity to live from week to week, ministering to their few needs, but I don’t remember another story that makes that ease of being into a prompt for self interrogation so deftly: what do I really need? What do I really want in life?
One of the things the ‘boys’ want from life is sex, and London apparently yields it up to them fairly plentifully. There are some amusing (and biting) reflections on their exotification by White women who ‘only want one thing’ and demand that they perform the white supremacist myth of black male hypersexuality, and a refreshingly respectful attitude towards sex workers (I like their word ‘sports’) but the most depressing aspect of the book is the treatment of black women.
‘a spade* wouldn’t hit a spade when it have so much other talent on parade don’t think that you wouldn’t meet real class in the park’
*spade = black person
This institutional desirability of white women, so devastating and wide-ranging in its consequences is still very much maintained by white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, and Selvon contributes here to exposing its history. Black women as marriage partners are targets of routine domestic violence, which white women (though routinely objectified) are likely to escape. When a white woman becomes ill in his flat, Moses is petrified and seeks help instantly to get her out, in blood-chilling terror of police intervention.
Tanty, a sympathetic older black women character, offers sharp criticism of this preference for white women, as well as shelter to abused black women. She is also an agent of change in local white-owned institutions, and shows her joie de vivre when she dances with young men at a party. She is no purveyor of respectability politics, which are ridiculed gently through the character of Harris, while Bart is a vehicle for critique of shadeism.
The West Indian English Selvon shares his tale in deserves slow, savouring reading. Its bounce & sway rhythm is pleasure like dancing, and its power to frame and re-shape the living of London is strong. It invites us; it's hospitable, easing us up to receive a dose of hard truth along with the fun. It makes me nostalgic for my own native inflection: I want to call my mum and let my consonants drop, my vowels spread and flatten northwards.
August 19, 2011
Q&A: What sparked the London riots?
On Saturday, August 13, in Tottenham, north London, an ethnically diverse area where locals had been protesting about the death of 29-year-old Mark Duggan, a black man who was shot in a police operation on Thursday, August 11. This initial outbreak spread into several areas of London and other major British cities, such as Birmingham and Gloucester in central England, Manchester, Salford, Liverpool and Notthingham further north and Bristol in the southwest. On Monday afternoon, August 15, large gangs roamed Peckham and Hackney in east London, looting shops, attacking buses and setting cars and shops alight. Later that day, trouble spread to the leafy London suburb of Croydon, where several buildings, mainly shops, were set on fire. In Enfield, a large Sony distribution center was torched. (Source: CNN)
Selvon was one of those Trinidad-born people who went to London to work in the 1950s because of the said law. The Lonely Londoners focuses on the cultural differences between the whites and the immigrant blacks. It’s a precursor of other 1001 books like White Teeth by Zadie Smith and The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi. Selvon was a contemporary of Nobel laureate in Literature, V. S. Naipaul.
The chapter-less novel is composed of 3-4 short stories, fused together in a continuous third-person narration. Each of those stories relates the experience of each Trinidadian immigrant to London. The milieu is London during involving people belonging to the Windrush Generation. This generation refers to the coming, via the ship called Empire Windrush, of the big batch (492 passengers) of West Indian immigrants from Jamaica on June 22, 1948. Those Jamaicans came to the UK hoping to start a new life. The passengers were the first large group from that country after WWII. The main protagonist Moses Aloetta is not a Jamaican but a Trinidadian (like the author Selvon) but he oftentimes is mistaken to be a Jamaican. Moses is one of the first to arrive in London. So he is asked to help and assist the new arrivals from Trinidad until they get settled in London or in other cities in UK.
One noteworthy aspect of this book is its narrative voice. It is written not in Standard English but in the English of the black people in West Indies during the 50’s and the 60’s called Creolized form of English. It reminded me a lot of how Thais or less-educated Filipinos speak. Wiki says that Selvon tried to write the novel using the standard form but it could not convey the experiences and articulate the desires of his characters. This worked well for me since it made my reading quite an experience.
So, how does the book relate to the on-going London riots? I am not an expert in that situation and I have not been to London but, despite what Prime Minister Cameron says above, I can smell that the problem is about alleged racism which is the same as this book’s theme.
I feel lonely (isn't that a synonym for sad?) even if I am not a Londoner.
On Saturday, August 13, in Tottenham, north London, an ethnically diverse area where locals had been protesting about the death of 29-year-old Mark Duggan, a black man who was shot in a police operation on Thursday, August 11. This initial outbreak spread into several areas of London and other major British cities, such as Birmingham and Gloucester in central England, Manchester, Salford, Liverpool and Notthingham further north and Bristol in the southwest. On Monday afternoon, August 15, large gangs roamed Peckham and Hackney in east London, looting shops, attacking buses and setting cars and shops alight. Later that day, trouble spread to the leafy London suburb of Croydon, where several buildings, mainly shops, were set on fire. In Enfield, a large Sony distribution center was torched. (Source: CNN)
The riot made me pick up this 1956 novel by British Caribbean author Samuel Selvon (1923-1994) who is said to be The Father of Black Writing in Britain. The story is about the life of working-class black immigrants called West Indians who migrated to post-WWII London following the enactment of the British Nationality Act of 1948. The said act established the status of CUKC (Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies) allowing the people from the British colonies (Australia, Jamaica, Trinidad, etc) to come to UK without needing a visa. One of the reasons that the act was implemented was that many of the MPs of the day thought that few citizens of the Empire would want to reside in the UK. The Act was mostly repealed in 1983.
Prime Minister David Cameron blames the riots that shook Britain over the past 10 days on a "slow-motion moral collapse ... in parts of our country," he said Monday. Cameron listed problems including "Irresponsibility. Selfishness. Behaving as if your choices have no consequences. Children without fathers. Schools without discipline. Reward without effort. Crime without punishment. Rights without responsibilities. Communities without control," in a speech in his constituency in Oxfordshire.
