In London's swinging sixties, Victor Johnson, a young immigrant from the Caribbean, arrives in Britain with dreams of becoming a journalist in the "mother country." Instead, he finds work collecting rent for Peter Feldman, a landlord equally kind and unscrupulous, and then falls into a relationship with Peter's lonely secretary Ruth, herself a migrant from the north of England.
A remarkable achievement of mood and emotional insight, infused with an air of melancholy and wisdom that only a lifetime of examining a subject allows. It’s a novel of regrets, not migration’s triumphs, that unfolds from the vantage point of one man’s final years.
A more daring approach ... Phillips has written an absorbing tale about the difficulties of settling down and fitting in ... The drawback with this kind of storytelling is that the novel’s narrative flow is occasionally impeded and some sections are more interesting than others. Yet Phillips serves up powerful meditations on race, and brilliantly articulates his three lead characters’ ambitions, fears, frustrations and thwarted dreams. Even readers with the hardest of hearts may find they have something in their eye by the time they get to the book’s tender closing pages.
Elegiac ... The novel succeeds as a fable-like, enigmatic tale. Phillips’s outlook may appear bleak, but it’s a depiction of the unvarnished truth about his subject and about the jeopardy of migration, the fickle nature of failure and success, and a portrayal of the self-protectiveness that comes from answering to no one but yourself.
