Light?...Life!

'I haven't shaken my fist at the moon.'

'I'm not here to be remembered. I'm here to be alive.'

Ian Dury

Joan London's wonderful novel 'The Golden Age' opens with this striking anecdote. The central

character, Frank Gold, aged thirteen, new resident of a polio victims' children's home, has pilfered  from his mother's handbag a scrap of cigarette and a damp cardboard tab of matches.  Seeking privacy behind a clothes line guarded by a wire trellis, he is struggling to strike a match, when Norm Whitehouse, the gardener, comes upon him. Taciturnly he growls, 'Light?'  'He may as well have said, "Life?"'  reflects Frank.
This striking turn of language and tone marks out something about the zest for life which marks out Joan London's character. It captures the powerful sense of the particularity of human experience which can be created in the best fiction, giving us some traction on how we might live our own particular humanity.  This is the magic of the novel: a craft and art form which makes the real living people in our lives and in our wider world, seem so important, so alive, so worth celebrating with attentiveness.


It is a novel which depicts the concerns of the displacement and forced migration of vulnerable peoples seeking to escape oppression and conflict zones, in this case at the  historical remove of post-Second World War period of Europe and Australia, centred round the Jewish Gold family.  At the same time it represents powerfully  the lives of children and their families affected by polio before its eradication after medical researcher Jonas Salk's vaccination breakthrough.  The novel can be read as a direct response to the Australian  'stop the boats' policy of the 2013 Liberal-National coalition, following on from the previous Labour administration's no less harsh offshore processing policy (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-28189608).
Of course, there is no room for European smugness with the fear-mongering response of the media and politicians lack of humanitarian statesmanship in the face of mass migration from conflict zones coupled with the shameful existence of the Calais camp, particularly with its child migrants. In reflecting directly a migrant family's story, it asks us as readers and as people with a political voice, to sidestep some of the manipulative media misrepresentations of migrants, detaching us from their humanity, instead leading us to understand migrants as people with absolute human particularity, people we can welcome as we  ourselves would wish to be welcomed in similar circumstances.  Perhaps there is a direct link between these two powerful themes in the novel in the words of British punk artist,  lyricist and polio victim, Ian Dury:

So place your hard-earned peanuts in my tin

And thank the creator you're not in the state I'm in

So long have I been languished

I must give all proceedings to myself.

                  Spasticus Autisticus  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6isXNVdguI8

And so to Joan London's vivid characters, whose stories carry these themes.  Frank, the central character, is a thirteen year old boy who has survived life as part of the Hungarian Jewish community, part of it spent in hiding in the attic space of his mother's non-Jewish piano teacher, then being relocated with his mother and father from refugee accommodation in Vienna to the far flung colonial community of Perth. There he is struck down by polio in the epidemic of the early 1950s. Characters, events and personal experience are often seen through his eyes. Joan London creates an intense, unconventional, part-exile, part-new Australian boy, unable to be contained by the constraints and limitations of both polio and the colonial Australian society his family are trying to make their home within.  He is at turns passionate, expressive, seeking to find his poetic vocation, while also being very much an adolescent boy with a burgeoning sense of attraction to the  perhaps more conventional Australian fellow polio children's home resident Elsa.  He possesses the strong vein of Jewish humour, dark as it comes, seen in his response to the more Anglo-Saxon Christianity Elsa has been brought up on:  'But I am not Christian.'  She'd never thought of Jews not being Christian. Jesus was a Jew: 'And you know what happened to him.' http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/27/the-best-of-old-jews-tell_n_1085089.html#gallery/196447/0 'The Golden Gate' residential home of the title is the burnished location of Frank and Elsa's relationship. From the bathroom door, Frank sees her foot, 'her ankle like a wishbone'. They share a growing intimacy, described in translucent language by London, echoing the language of Shakespeare's sonnets: 'She was his homing point, the place he returned to. His escape, his refuge. His park, his river, his track.' Frank, finds a resonant and multi-faceted poetic metaphor, 'The Third Country'. After his birthplace of Budapest is transformed into a country of terrors and he finds the refugee's place of safety, Perth, with its 'Australian sound' of 'emptiness' matching his mother's traumatised sense of displacement, he ends up at The Golden Gate polio residential children's home, which becomes the locus of love, 'the country he could finally feel at home'.  Frank is the character we travel with most through the narrative.


