Sexual shenanigans and marital misery
- Book: Mr Loverman
- Location: Hackney, London
- Author: Bernardine Evaristo
Barrington Jedidiah Walker is a larger-than-life 74 year-old dandy, full of erudition and charm, strutting the streets of Hackney like a preening peacock.
‘Barry’ is also still passionately in love. Just not with his wife of 50 years, Carmel, whom he met and married in Antigua in the 1960s.
No, that honour goes to lifelong friend, Morris Courtney de la Roux. Because Barry and Morris are gay, and have been lovers since their school days in the Caribbean.
These are the bare bones of the story Bernardine Evaristo tells in Mr Loverman, but she offers the reader so much more. Language, humour, richness of character, social observations and racial history combine to provide a literary feast, and in Barry a truly memorable character to stay long in the reader’s memory.
In structural terms, the book oscillates between the defining present – 2010 in East London – 1960 in Antigua and a few key staging posts along the way.
Barry’s flowery prose and exuberant sexually-charged mood contrast vividly with Carmen’s devout disappointment with marriage and her husband, told with a lilting poetic rhythm:
Barry in 2010: ‘He starts drinking his hot chocolate in that slurpy-slurpy way of his, putting his head down in the mug and suctioning it up, like a horse in a trough. Morris been living alone too long. Needs someone to remind him every now and then how to behave in company. His personal hygiene is still good though.’
Carmen in 1980: ‘you might as well be married to yourself, seeing as Barry don’t touch you, and to think you thought that bastard had a low sex drive
girl, you was hoodwinked
like you care anyway, because the longer you go without getting any, the more righteous you becoming, not sullying your mind or body with craven desires for a man who’s still too damned sexy for his own good‘
A host of other characters populate Mr Loverman, each as vividly drawn as the unhappy husband and wife: Morris, a quiet man of dignity, whose own wife decamped to Antigua: Barry and Carmen’s older daughter, Saint Donna, who suspects her Dad of consorting with whores; younger daughter Maxine, Daddy’s girl, a skinny fashionista looking to get her new business idea bankrolled; Carmel’s church cronies, all the way from St. John’s, Antigua to Hackney and each with their own vivid back-story.
Mr Loverman is a touching tale of sexuality and a wasted marriage, but its wider message is about being true to your inner feelings and being honest with yourself, your friends and family. All told with a vibrancy of language and character that only make me want to read more from this Booker prize-wninning author of Girl, Woman, Other.
For lovers of TripFiction, Mr Loverman paints a vivid portrait of Hackney over the last 50 years, with vignettes in Antigua and this colourful coming out excursion to Soho: ‘Ten hours later we are in Madame Maxine’s Gay-ho, the narrow thoroughfares around Old Compton Street riddled with motor vehicles trying to run you down, bar crowds spilling on to the pavement like they own it, and thiose irritating rickshaws that appeared in the West End about ten years ago, I ask you. Is this Shanghai? Is this Bombay? Is this Ho Chi Minh City?’
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