No one could describe Lucas Bostock as a “nice” man. He’s a bully and a philanderer, so no one is surprised when his wife Rhoda has had enough and leaves him. Regretfully, she can take only her daughter with her, so he is forced to bring up their three boys in his rough and sometimes brutal way. Lucas has arrived in London from Jamaica in the 1950s with no illusions about being welcome here. He is sure that only hard work as a carpenter on building sites and scrimping to buy a house to become a landlord will give his family any security. Relentless ambition is what he tries to teach his sons – with his daughter he can make no contact – and Concrete Dreams follows the paths his children take – in boxing, journalism, politics, retail and religion – and their vexed relationship with their father. They are all forced to question just how much they owe him for the choices they make.
Ferdinand Dennis never excuses Lucas, but he brings him intensely alive as a character who demands our understanding for his Jamaican past, his London struggles for survival and his rare moments of vision and reflection. Enriched by the portraits of his family going their individual ways, and of the tenants who inhabit his houses, Concrete Dreams is also a love letter to the parts of London transformed by the Caribbean presence. It’s a Windrush story, but one that insists on the variety of Caribbean British experience, not least through the presence in the text of the narrator who is keen to tell his own story, as well as that of the Bostocks.