Elsa is depicted as a character often through Frank's view, though London represents her in own right with her own independence.  She is a self-contained, quite private character.  As Frank is drawn to her, she is drawn to him, initially through his unconventional honesty and through his grasping of life in all its fullness outside the conventional Australian social perspective that as polio victims their life should be dictated by their victim status and social ostracism.  Adolescent attraction draws them closer, though despite the bond she feels with him, this is not transposed into any sort of tidy romantic completion in an adult relationship.  We are drawn to admire what is described as her 'internal' 'goodness' and her 'resoluteness'.  She, the child, the polio victim, is stronger than her able bodied mother Margaret: 'she knew she only kept breathing because of her mother. So that her mother would not die.'  This echoes the earlier character of Sullivan, Frank's poetic guide, who says of his parents: 'I refuse to be their only light. I want to be my own reason for living'. London considers the inevitable moral question of who survives and who does not, as Elsa considers how she has survived but an Irish Australian fellow victim has not, despite both being prayed for earnestly.  Elsa is left with the sense that 'polio had taken her legs, made her pale with thin cheeks, yet somehow herself'.


And so from the two adolescent main characters to Frank's father, the once sophisticated Budapest businessman. Having operated an import-export business and survived European labour camps, he finds himself a delivery driver for Bickfords soft drinks firm.  Seemingly unfamiliar through forced absence from his son, Frank, they are 'unalike in every way, yet with mutual goodwill had forged a bond, with no need to explain themselves'. His exaggeratedly accented self-mocking exclamations of 'vot da hell', bring warmth and lightness to those around him.  Yet the scars of his experience as a European Jewish survivor remain, so that he finds himself unable to utter the social niceties of 'goodbye' or 'see you later' to anyone. In the indirectly expressed connection he forms with the unconventional Australian head nurse of The Golden Gate, Sister Olive Penny, it becomes apparent that 'he was beyond intimacy. The pretence of normality, the weight of the past.' Later in another encounter between them, 'she sensed for a moment the dense life inside him, all he'd loved and given up.' Migration, exile and displacement weigh heavily upon his character, with his 'suspicion that to love a place, to imagine yourself belonging to it, was a lie, a fiction. It was a vanity'. London portrays his uncertainty about West Australia with this vivid and fecund image: 'Budapest was the love of his life who had betrayed him. Perth was the flat-faced, wide-hipped country girl whom he'd been forced to take on as his wife. Only time would tell if one day he would reach across and take her hand.'  He views the small, colonial mentality of West Australia of the 50s with sardonic detachment.  The newly wed and crowned Queen Elizabeth's visit captures the sort of public health hysteria repeated in a later generation's ludicrous paranoia over AIDS. So the golden girl, the beloved film star style royal is protected from unclean hand contact with the public. Meyer sees this not just as health related snobbery, but as an enactment of the colonial mentality, referring to Perth as : 'a tiny lost tribe on the coast of a huge island, faithfully waiting for a ship from the Motherland'. Yet with increasing contact with The Golden Gate, such as the Christmas party he and wife Ida organise, he reflects: 'This is the community we belong to now ... with the humble of the earth. The halt and lame.'  Perth and West Australia gradually insinuate themselves into his life: 'the roads here, the long steady run of them, the space and flatness soothed him. They suited the thinness of his spirit.'  Gradually he accommodates himself out of displacement to this new place: 'what had been temporary had become settled with its own mysterious significance'.  This is no welcoming open-armed new country, but represents instead the alignment to a new life which those forced into migration experience. 


Ida, wife of Meyer and mother of Frank, is a more tense, febrile character.  A concert pianist in Budapest, she reaches states of exalted melodramatic tension before performances, approaching practice with an exactitude that regards lack of rehearsal as a 'sin', in the run up to her first performance in Australia in the unexalted company of the children of The Golden Gate, their parents and the nurses.  Yet she too, along with Meyer, is recognised by the unconventional Sister Penny, in her reflections before announcing her performance to the assembled company, for 'their sharp attentiveness, like witnesses', for 'the different way they saw things...their expectation of relating closely to you...their frankness'.  Yet she is a character who lives vividly and with a prism of integrity for the reader, seen in her attitude to motherhood: 'motherhood never sat easily with Ida'.  The scars of wartime survival are there in her view of 'the weak spot, the broken part; the gap that let the polio in'.  She painfully recognises the bond between Frank and Meyer: 'his first smile, like hers, would always be directed towards Meyer.' Her dependence on Meyer is referred to  through 'the necessity of being positive and optimistic when he was with Ida, as buoyant as a balloon that must keep them both aloft above some open sea that terrified her.' Yet there is a complexity about this relationship that is not reductive, not one way, not sentimental to the representations of migrant victims. So as he watches her practice for the Christmas concert, he notices  her 'mind' and 'hands', 'the most moral, the most generous' part of her and she 'gave him back to himself', as he listened 'to a summation of all the tragedy and beauty of his life'.


