Will the last one out please turn off all the lights?” This was the joke that spread across the West Indies in the 1950s and 60s as young adults succumbed to “England Fever” in their determination to migrate to Britain. Having saved enough for his ticket from Saint Kitts, Victor Johnson, the protagonist of Another Man in the Street, has his finger on the light switch at the start of Caryl Phillips’s elegiac novel. From his debut, 1985’s The Final Passage, Phillips has steadfastly focused on the precarious lives of migrants in novels such as In the Falling Snow and in his hybrid work Foreigners: Three English Lives. His books have stood out against other accounts of the Windrush generation’s stoicism, exploring the emotional cost of leaving home and being met by hatred and rejection.

The transatlantic journey was a rite of passage for former “children of empire” – now “citizens of the Commonwealth” – on their way to an imagined homecoming in bombed-out, postwar Britain. This has previously been mapped in novels such as Andrea Levy’s Small Island and Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners. But Phillips’s refreshing approach in Another Man in the Street is to ask the question rarely posed: what happened to these pioneers over the decades to come? It’s as if the Kittitian-born novelist has taken a character from Selvon’s seminal work and tracked him over 50 years, charting his progress and consequential missteps.

Johnson, though, is poles apart from the likes of Sir Galahad in The Lonely Londoners, a carefree and exuberant Trinidadian who arrives in Britain wearing pyjamas under his tropical suit and with a toothbrush in his breast pocket. Phillips’s protagonist is glum, taciturn and dependent, mostly without gratitude, on the kindness of strangers.

We enter the story though Victor’s narrative, but three key secondary characters voyage around him: Peter (formerly Piotr), a displaced European Jewish émigré and Rachmanite slum landlord; Ruth, who becomes romantically involved with Victor; and Victor’s wife, Lorna, whom he has left behind in Saint Kitts.

Victor is riddled with anxiety and struggles to find work in London, until the proprietor of a seedy and “melancholy” pub takes pity on the near-destitute West Indian and offers him a job. This squalid Notting Hill establishment, with makeshift basement accommodation, is not the future he’d imagined for himself on setting out from Saint Kitts. Back home, as the son of a sugar cane cutter, Victor had eked out a living delivering newspapers. In England, he had hopes for an upgrade by realising an ambition to become a journalist.

Phillips sets himself a huge challenge by creating a protagonist who has neither the skill nor the inclination to reflect on his interior life, a man whose physical migration to Britain triggers an inner emigration. He meets this challenge by amplifying the colourlessness of Victor’s character in prose that mimics his ordinariness. Phillips’s writing is blunt, pared-back and intentionally plain. Daringly, he doesn’t try to make any of the characters appear more interesting. And in withholding details about Victor, he creates a dot-to-dot sketch with numerous dots removed, leaving the reader to imagine what’s missing; a portrait of absence that is both frustrating and tantalising.

Superficially, Victor appears to be guilelessly pragmatic – even accepting a job as a despised rent collector visiting Peter’s exploited West Indian tenants. But increasingly, Victor better fits the description “cowardly” and “deceitful”. Venturing 4,000 miles alone to save and prosper for a future life with Lorna, he might conveniently also be escaping from her and from the responsibility of fatherhood.

When Victor scorns a tenant who begs for more time to pay the rent – “this fool had no business coming to England and embarrassing himself this way” – he’s really talking about, and to, himself. His promise to send for Lorna and their child is honoured reluctantly years later. But subsequently he abandons them for his English lover, Ruth, who, when she first took up with him, resigned herself to being “pegged as a slag” for associating with a Black man. Both are meek women. Lorna has “a wounded quietness” about her and so, too, does Ruth. For a long time they were equally ignorant of Victor’s deceptions but have been determinedly loyal. Given the hostility in Britain towards interracial couples, Ruth would be surprised to learn of Lorna’s bitter assessment of her husband’s betrayal: “no doubt he thought he could go further in this world with a white woman on his arm”.

Throughout the book, Victor remains a man on the run, shadowed by a troubled past that he is attempting to outstrip. His watchfulness is mirrored by Peter, who sees in his rent-collector employee a “brother orphan” trying to build a future in an environment hostile to migrants.

Ultimately, 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.

How, then, might a migrant like Victor measure success? The clue is in the novel’s title. Over the course of an extended sojourn that morphs into permanency, Victor has “never had to resort to sleeping in a telephone box or on a park bench”. It may not be much, but he has avoided the fate that every migrant dreads, of becoming a shipwrecked soul, just another man in the street.

• Another Man in the Street by Caryl Phillips is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply