The tales of five Londoners, told in the present tense, are interwoven. There's a murder at the start but this is not a murder mystery. There is an act of terrorism near the end but this is not a thriller. And, at the end, the tales are mostly unresolved. It's difficult to classify. I suppose it is a novel about London, with a particular focus on the experiences of the immigrants who make the city function: the cleaners and the cab drivers, the prostitutes and the teachers.
The characters are:
- Polly, an immigration lawyer of Jewish descent, whose au pair is an illegal Russian who has disappeared
- Ian, from South Africa, a teacher in a sink comprehensive.
- Job, an illegal immigrant from Zimbabwe, working as a minicab driver and car washer.
- Anna, an illegal immigrant from the Ukraine, trafficked into prostitution.
- Katie, escaping an unfaithful but rich fiance in America, working as an editorial assistant for a small magazine.
It was an interesting read with a lot of information about the different experiences. But I only really got inside the head of Job, the others seemed slightly formulaic as was the school that Ian taught in and the portrayal of the Moslems. There were no real surprises. I guessed what had happened to Iryna almost from the start and the ending was fairly obvious from early on. There was some fun in spotting the little links that bound the characters together but those connections were not psychologically strong.
A much more emotionally engaging book about the immigrant experience is The Road Home by Rose Tremain.
Some great moments:
- "At night, even in these dead months of the year, the city is never wholly dark. Its shadows twitch with a harsh orange light that glows and fades, fades and glows.The sour air, breathed in and out by eight million lungs, stained by exhaust pipes and strained through ventilators, is never clean, although, after a time, you no longer notice its bitter taste and smell. The dust of ages swirls and falls, staining walls, darkening glass, coating surfaces, clogging lungs." (The first four sentences, C 1) Very Dickensian start (although two stains?)
- "Having lived under burning blue skies every day of his life, he understands that it changes something inside you when you are cut off from the light and the air." (C 2)
- "No one else will do what Job and his kind do, and doing them makes them invisible men as it is. Rubbish must be collected and roads swept, crops picked and chickens plucked, cars washed and offices cleaned, elderly nursed and children watched." (C 3)
- "Self-help at the Samuel Smiles means keeping out of trouble, at best; at worst, it means mugging another boy for his mobile phone." (C 6)
- "They have been carved like trees, and like trees they have endured." (C 8)
- "Children's memories are short, and their ingratitude is boundless." (C 12)
- "Poor people do live differently in Britain. There are so many things that it seems to drive out thought." (C 15)
- "The river of ice that has kept her frozen is melting, releasing a dark cloud of filth just as it does in the rivers at home when the winter begins to end." (C 19)
- "It never seems to strike teenagers that what goes around, comes around." (C 23)
- "The women themselves are largely of a type, being pale assisted blondes in jeans and jackets, clutching handbags so large that Job wonders whether they are displaced persons like himself." (C 26)
- "When I was growing up we were advised to always carry a tampon in out pocket. It's the best way to plug a bullet hole." (C 28)
- "Hers had been the kind of story which she thinks Henry James would never have told." (C 29)
- "Every day, everyone in the world takes decisions to trust people they don't know: trusting those who prepare your food or deliver your mail, trusting those who drive their cars or aeroplanes, trusting the stranger at the door, the politician in the seat, the doctor in the surgery." (C 30)
- "Every time you read a book your mind touches that of the person who wrote it - even if they died a long time ago." (C 41)
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