Sister Olive Penny is another vivid character. Joan London creates a powerful sense of a character who resides outside the social norms of Australian 1950s women.  Despite the social and physical ostracism of those with polio, Sister Penny welcomes Elsa to The Golden Gate, picking her up and carrying her without the sanitised plastic gloves of the other nurses.  As a single woman, she, like the migrant Gold family, walks the edges of Australian conventions. In her occasional sexual liaisons with men, often married, such as Constable Ryan, 'she met them on the same terms as theirs'. She has protected and supported her daughter Elizabeth Ann, while at the same time recognising the way she is growing apart from her mother, settling into the bosom of the adopted  Australian family she boards with, whose conventionality is the very antithesis of her mother's life.  It is her lack of convention, the integrity beyond the timid Australian conventions of the 1950s which marks her out with such a strong sense of life.  This is what draws Meyer to her, leaving the two of them teetering on the edge of deeper physical connections.  Their most intimate conversations are delineated through London's portrayal of the language of the eyes: 'her eyes, dark with a secret life knowledge'. Behind the rituals of nurse carer and parent 'they recognised each other. There was a call between them, clear as a bird's'. At their final meeting at the beach, her eyes are significantly hidden behind sunglasses as Meyer says: 'I learnt from you...How to live here.' While it is clear that they will go no further, 'loss....like  a seam running through her life' 'seemed to have been lifted, carried away in the sea wind.' So in the narrative's denouement, after the 'scandal', 'the revulsion' of Frank being found on top of Elsa, she responds to the home's governors' inquisition with: 'Children can surprise you by how much they feel and understand. How mature - emotionally - they really are'. Despite Frank's feeling that she has not stood up for him and Elsa, she knows she has in effect signed her own removal papers from The Golden Gate. 


Towards the end of the narrative London creates an enthralling set piece at The Golden Gate, which allows her to portray the characters at their most vivid and the themes of displacement and disability at their most poignant.  Frank's mother, the talented concert pianist, plays for the first time since her migration to this land, yet plays not to the grand cultured European audiences of before, but to the assembled children, parents, nurses and locals of The Golden Gate.  Empathy for the outcast, for the rejected and inequitable life of life of an Australian young woman is represented in Nurse Ngaire's silent tears at the memory of her piano teaching mother who said she 'didn't have a musical bone in her body', ending up in this job after escaping her mother for romance only to be abandoned by the faithless man.  The 'small white serious faces' of the children 'listened to every note'. Observing her passionate performance, Frank is drawn more closely to his mother: 'he saw her strength, her vast determination', putting him in mind of her 'fury' in the hospital for him to recover: 'they take the weak ones first'.  Meyer's mind loses the notion that 'any one thing, person, country could be better than another'. Rodney Bennett, insufferable parent and small-minded societal snob, whose wife had previously said to her daughter  about their invitation to a royal garden party: 'we thought, you know, with you being here, we'd be crossed off the list', is rebuffed in his boorish, bluff attempt to persuade Ida to play at his own garden party, so that he can achieve a social triumph.  His attempt to give her 'a chance to get ahead. Especially members of her race' is rejected with elegant resoluteness by Ida who makes it clear that he could not afford the likes of musicians such as her.  Ida finally achieves some sense of equilibrium: 'this was the land in which her life would take place. In which her music must grow. This was her audience, the emigres, the petit bourgeois, the nouveau riche, the country folk'.


And so to the novel's climax . Frank and Elsa are discovered in bed undressed atop each other and are expelled. The independent woman and remarkable nurse carer Sister Olive Penny is forced to move on. The Golden Gate's halcyon aura dissipates, not to be recovered by a clumsy meeting of Elsa and Frank's families. The coda offers no neat, resoundingly comfortable resolution in the face of disability and displacement. Elsa makes her life as a doctor with someone else.  Frank, relocated to New York, living alone, is a poet with minor success, being poignantly interviewed by Elsa's literary son. 


Joan London has written a book which is rich with character and life.  Her prose has a fluent, gentle, restrained and unsentimental elegiac ease, yet is an apt vehicle for offering the reader 'light' and 'life'. Sent to me by my Australian aunt, a short search on the book in the British media is revealing by its absence of discussion. A minor reference appears on the Guardian website in relation to coverage of novels up for the Miles Franklin award for Australian fiction. The tax-avoiding Amazon stock it, but the tax-paying British online firm 'Hive' do not.  This is a novel which deserves a global audience and opens the Eurocentric mind to the richness of Australian fiction.  Let's leave the final words with John Ruskin, English artist and social thinker, whose work has featured in a recent exhibition in my home town of Sheffield:

'When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece'

and

'There is no wealth but life.'

