"Open Water" by Caleb Azumah Nelson

 This extraordinary debut novel, written in the 2nd person, present tense, about the experiences of a young black man in present-day south London, garnered many awards when it was first published in 2021 including winning the Costa debut novel award, the Betty Trask award, and the Somerset Maugham award,  being shortlisted for Waterstones Book of the Year, and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott prize and the Dylan Thomas prize. It was named one of the top ten debut novels of the year by the Observer and one of the best novels of the year by TIME.

It chronicles a love between the unnamed protagonist ("you") and his equally unnamed girlfriend, the anonymity and the second person narration plunging the reader into deep empathetic identification with the characters.

The prose is lyrical and poetic. The author frequently uses repetition to bludgeon the reader into acceptance of his ideas, thus:

• "You think about what it means to desire your best friend in this way. You think about holding onto this feeling for so long, holding it down, holding it in, because sometimes it's easier to hide in your own darkness than to emerge, naked and vulnerable, blinking in your own light. You think about whether she has been doing the same. You think about spillage, and whether this is something that can be mopped up. You think as you walk through the night ..." (Ch 13)
• "It's summer now, and you're looking forward to worrying less. You're looking forward to longer nights and shorter days. You're looking forward to gathering in back gardens and watching meat sputter on an open barbecue. You're looking forward to laughing so hard your chest hurts and you feel light-headed. You're looking forward to the safety in pleasure. You're looking forward to forgetting, albeit briefly, the existential dread which plagues you, which tightens your chest, which pains your left side. You're looking forward to forgetting that, leaving the house, you might not return intact. You're looking forward to freedom, even if it is short, even if it might not last." (Ch 14)

But there are also many phrases that recur like leitmotifs, separated bu pages, even chapters, but popping up time and time again. These repetitions, like a heartbeat, like a drum keeping a rhythm in the background, reminded me of the style of At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop, another book about the black experience but in a very different context.

The book refers to Zadie Smith's NW, a story about black character in north London. The experiences and feeling of doomed black youth strongly reminded me of Poor by Caleb Femi, a book of poetry gathered from the experiences of black youths in London.

The novel provides a visceral description of what it is like to be a talented (he's hugely artistic, immersed in music and paintings and theatre and literature and photography) young black man in London. Many of his experiences resonated: I, too, have been in situations he describes and have shared these emotions, but I haven't had the relentless exposure to jeopardy day in day out that creates an existential dread, a foreboding of inevitable doom. Mostly, I felt like an outsider. But it was a privilege and an education to gain a glimpse or two of his reality.

And the prose!

Selected quotes:

• "There should be no shame in knowing what one wants." (Prologue)
• "You lost your god so you can't even pray, and anyway, prayer is just confessing one's desire and it's not that you don't know what you want, it's that you don't know what to do about it." (Ch 7)
• "There are really only two plot devices when writing: a stranger comes to town, or a person goes on a journey." (Ch 9)
• "The intense mess of being intimate with another." (Ch 10)
• "You look like you got hit by a bus, and you dusted yourself off, and did it again for the hell of it." (Ch 11)
• "To be you is to apologize and often that apology comes in the form of suppression." (Ch 12)
• "You want to find yourself in a basement, neck loose, bobbing your head as a group of musicians play, not because they should, but because they must." (Ch 14)
• "You ... pushed apologies towards her in the way one would do when diffusing a bomb in the movies: one eye closed, snip at the wire and hope for the best." (Ch 15)
• "You're like a pair of musicians, forever improvising. Or perhaps you are not musicians but your love manifests in the music. Sometimes, your head tucked into her neck, you can feel her heartbeat thudding like a kick drum. Your smile a grand piano, the glint in her eye like the twinkle of hands caressing ivory keys. The rhythmic structure of a double bass the inert grace she had been blessed with, moving her body in ways which astound. A pair of soloists in conversations so harmonious, one struggles to separate. You are not the musicians but the music." (Ch 17)
• "You're scared that she might not just see your beauty, but your ugly too." (Ch 18)
• "He had spent a life so close to death that it was less a life lived and more one survived." (Ch 25)
• "You gaze in the mirror and you see that you are not a coward but you have done a cowardly thing and that you're not malicious but you have hurt her and you're not an embarrassment but you are ashamed." (Ch 26)
• "Freedom is really the distance between hunter and prey." (Ch 27)

