Trinidadian author Samuel Selvon sought to capture the experience of West Indian immigrants in his fiction. His stories and novels are full of long digressions and experimental interludes, shifting rapidly between characters and narrative threads. In this way, they often reflect the bustling cityscapes in which they take place, showing the many lives contained in even a single neighborhood.
Selvon, discussing his composition of The Lonely Londoners, said that writing in dialect gave him the freedom he needed to unify the style of the book with its content: "When I wrote the novel that became The Lonely Londoners, I tried to recapture a certain quality in West Indian everyday life. I had in store a number of wonderful anecdotes and could put them into focus, but I had difficulty starting the novel in straight English. The people I wanted to describe were entertaining people indeed, but I could not really move. At that stage, I had written the narrative in English and most of the dialogues in dialect. Then I started both narrative and dialogue in dialect and the novel just shot along." For Selvon, these stories needed to mirror their sources. In subsequent work, he explored this idea further.
In The Housing Lark (1965), Selvon writes about a group of West Indian friends looking to buy an apartment in London. They run up against a number of obstacles, including the openly racist real estate industry, but continue on in their pursuit. Toggling between comic and tragic, the book charts the ups and downs of their mission as they search for a place to call home. In a similar vein, Moses Ascending, Selvon's 1975 follow-up to The Lonely Londoners, traces the continued story of Moses. Now retired, Moses makes his living as a landlord in the neighborhood of Shepherd's Bush. He hopes to live a peaceful and dignified life in old age, but instead becomes wrapped up in a series of political misadventures. Written from Moses's perspective, the book takes on a lighter tone than Selvon's previous work.
Selvon's concern about finding the right voice for his stories shows his overall concern with tone. He does not want his characters, like Moses, to be reducible to simple figures of tragedy or comedy, as their lives have such a great deal of both things. In wanting to give snapshots of a certain type of immigrant experience in London, Selvon writes in a voice that contains multitudes, much like the cities he depicts.
