Queerness in Rehearsal: Bernardine Evaristo’s Mr. Loverman

In Bernardine Evaristo’s Mr. Loverman, the literary tradition of the aging patriarch; the Lear, the Scobie, the Stevens, gets a radical reinvention. Not only is Barrington Jedidiah Walker a seventy four-year-old Black man from Antigua, living in Hackney and clad in “bespoke West Indian dandyism,” he is also gay and closeted, both flamboyant and terrified. He is a man out of joint with the time he has lived through, and yet very much of it; his gait shaped by colonialism, his Englishness hard-won, his performativity relentless. His voice; erudite, ironic, laced with Shakespeare and calypso, irreverent in the face of tragedy, is the beating heart of this novel.

Originally published in 2013, Mr. Loverman predates the Booker-winning Girl, Woman, Other, but in some ways lays the stylistic and thematic foundation for it: formal experimentation, a polyphonic sensibility, and a preoccupation with Black British life in all its pluralities. And yet Mr. Loverman is a more focused, and in some ways riskier, work. It is a novel of secrets, told with flamboyant candour. It invites us into the life of a man who has spent seven decades being someone else, and who, only now, at the edge of old age, dares to consider being himself.

What makes this novel feel urgent, even now, is not just its subject; a closeted Caribbean man wrestling with the ruins of his decisions, but how Evaristo renders that subject. The book is less a coming-out story than a study in performance: the lifelong rehearsal of masculinity, respectability, and heterosexuality under colonial, religious, and diasporic surveillance. Barry’s voice, rich and comedic, is not a mask, it is the performance itself. Evaristo makes the form match the theme: the novel unwinds in an idiosyncratic rhythm, eschewing quotation marks, often veering into soliloquy. It is theatrical because Barry is always on stage.

This is, crucially, a queer novel. Not just because its protagonist is a gay man, but because it queers the expected. It queers marriage. It queers the immigrant success story. It queers the idea of Caribbean masculinity as hypersexual and homophobic. It queers time itself: who else but a septuagenarian decides, belatedly, to live truthfully?

Barry has been in a sham marriage for over 50 years. His wife, Carmel, is deeply religious, bitter, and bruised by years of emotional neglect. Her chapters (few, but significant) offer a counterpoint to Barry’s glib narrative: hers is the voice of the Caribbean woman whose sacrifices have been erased. She suspects Barry of cheating though not, crucially, with a man. Her bitterness is not baseless. Evaristo, always fair-minded, refuses to turn her into a villain. Instead, she gives her just enough space to reveal a parallel tragedy: the loneliness of the dutiful wife whose life was never really hers either.

Barry’s lover, Morris, is his best friend since childhood. They have loved each other in secret since adolescence, with long stretches of estrangement and reconciliation. Their relationship is the most tender part of the novel, but also the most frustrating. Morris is patient to a fault, resigned to Barry’s evasions, forever waiting for the day he will leave Carmel. Barry promises, delays, equivocates. The dynamic mirrors many long-term queer relationships forged in secrecy: laced with intimacy and shame, shaped by decades of navigating danger. Yet the novel is not mournful about this; it is, rather, observant. These are men who have loved under duress, who were told by law, by family, by the church that their love did not exist. That they did not exist.

Evaristo is too skilled a writer to give us a morality play. There is no triumphant coming-out moment, no tearful family reconciliation. Instead, there is process. Barry tries, fails, reflects, deflects. He tells half-truths. He obsesses over his daughters, who see him through generational prisms: one, a careerist neoliberal, the other lost in her own romantic wreckage. Neither fully knows him. Neither is entirely blameless.

The novel’s London is one of layered geographies. Hackney is not just a postcode, it’s a diasporic palimpsest. Barry navigates it with a mixture of nostalgia and irritation, recalling the Caribbean arrivals of the 1960s, the racial abuses of the 1980s, the gentrification of the 2000s. Time folds. His voice collapses decades into sentences. We learn of his early life in Antigua; his grammar school elitism, his father’s tyranny, the queer moments snatched in secret. Evaristo doesn’t overplay the trauma; she simply shows what it meant to grow up with no vocabulary for one’s desires.

There is a moment when Barry, watching a same-sex couple kiss on the street, marvels at the openness of today’s youth. But it is not envy he feels, it is awe, tinged with fear. Barry’s world is not theirs. His body carries the reflex of repression. He has learned to pass. And the reader is reminded that liberation, for many, comes too late to be lived fully. The beauty of Mr. Loverman is that it treats this belatedness not as failure, but as fact. Barry’s journey is not redemptive. It is simply necessary.

Stylistically, Evaristo uses form to create intimacy. The lack of quotation marks is not a gimmick, it collapses the distance between thought and speech. Barry’s narrative slips in and out of memory, fantasy, and confession. His voice is a marvel: flamboyant yet wounded, scholarly yet colloquial. He quotes Auden and Buju Banton with equal ease. His sentences lilt like speech. You hear the Caribbean in them, not the tourist version, but the lived, diasporic voice of a man who is both rooted and dislocated. It is this voice that sustains the novel, even when the plot meanders. And if occasionally Barry becomes too pleased with his own quips, the reader forgives him, he has had so few chances to speak.

There are no villains in Mr. Loverman, only people doing the best they can with the lies they were given. Even Carmel, when she finally discovers the truth, does not explode. She collapses inward. Her final chapters are laced with quiet devastation, not because her husband was gay, but because he never trusted her with the truth. Evaristo resists easy pathos; she shows us the cost of secrecy not just for the one who hides, but for all who are denied the chance to see.

What makes Mr. Loverman radical, still, is its insistence on the interior life of an older Black gay man. In a literary world that often privileges youthful queerness, trauma spectacle, or the tragic arc, Barry is a revelation. He is not tragic. He is not exceptional. He is simply human; flawed, ridiculous, stylish, scared, stubborn, lovable. His sexuality is neither incidental nor defining. It is simply part of the architecture of his life; long obscured, now slowly uncovered.

The novel ends without neat closure. Barry begins, at last, to untether himself from the structures that held him. But there is no guarantee of bliss. There is only the possibility of honesty. That possibility, at seventy four, is a kind of revolution.

In this, Mr. Loverman speaks to something deeply under-explored: the long tail of colonial masculinity, the rituals of denial passed down across oceans. Barry is not just unlearning homophobia, he is unlearning Empire. The colonial schooling that taught him Shakespeare and respectability also taught him shame. His queer desire is not just personal; it is historical, political. To come out, for Barry, is to reject the scripts he has lived by. And Evaristo, in letting him do so with flair and frailty, gives us one of contemporary fiction’s most quietly subversive portraits of liberation.