Surviving solitude in Caleb Azumah Nelson’s ‘Small Worlds’

Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Small Worlds (2023) won the 2024 Dylan Thomas Prize. This comes not long after his first novel, Open Water (2021), won the Costa First Novel Award and a Betty Trask Award. He is already destined for great things and Small Worlds is a big part of that.

In Small Worlds Stephen is an aspiring jazz trumpeter. He is in love with Del who, like him, wants to get into music college. Stephen and Del are clearly meant to be; even when things aren’t working for them, the reader trusts it will eventually. And when they do get back together after a romantic break, there is little hand wringing and tortured making-up.

Though Small Worlds has a love story, that’s not where the power of this novel lies. I had so many ideas to write about for this post: the use of refrains and the jazzy structure; the depictions of the city of London; the mystical epiphanies in the characters’ love of music.

But instead I’ve chosen to look at how Small Worlds celebrates community of any group larger than one. And how isolation threatens those celebrations.

Celebrating small worlds

The opening pages sets out the joy inherent in people coming together in community celebration. The scene is at church and Stephen and his brother

[a]llowed ourselves to speak to someone who is both us and the people we want to be, allowed ourselves to speak quietly, which is a call to give up the need to be sure, and ask, when was the last time we surrendered? When was the last time we were open?¹

The word ‘open’ is central to the whole book. It signals those moments when characters such as Stephen and Del are able express themselves through music and through dance. To be ‘open’ is to be free and to achieve some kind of transcendence.

These scenes of small worlds are replicated throughout the novel. Sometimes it’s just two of them, at other times it’s a whole jazz band playing together in a park. It could be a small world with family at a barbecue, or with friends at a rave. The small worlds even appear when Stephen is walking down Rye Lane in south London, or working at his Auntie Yaa’s shop. To put it in Aristotelian terms, to be in a small world is to live virtuously.

Solitude

By contrast, solitude often slides into isolation. This appears first of all when Stephen, having failed to get into music school, is on his own at university. Del is making her way successfully through college, and Stephen despairs:

I am hungry for something I have lost. […] I don’t know myself any more. I am floating, floating. I am closed off, a total eclipse. […] I cry so much that not even two hands can dry the tears. I cry until there’s nothing left. I climb into bed and cradle my soft body, willing myself to sleep. But I don’t sleep that night because to sleep with grief is not to sleep at all. (Nelson, p. 85)

There is a trauma to being alone and to this isolation. The signal phrase ‘I am closed off‘ alerts the reader to the way that isolation opposes the small worlds of the communities—either of two people in love or a whole room dancing to Craig David’s Rewind.

This world-of-one is never positive in Small Worlds. But there are ways out of the gloom.

Escaping isolation

At the end of the novel’s second part—there are three in total—Stephen’s mother dies unexpectedly. Of course there is intense grief, and not just for Stephen and his brother. Their father, Pops, is also grieving, and has suffered along with his two sons.

Their father, that is, is living in a world-of-one. He even stops attending church for nearly a year.

But something changes half-way through the final part when Pops rediscovers some vinyl some records he used to play with his wife. Stephen witnesses the scene:

Leaning my head through the doorway, a glimpse of my father, caught in rapture: he’s playing the record I played in Ghana, The Delfonics LP. The crackle of the horns, the sound full and dusty and warm. Pops sings to the lover he’s lost, a little sway in his hips. As the falsetto of the chorus comes up, his eyes closed, a hand pressed to his chest, the other arm raised like a beacon, as if to say, to no one but himself, I am here. (p. 222)

Music here stands in for the friend he’s lost. Music—path through nostalgia to memory—also creates something in the present. This something is dancing, singing, and the ecstasy of love—and all together they reprieve isolation, returning Pops from the world-of-one into the small world he had with his wife.

It’s a reprieve that renews the past in the present.

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1. Caleb Azumah Nelson, Small Worlds (Penguin, 2024 [2023]), p. 3. ↩︎