An Archway, A Bridge, An Altar

'We keep our title, human,


word like an archway, a bridge, an altar'


Denise Levertov ('Vocation')


Coming to, as the sedatives, wear off, I watch the ceiling pass by above me, a brightly lit path. Being prostrate, trundled along hospital corridors in the conscious aftermath of some quite brutal orthopaedic surgery, I find a strange disorientation; life viewed from another bodily perspective.


And so to the ward bay. Prone, vulnerable, two nurses prepare themselves physically before heaving my body onto the bed, trying to minimise the inevitable shout of pain sensors. It is early evening, five o'clock, and I am last out of theatre.  Three sets of eyes watch me and wait for the moment to open up out of this immediate, post-surgical vulnerability, a moment to offer greeting.


I share the bay with three men recovering from knee replacements: Abdul, a quiet seventy year old  man, a former metal worker, originally from Sylhet,   Darnall resident since the 70s; Richard, a considerate former electrical engineer from Dronfield, in his late fifties, having been forced to retire early through an arthritic condition; and Colin, a cantankerous and irrepressible man, with thin bony limbs curled over from lifelong arthritis.  For three days we share this bay.


Night sets in, main lights are switched off and we give ourselves over to pain relief-assisted sleep.  Four men on our backs, we tolerate each others heavy snores, occasionally marked by large, semi-apnoeic sucks of air, which reverberate around the bay.


Five am and the night shift nurse arrives to nudge us into consciousness, enough to offer an arm for the five times daily blood pressure checks, and the administering of the first drugs of the day.  As the shift is changing over, with a brusque cheeriness, we are offered a cup of tea.  Then begins a day of structured regularity, marked by meals, meds and more blood pressure tests. Four men together, we are woven together by these rituals of care and convalescence.


So we watch each others daily progress. Abdul and Richard, a day ahead of me, begin to make their hesitant steps on crutches.  We notice and seem to know when to mark or pass over the grimaces and sharp intakes of breath.  The first cautious move from my bed to the chair is welcomed and remarked upon.  In turn, I mark with encouragement their progress from shuffles to more fluid paces. 


Colin keeps us occupied by his insistent demands to be accompanied outside for a cigarette. Staffing levels of course cannot allow this.  Eventually, with boisterous bravado and braggadocio, he sets off,  his arthritically twisted hands grasping onto the handles of his adapted mobility frame.  We are hias brother invalids for this passage of three days convalescence, so we work at placating, jollying and recognising the jocular irascibility that marks out his determination to live life unconstrained by his disability.
Meal times are an opportunity to be companions, bread-sharers.  My ascetically healthy choice of diet refuses to separate me out from this fundamental sharing of food.  Abdul quietly tolerates a predominantly European cuisine, though confides that he can't wait for proper home food. Three times a day, the priestly ministrants arrive, trundling a medicine cabinet.  Each in turn, we submit ourselves to the intake of pain relief tablets and thick and gluey constipation relief fluid, the inevitable result of surgery and serious analgesics.  This  ritual again weaves us together in a secular rite at this pharmaceutical altar.
Three of us receive regular visitors.  Abdul trumps us all with his family gathering in a semi-circle of chairs.  His extended family visitors kindly share out with the rest of us their greetings as they arrive and depart. Colin finally receives a visit from those responsible for his social care needs, without which he won't be allowed out to the home he craves as much as his cigarettes.
Day three and departure day arrives for three of us. First Abdul is transformed into his daily clothes, strange vestments of normality after three days of pyjamas.  Then Richard is similarly transformed.  As the moment for leaving comes for each in turn,  I find myself quite undone.  We share a formal handshake and  conventional words of well-wishing. Yet the depth of eye-contact, the warmth in our voices, the way we are all struggling to control our voices, marks some deep level of contact, of connection we have made over the course of these three days. 
I find myself feeling fresh, cleaned out, ready for new ways of daily living, marked out by deep connections formed by shared vulnerability, simple kind words.  These seem to me a new vocation, the daily archway, the bridge, the way to keep the title...human.

Theatre of the Vulnerable

The wounded surgeon plies the steel

That questions the distempered part

‘East Coker’ TS Eliot

 

Four months after beginning the process of referral for a hip joint replacement, I find myself queuing in the seven o’clock winter dark to gain entry into the stark electrically-lit room of the Hallamshire hospital Theatre Admissions Unit.  A small gathering of a quietly tense cross-section of Sheffield’s population sits clutching small over-night bags, waiting for the call.

We are summoned and  trail along down a windowless corridor into an area, seemingly a cross between a concrete colon and an airport docking system with large green panels marked on the floor with numbers for each curtained bay. I find myself in number 38.