Selvon was one of those Trinidad-born people who went to London to work in the 1950s because of the said law. The Lonely Londoners focuses on the cultural differences between the whites and the immigrant blacks. It’s a precursor of other 1001 books like White Teeth by Zadie Smith and The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi. Selvon was a contemporary of Nobel laureate in Literature, V. S. Naipaul.
The chapter-less novel is composed of 3-4 short stories, fused together in a continuous third-person narration. Each of those stories relates the experience of each Trinidadian immigrant to London. The milieu is London during involving people belonging to the Windrush Generation. This generation refers to the coming, via the ship called Empire Windrush, of the big batch (492 passengers) of West Indian immigrants from Jamaica on June 22, 1948. Those Jamaicans came to the UK hoping to start a new life. The passengers were the first large group from that country after WWII. The main protagonist Moses Aloetta is not a Jamaican but a Trinidadian (like the author Selvon) but he oftentimes is mistaken to be a Jamaican. Moses is one of the first to arrive in London. So he is asked to help and assist the new arrivals from Trinidad until they get settled in London or in other cities in UK.
One noteworthy aspect of this book is its narrative voice. It is written not in Standard English but in the English of the black people in West Indies during the 50’s and the 60’s called Creolized form of English. It reminded me a lot of how Thais or less-educated Filipinos speak. Wiki says that Selvon tried to write the novel using the standard form but it could not convey the experiences and articulate the desires of his characters. This worked well for me since it made my reading quite an experience.
So, how does the book relate to the on-going London riots? I am not an expert in that situation and I have not been to London but, despite what Prime Minister Cameron says above, I can smell that the problem is about alleged racism which is the same as this book’s theme.
I feel lonely (isn't that a synonym for sad?) even if I am not a Londoner.
July 11, 2020
I loved it. The Lonely Londoners (1956) is wonderful. Sam Selvon beautifully evokes immigrant life in 1950s London for various characters who have come to London from the West Indies for work and opportunity.
The tale is narrated by kindhearted but homesick Moses Aloetta who introduces us to some marvellous characters: newly arrived Galahad, ladies man Cap, Tolroy whose family have arrived en masse, Five Past, and many many more. The whole book is written in patois and it is this technique that brings it all to life - it flows like the best prose, is beautifully written and even the moribund slang sings. There's not really a story as such, just a flow of vignettes that touch on discrimination, the weather, relationships, friends, family, feuds, humour, fifties London and so on.
A really interesting, enjoyable and important book. Despite being rooted in the 1950s I suspect it contains universal truths for all people who seek a new life in a new and alien place.
4/5
The tale is narrated by kindhearted but homesick Moses Aloetta who introduces us to some marvellous characters: newly arrived Galahad, ladies man Cap, Tolroy whose family have arrived en masse, Five Past, and many many more. The whole book is written in patois and it is this technique that brings it all to life - it flows like the best prose, is beautifully written and even the moribund slang sings. There's not really a story as such, just a flow of vignettes that touch on discrimination, the weather, relationships, friends, family, feuds, humour, fifties London and so on.
A really interesting, enjoyable and important book. Despite being rooted in the 1950s I suspect it contains universal truths for all people who seek a new life in a new and alien place.
4/5
January 6, 2013
This is a unique book, written in the same West Indian patois spoken by its characters, Afro-Caribbean immigrants to London in the 1950s. There isn't really a story, but a bunch of stories. Starting with Moses Aloetta, the veteran immigrant from Trinidad who is now responsible for initiating greenhorns to life in this cold, white city, we circle through the lives of a dozen or so other working class blacks from the West Indies. They used to think London was the center of the universe; now they have to cope with living in a place that makes it clear in the "English manner" that they aren't wanted.
Us Yanks are familiar with the "American Dream" and all the promise and hypocrisy and betrayal and disappointment it implies, especially for immigrants of the wrong skin color. You could say this is a book about the "Imperial Dream"; immigrants to Britain arriving with dreams that are too often crushed, and Britain's fading dreams of empire, for whom all the immigrants landing on its shores from former colonies are an unwelcome symbol of its crumbling glory.
Newcomer Galahad is the second person we meet, right off the boat from Trinidad. He's a brash young man who's full of talk, putting on a brave front that quickly erodes. We go on to meet Cap, the eternal hustler who's always drifting from hotel to hotel, woman to woman; Five Past Midnight (so-nicknamed because his skin is so dark); Harris, the most assimilated of the crew, who throws elegant parties attended by white people and speaks and dresses like them but slips into creole when he's around "the boys"; Lewis, always looking for his runaway wife; and half a dozen other comical, tragic figures. Each of them gets a page or two here or there, and then we skip to someone else's story.
It took a while to get into this book, but the voice grew on me, and it's very easy to empathize with the characters, who represent the full range of human virtues and vices. Selvon was writing fiction but it felt like he was writing about people he knew; maybe he was. Don't expect a profound meditation on race relations or colonialism, even though those things pervade the book, and don't expect a plot, but it's still worth reading both for the viewpoints and the prose. In the end, the circle comes back around to Moses, who meditates on how far he's come without getting anywhere. You feel what they feel, the coldness and energy, hope and hunger, and the fight for survival in 1950s London. Very different from anything I've read before and not my usual sort of book, but I definitely recommend it. Don't pay attention to all the college students griping about how they had to read this book for a class and hated it; it's worth reading for its own sake.
Us Yanks are familiar with the "American Dream" and all the promise and hypocrisy and betrayal and disappointment it implies, especially for immigrants of the wrong skin color. You could say this is a book about the "Imperial Dream"; immigrants to Britain arriving with dreams that are too often crushed, and Britain's fading dreams of empire, for whom all the immigrants landing on its shores from former colonies are an unwelcome symbol of its crumbling glory.
