I spend a lot of my life being other people, spending years inside the lives of my fictional protagonists, and, when the creative alchemy is going well, it is intensely satisfying. It’s not that I can’t bear being myself, but to be honest, I find other people much more interesting. Creating characters and unravelling their stories is an invigorating and unpredictable adventure into the unknown. It might be daunting sometimes, and I’m never sure of the outcome, but when I’m in the zone, it’s one helluva ride.
When I wrote my 2013 novel, Mr Loverman, I felt deliciously consumed by my 74-year-old Caribbean protagonist, Barrington Jedidiah Walker Esq. He arrived easily – no birthing pains – and when my husband came home in the evenings, I’d inhabited him so deeply, I found myself unwittingly talking to him in Barrington’s Antiguan accent. “Y’all right, spar?” I’d ask him, the boundaries between character and creator momentarily blurred, much to my husband’s amusement.
I don’t fall in love with all of my characters, but I had a platonic crush on Barrington, as mad as that sounds. Not because he’s perfect, God forbid, who is? But because he’s a larger-than-life unreliable narrator who is complicated and passionate, with a strong and opinionated internal commentary, who couldn’t wait to regale me with his escapades and lay bare his traumas and dilemmas.
This is a novel of two very long relationships – public and private. On the surface, Barrington is a traditional family man, married to his deeply religious wife, Carmel, for 50 years. The pair of them arrived from Antigua in 1960 and settled in Stoke Newington in north London, where they still live, conjoined in an increasingly unhappy union. Barrington is also the father of their middle-aged daughters, Donna, a social worker, and Maxine, a fashion stylist, and he’s the grandfather of schoolboy Daniel, privately educated and intent on becoming Britain’s first black prime minister. The family appears pretty conventional, except Barrington leads a double life – as a closet homosexual. He’s still sexually active with his lover Morris, in an affair that began when they were 14. Carmel has no idea her husband is gay or that their treasured family friend is her husband’s lover.
At the start of the novel, Barrington’s marriage is blown apart, and he must decide if he’s going to be brave enough to leave it and live freely as a gay man. He has choices: he’s rich, he bought his house years ago when it was dirt cheap, and he can live anywhere. But he’s terrified, or as he puts it: “I am too used to being in a prison of my own making: judge, jailer and jackass cellmate.” The novel asks the question: what does it mean to spend a lifetime hiding your sexuality, and what are the consequences of this deception on yourself, and those closest to you?
Each of my novels has a different starting point – a character, an era, a theme, a place – but Mr Loverman had unusual origins. In 2009, as a writing mentor for a development programme, I attended a workshop led by one of my co-mentors, the playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz. She set an exercise whereby she laid out a selection of old passport photographs on a table, asked each of us to pick one, and to then describe the person in the picture taking their clothes off in front of a mirror while delivering a monologue. Who knew that my chosen photo of a 1950s black man wearing a trenchcoat and hat would produce the character of Barrington? It was a simple prompt, but it generated a voice that so excited me with fictional potential, I went home and continued writing until he had filled a novel.
Prior to this I’d spent years on another novel about a Gambian seaman who migrates to Cornwall in the 1900s, yet I never fully managed to bring his character to life. Try as I might, I couldn’t fix it. As soon as Barrington came on the scene, I unceremoniously dumped my Gambian seaman in the bin, salvaging a few thousand words that became a short story.
There are several stages in the lifetime of a novel, which, I believe, begins when it’s unborn, unformed and floating around our subconscious landscapes, long before a single word has been written. As a writer, I’m aware that in my everyday life, I soak up experiences, stories, histories, passions, problems, worldviews, arts, literature, politics and, of course, people, cultures and communities. These influences eventually coalesce and metamorphose into fiction. Barrington, who seemed to appear fully formed, actually materialised from the nebula of my imagination.
His voice is also influenced by an Antiguan friend I’ve known since we were teenagers. When I wrote him, I heard her. While I’m not from the Caribbean but of British-Nigerian heritage, I’ve been around Caribbean people my entire adult life – friends, lovers, associates, colleagues. I would have struggled to conceive, let alone write, this novel, without this personal context.
Barrington may dominate the novel, but his family give him a run for his money, especially Carmel, who has chapters spliced in between his. He writes in the first person, she writes in the second. He speaks in prose, her sections are poetic. Carmel’s chapters were added to the novel at a late stage after I received feedback from my publisher that the reader only sees her through Barrington’s bitterly negative perspective. Horrified that I’d been so seduced by his charisma that I’d not done Carmel justice, I subsequently gave her the space to tell her side of the story. Barrington is the showman, Carmel the support act. Yet we get to know her intimately, from her troubled childhood through the difficult decades of marriage up to the present day. The women in the novel are significant but secondary figures. In a sense my later novel Girl, Woman, Other was written to redress the balance. My books are often in conversation with each other.
I’ve always been interested in writing marginalised figures, to fill the silences in our society with fiction from underexplored demographics. When I began writing this novel, I had long registered the overwhelmingly heteronormative portrayal of the Windrush generation, which simply wasn’t representative. It seemed to me that Windrush gays had been erased, although occasionally younger, black gay figures appeared on television or in literature. I became aware that British colonial legislation criminalising sex between men was still prevalent in many Caribbean countries. Barrington was raised under these oppressive laws, which in Antigua and Barbuda were only repealed in 2022.
In the novel, Barrington recalls: “I’d been under such pressure back home. A young man showing no interest in girls, when he could have any one of them? I was 24 when I married Carmel, and I’d almost left it too late for some. They was talking, and I was afraid I’d be up before a judge on some trumped-up charge of indecent exposure; or end up lying on an operating table with a bar of wood between my teeth and electric volts destroying parts of my brain for ever; or in the crazy house pumped full of drugs that would eventually drive a sane man mad.”
Like many of his Caribbean generation, Barrington migrated to Britain expecting a utopia, only to be sorely disappointed. As a gay man, he had the added challenge of landing in another culture where homosexuality was illegal. Therefore, in Barrington’s original and adopted countries, legislative and social persecution were the norm. Further, as a black man rooted in his Caribbean community, which typically offered support and survival in a hostile new home, he couldn’t risk ignoring the pressures to conform. While Barrington describes his hidden sexuality as akin to living in a prison of his own making, the reader understands he had little choice.Barrington is arguably, mischievously, an unreconstructed sexist male, which sometimes confuses people. They ask me how I can justify this when I am a feminist. My answer is that I don’t impose my politics on my characters, although of course my politics underpin the themes of my novels. I have to let my characters breathe and be their own difficult, contradictory selves, rather than using them as a vehicle for my personal beliefs.
While writing Mr Loverman, I was aware that I was challenging assumptions and limitations around sexuality, culture and ageing. The novel is about many things, but, at its heart, it celebrates the greatness of a longstanding love affair between two men – a lifetime of chemistry, compatibility and companionship, not without its vicissitudes, but that has survived and thrived, in spite of the obstacles thrown at it.
• Mr Loverman is on BBC One on 14 October. The novel by Bernardine Evaristo is published by Penguin. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