A wonderful book.March 2026; 145 pages

First published by Viking in 2021

My Penguin paperback was issued in 2022

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Color Purple" by Alice Walker

 An epistolary novel of a sort in that the story is told as if the protagonist Celie is writing letters to God. This has the advantage that the novelist can use the conceit that they don't know what is about to happen next. But, despite the careful use of mis-spelt words to give an authentic feel, these snippets have too much controlled narrative to sound like letters. Later, there are letters written to Celie. These are even more obviously contrived.

Nevertheless, the voices of the two main characters, Celie and Shug, come through very strongly.

One of my problems with this book is that it is issue driven. We start off with child sexual abuse; it almost feels that the author has contrived to select a hook with the biggest shock value. Then the protagonist is married off to a man who wants a wife to work for him and to have sex with; he beats her. Before too long we have lesbianism, racism, colonialism, slavery, the true origin of the Uncle Remus stories, lynching, female circumcision ... It is almost as if the author can't think of an issue without being compelled to add it to the story. This means that some of the characters (eg Nettie) simply become channels to report on these things. This reduces them from potentially three-dimensional characters into mouthpieces.

There are characters. The core of the book involves the narrator, Celie and her relationship with Shug, a jazz singer who is Celie's husband's former lover and occasional boyfriend. It is by observing how Shug confronts the world that Celie learns how to stop being exploited, downtrodden and abused. There are also two other characters: Harpo, Celie's stepson and his wife Sofia, who have an on-off relationship. Harpo tries hard to treat Sofia better than his father treats his stepmother; Sofia version of standing up to the world gets her into trouble that even she can't handle. These four characters could have made an excellent novel on their own, but every time Nettie shows her face she preaches.

The other interesting character is that of Mr ------, Celie's husband. He's very much the villain at the start. Then we discover that when he was in love with Shug, he was a different person. By the end of the book he is tamed. He is not the only baddie to be redeemed. It is almost as if the author is saying that if you are true to yourself, if you stand up for yourself, then in the end goodness and righteousness will prevail. It makes a book that started with a shock into a feel-good novel by the end. But I found such redemptive character arcs unconvincing.

A potentially great novel spoiled by too many issues, too much plot and too little concentration on the characters. 

Selected quotes: 

(page references refer to the Wiedenfeld & Nicolson paperpack published in 2017)

• "I don't know how to fight. All I know how to do is stay alive." (p 18)
• "Next time us see Harpo his face a mess of bruises. His lip cut. One of his eyes shut like a fist. He walk stiff and say his teef ache." (p 36) I love the eye that is 'shut like a fist'; both descriptive and hinting at the reason for his injury.
• "She weak as a kitten. But her mouth just pack with claws." (p 47)
• "Harpo sits on the steps acting like he don't care. He ... whistle a little tune. But it nothing compared to the way he usually whistle. His little whistle sound like it lost way down in a jar, and the jar in the bottom of the creek." (p 64)
• "She wearing a skintight red dress look like the straps made out of two pieces of thread." (p 69)
• "'Tea' to the English is really a picnic indoors." (p 123)
• "Nobody feel better for killing nothing. They feel something is all." (p 129)
• "There is a way that the men speak to women that reminds me too much of Pa. They listen just long enough to issue instructions." (p 146)
• "The God I been praying and writing to is a man. And act just like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgitful and lowdown." (p 173)
• "You better hush. God might hear you. Let 'im hear, I say. If he ever listened to poor coloured women the world would be a different place, I can tell you." (p 173)
• "Have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me." (p 174)
• "I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it." (p 177)
• "People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back." (p 177)
• "Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?" (p 177)
• "Every time I conjure up a rock, I throw it." (p 178)
• "I don't know who tried to teach him what to do in the bedroom, but it must have been a furniture salesman." (p 225)

