The Lonely Londoners is a milestone in English literature. Or at least, it is if we are to believe its author Sam Selvon. He wrote in an essay in 1973:

I think I can say without a trace of modesty that I was the first Caribbean writer to explore and employ dialect in a full-length novel where it was used in both narrative and dialogue.

In a discussion with critic Michel Fabre, Selvon described the discovery of this voice as a breakthrough in a creative process that had been stalling:

When I wrote the novel that became The Lonely Londoners, I tried to recapture a certain quality in West Indian everyday life. I had in store a number of wonderful anecdotes and could put them into focus, but I had difficulty starting the novel in straight English. The people I wanted to describe were entertaining people indeed, but I could not really move. At that stage, I had written the narrative in English and most of the dialogues in dialect. Then I started both narrative and dialogue in dialect and the novel just shot along.

And when he said, “shot along”, he meant it. He wrote in 1987 that he completed the novel in just six months:

Two of those were spent wrestling with standard English to give expression to the West Indian experience: I made little headway until I experimented with the language as it is used by Caribbean people. I found a chord, it was like music, and I sat like a passenger in a bus and let the language do the writing.

It sounds so easy! But it wasn’t simple. It isn’t a straightforward recreation of Trinidadian speech patterns, for a start. Selvon himself explained that the prose style was a deliberate and considered invention. “It may be called artificial and fabricated,” he said.

There’s shrewd calculation in the words Selvon uses and the way he presents them. Most obviously, the book introduces an intriguing vocabulary. We are plunged into a world where “tests” are about causing trouble. “Fellars” too – although fellars are also generally equals and friends. These fellars like to get dressed up and go “liming” or to “coast a lime” on the London streets.

Familiar words can also take on new meaning. “Spade” is re-appropriated as a word for a West Indian, instead of a racist insult. “Old English diplomacy” comes to mean the opposite of discussion, a kind of haughty cold shoulder – albeit one delivered with studied politeness.

Selvon provides enough new language to interest readers who might not be familiar with Trinidadian vernacular – but not enough to alienate them. He works a similar trick with the sound of his prose, which has a rhythm and texture all of its own. Even the most mundane sentences feel subtly different: “Moses Aloetta hop on a number 46 bus.” Longer passages take on a special poetry: sometimes you can hear the breeze. “See all them pretty pieces of skin taking suntan and how the old geezers like the sun they would sit on the benches and smile everywhere.”

There is an accent, a way of mixing singular and plurals and of emphasising verbs that sets apart the narration of The Lonely Londoners. But none of that music is over-pronounced. Late on in the book there’s a remarkable single sentence that takes up 10 pages, but even there the writing remains taut and wonderfully clear. Selvon also avoids the kind of thickly accented dialect that makes writers such as James Kelman so challenging. You can hear his accent – but you don’t have to struggle to understand it.

The net result is that the novel becomes unusually immersive. The narrator is one of the fellars – and so are you, because he speaks to you so directly. It’s a fantastic artistic and political statement. Any white readers who picked up the book when it was first published in 1956 with strong ideas about the otherness of West Indian people would find those assumptions challenged. More than that. As Selvon himself said, he had found a way of “extending the language”. From his very first sentence referencing TS Eliot and Dickens he was taking on the masters of English prose and beating them at their own game. Like James Joyce before him (and the intimate interiority of much of Selvon’s prose is clearly influenced by the great Irish writer), he owns colonial language and bends it to his will. He presents English back to us, new and repurposed. That sounds like a milestone to me, too.