Newcomer Galahad is the second person we meet, right off the boat from Trinidad. He's a brash young man who's full of talk, putting on a brave front that quickly erodes. We go on to meet Cap, the eternal hustler who's always drifting from hotel to hotel, woman to woman; Five Past Midnight (so-nicknamed because his skin is so dark); Harris, the most assimilated of the crew, who throws elegant parties attended by white people and speaks and dresses like them but slips into creole when he's around "the boys"; Lewis, always looking for his runaway wife; and half a dozen other comical, tragic figures. Each of them gets a page or two here or there, and then we skip to someone else's story.
It took a while to get into this book, but the voice grew on me, and it's very easy to empathize with the characters, who represent the full range of human virtues and vices. Selvon was writing fiction but it felt like he was writing about people he knew; maybe he was. Don't expect a profound meditation on race relations or colonialism, even though those things pervade the book, and don't expect a plot, but it's still worth reading both for the viewpoints and the prose. In the end, the circle comes back around to Moses, who meditates on how far he's come without getting anywhere. You feel what they feel, the coldness and energy, hope and hunger, and the fight for survival in 1950s London. Very different from anything I've read before and not my usual sort of book, but I definitely recommend it. Don't pay attention to all the college students griping about how they had to read this book for a class and hated it; it's worth reading for its own sake.
December 28, 2021
I enjoyed this one - an interesting portrait of a particular point in time, with strong characters and a great style.
January 17, 2019
I was surprised by how much I enjoyed reading this novel. I'm not sure why I was surprised, seeing as I do have personal connection to the narrative. Both sets of my grandparents ended up moving from Jamaica to the UK in around the time period that this novel is set, and faced many of the problems and situations that the novel presents. Of course, it means I am not relating to this from a first hand perspective. But the events and everything discussed in the novel relate to how I am here now, and the stories I hear from my grandmothers and heard from grandfathers.
I am so grateful that Selvon chose to write this in dialect language. It adds to the authenticity of the story-telling, and makes you more able to relate to the main character, Moses, and all the friends he mentions throughout the book.
I also really like how it presented a range of characters, each with their own personalities and view on the London life. There are so many different views and by having all these characters taking the spotlights in different moments and situations goes to show just how vast the different kinds of people you get are. There is no same story that fits all and when it comes to grouping people like that, it's where trouble starts.
The descriptions of London and 'home' to the characters were sometimes so beautiful, and sometimes so chilling. The writing was brilliant. There's also one particular moment in the novel where it is a continous stream of writing, without full stops to pause. I think it was the perfect moment to use that stylistic technique and resonated so well with what was happening.
The ending worked well for me too, even though I am usually someone who likes closed endings.
In the end, I think this did a good job of hopefully achieving whatever the author wanted it to achieve. But it really got to me personally, and also had me thinking about how many of the themes and perspectives presented aren't any different today. There are still concerns about foreigners imposing themselves on England, on them staining the 'good' English language, Brexit is happening, xenophobia is thrown around, and at the root of it all there are the people who come who are all being grouped into one 'being' that represents them as a whole. I'm not saying here to tell you what is wrong or right (gosh, this book review is straying a bit), but maybe we need to be reading more books like this one at this current time ^.^
Read for university.
I am so grateful that Selvon chose to write this in dialect language. It adds to the authenticity of the story-telling, and makes you more able to relate to the main character, Moses, and all the friends he mentions throughout the book.
I also really like how it presented a range of characters, each with their own personalities and view on the London life. There are so many different views and by having all these characters taking the spotlights in different moments and situations goes to show just how vast the different kinds of people you get are. There is no same story that fits all and when it comes to grouping people like that, it's where trouble starts.
The descriptions of London and 'home' to the characters were sometimes so beautiful, and sometimes so chilling. The writing was brilliant. There's also one particular moment in the novel where it is a continous stream of writing, without full stops to pause. I think it was the perfect moment to use that stylistic technique and resonated so well with what was happening.
The ending worked well for me too, even though I am usually someone who likes closed endings.
In the end, I think this did a good job of hopefully achieving whatever the author wanted it to achieve. But it really got to me personally, and also had me thinking about how many of the themes and perspectives presented aren't any different today. There are still concerns about foreigners imposing themselves on England, on them staining the 'good' English language, Brexit is happening, xenophobia is thrown around, and at the root of it all there are the people who come who are all being grouped into one 'being' that represents them as a whole. I'm not saying here to tell you what is wrong or right (gosh, this book review is straying a bit), but maybe we need to be reading more books like this one at this current time ^.^
Read for university.
October 2, 2020
Wonderful. Published in 1956, a short, incredibly evocative, and important novel about West Indian immigrants to London, the so-called ‘Windrush generation.’ It’s written in the vernacular, with a marvellous cadence flexible enough to contribute to the tale’s humour or its pathos alike (rather like the much later Milkman actually, which I could also hear in my head and similarly kept trapping my spouse to read bits out loud to). There’s one amazing ten-page sentence about summer in the park that just rolled through my head as I read it. The focus is on Moses, who has lived in London for a number of years, and the other arrivals around him as they struggle to make ends meet in a city that rejects them, while still going to fetes, smoking weed, chasing girls, and having a ‘oldtalk’ together.
Selvon was from Trinidad and lived in the UK from 1950 to 1978. I was interested to learn he then came to Canada and taught creative writing at the University of Victoria for a while before going to the University of Calgary - first as a janitor then as a writer in residence. I read that the Canadian literary establishment ignored him, and his work wasn’t reviewed while he lived here. And yet he’s often called the father of black writing in Britain.
Some quotes:
“It have people living in London who don’t know what happening in the room next to them, far more the street, or how other people living. London is a place like that. It divide up in little worlds, and you stay in the world you belong to and you don’t know anything about what happening in the other ones except what you read in the papers.”
