This is by Bernardine Evaristo. It was published in 2013, and my audio-version was most entertainingly narrated by James Goode, who does the different accents and voices quite brilliantly.

The book was serialized on television while we were in the UK recently, but I deliberately held off watching it, as I wanted it in book form first (the serial is, by all accounts, very good).


This cover depicts Lennie James, who played the lead character in the TV series

Why now? Well, February was Black History Month in North America, and as is the case with many things at the moment, I'm running a little late with the post.

Long story short, this book is well worth your time. It offers one of those hard-to-pull-off combos: Heart-breaking yet funny; grimly honest yet hopeful.

Our protagonist is Barrington Jedediah Walker, aka Barry. It's 2010, and he's 74. He and his wife, Carmel, arrived from Antigua in 1960 (as part of the Windrush generation), and settled in north London. An auto-didact, and proud of it, Barry is a a bit of a dandy, with a predilection for retro suits.

Barry has done very well. He started investing in real estate soon after arriving in Britain, and he has made a tidy sum of money. He and Carmel have two daughters, now perilously close to middle age (Donna is a social worker, and Maxine a fashion stylist). Donna has a teenage son, Daniel, who is keen to become the UK's first black prime minister. Carmel, too, put herself through university, and held down a good job before retiring.

But there's one major fly in the ointment. Barry has been married to Carmel for 50 years, but he's a closet gay... He has had many minor flings, but his residual partner, the love of his life, is Morris Courtney de la Roux. The two have been friends and lovers since their time at school back in Antigua.

And, of course, for much of Barry's life, there has been absolutely zero possibility for openness. Gay sex wasn't decriminalized in Antigua and Barbuda until 2022... It was still illegal even in England when Barry arrived, and would remain so for another seven years.

And if a young man just stayed single, he would fall under suspicion. So Barry marries Carmel. And Morris marries Odette.

How indescribably tragic. Carmel knows she's not really loved in the way she wants to be loved, even if she doesn't find out quite why until almost the end. When Barry drives her crazy by spending long evenings out, she thinks he's chasing women... We're not surprised when (through Barry's eyes) she comes across as a bit shrewish, especially when flanked by her phalanx of church-going (homophobic) friends.

But then you learn of her post-natal depression (and of the way Barry and those same friends helped her through it), and you hear of the affair she had with a co-worker, because she was just desperate to be loved, and you feel sorry that this relationship never came to anything because her religious nature tells her marriage is inviolable, even if it's terribly unhappy.


Not just the Caribbean... Anything suspected of having LGBTQ connotations is controversial in Malaysia

Barry's point of view is narrated in the first person, Carmel's in the second person.

His sections are wise-cracking, cynical, often a little mean. He's a man of his time, after all, not a saint. He very much has a male ego, and thinks nothing of referring to Carmel as "wifey", and generally disparaging pretty much everything she does. His alpha-male persona means he even dislikes the term homosexual, because he thinks it connotes effeminacy: "I, for one, do not wear make-up, dye my hair, or do the mince-walk… I ain't no homosexual, I am a… Barrysexual!"

Carmel's sections are much more lyrical, much more introspective. She's often guilt-ridden. Her religion seems more of a rod for her back than a comfort for her soul.

The novel as a whole is the story of how Barry and Morris finally come out. It's not easy. Morris wants Barry to leave his marriage, so they can set up openly together (Morris's marriage having fallen apart a while ago). But there's still plenty of homophobia in the family and the surrounding community. And a lifetime of shackles can't be shrugged off so easily. As Barry says: "I am too used to being in a prison of my own making: judge, jailer and jackass cellmate."

There's a kind of a happy ending, after much turmoil. Barry and Morris set up home. It's a strong relationship, and they're totally complementary. Morris doesn't let Barry get away with any nonsense, so they bicker and spar, and also tease each other beautifully. Carmel, likewise, rediscovers a former admirer in Antigua, and becomes a changed person. There is finally a divorce, and she makes sure that Barry coughs up handsomely...

So they'll all live to fight another day. And Barry does come to recognize and express regret for the terrible harm he has done Carmel.

But 50 years... Not a single one can be reclaimed. If Barry's sexual orientation had been socially acceptable, he wouldn't have had to live a life of pretence and repression, and wouldn't have had to subject someone to the best part of a lifetime of misery.

Donna has suffered, too. Her impressions of her mother's unhappiness and her father's (supposedly heterosexual) infidelity have influenced her own relationships with men. She's bitter and angry. Maxine, on the other hand, has known her father's secret for a long time. She seems to have been infantilized by her parents' circumstances, but flourishes as Barry moves further towards integrity and liberation.


No problems with same-sex relationships in the macaque world...

Any reservations?

Well, Evaristo herself is British/Nigerian by ethnicity. And we're all taught to wonder these days about writing as someone else... Barry's voice, she says, was influenced by an Antiguan friend, and by the Caribbean community she has interacted with all her adult life. She's certainly qualified to speak about exclusion: She was actively involved in the feminist movement in the 1980s, but found that it struggled to accommodate black women; conversely, because her mother was white, she also found she wasn't always welcome in black spaces. Growing up in Britain, she says, "there was nothing around us to tell us being a person of colour was a good thing".

My other question-mark concerned the scene where Maxine takes Barry and Morris to a gay bar, as part of their coming-out journey. It's a comic interlude, and also rather touching -- for the first time, for example, the men feel able to express affection for each other in public -- but I did wonder whether the other characters were slightly stereotypical.

Generally, though, this was a poignant read, and Evaristo is an author I would gladly explore further.

And it's an issue that we're still grappling with, even in jurisdictions with no legal ban. Just as I was finishing Mr Loverman, I read about a Singaporean politician who's worried about his country's fertility rate, and has found an easy explanation: He advises that we "not promote LGBTQ as a form of lifestyle because it will be detrimental to the fundamental sustainability of our country". It's hard to know where to even start unpicking that sentence... "Form of lifestyle"?? And -- as Kirsten Han puts it -- the notion that if "we stop 'promoting LGBTQ', then more Singaporeans will pump out kids instead of living big gay lives"?? I'm digressing, but the point is that it's tempting to look at Barry's story, and think, complacently, oh, it wouldn't happen now. Well, the battle's not over.