January 2024; 261 pages

The Color Purple won the Pulitzer Prize in 1983.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"If Beale Street Could Talk" by James Baldwin

This superb short novel is a searing indictment of white America in the 1970s (and it may not be a whole lot better now) seen from the perspective of a black family living in New York. The narrator, Tish, is pregnant with her first child; her lover and long-time friend Fonny, a sculptor, is in jail, on remand, not yet convicted. They are trying to raise the money for a lawyer. In one of the most brilliant scenes I have ever read, Tish tells Fonny's church-going mother and sisters, and his drunkard of a father, about the baby. The narrative, told in first-person with an intriguing mixture of past and present tense, jumps backwards and forwards in time as Trish recounts the events that led up to Fonny's arrest and the family's efforts to get him acquitted. The tension builds to an almost excruciating climax as the baby develops in her womb towards its birthday.

The power of this novel lies in its characters. Although the city as a whole is cast as the villain, most of the individuals are shown as good guys struggling to survive, often in ways that bring them into conflict with others (Fonny's mother, Senor Alvarez, Mrs Rogers), but often in ways that mean they give help generously and selflessly (Jaime, Levy). 

Told in uncompromising language, and this is an outstanding story written by a novelist at the very pinnacle of the writer's art.

Selected quotes:

• "New York must be the ugliest and the dirtiest city in the world. It must have the ugliest buildings and the nastiest people. It's got to have the worst cops. If any place is worse, it's got to be so close to hell that you can smell the people frying. And, come to think of it, that's exactly the smell of New York in the summertime." (p 8)
• "Some men wash their cars, on Sundays, more carefully than they wash their foreskins." (p 18)
• "I don't think America is God's gift to anybody - if it is God's days have got to be numbered." (p 24)
• "That God these people say they serve ... has got a very nasty sense of humour." (p 24)
• "It was the hour when darkness begins, when the sounds of the night begin." (p 30)
• "The death that was waiting to overtake the children of our age ... took many forms, though ... the death itself was very simple and the cause was simple, too: as simple as a plague: the kids had been told that they weren't worth shit and everything they saw around them proved it. They struggled, they struggled, but they fell, like flies, and they congregated on the garbage heap of their lives, like flies." (p 32)
• "Between the mother's prayers, which were like curses, and the sisters' tears, which were like orgasms, Fonny didn't stand a chance." (p 33) The power of this line is the choice of oxymoronic similes, to disrupt your thoughts, and to make you think.
• "He had found his centre, inside him: and it showed. He wasn't anybody's nigger. And that's a crime, in this fucking free country." (p 33)
• "Although I cannot say that your beauty rest did you a hell of a lot of good, I do admire the way you persevere." (p 36)
• "These days, of course, everybody knows everything, that's why so many people, especially most white people, are lost." (p 40)
• "Blessed be the next fruit of thy womb. I hope it turns out to be uterine cancer." (p 64)
• "He looked as though he wanted to knock Fonny down, he looked as though he wanted to take him in his arms." (p 76) Another powerful oxymoron expressing the complexity of human emotion.
• "A fool never says he's a fool." (p 104)
• "Something almost as hard to catch as a whisper in a crowded place, as light and as definite as a spider's web, strikes below my ribs, stunning and astonishing my heart." (p 106)
• "The baby, turning for the first time in its incredible veil of water, announces its presence and claims me." (p 106)
• "People make you pay for the way you look, which is also the way you think you look, and what time writes in a human face is the record of that collision." (p 108)
• "The rind of regret" (p 131) What a stunning description.
• "The blue sky above, and the bright sun, the blue sea, here, the garbage dump, there. It takes a moment to realize that the garbage dump is the favella. Houses are built on it - dwellings; some on stilts, as though attempting to rise above the dung-heap. Some have corrugated metal roofs. Some have windows. All have children." (p 142)
• "The righteous must be able to locate the damned." (p 168): The excuse for prison!