“Under the kiff-kiff laughter, behind the ballad and the episode, the what-happening, The summer-is-hearts, he could see a great aimlessness, a great restless, swaying movement that leaving you standing in the same spot.”
Selvon was from Trinidad and lived in the UK from 1950 to 1978. I was interested to learn he then came to Canada and taught creative writing at the University of Victoria for a while before going to the University of Calgary - first as a janitor then as a writer in residence. I read that the Canadian literary establishment ignored him, and his work wasn’t reviewed while he lived here. And yet he’s often called the father of black writing in Britain.
Some quotes:
“It have people living in London who don’t know what happening in the room next to them, far more the street, or how other people living. London is a place like that. It divide up in little worlds, and you stay in the world you belong to and you don’t know anything about what happening in the other ones except what you read in the papers.”
“Under the kiff-kiff laughter, behind the ballad and the episode, the what-happening, The summer-is-hearts, he could see a great aimlessness, a great restless, swaying movement that leaving you standing in the same spot.”
June 9, 2020
Despite all of it it’s a love letter to London. That no matter how worse your life is, you’re doing everything to stay in this city. Everyone of the “boys” is struggling with their lives and faces different problems but they can’t make themselves go back to Trinidad.
Also it’s a good book to read at this time. A character realises at some point that the immigrants can be integrated perfectly but nevertheless are not seen as English. He nots that it’s because of their skin colour they are not treated equally.
And reading this book by someone from Trinidad made me understand even more where the problem is with racism in society. Even if people think they’re doing good it’s sometimes not and the daily racism is something that constantly makes POC question themselves and not feeling at home no matter how long they live in this country.
Also it’s a good book to read at this time. A character realises at some point that the immigrants can be integrated perfectly but nevertheless are not seen as English. He nots that it’s because of their skin colour they are not treated equally.
And reading this book by someone from Trinidad made me understand even more where the problem is with racism in society. Even if people think they’re doing good it’s sometimes not and the daily racism is something that constantly makes POC question themselves and not feeling at home no matter how long they live in this country.
February 13, 2022
And Galahad watch the colour of his hand, and talk to it, saying, 'Colour, is you that causing all this, you know. Why the hell you can't be blue, or red or green, if you can't be white? (...)'
A short but interesting story about West Indian immigrants to London written in 1956.
The image of the cover looks orange-ish but the color of the cover is rather red which stands in a better contrast to the black lines.
September 27, 2013
"The sun shining, but Galahad never see the sun look like how it looking now. No heat from it, it just there in the sky like a force-ripe orange. When he look up the colour of the sky so chocolate it make him more frighten. It have a kind of melancholy aspect about the morning that making him shiver. He have a feeling is about seven o'clock in the evening: when he look at clock on top of a building he see it only half-past ten in the morning.."
"...listen to this ballad what happen to Moses one summer night one splendid summer night with the sky brilliant with stars like in the tropics he was liming in green Park when a English fellar come up to him and say you are just the man I am looking for who me Moses say yes the man say come with me Moses went wondering what the test want and the test take him to a blonde who was standing up under a tree and talk a little so Moses couldn't hear but Blondie shake her head then he take Moses to another one who was sitting on a bench and she say yes so the test come back to Moses and want to pay Moses to go with the woman Moses was so suprise the he say yes quickly and he went with the thing and the test hover in the background afterwards he ask Moses if he would come again and Moses say yes it look like a good preposition to me I don't mind and he carry on for a week the things that does happen in this London people wouldn't believe when you tell them they would cork their ears when you talk and say that isn't true but some ballad happen in the city that people would bawl if they hear...."
There are already many great reviews of this here, but I wanted to quote the above to demonstrate that there is more going on here technically than one may expect. The great, long 10 page run on sentence (partly quoted above) is particularly impressive.
An important and groundbreaking book, well worth the couple of hours it will take to read.
"...listen to this ballad what happen to Moses one summer night one splendid summer night with the sky brilliant with stars like in the tropics he was liming in green Park when a English fellar come up to him and say you are just the man I am looking for who me Moses say yes the man say come with me Moses went wondering what the test want and the test take him to a blonde who was standing up under a tree and talk a little so Moses couldn't hear but Blondie shake her head then he take Moses to another one who was sitting on a bench and she say yes so the test come back to Moses and want to pay Moses to go with the woman Moses was so suprise the he say yes quickly and he went with the thing and the test hover in the background afterwards he ask Moses if he would come again and Moses say yes it look like a good preposition to me I don't mind and he carry on for a week the things that does happen in this London people wouldn't believe when you tell them they would cork their ears when you talk and say that isn't true but some ballad happen in the city that people would bawl if they hear...."
There are already many great reviews of this here, but I wanted to quote the above to demonstrate that there is more going on here technically than one may expect. The great, long 10 page run on sentence (partly quoted above) is particularly impressive.
An important and groundbreaking book, well worth the couple of hours it will take to read.
June 28, 2015
This is a book of near-mythical status to me, one that I have known about since I was 10 years old, having read extracts from it in my Rhodri Jones textbook as a schoolboy. Those mellifluous alliterations - Samuel Selvon, Lonely Londoners - have stayed with me across the decades. Had I never come across this book, it would still have set off bells ringing in my head, no matter where I found myself or how much time had passed.
But as luck would have it, come across it I did - in Selvon's London of all places, as one of Selvon's immigrants. 50 years later maybe and from a different part of the world, but I am one of his people too. This book is for anyone who ever came to this great city from somewhere else, inhaled its thrilling cold air for the first time - an intoxicating mix of aspiration and ambition and alienation, of longing and belonging and not-belonging, of money and the constant quest for it, of art and culture and cuisine like nowhere else, a place of bewildering diversity and equality, every single race and religion and language on God's green earth converging on this one grey point of the planet, being an outsider and never fitting in, misting up the window your nose forever pressed to the glass, only to suddenly realize one day that you too are on the inside, for there is no inside or outside here, everyone is from someplace else, and so you are always on both sides and always will be.