This is not a private environment: just flimsy green cloth curtains offering visual privacy. However pre-operative mini-consultations with a steady stream of health care professionals are anything but private. The lead surgeon offers a cheery welcome. The junior doctor (complete with 'support the junior doctors strike' lanyard badge), registrar and anaesthetic teams, alongside the ever present theatre nurse all conduct their necessary conversations with all those of us in the bay. It becomes unavoidable: personal stories will not be private.

A sort of priestly call and response ritual follows between registrar and patient: ‘Can you tell me what you are having done today?’  ‘I’m having a hip replacement’. Next the junior doctor lays the arrowed stroke of a thick black marker pen down my left leg.   Then questions and accounts from anaesthetist, ensuring nil-by-mouth procedures have been followed.  The long wait begins, but with some relief that this is the ‘kairos’: the time is coming after several months of counting down to ‘it’. Whatever ‘it’ is will arrive in the passage of a few small hours.

Directly opposite me sits a man in his eighties, with his wife, his present and long-time companion.  He has tumbled over on his entrance to the Theatre Admissions Unit in the dark, having lost the use of his legs and been accidentally tipped out of a wheelchair. So the bridge of his nose below his glasses is painted with scarlet drips of blood, patched temporarily with a simple plaster.  I am struck by the interactions between this elderly man and his accompanying wife, the practical utterances of a lifetime’s togetherness punctuating the quiet waiting.

In another bay opposite me a man in his thirties sits calmly and waits with kind cheerfulness and consideration alongside his partner’s unspoken tension. He faces an all-day brain procedure.  The surgeon, a tall, willowy and ascetic looking man,  has a more extended discussion with him and his partner, explaining the probable length and outlining the meticulous complexity of the operation in language which renders the whole calmly factual.  The tumour lies embedded deeply and requires a slow excavation of absolute precision. There is an unspoken kindliness in this calm professional manner.  The man, a father, a husband, receives it with calm, cheerful politeness.   I see him walking down the corridor with the nurse and anaesthetist attendants: ‘you get off now, love. It’ll be ok’, he says to his tense partner. There is something about this undemonstrative vulnerability and courageous vulnerability that applies an invisible surgeon’s knife to those like me who are able to observe: ‘the distempered part’ is opened up.

By my side a man acknowledges his drinking and smoking, acknowledges the vulnerability of the loss of his wife. He makes it apparent that he and his bereaved friend minister friendship to their grieving parts over pints and crushed tabs.  He finds himself sitting here awaiting a spinal procedure to relieve his pain. It is the other pain that opens up  the observer.

What strikes me about all these professional -patient interactions is the way they have a ritualised manner, rendering them impersonal.  Yet underlying the professionality of all this is an understanding by all involved in the care that there is an underlying human ministration to that which is unspoken, unuttered in each one of us as we face an unknown in the hands of strangers with mysterious skills, skills we entrust ourselves to.

The elderly man who has lost the use of his legs, the man in the prime of life facing the removal of a brain tumour, the man whose body seems wrung out by grief, and me, a late middle-aged man awaiting the removal of the bodily discomfort of an arthritic hip:  all of us are brought together in all our extraordinary human ordinariness, our vulnerability,  to this strange fellowship of the sick.

The unspoken that lies like an invisible thread connecting healer and sick, feels luminous.  I feel as if I will walk again pain free, but with a part of me opened up to another light, to live perhaps a little more fully.

Pigeon English

"Hope," says Emily Dickinson, "is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul."

My first reflections take their cue from Stephen Kelman’s ‘Pigeon English’.

Exuberant, indefatiguable and swift on his feet, Harrison Okopu is a character whose voice is unforgettable.   Despite what seems to be a claustrophobic sense of street menaces and limited financial constraints of migrant family lives and a tragic ending, we never lose the sense of hope, that ‘thing with feathers that perches in the soul’.  Stephen Kelman manages to craft a unique and vivid language out of what might often be seen as a clichéd, brutal and brutalist urban idiom.  From the shouts penned on a school leaver’s shirt:

Northwell Manor Till I Die

Hair by Ton and Guy, personality by Ronald Macdonald

Get high naturally: climb a tree

to Harri’s own unique voice, a pidgin of urban London with a Ghanaian inflection:

In England there’s a hell of different words for everything. It’s for if you forget one, there’s always one left over, Harri punctuates the language of his thoughts with expressions such as  ‘brutal’ (‘cool’)and ‘hutious’ (‘scary’), blending London and Ghanaian slang respectively.  Expressions such as ‘Advise yourself!’ are directed between Harri and his older sister Lydia, creating the sort of inventive linguistic repertoire of cultures from the exclamative and authoritative forms, familiar with the discourse of African pastors, to street argot of ‘chooking’ or stabbing.