Not only does this little story pack an incredible emotional punch (and the ending of the book is different from that of the film; otherwise the film adaptation is very loyal) but the characters are beautifully drawn and their struggles to thrive given their circumstances are epic.

March 2022; 173 pages

Also by this author:

• Giovanni's Room: another classic, this time about a love between two men
• Go Tell It On the Mountain
• Another Country

This book reminded me of the poems collected in Poor by Caleb Femi, about the plight of young black boys living in London 

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Afterlives" by Abdulrazak Gurnah

Afterlives (published 2020) is the latest novel by Abdulrazak Gurnah who on 7th October 2021 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in Zanzibar, in Tanzania, Gurnah has lived most of his life in Canterbury, Kent, England. I moved away from Canterbury the day before Gurnah won his Novel Prize! And I never met him. 

It took me a while to get into this book. It is written in a conventional third person past tense with an omniscient narrator and the narrative distance varies from extreme overview shot (there are individual paragraphs which detail years of warfare, as if they are the establishing shot in a film, taken from a long way off) to in head thoughts (for Hamza and Afiya, at least) but it never gets close enough to the thoughts of the characters to be stream of consciousness so the overall effect is a little bit stand-offish. This is particularly the case in the first few chapters and the last chapter which deal mostly with peripheral characters; the core narrative of the love story between Hamza and Afiya is restricted to the centre of the book. There were parts which read like a narrative history. This distant narration reminded me of other African writers such as Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God, and No Longer at Ease). 

I think this was why I took a while to enjoy the book; once it arrived at a more conventionally 'western-novel-style' narrative I began to enjoy exploring the character of Hamza and, through him, began to appreciate the complexities of the other characters, Khalifa in particular who is a great grumpy old man with a heart of gold and his shrewish wife Bi Asha. 

In some ways, Afterlives resembled a memoir more than a novel. What, in conventional novel terms, is one to make of the demonic possession of Ilyas, unless it is to provide a motivation for his researches in the final chapter, or to suggest that native African explanations of 'voices in the head' have as much validity as Western-style psychology? 

It was a coincidence that I had read An Ice Cream War by William Boyd less than a month before this book: both of these novels deal with the fighting between the Germans and the British in East Africa during World War One although their perspectives (Afterlives purely African; Ice Cream purely British) are diametrically opposite. 

Another brilliant book about the African experience in the First World War (though this time in the trenches of the Western Front) is At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop.

Selected quotes:

• "‘No, you’re adding too much salt,’ Hamza said in exaggerated disbelief." (C 5)
• "European volunteers who thought killing was an adventure and were happy to be at the service of the great machinery of conquest and empire." (C 5)
• "In his exhaustion he sometimes reached a stage when he was unafraid, without bravado, without posturing, detached from the moment and open to whatever might happen to him." (C 5)
• "The Oberleutnant was furious and the other Germans joined him in his rage at the indiscipline of the carriers, as if they really believed that the ragged troop they beat and despised and overworked owed them loyalty." (C 7)
• "The morning was warming up but not yet hot and the crowds were still good-natured in their jostling and shoving. Carts barged their way through pedestrians, their drivers calling out in warning, bicycle bells tinkled and cyclists snaked a passage through the press of bodies. Two elderly matrons shuffled on unconcernedly and the crowd parted around them as if they were rocks in the middle of a stream." (C 8)
• "The worst mistakes he made in his earlier life in this town had been the result of his fear of humiliation." (C 9)
• "These thoughts filled him with sorrow, which he thought was the inescapable fate of man." (C 9)
• "Their disagreements sometimes ended in an exchange of tiny imperceptible smiles as if they had seen through each other’s performances." (C 9)
• "He puts great faith in the truth, though that sounds more pompous than I meant it to. Perhaps it would be better to say he has faith in frankness, openness, something like that, without noise or show" (C 10)
• "Poor Ilyas, his life was attended with difficulties yet he lived under a kind of illusion that nothing bad could ever happen to him on this earth. The reality was that he was always on the point of stumbling." (C 11)
• "Good fortune is never permanent. You cannot always be sure how long the good moments will last or when they will come again. Life is full of regrets, and you have to recognise the good moments." (C 12)
• "She talked almost constantly while she was with Bi Asha, even ventriloquising some replies to the questions she addressed to her." (C 13)
• "So what we can know for sure, Ilyas told his parents, is that someone loved Uncle Ilyas enough to follow him to certain death in a concentration camp in order to keep him company." (C 15; last lines)