Somehow Selvon captured all these contradictions in his classic. And all of it in the most irresistible addictive patois that will have you reading long into the night. You'll laugh out loud at the adventures of shiftless wastrels like the Captain and Big City, at the same time sympathizing and appreciating the travails of those who trod this path before you, Moses and Tolroy, Tanty and Galahad, back in a time when racial equality was not taken for granted, when contact with friends and family meant a waiting period measured in months not seconds, when the world was a bigger, lonelier, less connected place than it is today. It is their struggles we repeat endlessly, the Bangladeshi student at the Tesco till, the Polish girl in Starbucks, the African nightguard in a City office building, the young Italians and Spaniards now flocking in. Because each of those generations follow in the footsteps of Selvon's Caribbeans, and all of us owe a debt to those trailblazers, the brave pioneers who made it all possible for us.
*
The book is episodic by design, with not much in the way of straightforward narrative momentum. Instead it is baggy and loose-limbed, taking in all sorts of characters and moods and anecdotes. Moses Aloetta goes down to Waterloo station to meet the boat train and picks up Sir Galahad, newly arrived from Trinidad but full of beans. What follows are the hilarious escapades of Cap the Nigerian rogue, and the spade Bart's eternal search for his lost Beatrice. The pursuit of white 'skin' is a constant theme throughout the book - if Selvon is to be believed, even the most dire circumstances didn't prevent the spades from getting action, and plenty of it! "Boy, it have bags of white pussy in London, and you will eat till you tired." The hunting ground is west-central London, stretching from Marble Arch to Notting Hill Gate, the same Notting Hill which is prohibitively expensive today but whose Caribbean legacy lives on in its annual carnival.
A sublime sequence has Sir Galahad dressing up extra fine, 'coasting the lime', going down to Piccadilly Circus to meet up with his girl Daisy. It is here, through Galahad, that you begin to suspect the depths of Selvon's paradoxical love for London. Comic interludes are scattered throughout - the old lady Tanty braving public transport for the very first time to make her way down to 'Greatport Street'; Big City 'fulling up' his forms with help from Moses; the fete-throwing faux-Englishman Harris with his bowler, briefcase, umbrella and copy of the Times; Galahad snatching pigeons from parks and Cap dining out on trapped seagulls he caught in his flat.
In an extended passage of astonishing lyricism, the author riffs stream-of-consciously on summer in the city and the endless sexual opportunities that come in its wake. From here on, Selvon's prose rises to a whole new level, going from the excellent to the transcendent. As Moses, the guiding spirit of the narrative, grows ever more lonely and morose, he questions the very basis of his migrant existence, the point of ten years lost in London. The pain and fear at the end of the book is palpable (and remorselessly quotable). And yet it is as ever counter-balanced by inertia, practicality, and an enduring love of the big bad city. "I will wait until after the summer, the summer does really be hearts."
Anyone who's ever left home to make a life elsewhere will feel those last few pages. And as long as London lives, Selvon's book deserves to be read and remembered.
But as luck would have it, come across it I did - in Selvon's London of all places, as one of Selvon's immigrants. 50 years later maybe and from a different part of the world, but I am one of his people too. This book is for anyone who ever came to this great city from somewhere else, inhaled its thrilling cold air for the first time - an intoxicating mix of aspiration and ambition and alienation, of longing and belonging and not-belonging, of money and the constant quest for it, of art and culture and cuisine like nowhere else, a place of bewildering diversity and equality, every single race and religion and language on God's green earth converging on this one grey point of the planet, being an outsider and never fitting in, misting up the window your nose forever pressed to the glass, only to suddenly realize one day that you too are on the inside, for there is no inside or outside here, everyone is from someplace else, and so you are always on both sides and always will be.
Somehow Selvon captured all these contradictions in his classic. And all of it in the most irresistible addictive patois that will have you reading long into the night. You'll laugh out loud at the adventures of shiftless wastrels like the Captain and Big City, at the same time sympathizing and appreciating the travails of those who trod this path before you, Moses and Tolroy, Tanty and Galahad, back in a time when racial equality was not taken for granted, when contact with friends and family meant a waiting period measured in months not seconds, when the world was a bigger, lonelier, less connected place than it is today. It is their struggles we repeat endlessly, the Bangladeshi student at the Tesco till, the Polish girl in Starbucks, the African nightguard in a City office building, the young Italians and Spaniards now flocking in. Because each of those generations follow in the footsteps of Selvon's Caribbeans, and all of us owe a debt to those trailblazers, the brave pioneers who made it all possible for us.
*
The book is episodic by design, with not much in the way of straightforward narrative momentum. Instead it is baggy and loose-limbed, taking in all sorts of characters and moods and anecdotes. Moses Aloetta goes down to Waterloo station to meet the boat train and picks up Sir Galahad, newly arrived from Trinidad but full of beans. What follows are the hilarious escapades of Cap the Nigerian rogue, and the spade Bart's eternal search for his lost Beatrice. The pursuit of white 'skin' is a constant theme throughout the book - if Selvon is to be believed, even the most dire circumstances didn't prevent the spades from getting action, and plenty of it! "Boy, it have bags of white pussy in London, and you will eat till you tired." The hunting ground is west-central London, stretching from Marble Arch to Notting Hill Gate, the same Notting Hill which is prohibitively expensive today but whose Caribbean legacy lives on in its annual carnival.
