Edexcel Paper 2: Prose: ‘Colonisation and its aftermath’
Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) is an iconic black modernist novel, as it demythologises the ‘Mother Country’ by reimagining London and revoicing Englishness. The novel influenced generations of black British writers, such as Linton Kwesi Johnson, Andrea Levy, Zadie Smith and Anthony Joseph. This article explores the novel’s distinctive modernist structure and vernacular narrative voice. It switches narrative perspective, moving back and forth in time, drawing on Trinidadian calypso through its witty and satirical tones. This was Selvon’s third novel, after A Brighter Sun (1952) and An Island is a World (1955), following his arrival in London from Trinidad in 1950. It was his first novel to explore the West Indian experience in London. Early reviewers misread the novel, regarding it mistakenly as ‘an amusing social documentary of West Indian manners’ (Nasta 2006, p. xii), rather than recognising how it decolonises the British novelistic tradition.
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