Mr. Loverman
by Bernardine Evaristo
Translated from English by Françoise Adelstain
Globe, 304 pages, €23
Barrington Jedidiah Walker, known as Barry, and his wife Carmel have a lot in common. After a childhood and youth in Antigua, they left their Caribbean island together to go to work in London. From their five decades of marriage, were born Donna and Maxine, now in their forties, the first rigid and responsible, the second creative and whimsical.
→ REREAD. The Booker Prize to Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo
But the couple also has endless disputes to their credit. Barry likes nothing more than to roam the bars, happily chatting about literature, philosophy and the world as it goes with Morris, his old lifelong friend, as sober as himself is thirsty. No matter how hard he tries to sneak home in the early morning, he inevitably wakes up Carmel, asleep in their comfortable London home. “Head of a woman, body of a lioness, wings of an eagle, memory of an elephant, jaw of a saltwater crocodile with a kilo of pressure per square centimeter, ready to rip my head off. » His conviction: Barry is an abject womanizer. In which she is absolutely wrong. “In all honesty, I can say to my wife, ‘Honey, I’ve never slept with another woman.’ » His painful secret is quite different. Since adolescence, he has been madly in love with Morris, his lover.
Writing with lively verve and poignant melancholy
Nigerian-born British writer Bernardine Evaristo, winner of the 2019 Booker Prize for her choral novel Girls, women, others, returns with a book with a more compact plot and what makes the strength of his stories: a writing with a cheerful verve from which a poignant melancholy erupts. In Mr. Loverman, it alternates the chapters dedicated to Barry and Carmel. Cultivated dandy who likes to quote Shakespeare and James Baldwin, Mr Walker walks his male assurance through life. But preferring the wisdom of common sense to that of Socrates, he held the modest job of mechanic-fitter to which his status as a small islander from a former British colony assigned him in the 1970s.
But that didn’t stop him from understanding London’s early gentrification and starting his own real estate business by buying decrepit Victorian houses in his working-class Hackney neighborhood, refurbishing them and renting them out for a market still on the rise. “I am not a dilettante, likes to retort this autodidact to Morris. I am what is called a universal spirit. » Between them, the loving complicity, total for more than half a century, has not lost its tender fervor. But Barry, a conservative at heart, could never bring himself to reveal their passion as Morris asked him, too crushed as he was by the violent homophobia of Antiguan and English societies and the weight of propriety.
An unsuspected rival
If the story espouses his point of view more, with its often gratifying bad faith, Mr. Loverman also gives pride of place to the voice of Carmel, who has been running since the 1960s. In love and deeply religious, she never in her innocence imagined her husband’s double life, nor saw a rival in the adorable Morris that her daughters regard as an uncle. Depicted with fierce humor as a shrew by Barry, Carmel emerges over the chapters in all her complexity, in love with this young man who makes her laugh so much, young mother struck down by a terrible postpartum depression then wife who suffers from the evasions of her husband whose heart is racing elsewhere.