The storytelling is shot through with an exuberant sense of being alive. So Harri plays at pretending being a bird in the wind funnel effect created by the three towers encapsulating his world, Luxembourg House, Stockholm House and Copenhagen House, and cheerfully asserts to his friend Jordan, ‘It’s not gay, it’s brilliant!’, reflecting to himself ‘Asweh, it’s the best way to feel alive.’

As a piece of literature, this novel has the authenticity of someone like Bob Holman from Glasgow’s tower block tenements. This is not the literary tourism of detached sociological observation. Stephen Kelman’s early life in Luton’s high rises and his stated intention to represent the Damilolah Taylor world of tower blocks with a sense of the good life, the light that resides within those often portrayed as victims or perpetrators of a claustrophobic world of urban crime. This, along with the skilful crafting of the novel, gives the character of Harrison Okopu artistic integrity.  This is not the only British voice from this context. Voices such as that of  KateTempest, with her mythological ideas echoing those of William Blake,  also represent with integrity and authenticity the stories and charged light disguised by crime statistics and tabloid representations. The choice of urban, feral pigeon as the choric voice alongside that of Harrison Okopu’s is apt, in a similar way to that of Barry Hines’s kestrel in the  rural landscape of the Yorkshire coalfields ‘Kestrel for Knave’. It does not have the

otherness of the kestrel and of Billy Caspar himself in his own isolated and fractured family world. The pigeon possesses a greater sense of connectedness to Harrison’s fractured Ghanaian migrant family’s world and that of the tower block community he is a part of.  This is part of what lifts the novel from the world of soap opera melodrama. It is also a device which saves the novel from a Dickensian overly ideologically freighted architecture.

The story echoes the startling beginning of ‘Curious Incident’ with its focus on the stark death indicated by the pool of blood on the concrete outside ‘Chicken Joe’s’ and the poignantly piecemeal shrine composed of school photos, beer bottles, mis-spelled messages and ‘nearly new Nike’ football boots hanging on the metal railings.  Similarly, there then begins a captivatingly naïve, innocent investigation, conducted by Harri and his best friend, Dean. Cheap binoculars are used, along with sellotape to capture fingerprints in a project which consumes the two of them. References are more  CSI televisual clichés than the self-consciously literary Conan Doyle references of ‘Curious Incident’.  This is, however, manages not to mock  or offer a critique of the limited cultural reach of high rise life, but instead crafts a naive, hopeful, positive depiction of a life lived both within the limited eleven year old perspective yet also with the generous perspective that finds the cracks in apparently clichéd characters such as ‘Terry Takeaway’, the pit bull owning, all day drinker, a Bubbles-style (from tv series ‘The Wire’) opportunistic thief of all things jobsworth, whether a kettle or a tray of butcher’s chickens.

Dialogue is represented in what appears to be a naive and mechanical manner with script style designations of speaker’s name, followed by a colon and their speech. Yet this adds to the childlike innocence of Harri’s voice, as if there are none of the overlays of a skilled narrative technician. 

Some of an earlier educational generation may recall the earnest engagement of SE Hinton’s ‘The Outsiders’ (with its school literature classroom engagement with

displaced youth culture and literary aspiration with American poet Robert Frost’s poetry worked into the narrative. While this novel appears to give a British treatment of this familiar genre, it is clearly written with a lot more craft, skill and a lighter touch.

Set over a chronological 5 month period between March and July in the life of eleven year old Harrison Okopu, a Ghanaian migrant boy, whose mother has paid older gangster Julius an undisclosed sum for a better life as a midwife in London’s hospitals with her two older children, while her husband, Harri’s ‘Pappa’ continues to scrape a living with baby sister Agnes back in Ghana.

 

One of the delights of the plotting is the way it captures the butterfly mind of this eleven year old boy from classroom interactions, corridor menaces, tower block interactions, sisterly squabbles, conversations with his hard-pressed midwife Mamma and snatched monosyllabic conversations with the absent baby sister he dotes upon.

 

It is over this still bloodied concrete of the opening playground shrine that the eponymous pigeon walks before flying through the window of Harri’s flat, sending his older sister Lydia into a hysteria, before Harri accommodates the creature into his warm human heart, guiding it out onto the balcony.

Local street gang Dell Farm Crew, known only by their street monikers, X-Fire, Killa, Clipz, Dizzy,  teach the newboys like Harri how to ‘shank’ with a ‘blade’.  Harri tries to navigate the his life of casual everyday threats and abuse, with the ever-present menace of the above Crew hanging over him, as a sort of fatalistic ‘with us or against us’ sword of Damocles that can offer the hope of protection or the unreliable moral compass of the street status of  ‘fronting’.