A sublime sequence has Sir Galahad dressing up extra fine, 'coasting the lime', going down to Piccadilly Circus to meet up with his girl Daisy. It is here, through Galahad, that you begin to suspect the depths of Selvon's paradoxical love for London. Comic interludes are scattered throughout - the old lady Tanty braving public transport for the very first time to make her way down to 'Greatport Street'; Big City 'fulling up' his forms with help from Moses; the fete-throwing faux-Englishman Harris with his bowler, briefcase, umbrella and copy of the Times; Galahad snatching pigeons from parks and Cap dining out on trapped seagulls he caught in his flat.
In an extended passage of astonishing lyricism, the author riffs stream-of-consciously on summer in the city and the endless sexual opportunities that come in its wake. From here on, Selvon's prose rises to a whole new level, going from the excellent to the transcendent. As Moses, the guiding spirit of the narrative, grows ever more lonely and morose, he questions the very basis of his migrant existence, the point of ten years lost in London. The pain and fear at the end of the book is palpable (and remorselessly quotable). And yet it is as ever counter-balanced by inertia, practicality, and an enduring love of the big bad city. "I will wait until after the summer, the summer does really be hearts."
Anyone who's ever left home to make a life elsewhere will feel those last few pages. And as long as London lives, Selvon's book deserves to be read and remembered.
October 4, 2019
Me reading this book was a bit of luck, somebody was getting rid of a pile of books and this Penguin classic was hidden amongst them, who'd want to offload a Penguin classic? I'd never heard of it, nor the writer but the feeling I got from the cover makes me think it is going to be a cool read. Sam Selvon has a fantastic writing style, the language has not been tweaked for the public, you get the full West Indies accent....it is so easy to read, the issue is to not speak like it in real life. Very laid back and contagious.
The main character is Moses and through him you find out about the arrival of Galahad and how an immigrant tries to make it in 1950s England, the environment is pretty hostile, as usual fuelled by the media. Moses tells stories about his friends, Big City, Five, Lewis, Cap and a few others. The craziness they get up to, looking for ladies, partying....eating seagulls.....yep that happens, Moses leaves nothing out. By far the best character was Tanty, she made me laugh again and again, a powerful woman who knows how to put these lads in their place.
One embarrassing thing for me here, as I was reading this I kept thinking there is this constant feeling of loneliness throughout the book, I was quite pleased with myself for spotting that...........until I saw the title. Doh!
Well worth giving this a read as it gives you an inside view of why somebody leaves their home country looking for a better life and how lonely and scary that can be...I reckon nothing has changed for those immigrants today.
Blog review: https://felcherman.wordpress.com/2019...
The main character is Moses and through him you find out about the arrival of Galahad and how an immigrant tries to make it in 1950s England, the environment is pretty hostile, as usual fuelled by the media. Moses tells stories about his friends, Big City, Five, Lewis, Cap and a few others. The craziness they get up to, looking for ladies, partying....eating seagulls.....yep that happens, Moses leaves nothing out. By far the best character was Tanty, she made me laugh again and again, a powerful woman who knows how to put these lads in their place.
One embarrassing thing for me here, as I was reading this I kept thinking there is this constant feeling of loneliness throughout the book, I was quite pleased with myself for spotting that...........until I saw the title. Doh!
Well worth giving this a read as it gives you an inside view of why somebody leaves their home country looking for a better life and how lonely and scary that can be...I reckon nothing has changed for those immigrants today.
Blog review: https://felcherman.wordpress.com/2019...
November 11, 2020
I really enjoyed this short novel first published in 1956 about West Indian immigrants coming to London. Narrated by Moses, who has already been in London several years, we see him and his friends as they try to get work, find places to stay, pick up women and borrow and lend money. It’s written in dialect, which is what brings these men and their characters to life. Having read lots of novels by women set in 50s London (also often with characters scraping by) it was so interesting to see the place from a different perspective.
June 25, 2015
[4.5] An excellent mix of kitchen-sink realism and picaresque, with entertaining characters. The dialect narrative gives a wonderful sense of being right inside a subculture yet is lightly enough done that it's still a pretty fast read. (It's so relaxed that it doesn't seem like a trad third-person narrative, more often like listening to an old man telling stories of what his mates got up to back in the day.) There is l great detail about the London of the 1950s and the eternal magic of the city, as well as about the lives of the guys who've arrived from the West Indies to look for work. And it's got that tingling combination of adventure and adversity that is moving to a brand new place down to a t.
For years I'd noticed this book on various lists (best London novels, best Black British novels etc) and hadn't realised a) it would be so enjoyable - it made me laugh several times - and b) it was so short - under 140 pages. So if anyone else has been swithering for ages about whether to read it, as I did, my advice would be to go for it, especially if you're interested in this era of recent British history.
The introduction by Susheila Nasta of the OU is excellent on literary background. (The historical side was already familiar from general knowledge and more recently in more detail from Never Had it So Good: a history of Britain from Suez to the Beatles by Dominic Sandbrook.)
I'd now rather like to read the 1970s sequel featuring some of the same characters, Moses Ascending.
For years I'd noticed this book on various lists (best London novels, best Black British novels etc) and hadn't realised a) it would be so enjoyable - it made me laugh several times - and b) it was so short - under 140 pages. So if anyone else has been swithering for ages about whether to read it, as I did, my advice would be to go for it, especially if you're interested in this era of recent British history.
The introduction by Susheila Nasta of the OU is excellent on literary background. (The historical side was already familiar from general knowledge and more recently in more detail from Never Had it So Good: a history of Britain from Suez to the Beatles by Dominic Sandbrook.)
I'd now rather like to read the 1970s sequel featuring some of the same characters, Moses Ascending.
Read
April 10, 2019A classic of British West Indian writing about life in London for the Windrush generation and their struggles coping with racism, poverty, the awfulness of post-war living, acceptance, reality vs hope, homesickness, and of course the weather.