Other books about war reviewed in this blog are here.

October 2021

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Small Island" by Andrea Levy

Winner of the 2004 Whitbread Novel Award and the 2004 Women's Prize for fiction. Rated in a BBC poll as the 76th best novel ever.

This is a book about the experience of Jamaicans coming to London after the Second World War. It describes their shock and distress at the shabbiness of the Mother Country but particularly at the anger and hatred they encounter, and racism little short of apartheid. Yet through it all, as their naivete is stripped away, even though they might lose their temper, though they might cry, they preserve their essential goodness.

The trouble is that this dissipates some of the force of the book. Horrid ugly things are described, endemic racism, ignorance from the few well-intentioned, wickedness from the majority. Yet Gilbert and Hortense cope. He wants to be a lawyer; he drives a van for the post office and no other postie will accompany him on his rounds. He should feel disgusted; he should rage. And because he doesn't I didn't either.

The book is written from four points of view:

• Gilbert, a Jamaican who fights in World War II for the RAF and then emigrates to London on the Windrush. He is naive and bewildered when he encounters racist hostility but he is fundamentally good and his sense of humour carries him through the most trying times.
• Hortense, a mixed race Jamaican, the illegitimate child of a white man and a mother who was shipped away. She is brought up to expect the good things in life and she is shocked when she arrives in England as Gilbert's wife; she knows nothing about men and sex, she knows nothing about cooking; she thinks she will get a job as a teacher and is distraught to be told that her hard-won Jamaican qualifications count for nothing.
• Queenie, the butcher's daughter who, desiring better than the slaughterhouse, goes to London and, after surviving the blitz but husbandless, becomes landlady to Gilbert and Hortense. She is very much like Hortense in that, as a girl, she is brought up to be too delicate and to be naive about men; her husband's love-making leaves her cold.
• Bernard, Queenie's lacklustre bank clerk of a husband who cares for his shell-shocked father and then goes to India as a mechanic with the RAF; his war career is one long mishap. Bernard thinks mostly in sentence fragments.

There are many great lines, though almost all of the ones I have selected as my special favourites come from Gilbert

• “You touch an angel with white glove it come up black.” (C 2)
• “I was not trained to eat food that was prepared in a pan of boiling water, the sole purpose of which was to rid it of taste and texture.” (C 11)
• “We Jamaicans, knowing our island is one of the largest in the Caribbean, think ourselves sophisticated men of the world. Better than the ‘small islanders’ whose universe only runs a few miles in either direction before it falls into the sea.” (C 11)
• “Pure imagination was needed to see how in peacetime English families could actually enjoy a holiday at this woebegone place.” (C 12)
• “Elwood showed me to his truck. Part metal, part rubber but mostly held together with prayer.” (C 12)
• “Bread so plentiful the five thousand could have invited family and all would have been fed.” (C 14)
• “Pour it back in the mule is what I say about tea.” (C 14)
• “Dreamboats ... with fingernails that still carried soil from home, and eyes that crossed with any attempt at reading. Heartthrobs ... who dated their very close relatives and knew cattle as their mental equal.” (C 17)
• “I know trouble. When it come through the door, it place a hand round a delicate part and squeeze.” (C 49)
• “Nothing is a smile ... You no cry over nothing.” (C 51)

