I I spend most of my life as other people, spending years in the lives of my fictional protagonists, and when the creative alchemy goes well, it's immensely satisfying. I can't stand being myself, but to be honest, I find other people more interesting. Creating characters and unraveling their stories is an exciting and unpredictable adventure for the uninitiated. It can be scary at times and I'm never sure of the outcome, but when I'm in the zone, it's a scary ride.
When I wrote my 2013 novel Mr. Loverman, I felt deliciously consumed by my 74-year-old Caribbean protagonist, Barrington Jedidiah Walker Esq. He came easily – no labor pains – and when my husband came home in the evening, I settled into him so deeply that I unconsciously found myself speaking to him in Barrington's Antiguan accent. “Okay, Spar?” I ask him, the boundaries between character and creator momentarily blurred, much to my husband's amusement.
I didn't love all of my characters, but I had a platonic crush on Barrington, as crazy as that was. Not because he's perfect, God forbid, who is? But because he's a larger-than-life unreliable narrator, he's complex and emotional, with a strong and opinionated inner commentary that he can't wait to escape and reveal his traumas and dilemmas.
It is a novel of two very long relationships – public and private. On the surface, Barrington is a traditional family man who has been married to his deeply religious wife, Carmel, for 50 years. The pair arrived from Antigua in 1960 and settled in Stoke Newington, north London, where they still live, joining an increasingly unhappy union. Barrington is the father of their middle-aged daughters, Donna, a social worker, and Maxine, a fashion stylist, and he is the grandfather of schoolboy Danielle. The family seems pretty normal, except that Barrington is leading a double life – a homosexual. She is still having sex with her boyfriend, Morris, in an affair she started when she was 14. Carmel does not know that her husband is gay or that their treasured family friend is her husband's lover.
At the beginning of the novel, Barrington's marriage has broken up and he must decide if he has the courage to leave it and live freely as a gay man. He has options: he's rich, he bought his house years ago when it was dirt cheap, and he can live anywhere. But he is afraid, or as he puts it: “I am used to being in a prison of my own making: judge, jailer and jackass cellmate.” The novel asks: What does it mean to hide your sexuality for a lifetime, and what are the consequences of this deception for you and those close to you?
Each of my novels has a different starting point – a character, an era, a theme, a place – but Mr Loverman's is unusual. In 2009, as a writing mentor for a development project, I attended a workshop led by one of my co-mentors, playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz. She selected old passport photos on a table and asked each of us to pick one, then describe the person in the picture undressed in front of the mirror while giving a monologue. Who knew that the 1950s photo I chose of a black man in a trenchcoat and hat would create Barrington's character? It was a simple prompt, but it created a voice that invigorated me with imaginative energy, and I went home and continued to write until he filled a novel.
Before this, I had spent years on another novel about a Gambian seaman who moved to Cornwall in the 1900s, but I couldn't quite bring his character to life. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't fix it. As soon as Barrington came on the scene, I unceremoniously trashed my Gambian seafarer, saving a few thousand words for what had become a short story.
There are many stages in the life of a novel, and I believe it begins long before a word is written, when it is unborn, unformed, floating through our subconscious landscapes. As a writer, I know that in my daily life, I soak up experiences, stories, histories, feelings, problems, worldviews, arts, literature, politics, and, of course, people, cultures, and communities. These influences eventually coalesce into fiction. Barrington, who seemed fully formed, actually emerged from the nebula of my imagination.
His voice was influenced by an Antiguan friend I've known since we were teenagers. When I wrote to him, I asked her. I am not Caribbean, but of British-Nigerian heritage, and have been surrounded by Caribbean people throughout my adult life – friends, lovers, partners, colleagues. Without this personal context I would have struggled to conceive, let alone write, this novel.
Barrington may dominate the novel, but his family gives him a run for his money, especially Carmel, between whom the chapters are divided. He writes in first person and she writes in second person. He speaks in prose, her parts are poetry. Carmel's episodes were added late in the novel after I received feedback from my publisher that the reader was seeing Barrington from a bitterly negative perspective. Horrified that I was so mesmerized by Carmel's charisma that I didn't do her justice, I then gave her the space to tell her side of the story. Barrington Showman, Carmel Support Act. Yet we get to know her intimately from her childhood, through the difficult decades of her marriage to the present day. The women in the novel are significant but secondary figures. In a way, my later novel Girl, Girl, and Others was written to settle arrears. My books are often in conversation.
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I've always been interested in writing about marginalized people, filling the silence in our society with stories of understudied populations. When I started writing this novel, I had long registered a great multifaceted portrayal of the Windrush generation, which was simply not representative. It seemed to me that Windrush gays were wiped out, although occasionally younger, black gay people appeared on television or in literature. I learned that British colonial laws criminalizing sex between men are still in force in many Caribbean countries. Barrington was raised under these repressive laws, which were only repealed in 2022 in Antigua and Barbuda.
In the novel, Barrington recalls: “I was under such pressure when I returned home. Can a young man not be interested in women and get any of them? I was 24 when I married Carmel, and for some I left it too late. They were talking, and I was afraid I would appear before the judge on a charge of indecent exposure; Or lying on an operating table with a saw between my teeth and electric volts, forever destroying parts of my brain; Or if a mad house is full of drugs that will eventually drive a good man mad.
Like many of his Caribbean generation, Barrington immigrated to Britain hoping for a utopia, only to be sorely disappointed. As a gay man, he had the added challenge of landing in another culture where homosexuality was illegal. Thus, in Barrington's original and adopted countries, legislative and social persecution were the norm. And as a black man rooted in his Caribbean community, which provided support and survival in a typically hostile new home, he could not ignore the pressures to conform. When Barrington describes his latent sexuality as akin to living in a prison of his own making, the reader understands that he has no choice. Barrington is arguably, mischievously, an unreconstructed sexual masculinity, which sometimes confuses people. They ask how I can justify this when I am a feminist. My answer is that I do not impose my politics on my characters, although my politics underlie the themes of my novels. I want to let my characters breathe, rather than using them as a vehicle for my personal beliefs.
While writing Mr. Loverman, I found myself challenging assumptions and limitations about sexuality, culture, and age. The novel is about many things, but, at its heart, it celebrates the magnificence of a long love affair between two men – a lifelong chemistry, harmony and companionship, not without its vicissitudes, but one that has survived and thrived. Obstacles thrown at it.
