The book details the life of West Indians in post-World War II London, a city the immigrants consider the "centre of the world." Covering a period of roughly three years, The Lonely Londoners has no plot in the usual sense of the term. Rather, the novel follows a limited number of characters of the "Windrush generation", all of them "coloureds", through their daily lives in the capital. The various threads of action form a whole through the unifying central character of Trinidadian Moses Aloetta, a veteran émigré who, after more than ten years in London, has still not achieved anything of note and whose homesickness increases as he gets older. Every Sunday morning "the boys", many a recent arrival among them, come together in his rented room to trade stories and inquire after those whom they have not seen for a while. Not surprisingly, their lives mainly consist of work and various petty pleasures. Dating young white women is at the top of the list, as is hanging around prostitutes.
Social commentary
A recurring theme in Selvon's character development addresses upward social mobility. This mobility, however, is clouded by the character's designation as the "other". Selvon's characters are offered the worst jobs, they are exploited by housing landlords, and romance for these characters oftentimes only includes sex. Their accents and skin colour mark them as outsiders and force them to form a group identity based on the principle of congregation via segregation. This analysis allows the reader to better understand the self-hate, disappointment, and struggle that haunts Selvon's characters. The protagonist, Moses, describes London as a lonely city that "divide up in little worlds, and you stay in the world where you belong to and you don't know anything about what is happening in the other ones except what you read in the papers." Against a backdrop of invisibility, many of the characters struggle with a sense of failed promise. By looking at the various coping mechanisms: sex, lavish spending, drinking, hard work, appeasing white women, etc., the author ultimately conveys the unity in their experience. Regardless of their actions, a certain sense of stagnancy prevails. Moses says: "...I just lay there on the bed thinking about my life, how after all these years I ain't get no place at all, I still the same way, neither forward nor backward." Helon Habila has noted: "One imagines immediately the loneliness that must have gnawed at these immigrants whose memory of their sunny, convivial island communities was their only refuge at such moments. But although this is a book about exile and alienation, it is not a sad book. Even when his characters are under-going the direst of tribulations, Selvon has a way of capturing the humour in the situation.... The message of The Lonely Londoners is even more vital today than in 50s Britain: that, although we live in societies increasingly divided along racial, ideological and religious lines, we must remember what we still have in common - our humanity."
The most striking feature of The Lonely Londoners is its narrative voice. Selvon started writing the novel in standard English but soon found out that such language would not aptly convey the experiences and the unarticulated thoughts and desires of his characters. In creating a third person narrator who uses the same creolized form of English as the characters of the novel, Selvon added a new, multiculturalist dimension to the traditional London novel and enhanced the awareness in both readers and writers of a changing London society which could no longer be ignored. Thus, in style and context, The Lonely Londoners "represented a major step forward in the process of linguistic and cultural decolonization." The language used by Selvon's characters and by the narrator contains a multitude of slang expressions. For example, when "the boys" talk about "the Water" or "the Gate", they are referring to Bayswater and Notting Hill respectively. Sometimes referring to themselves and each other as "spades", in their spare time they can be found "liming"—the Caribbean pastime of hanging around with friends eating, talking and drinking—and some of their talk will be "oldtalk", reminiscences of their previous lives in the West Indies and the exchange of news from home. Finally, a white English girl can be a "skin", a "frauline" , a "cat", a "number", or of course a "chick" or "white pussy". A remarkable passage within the novel about a typical London summer is written in the stream-of-consciousness mode, linking up Selvon with the modernist movement.