Hortense has her moments:

• “The principal was making her entrance, parting girls to her left, to her right, like Moses through the Red Sea.” (C 4)
• “She walked with dainty yet lumbering steps - full of feminine grace that nevertheless shook the floor beneath us.” (C 4)
• “If you were second, third, or a deliberately dawdling fourth, then the chocolate would not only be cold but have a skin on it so thick it could be stitched into a hat.” (C 4)
• "These two boys, Leonard and Clinton, looked so alike I puzzled on the need for both of them to exist.” (C 6)
• “I would not presume to tell the Lord His business but, come, the laying of an egg by a hen was, without doubt, the more civilized method of creation.” (C 53)

So does Bernard:

• “Maybe the threads of that fraying cloth was still in a tangle.” (C 57)

On Thursday 27th June 2019 I watched a live broadcast of the National Theatre production of Small Island. The stage adaptation was very faithful to the book, except that the story was told in a more or less chronological sequence whereas the book jumps around a lot. Thus the opening scene of the novel (Hortense turning up at Gilbert's room in Queenie's house in London after the war) becomes the opening scene of the second half of the play, after the interval. Otherwise much was the same although they changed the nature of Bernard's wartime experience.

The acting was first class and the growing fondness between Gilbert and Hortense after what was very much a marriage of convenience (at least for Hortense) was superbly portrayed.

Watching the stage adaptation offered me the chance to reflect on the story:

• Why is Bernard's war-time experience related? This is a substantial chunk of the book and was reduced to a few lines of retrospective spoken by Bernard. But why bother with it at all? We are told the the reason why Queenie lets her house to 'coloured people' is that Bernard has failed to return after the war (this at least is the excuse that Queenie uses but later a more compelling reason is suggested). We therefore need a reason why Bernard doesn't come straight home but 'goes missing' for a crucial and carefully calculated period of time. But simple post-war trauma would have been sufficient for this without going into any details.
• Why is Queenie made to grow up on a Lincolnshire farm? The location means that she can meet Gilbert during the war when she escapes from London for a while but it would have been relatively easy for her to meet Gilbert in London. But we do have to find a compelling motivation why Queenie, a very lively young woman, would have married a dry old stick like Bernard; the threatened alternative of having to go back to the farm provides this motivation.
• This then raises the question of whether there was a similar motivation provided for Hortense and Gilbert to have been so eager to leave Jamaica. Given how tough they found London, why didn't they simply go back to Jamaica as soon as they possibly could? Queenie's background was compellingly horrid but Jamaica seems less of a place to escape from.

This production rose admirably to the challenges of giving birth on stage and having a baby on stage as well as the need to have multiple sets. Nevertheless, a film adaptation of the book cannot be far away.

The Lonely Londoners and its sequel Moses Ascending by Sam Selvon are brilliant short novels about the experience of Caribbean post-war immigrants to London

June 2019; 530 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Hate U Give" by Angie Thomas

American black teenager Starr lives in the inner city where drive-by shootings, gang warfare and drug-dealing is rife but goes to a posh school in the suburbs. She is the only witness when her oldest friend Khalil is shot by the police. Should she speak up when raising one's head above the parapet might put her and her family in danger?

The structure of this book is unusual. There are many classic elements. For example, Starr's relationship with her rich white boyfriend is disrupted by the polarisation of her community into black and white. Normally classic plot points such as this are not resolved, one way or the other, until the very end of the book. But in this story there are a number of resolutions by the end of part one which is about two-thirds of the way through the book. This does introduce a degree of tension as one realises that this story is straying from convention and that therefore what might happen in the remaining third of the book might surprise.

