Ways of Sunlight

A really striking and enjoyable collection of short stories. A distinctive voice and very engaging. Shines a new light on Selvon's work.

I read Sam Selvon's Windrush classic The Lonely Londoners long enough ago that 'Windrush' wasn't automatically followed by 'scandal', and keep meaning to read the sequels - one of which I have in an original eighties paperback whose colourful sitcom cover is fascinatingly far from the monochrome respectability which swathes modern editions of his work. Including this, a collection of his short stories, which jumps the queue on account of being from Netgalley. It's divided into two sections, Trinidad and London, and the temptation is to add 'much like Selvon's life', but one of the most noticeable things for me in the Trinidad section was the variety of voices, an overseer's resentful account in formal English followed by shorter tales in various flavours of local lingo. Which, more than the novels, is a handy reminder for the reader to guard against that temptation to treat writers who aren't well-off white guys as necessarily more autobiographical. For the most part, these stories are fine, but firmly within the expected compass of post-colonial literature, slices of life which are far livelier than short stories where a Midwestern housewife or Hampstead intellectual has a minor realisation about their life, but not necessarily any more substantial. The exception is the first and longest, Johnson And The Cascadura, which strikes the collection's most tragic note, the normal round of rural life disrupted by the arrival of a gullible European folklorist. Which, taken together with the way the London stories, even the daftest squibs among them, feel like they're operating on another level, is almost enough to make one believe that dubiously sourced line about how there are only two stories - someone goes on an adventure, and a stranger comes to town. In London, Selvon's new arrivals are often living in a shoestring in shitty apartments, but while the cold weather and early nightfall are soul-sapping, unignorable, there's seldom any sense of systemic oppression on the part of the 'Nordics' - even in a story such as Obeah In The Grove, which is explicitly about racist landlords, it's played more as chancers trying to get one over on their existing tenants, and then on the West Indian protagonists, only for the latter to turn the tables. More often, it's not even that so much as stories driven by characters with an eye to the main chance and others who either go one better or get carried along in their wake, mostly with comical consequences; that cover really doesn't do much to convey how often I found myself thinking of a forerunner to Only Fools And Horses.

Also, living out on that fringe of London myself, I was doubly amused by the consternation of Brackley in Waiting For Auntie To Cough when he sees the station names Gypsy Hill, Penge West, Forest Hill from the train window and is sure they must have left the city far behind. Not to mention learning from Working The Transport that the 196, which now stops at Elephant & Castle, used to make it all the way to Tufnel Park.

By the final piece, My Girl And The City, even an accommodation with the weather has been reached. I don't know whether the events described ever happened quite this way, but more than anything else here it feels less story than essay, and less either than the monologue from a St. Etienne album track (which, to be clear, is from me high and rare praise). It shares with that first and longest story a melancholy that's absent from most of the collection, and I wonder if I'm falling into that old, foolish privileging of tragedy over comedy by calling them the best things here. Maybe better say that they have a hard-won wisdom, and the stories in between have an enormous sense of life, and aren't those both qualities worth celebrating?