 

The dead boy’s funeral is described in a way which convincingly captures a child’s sense of the tragic and of the absurd: ‘they should have made his coffin a football boot’, next to ‘children aren’t supposed to die, only old people. I spat out the rest of my Atomic Apple Hubba Bubba for if I swallowed it by mistake and my guts all got stuck together.’

 

Harri’s country origins within the melting pot of southern urban citiscapes is illustrated by casually unscreened interactions such as the following when the Dell Farm Crew toy with Harri’s school bag:

X-Fire: ‘What country you from anyway?’

Me: ‘Ghana.’

Clipz: ‘They make their houses out of cowshit, innit. I seen it.’

Harri’s fellow investigative double act Dean offers some insights which help Harri develop a sense of what is right.  Harri is caught between the desire for protection from the Dell Farm Crew against bullies like fellow Y7 abusive Villis and his natural instinct that they are not in his best interest. So he fails the ‘mission’ they give him to break the school’s fire alarm glass. Dean, or ‘Ginger’,  is forced to yield his school dinner pound to the gang at the cafeteria. Dean’s voice is clear in its transparent childlike clarity: ‘I don’t wanna be in their stupid gang, all they do is rob people. Don’t go with them, they’re numpties.’

 

In the following chapter, Harri finds his sister Lydia placing a mysterious bundle of dirty, stained clothes in the tower block basement launderette with a bottle of bleach, given to her by her friend Miquita.  Incidents like this illustrate the pressures on young people in these compromised friendships.

 

School ground incidents capture other painful experiences for Harri, like when he is laughed at by his peers for drawing with a marker pen ‘adidas’ style stripes on his plain white trainers. At this point he drifts back towards the Dell Farm Crew and participates in a mugging. It makes him sick to his toes when he realises the weaker person picked out is Mr Frimpong, the oldest person at the African church his family attends. Normally Harri extracts hilarity from Mr Frimpong’s overly loud and long hymn singing voice, but here Harri runs away. It is at this point that the pigeon’s voice adds its litany, echoing the threat by its own experience of magpies, urging Harri to ‘be as big as you want to be’, in counter melody to his despairing wish to be bigger.

There is a constant tenor of underlying trouble in Harri’s world. He makes a list of ‘wars going on all the time’, from ‘Arsenal vs Chelsea’, ‘Kids vs Teachers’, ‘God vs Allah’ to Chicken Joe’s vs KFC’. He then reflects: ‘I don’t even know what side I’m on. Nobody’s told me yet.’ 

 

There is a sense in which world Kelman portrays is marked by strict notions of masculinity and femininity.  So when Lydia’s friend Miquita heat treats Lydia’s hair with an iron when she suddenly switches to a more menacing tone: ‘Are you with us?...You’re either with us or against us, innit’. We later find out that Miquita’s boyfriend Killa has been applying the same ‘tests’ to her, as if branding her, marks which she appears to carry proudly.  Tellingly, Harri later, with the clarity of the untarnished, says of Poppy, his girlfriend: ‘I didn’t even have to burn Poppy to make her admire me, I only had to make her laugh.’ There is a later description of a brutal school ground fight between Miquita and her former friend Chanelle over how much of the unspoken has been talked about. This relationship between Harri and his girlfriend Poppy offers some innocent relief from the strong sense of how limited the lives of girls and young women can be in this male dominated street culture.

 

This female victim mode is explored further through Harri’s mother’s friend Auntia Sonia’s boyfriend Julius. It becomes apparent that he is some sort of gangster whose control of Sonia is total. So when she is bandaged up as if ‘she was in a war’, Sonia relates a tale of suitcases falling off a wardrobe.  This later develops with Aunt Sonia’s broken leg either from Julius’s ‘Persuader’ or from him having run her over his car. Either way the shrinking claustrophobic world of Harri’s Mamma and Auntie Sonia are illustrated by the way that Julius’ money is revealed to be what got her to the UK, while Sonia can only respond with ‘she just says it was her fault for not getting out of the way’.

 

The one point of stability is Harri’s African church going mother, who keeps him separate from school assemblies with Atlaf, a Somali boy, for reasons  which the church spire aspiring Harri never quite understands.  So when Harri is led to participate in a stone throwing incident at a bus with his school exclude friend Jordan, he is mortified when his mother gets off the very same bus to castigate him.  Yet there is no sense of falsely eulogising her, just representing her as a pressured mother trying to hold a fractured family unit together.  Movingly, he descends into self-recrimination involving what appears to be a street gangster-style vengeful God: ‘God’s going to destroy me. He’ll probably kill Agnes first just to teach me.’  Yet this intensity of guilt is rendered disarming by his imaginative conjectures on ‘air holes in my coffin’, his aeroplane-shaped coffin.

