Beginning Mr Loverman (Penguin UK, 2013) is like overhearing choice gossip in the market, conducted between two strident saleswomen hawking bundles of bhaji, mountains of tomatoes, hands of green fig. You basket your purchases and move on reluctantly, wishing all the while that you could stay for the duration of the bacchanal.The good thing about Bernardine Evaristo's seventh book is that the commess and commotion comes right up to your front door, knocks sharply, and demands the best seat in your house.Evaristo's previous publications include Hello Mum (2010); Blonde Roots (2008) and the verse novel, The Emperor's Babe (2001), which was named one of the UK Times' Best 100 Books of 2000-2009. She is a poetry judge for the 2014 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and the mentor of the inaugural Hollick Arvon Caribbean Writer's prizewinner, Barbara Jenkins.
What's the rambunction at the core of Mr Loverman? The "loverman" in question, a nattily attired septuagenarian by the name of Barrington Jedidiah Walker, Esq, has been leading a double life. His long-suffering wife, Carmel, believes Barrington (Barry, to his friends) to be an incorrigible adulterer, one who carouses about Hackney with any number of, as she puts it, godless women.
She's only half right: Barry is indeed routinely unfaithful to Carmel, but the object of his true ardour and affection is none other than his best friend of some sixty-odd years, Morris Courtney de la Roux.Ever since their boyhood days, in the close quartered village communities of St John's, Antigua, Morris and Barry have been thick as thieves. Their bond hasn't diminished, not through the fluctuations brought on by emigration, their conventional marriages to women, and fatherhood. Will Barry be able to break new ground in his relationship with Morris, and at what cost can he take their decades-old courtship into the light?
On its face, Mr Loverman reads a bit like transplanted domestic comedy-drama, flavoured with a honeyed touch of Alexander McCall Smith. Delve past a surface interpretation, however, and it becomes evident: Evaristo primes the subtext of the work with far more bite than you'd expect.Homosexuality isn't turned out like a gaudy, chintz-embellished plot centrepiece from which the writer spins an utterly ordinary yarn. Instead, Barry's gayness is emblematic of the ways in which avoidance has flavoured his entire foppish, yet secretive life.During a conversation with his elder daughter's strident girlfriend, Barry ponders the hard truths that his life of artful concealment has wrought."In that moment," he thinks, "I wanted to tell this stranger, this Merle, this girl from the tiny island of Montserrat, that I had commensurate preferences too, but I couldn't be a brave warrior like her. I wanted to tell her about Morris. I wanted to sing his name out into the light.
"We all present carefully selected versions of we-selves to the world at large," muses Barry, and this sentiment is no less true for his frustrated wife than it is for himself. Carmel's chapters, spanning decades and conducted in rambling, self-interrogative tracts, are as telling as they are damning.Barry's wife swiftly loses auxiliary status in her narrative. Through her time-shifting segments, deep swathes of loss and sexual repression pour out, revealing a woman hungry for a brand of her husband's love, that, unbeknownst to her, has long been given to another.
The novel investigates the regrets that are easily summoned by a lifetime of avoidance, but it also dredges up a buffet of other complex themes. Barry, Carmel, Morris and others all confront, in both large and small instances, issues of cultural alienation, of generational divide, of religious fervour and its agnostic absence.
The reader is treated to a patchwork assemblage of Stoke Newington's historical multiculturalism, and of the roles that Caribbean Britons have played since their introduction to the United Kingdom.Evaristo's storytelling is consistently satisfying, even in the wake of the novel's possibly tidy series of conclusions. Mr Loverman, however, is a riot on the page, a lushly conducted affair that's begging for filmic treatment. In this world, as in the real one, happy endings don't come without cost, and what constitutes "happy" can be leveraged against an adult lifetime's sacrifices and scars.
