Another Man in the Street tells the story of Lucky, who immigrated to England from St. Kitts. We see his growth and challenges, and the author gives us great insight into another world.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Another Man in the Street is available now.

If you’re looking for a carefully plotted, linear story, ANOTHER MAN IN THE STREET by Caryl Phillips is not for you. But take a look if you like picaresque witness to sad interconnected personal journeys. Maybe even the universal human journey.

The novel radiates out from Victor, an émigré from St Kitts to London in the 60s. He will suffer all manner of social and economic roadblocks as he struggles to establish himself in a journalism career there. But the book is not limited to a narrow focus on the immigrant experience. His life will intersect with significant other characters, most of whom tell their own stories. Lorna and Leon, his wife and child from home. Peter, a Jewish holocaust survivor, and one in a series of employers. Ruth, a lonely white woman who shares his bed and home and remains with him until the end.

With their heartaches and failures, any of these characters can be seen as “just another man (or woman) in the street.” And in his deathbed life review, Victor confronts his own collusion in creating the life he now wants to leave. He’s been both victim and perpetrator.

I appreciated the way Phillips expanded the focus beyond the immigrant experience to shared human challenges but the novel with its frequent changes of point of view (even going from 1st to 3rd person) and timeline extending well beyond the 60s was not always a smooth reading experience.

With thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Strauss and Giroux for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you to the author, Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley, for an ARC in exchange for an honest review. My apologies for the delay in posting, I had several familial health challenges to contend with in the past month.

I may have had false expectations going into this book - since it was introduced as the story of Victor Johnson, a young immigrant from the Caribbean, I expected him to be the main focus/voice. Although some chapters were written from his POV, there were many others that were from the POV of other characters - and it was not always clear who this was and what their connection to Victor was. Additionally, there were time jumps back and forth, so overall I found this very disjointed and thus hard to really get into in any depth. The author was able to transport us back to 1960s London - but I would have liked more of a clear focus on Victor, and a less disjointed narrative.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This moves around in time to tell the story primarily of Victor but also of Peter and Ruth all newcomers to London in the 1960s. Victor left his wife and child behind in St Kitts, Peter is an immigrant from Germany and Ruth is from the north and has a secret in her past. There's a fair about of back and forth between the three in this melancholy volume. It's not just about the immigrant experience but that looms above all. Know that some paragraphs are very long and that this is slow in spots but that there's also some lovely imagery. Thanks to netgalley for the ARC. A good read.

…the thought of maybe one day leaving the country and beginning again, back home, momentarily lifts your spirits, even though you know you are trapped in England. from Another Man in the Street by Caryl Phillips

Victor wanted more from life than cutting sugar cane. He had been a bookish boy who longed to be a writer. At twenty-seven, he left his home in the Caribbean for the England. He found a job at a bar, then lucked into a job as a rent collector for another immigrant with a tragic background. He began writing for a newspaper. It turned into a career. He gained a white, educated girlfriend (no matter that he had left a wife and child behind) who herself had left home for an imagined better life, becoming a secretary.

But in 1960s England, the immigrant dream of a new life never turned out the way one imagined. I tried to hold on to dignity, Victor tells his girlfriend, knowing “full well that all you people see is the colour and not the man.”

The story is told from different points in time and from the viewpoints of Victor, his boss Peter, and Ruth, who had been Peter’s love before Victor stole her away.

Victor finds those who are sympathetic to his plight as an immigrant. But the wider attitude is anti-immigrant, those who resent the influx of people from the colonies. As one character states, “The real worry for us Englishmen is that we’re bloody well running out of colonies…But you lot need us, don’t you? We make things all nice and easy for you, don’t we? Cheap passage to England, no questions asked. Loose women and lots of jobs.”

Our sympathy for Victor wavers as we learn his ruthlessness in his pursuit of bettering his life. It took a lifetime for Victor to realize what he had lost in England, yet his grappling with his choices at end of life redeems him in our eyes.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book through NetGalley.

This is a dark book, spreading tragedy and heartbreak amongst various principal characters. It seems at first that the book is about Victor, aWest Indian immigrant to Britain in the sixties, but no, we don’t really stay with or penetrate Victor’s character, instead just watch his suffering and failure. He is matched by Peter, another immigrant, but white and Jewish, a survivor of World War II’s racial cataclysm. Peter, however, wishes to find kindness - despite being a landlord who exploits the poor - and emerges a more benign figure than Victor. Then there’s the woman who links the two men, she herself a social victim who yearns to connect again with the child she gave away.
It’s all very sad but also makes for rather sour reading. The narration also isn’t linear, and becomes circular and repetitive instead. I’ve enjoyed Phillips’ work in the past but this novel I found too schematic and relentlessly negative. He’s a sensitive writer but this work, though empathetic, doesn’t wholly succeed.

A humane and compassionate portrait of people who have made their way to London in the sixties. The relationships of Victor, from the West Indies, Peter from Germany and Ruth from a northern town develop over the years, and the story of their complex lives, and how history has shaped, them play out through the novel. Phillips explores their unfulfilled potential, compromises and hopes, and in this novel, none of these characters are just “another man in the street”. Each has their dreams, but their past experiences permeate their lives as they try to reinvent themselves.

I would recommend this poignant and sad novel to readers who enjoy nuanced characters, and reading about sixties London through the eyes of newcomers.

Wow, I have a feeling Another Man in the Street is going to be one of the best books of the year. I can’t say enough good things about this book. It was awesome.