The book is also enlivened by the entangled relationships between the members of the black community. Starr's father went to jail for the local drug baron with whose wife he had previously had a child, Starr's half-brother Seven. Starr's father is now a reformed character, a Christian and local store owner whilst still being a militant Black Panther, and there is tension between him and his son's stepfather. Starr's mother's brother, who acted as surrogate father for Starr whilst her real father was in jail, is a cop. This enables the author to extract maximum conflict from relatively few characters.

There are a couple of moments when it gets a bit preachy. Daddy puts Starr through a catechism in Chapter 10 to investigate the reasons for drug dealing in black neighbourhoods. Hailey seems to be a character developed so that the author can develop arguments about racism. But if Victor Hugo can spend page after page of Les Miserables lecturing about the Battle of Waterloo, or the iniquity of monasticism, I guess any author is entitled to disrupt their story with a page or two of preaching.

But the real beauty of this book is the freshness of the prose:

• “There are just some places where it's not enough to be me. Either version of me.” (C 1)
• “Guys in their freshest kicks and sagging pants grind so close to girls they just about need condoms.” (C 1)
• “Spring in Garden Heights doesn't always bring love, but it promises babies in the winter.” (C 1)
• “He always has [the party] on the Friday of spring break because you need Saturday to recover and Sunday to repent.” (C 1)
• “She's the perfect height for modelling ... but a little thicker than those toothpicks on the runway.” (C 1)
• “Hoedom is universal.” (C 1)
• “that's more difficult than buying retro Jordans on release day.” (C 1)
• “He wipes his nose like he always does before a lie.” (C 1)
• “He couldn't carry a tune if it came in a box.” (C 3)
• “How could he sell the very stuff that took his momma from him? Did he realise that he was taking someone somebody else's momma from them?” (C 4)
• “Did he realise that if he does become a hashtag, some people will only see him as a drug dealer?” (C 4)
• “Khalil matters to us, not the stuff he did. Forget everybody else.” (C 4)
• “Good-byes hurt the most when the other person’s already gone.” (C 4)
• “I left his house pissed and horny, the absolute worst way to leave.” (C 5)
• “Sometimes you can do everything right and things will still go wrong. They key is to never stop doing right.” (C 9)
• “If babies can count as humans when they’re little, veggies can count as veggies when they’re little.” (C 12)
• “Brave peoples’ legs don’t shake. Brave people don’t feel like puking. Brave people sure don’t have to remind themselves how to breathe ... If bravery is a medical condition, everybody’s misdiagnosed me.” (C 16)
• "I didn't know a dead person could be charged in his own murder" (C 16)

A very enjoyable read.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Moses Ascending" by Sam Selvon

This is the sequel to Selvon's The Lonely Londoners whose narrator, Moses, has moved out of his basement flat to buy a ramshackle house on a short lease and become a landlord. To this end he hires a 'Man Friday', white Bob from Ashby-de-la-Zouche who not only manages the other tenants but also acts as butler to Moses whilst Moses writes his memoirs. But gorgeous black girl Brenda sets up a Black Power office in the basement and Faizal and Farrukh are using the house as part of their people-trafficking business.

The narration voice of Moses is a wonderful mixture of Caribbean patois and literary English including Shakespearean and Biblical quotes, misspelled words and malapropisms. But this book lacks the gritty authenticity of Lonely Londoners. Where it wins is in the wonderfully subtle humour; after Moses has been asked to suggest some newspaper headlines Brenda tells him: "Stop making up alliterations. Concentrate on something thoughtful, tense, taut and telling."  (p 136) There is a lot in this vein.

