Mr. Loverman

Barry

Barrington Jedidiah Walker has the air of a man who has perfected himself. At seventy-four, he is still the sharpest dresser in Hackney — the suits bespoke, the shoes gleaming, the car a vintage Mercedes maintained with the kind of devotion that makes his neighbours shake their heads in admiration. He speaks with the authority of a man who has always been the patriarch, who has always known his own position, who has always known what he wants. He is, on the surface, exactly what the Antiguan-British community of Hackney expects him to be.

Beneath the surface, Barry has been in love with his best friend Morris for sixty years. They grew up together in Antigua, emigrated to England in the same wave of Caribbean migration, and have maintained a relationship that has been the true marriage of Barry’s adult life, hidden behind the formal one. Barry’s voice — garrulous, digressive, self-dramatising, very funny — is the instrument through which Evaristo explores the specific texture of this performance. He knows what he is. He has always known. The community around him, shaped by Pentecostal Christianity and the particular codes of Caribbean masculinity, has never offered him a language for it, and so he has used a different language instead: the language of the patriarch, the ladies’ man, the man who has everything he needs.

The cost of this performance, to Barry himself, is something the novel tracks carefully. He is not, despite his wit and his charm, a happy man. He is a man who has spent sixty years being someone other than himself, and who is beginning, at seventy-four, to wonder whether it is too late to stop.

Carmel

Mr. Loverman alternates between Barry’s narration and Carmel’s, and the alternation is the novel’s most important structural decision. Carmel Walker has spent decades in a marriage that has never given her what she needed, married to a man who has never truly seen her, who has been performing a role rather than living a life. She does not know about Morris — not explicitly, not in words — but she knows something is wrong, has always known, in the way that people who live with secrets know the shape of the absence even when they cannot name what fills it.

Evaristo gives Carmel a full interior life and a full set of grievances, which prevents the novel from becoming entirely Barry’s story. This is a significant achievement: the coming-out narrative is culturally coded as the story of the person coming out, and the people left behind by that coming out tend to be supporting characters in someone else’s liberation. Mr. Loverman refuses this. Carmel’s suffering is not backdrop to Barry’s journey. It is its own story, with its own weight, and the novel’s emotional seriousness depends on keeping both in view simultaneously.

Carmel has her own faith, her own community, her own resources for making sense of a marriage that has failed her — and her own anger, which Evaristo renders without softening it into forgiveness. Whether she gets justice, and what justice would even mean in this situation, is one of the questions the novel leaves genuinely open.

Late Life

The novel’s central question — what does it mean to come out at seventy-four? — is given its full difficulty. Barry’s community offers almost no precedent. The Antiguan-British community of Hackney in which he has spent his adult life is shaped by a Christianity that does not accommodate what Barry is, and by a tradition of Caribbean masculinity that regards the performance he has sustained as the definition of manhood rather than a disguise. The silence around same-sex desire in this community is not simply prejudice — it is structural, woven into the community’s sense of itself and its place in Britain.

Evaristo is interested in this specificity. The novel is not a story about homophobia in the abstract, but about homophobia in a particular community with a particular history — a community that formed its identity partly in response to the racism of the white Britain it migrated into, and that is therefore complicated about what it means to now ask that community to extend itself further. Barry’s closet is not just personal; it is communal.

What the novel finally argues about Barry’s chances — whether he can, at seventy-four, be the person he has always been — is handled with a tact that refuses both sentimentality and cruelty. Some things can be changed. Some things cannot. The novel knows the difference, even when Barry doesn’t.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — A warm, funny, and genuinely moving portrait of what a closeted life costs, told from the inside of a community that has never had a language for what its protagonist is.