This is brilliant. I have been putting it off because the title makes it sound so depressing but it isn't at all. It's written lyrically in a combination of West Indian dialects which works really well, telling stories of a group of "the boys" who all cope differently with their circumstances. These are undoubtedly crappy, and there is a lot of human grimness on display (including a lot of toxic male behaviour--exploiting women and domestic violence) but there's also a powerful sense of resilient humanity and of joy taken where you can find it, especially in the pages-long single sentence about British summer and how everyone goes mad. Classic for a reason, highly recommended.
This is brilliant. I have been putting it off because the title makes it sound so depressing but it isn't at all. It's written lyrically in a combination of West Indian dialects which works really well, telling stories of a group of "the boys" who all cope differently with their circumstances. These are undoubtedly crappy, and there is a lot of human grimness on display (including a lot of toxic male behaviour--exploiting women and domestic violence) but there's also a powerful sense of resilient humanity and of joy taken where you can find it, especially in the pages-long single sentence about British summer and how everyone goes mad. Classic for a reason, highly recommended.
November 14, 2019
I knew very little about this book prior to reading it other than (1) it is on the 1001 books to read before you die list; and (2) it was a Kindle deal for 99p! I wondered if it might be depressing but it was quite the opposite. It is written in a Trinidadian patois, with a rambling free-association kind of reminiscing vibe and is full of vividly drawn colourful characters and a strong sense of place and time. Some of the blatant misogyny got me down at times but otherwise a joyful read.
April 30, 2021
The Lonely Londoners прича је о досељеницима са разних карипских острва у „центар света“ – Лондон. Главни лик и наратор је Мозес (није случајно одабрано то име – Мојсије), досељеник са Тринидада који је у Лондону већ десетак година и који је, силом прилика, први са којим се скоро сви карипски имигранти сусрећу.
И као што је Мојсије извео Јевреје из Египта и повео их у Ханаан, тако ће и овај, савремени Мојсије, дочекивати своје сународнике на железничкој станици и уводити их у жељно ишчекивану Обећану земљу, помажући им да се пријаве на биро и снађу за почетак.
Ипак, ова Обећана земља, испоставиће се, није баш толико обећана као она библијска. Досељеници добијају најслабије плаћена занимања, физички најзахтевнија или само она са ноћним сменама, живе по подрумима и таванима, у далеким предграђима. Ово је свет лондонске имигрантске маргине педесетих година ХХ века, свет (силом прилика посталих) ситних криминалаца, проститутки, алкохоличара и наркомана у настајању. Сви они се крећу у једном затвореном друштву, на најнижим социјалним лествицама, једва спајају крај с крајем и животаре, без перспективе и могућности за напредак у социјалној хијерархији.
Нема овде неке кохерентне радње. Испричано је пар исцепканих секвенци из живота неколико миграната са Кариба, али и то је суштински довољно да се спозна једноличност и бесциљност таквог живота, који води даље само у пропаст и болест, без толико жељеног остварења сна да се (за)ради и помогне породици која је остала на Карибима.
Оно што ми је мало кварило утисак јесте то што је цео роман написан „исквареним“, дијалекатским, енглеским, односно онаквим енглеским какав се говори на Карибима. То не би био проблем да је то случај само са реченицама које изговарају ликови или преношењем њихових унутрашњих монолога или да је све ово један исповедни монолог. Овако ми је било исфорсирано.
И као што је Мојсије извео Јевреје из Египта и повео их у Ханаан, тако ће и овај, савремени Мојсије, дочекивати своје сународнике на железничкој станици и уводити их у жељно ишчекивану Обећану земљу, помажући им да се пријаве на биро и снађу за почетак.
Ипак, ова Обећана земља, испоставиће се, није баш толико обећана као она библијска. Досељеници добијају најслабије плаћена занимања, физички најзахтевнија или само она са ноћним сменама, живе по подрумима и таванима, у далеким предграђима. Ово је свет лондонске имигрантске маргине педесетих година ХХ века, свет (силом прилика посталих) ситних криминалаца, проститутки, алкохоличара и наркомана у настајању. Сви они се крећу у једном затвореном друштву, на најнижим социјалним лествицама, једва спајају крај с крајем и животаре, без перспективе и могућности за напредак у социјалној хијерархији.
Нема овде неке кохерентне радње. Испричано је пар исцепканих секвенци из живота неколико миграната са Кариба, али и то је суштински довољно да се спозна једноличност и бесциљност таквог живота, који води даље само у пропаст и болест, без толико жељеног остварења сна да се (за)ради и помогне породици која је остала на Карибима.
Оно што ми је мало кварило утисак јесте то што је цео роман написан „исквареним“, дијалекатским, енглеским, односно онаквим енглеским какав се говори на Карибима. То не би био проблем да је то случај само са реченицама које изговарају ликови или преношењем њихових унутрашњих монолога или да је све ово један исповедни монолог. Овако ми је било исфорсирано.
April 7, 2024
A superb book filled with great characters and wonderful language. It's London's answer to Cannery Row.
November 2, 2020
"Праздник, который всегда с тобой", но про карибских эмигрантов в Лондоне и с грамматическими ошибками - сначала было классно, а потом надоело.
Нельзя построить хороший роман на одном приеме, если ты не великий писатель.
Нельзя построить хороший роман на одном приеме, если ты не великий писатель.
August 16, 2020
Setting: London; 1950s. This is a tale of the lives, trials and tribulations of West Indian men arriving in London during the 1950s, looking for a better life. Told largely from the point of view of Moses, who came from Trinidad 10 years earlier, the reader is also introduced to an array of characters, many with great nicknames such as Galahad, Captain and Big City, all of whom are struggling to survive, find jobs, make money to send home and remain positive in the face of racism and homesickness. Although written in West Indian vernacular, I still found the book was easy to get into and appreciate, indeed it added to the authenticity. There was only one area I struggled a bit with when there were 10 pages of 'stream of consciousness' about 2/3rds of the way through the book. Still found the whole story intriguing and discovered there is a follow-up book about the character Moses which I shall be looking out for - 8.5/10.