 

Similarly there are moments with his older sister Lydia which illustrate the cracks which let the light through.  The tense secrets of the launderette scene elicited by Harri are counterpointed by the urban whimsy of his birthday present to her: the creation of their footprints in fresh cement. ‘The footprints are there to tell everybody we were here.’  This sort of mark captures something of Harri’s simple joy in life and imaginative generosity. This sibling closeness becomes all the greater as the distance between Miquita and Lydia becomes more marked.  Miquita initiates Harri into the technique of kissing, which he believes will mean Poppy won’t ‘cut him’ for better kissers. However, the whole incident is conveyed with growing mixture of inappropriacy and repugnance at its physical invasiveness, until Lydia in an attempt to protect her brother from further molestation, blurts out: ‘At least my boyfriend’s not a murderer.’  Miquita responds with deadly silence and then a mouthful of insults, ‘fronts’ and put downs.  Harri’s simple childlike generosity and kindness is then illustrated by his offering of the first Oreo, ‘always the tastiest’, to his shaking sister.

 

As the narrative moves towards its climax, the pigeon voice and that of Harri blend as the pigeon is set upon by four magpies, delineated like a tower block gang rap. It is Harri who saves the day by chasing the magpies away. As he converses with his pigeon a poignantly empty page space of:  ‘    ‘is uttered in response by the pigeon to Harri’s ministrations and protective friendship.  This is followed by the high point of Harri winning the Y7 athletics crown against Brett Shawcross to Poppy’s delight.  Harri celebrates this moment of success and lack of fear: ‘Asweh, it felt like I was the king. Everybody admired me and nobody was waiting for me at the gate.’

 

Harri is then taken with the idea and persuades his friend Dean to ‘capture the spirit’ of the dead boy on the basketball court. This leads to an account of the incident leading to the motive for killing, a humiliation of Killa by the dead boy related to the dead boy’s basketball skill. This leads ominously to the Dell Farm Crew cornering Dean and Harri on the same court. Miquita’s intuitive attempt at redemption by trying to dampen the tension and distract Killa are blanked by b-boy ignorance. They take Dean’s trainers and search Harri finding the wallet and dead boy’s photo, then icily putting a lighter to it.  Just as X-Fire is putting up his hood in some ritualised urban execution, blade in hand, Lydia shouts up, having filmed the whole thing on her mobile. In the melee they manage to escape. It is then left to the pigeon to voice a foreboding epigraph:

‘You keep going out of spite or with magnificent defiance, you keep going through steely instinct or by cotton-wool consensus, you keep going because you’re made that way. You keep going, and we love you for it.

We miss you when you’re gone.’

 

This choric voice can appear at times to be forcedly opine and clichéd, overly directive of the reader’s attention. Yet the gap between it and Harri’s voice give it a Hughes-like sense of a more benign mythical bird, an urban survivor like Harri.

 

Then follows a strange, almost Ghanaian bush-like episode where Harri escapes from a school game of rounders to find  some sort of crab apple-like fruit he hopes the consuming of which will render him safe by some sort of magic or by a more simple matter of toxicity. 

 

There are echoes of the classic ritualised cleansing and hellish fire at the conclusion of ‘Lord of the Flies’ in the burning of the playground. It is at this scene that Killa is rendered human with his name Jermaine Bent finally being used for the first time, then being described gripping a smouldering woodchip ‘for donkey hours’ – ‘It was like he was as sad as me’.

 

And so to the tragic finale, the last day of school, Poppy’s number written on Harri’s arm. He and Dean have planned to see the police on Monday, still with a child-like, mish-mash of reality, tv and newsroom clichés of ‘In England you get TV in jail and the pool balls even roll straight.’ It is the pigeon who is the only witness to Harri’s stabbing and his final thoughts of his baby sister Agnes.

 

So just how does the light break through what might be read by some as an unremittingly bleak depiction of tower block realities cruelly crushing child-like innocence, in the way which captured so much public empathy in the reporting of the Damilola Taylorkilling? Harri’s delightfully innocent voice is brutally extinguished at the end.  However, it is maybe the courage and artistry to depict voices like these in contexts like these which show the cracks which let the light through. It is this light like a life giving vein, which can join writer, reader and lives lived in our cities by young people who may otherwise be written off as faceless hoodies.

                                                

To reiterate the pigeon’s words:

You keep going, and we love you for it.

We miss you when you’re gone.’

 

Finally, something of the light which breaks through the bleakness and concrete husk of this world is offered by the feral pigeon voice:

We gave you the map, it’s inside you.