Oct 9, 2018 Ina D. -

Reading group: The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon is our book for October

Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners has come out of the hat and will be our book for this month’s Reading Group.

This novel was the overwhelmingly popular choice last week, when we were nominating titles to celebrate the Windrush generation. “It’s wonderful and sometimes uplifting,” explained commenter Fourpaws, “but at its core is the relentless prejudice and racism that greets [Windrush immigrants] at every turn.”

Now seems like a very good time to read a book addressing such issues. But The Lonely Londoners has been essential reading ever since it was released in 1956. It’s telling that when he wrote about the book in the Guardian in 2007, Helon Habila said:

The message of The Lonely Londoners is even more vital today than in 50s Britain: that, although we live in societies increasingly divided along racial, ideological and religious lines, we must remember what we still have in common – our humanity. As the novel says: “Everybody living to dead, no matter what they doing while they living, in the end everybody dead.”

Ten years later, those ideals seem still more precious. So too does Selvon’s status as the “father of black writing” in Britain. In 1994, the author’s obituarist in the Guardian said of The Lonely Londoners:

“The novel exudes an excitement and exhilaration at being in London, and is perhaps best known for its innovative creation of a black city; a place that Selvon mythologised, transformed and ultimately colonised in reverse through his use of a self-consciously chosen and creolised form of CaribbeanEnglish … The city, while always bleak and great to figures such as the veteran Londoner, Moses, and the newcomer, Galahad, is remade in their own image, with the walls of Paddington slums, for instance, ‘cracking’’ like the ‘last days of Pompeii’; whereas the sun, for the uninitiated outsider takes on an almost surrealistic character – ‘no heat from it, it just there in the sky like a force-ripe orange’.”

All that sounds tremendous. And, as Susheila Nasta’s fine introduction to my Penguin Classics edition of the book points out, in rewriting the city from a black perspective, Selvon also changed “the way the city was seen” alongside “Englishness itself”. He helped write our collective future, in other words. Or, at least, one possible version of that future, if we are able to remain open to it.

Anyway, as if all that weren’t reason enough to read The Lonely Londoners, the book is a funny, entertaining work of art. Selvon was a serious and determined writer. He left his native Trinidad in 1950 to avoid, as he explained, “being lulled into complacency and acceptance of the carefree and apathetic life around me”. He was correspondingly earnest and productive in his craft. The Lonely Londoners was actually his third novel (his Caribbean-themed novels A Brighter Sun and An Island World were published in 1952 and 1955 respectively) and by the time it was published he’d already been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. But it was this pioneering immigration story that sealed his immortality. You only have to look at Selvon’s audacious first sentence to get an idea of The Lonely Londoners’ enduring appeal. He takes the language and imagery of Charles Dickens and TS Eliot and makes it entirely his own:

“One grim winter evening, when it had a kind of unrealness about London with a fog sleeping restlessly over the city and the lights showing in the blur as if is not London but some strange place on another planet, Moses Aloetta hop on a number 46 bus at the corner of Chepstow Road and Westbourne Grove to go to Waterloo to meet a fellar who was coming from Trinidad on the boat-train.”

For more read the full of article at The Guardian

Reading group: The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon is our book for October

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