• "You does wonder what crime this country commit that it have to punish so with this evil weather." (p 7)
• "Every now and then a fleck of spit flying out of his mouth which I dodge when I see it coming." (p 16)
• "Whereas he was like a lion, he went out like a lamb." (p 32)
• "I had to peddle my own canoe for survival." (p 51)
• "It's the sheep that should be praying." (p 73)
• "You could fool a white man with any shit if he believe it will prolong the sexual act." (p 76)
• "The hero will gird his lions, and after a series of breathtaking adventures, successfully overcome the forces of evil." (p 84)
• "When you crooked you bend." (p 87)
• "Kay sir rah, sir rah, as the Japanese say." (p 88)
• "They say the world is round, but a donkey shit square." (p 140)

Great fun. February 2017; 185 pages

"The Lonely Londoners" by Sam Selvon

This is a novel about the experience of West Indian immigrants in London in the 1950s, when there were still signs saying'No blacks', when racist employment practices were common, when prices for black men were always a little higher than for the indigenous population.

Moses has been living in Water (Bayswater) for a long time now (ten years by the end of the book) so he is the one the others turn to as fixer. He goes down to Waterloo Station to meet new boy Galahad from the boat train; Galahad stays the night in his rented room and then goes to the Labour Exchange in the morning. Then the canvas broadens to include other characters: Tolroy with his Mum and Tanty, Cap the Nigerian who never ever works but lives by scrounging from others ad always manages to have a girl, Lewes who beats wife Agnes every night until she leaves him, Five After Midnight who always disrupts the parties that Harris arranges. Wonderful characters, loose plot. But what makes the book brilliant is the fabulous mixture of English and patois in which Selvon writes.

• "And this sort of thing was happening at a time when the English people starting to make rab about how too much West Indians coming to the country." (p 2)
• "whatever the newspaper and the radio say in this country, that is the people Bible" (p 2) 
• When newcomer Galahad observes vapour coming from people's mouths in the cold winter, old-timer Moses tells him "Sometimes the words freeze and you have to melt it to make the talk." but Galahad is sharp enough to realise he is being teased (p 15)
• "It all well and good to play boldface in a small place like Trinidad" (p 20)
• "You try to fool people that you know everything, then when you get lash you come bawling" (p 20)
• "It ain't have no place in the world that exactly like a place where a lot of men get together to look for work and draw money from the Welfare State while they ain't working. Is a kind of place where hate and disgust and avarice and malice and sympathy and sorrow and pity all mix up. Is a place where everyone is your enemy and your friend." (p 27)
• "In the world today, a job is all the security a man have. A job mean place to sleep, food to eat, cigarette to smoke. ... when a man out of work he like a fish out of water gasping for breath." (p 27)
• "Yet is so things does happen in life. You work things out in your own mind to a kind of pattern, in a sort of sequence, and one day bam! something happen to throw everything out of gear, what you expect to happen never happen, what you don't expect to happen always happen, and you have to start thinking all over again." (p 40)
• "Things does have a way of fixing themselves, whether you worry or not. If you hustle, it will happen, if you don't hustle, it will still happen. Everybody living to dead, no matter what they doing while they living, in the end everybody dead." (p 52)
• "London is a place like that. It divide up in little worlds, and you stay in the world you belong to and you don't know anything about what happening in the other ones except what you read in the papers." (p 60)
• "People get tired after a time with who poor and who rich and who catching arse and who well off, they don't care any more." (p 61)
• "You might meet them hunch-up in a bus-queue." (p 61) 
• "All he know is that a tanner fall in the road, and he had to watch it else it roll and get lost." (p 62)
• "I meeting that piece of skin tonight" (p 71) 
• "Lord, that is life for you, that is it. To meet a craft there, and take she out some place." (p 73) 
• "The summer night descend with stars, they walking hand in hand, and Galahad feeling hearts." (p 81)
• "He walking upright like if he is alone who alive in the world." (p 103)
• "Next thing you hear, the wife horning them and the marriage gone puff." (p 129)
• "It was a summer night: laughter fell softly: it was the sort of night that if you wasn't making love to a woman you feel you was the only person in the world like that." (p 139; last sentence).

Magical and important. February 2017; 139 pages

The adventures of Moses are continued in the sequel: Moses Ascending.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God