Secker £12.99 pp214

Appearances are everything for the characters in Caryl Phillips’s new novel. They matter to George Walker, one half of early 20th- century America’s most successful black vaudeville team, who flaunts his fame and his new-found racial awareness by wearing risqué clothes in the bars and brothels of Harlem. They matter, too, to Lottie, the wife of Bert Williams (the other half of the act), who hides her short, “kinky” hair under a hat after disastrous attempts to lengthen and straighten it. Above all, they matter to Bert himself, “in his day, the most famous colored man in America”, whose nightly ritual of smearing burnt cork on his face and acting the “blackfaced coon” to segregated audiences (whites in the stalls, blacks upstairs in “nigger heaven”) has rendered him almost mute with anxiety and unexamined shame.

Race and identity have always been key issues in Phillips’s fiction, and they take centre stage again in this subtle and poignant novel, which reimagines the lives of two real-life vaudeville stars (so famous that they played at Buckingham Palace on the future Edward VIII’s ninth birthday) as they progress from imitating “southern ‘plantation darkies’ or northern ‘zip coons’ ” in West Coast dives, to New York, where they front the first all-black production on Broadway. As youngsters, Bert and George promised each other that they would one day get rid of the black makeup and end “the daily trauma of having to look up to the colored people in the upper balcony and silently beg their forgiveness”. Bert’s success as a shambling simpleton, though, has made any such ambition next to impossible. The strain this puts on their relationship, and on each individually, forms the spine of Phillips’s book.

As a pair, the two could not be more different — George a brash and sexually rapacious exhibitionist with a burgeoning racial conscience, Bert a stiff-backed, agonisingly reserved individual who shuns his wife Lottie and dulls the pain of performance with whisky after whisky in the local bar. Where George talks passionately about the need for black artists to work together to project the right image of the race, Bert doggedly defends his old-fashioned, grotesquely caricatured theatrical persona. “This is not me,” he pleads pathetically at one point. “Surely the audience understands that?” Only in one way are the two alike: in their duplicitous behaviour towards their wives — “one in mind, one in body,” remarks Lottie, “though it is unclear to me which is the greater betrayal”.

That word betrayal crops up time and again in the novel — betrayal of family, of roots, of race, of self. So, too, does “dignity”, an elusive state of social grace that everyone in black Harlem is quietly frantic to achieve. People in this minutely shaded world of unofficial segregation and routine humiliation are agonisingly alive to the impression they make with their clothes, their houses, their faces. Looks count. When George’s humiliated wife Ada, for instance, finally finds her husband’s infidelities just too much to bear, she covers “all the mirrors with drapes so that she can travel through what remains of this winter day without being seen”. And when Bert gives in to his conscience and goes on stage without his make-up, the white press react with indignation at his “uncorked colored person . . . that left a sour taste in the mouth of all who had paid money to attend this presentation”.

Not everything works perfectly in the novel — by adopting the stiff, formal vernacular of his characters as his narrative voice, for instance, Phillips has difficulties creating a proper sense of intimacy — but in most respects this is a fine and beautifully nuanced performance. How such a carefully crafted book failed to make even the long list of this year’s Man Booker prize is something of a mystery.

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