June 22, 2022
Find this review on my blog:https://fizwrites.wixsite.com/website...
I find myself properly reviewing this novel as we commemorate Windrush day. I initially gave this 3.5 stars on Goodreads, but after re-reading and analysing this to write about it for a uni assignment I felt I truly appreciated it. I compared this novel to Othello, analysing race, culture, and gender/gender roles and I felt before I didn’t really know what Windrush was or meant but I had a gist of what it is until I actually researched, read articles, archives, interviews that I truly found out not only what it meant but the impact and effect it still has to this day.
Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners is an insight into 1950s London where the post-war saw immigrants making that arduous journey across the ocean to come to Britain in hope of a better future. The plot is continuously moving from character to character, and we get an insight into how these migrants settled in London and what their life is like. The Windrush generation was allowed to come to England visa-free to help out because of the effects of the war so they saw an opportunity whether that be financial or because they are fleeing from war-torn countries. They saw England as a beacon of hope, of prosperity and this sense of hope, never wavers in these characters we follow. Their illusion of Britain is this sense of place where dreams come true is quickly shattered when they realise the harsh reality of actually living there.
When I was re-reading this novel, I found the portrayal of London so vivid and the characters Selvon portrayed almost Dickensian in nature. It was hard to read but heart-breaking to read about the daily racism they faced. They were discriminated against by their race, class, and gender, and it is such a deep account of exactly how they were treated. Reading this again became vivid because of the current immigration issues I read the other day an article on how people are still being discriminated against and are judged by their accent and dialect and racism is very much still alive because the study suggests that those who didn’t speak English fluently are being treated differently to those who do. The citizens in the novel were being treated as second-class citizens and there are people today who still feel the same. The novel is timely. It has heavy themes of identity, belonging, memory and migration but for me, the best thing about this novel is the sense of hope. In this big city where the characters face alienation and isolation and loneliness there is hope, hope for a better future, hope for change, and hope that their children and families or friends will have a better future than them and that is what makes this novel so special. They endure hardship and struggle, discrimination, there are cultural clashes and regardless of their background, they are all generalised as the Caribbean amongst all this what remains is hope. The dialect when you are reading comes alive. It is such an insightful read that should be made a compulsory read, educates you and gives such a vivid portrayal it is a must-read. Everyone needs to pick up this novel.
I find myself properly reviewing this novel as we commemorate Windrush day. I initially gave this 3.5 stars on Goodreads, but after re-reading and analysing this to write about it for a uni assignment I felt I truly appreciated it. I compared this novel to Othello, analysing race, culture, and gender/gender roles and I felt before I didn’t really know what Windrush was or meant but I had a gist of what it is until I actually researched, read articles, archives, interviews that I truly found out not only what it meant but the impact and effect it still has to this day.
Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners is an insight into 1950s London where the post-war saw immigrants making that arduous journey across the ocean to come to Britain in hope of a better future. The plot is continuously moving from character to character, and we get an insight into how these migrants settled in London and what their life is like. The Windrush generation was allowed to come to England visa-free to help out because of the effects of the war so they saw an opportunity whether that be financial or because they are fleeing from war-torn countries. They saw England as a beacon of hope, of prosperity and this sense of hope, never wavers in these characters we follow. Their illusion of Britain is this sense of place where dreams come true is quickly shattered when they realise the harsh reality of actually living there.
When I was re-reading this novel, I found the portrayal of London so vivid and the characters Selvon portrayed almost Dickensian in nature. It was hard to read but heart-breaking to read about the daily racism they faced. They were discriminated against by their race, class, and gender, and it is such a deep account of exactly how they were treated. Reading this again became vivid because of the current immigration issues I read the other day an article on how people are still being discriminated against and are judged by their accent and dialect and racism is very much still alive because the study suggests that those who didn’t speak English fluently are being treated differently to those who do. The citizens in the novel were being treated as second-class citizens and there are people today who still feel the same. The novel is timely. It has heavy themes of identity, belonging, memory and migration but for me, the best thing about this novel is the sense of hope. In this big city where the characters face alienation and isolation and loneliness there is hope, hope for a better future, hope for change, and hope that their children and families or friends will have a better future than them and that is what makes this novel so special. They endure hardship and struggle, discrimination, there are cultural clashes and regardless of their background, they are all generalised as the Caribbean amongst all this what remains is hope. The dialect when you are reading comes alive. It is such an insightful read that should be made a compulsory read, educates you and gives such a vivid portrayal it is a must-read. Everyone needs to pick up this novel.
December 12, 2019
The real strength of Selvon’s stories are perhaps not as a work of art, but as an exploration of 1980’s London through the eyes of various West Indian men; this aligns with Selvon’s hyper-realistic prose style, one which dispenses of prettiness in favour or authenticity. Whether it be the smog filled streets of London, the disorientating nature of big city life, the everyday prejudices which many of these men had to live through, or the feeling these men had of being cast adrift, of existing on the fringes of a society which neither wants nor understands them, there is something understated in Selvon’s ability as a social observer. Part of the problem with Selvon’s prose style is that we never really get to know the characters; instead we get superficial portraits of their quirks and behaviours through the eyes of the narrator and although the reader is able to sense that there are whole human beings behind these characters which Selvon is able to bring out, it feels like there are further depths to these characters which which we want the narrator to tease out.
In the end ‘The Lonely Londoners’ acts as a series of connected vignettes rather than a coherent narrative, although that plays to Selvon’s strengths as a social commentators, it also downplays his abilities as a writer to fashion truly original worlds and characters.
In the end ‘The Lonely Londoners’ acts as a series of connected vignettes rather than a coherent narrative, although that plays to Selvon’s strengths as a social commentators, it also downplays his abilities as a writer to fashion truly original worlds and characters.
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