As she emerges from the coma 15 years later father and daughter rediscover each other until tragedy strikes again and
Posted in General on 30. Jul, 2010
As she emerges from the coma 15 years later, father and daughter rediscover each other until tragedy strikes again, and Nehushta finds herself alone once more. It’s a wonderfully perceptive portrait of Brixton, with the middle classes living shoulder to shoulder with the destitute. With great style, though perhaps too ostentatious in his vocabulary, Bandele builds two parallel storylines which eventually connect.When Nehushta is 13, her father falls into a coma With her mother already dead, she is effectively orphaned. Bandele introduces the dream-like into solid urban living, and pads a minimalist cast with fantastical but recognisable characters, all of whom are unhinged in one way or another. By contrast, his Brixton setting is full of colour and charm, its people brimming with wit and optimism, even in the face of disaster. Newland’s characters are complex but not always vividly created.
His strength lies in the depiction of violence and menace but, faced with amiable characters and incidental conversation, particularly among women, he falters, and dialogue falls flat.Biyi Bandele’s The Street, far broader in its scope, is an entirely different undertaking. And it’s a challenge to stay on the right side of the law when you live in an underworld – a society within a society – which possesses its own laws and language to the exclusion of all other people.Newland dips in and out of connected stories: Elisha is new to the estate, forging new friendships, finding employment, perhaps a boyfriend; Art is struggling to stay off crack, but the only way to stay clean is to escape the estate. Adults behave even worse because they have tried law-abiding lives and failed or, arguably, have been failed by society.It is difficult to fulfil potential in a culture where a first date is a shopping trip with a stolen credit card. The estate is home, and yet also a kind of prison.Newland’s description of black London life, confined to one estate, is bleak.
Unemployment, drugs, violence and under-age sex feature heavily. Bright young people behave badly because nothing better is expected of them. But it is also a place where neighbours rob and rape each other. A youth centre is both somewhere to socialise, and a place out of which to deal drugs. Recently gentrified areas were then virtual slums; working-class ghettos. It was a struggle to survive prejudice and unemployment, but once bitten by the London bug – the history, the grandeur, the social life – it was impossible to leave.
Whatever “home” was, it was never intended to be the violent and desperate concrete jungle which is the setting of Courttia Newland’s second novel Society Within. Set loosely around White City in west London, it pulls no punches in its description of estate life as a mixture of community and ghetto.This is a place where people make friends of their neighbours and, excluding the smoking of dope, live law-abiding lives.
London was bright, if smog-filled, with the new estates and the promise of work as magnates. Focusing on Notting Hill, Selvon perfectly captured the tug of both places on the heartstrings. Samuel Selvon’s seminal 1956 novel The Lonely Londoners tells with humour, realism and pathos an intimate story of the capital’s first West Indian immigrants. “Home” was a confused issue: partly England, partly the country of their birth.
WHEN BLACK people settled in London in the 1950s, it was predominantly the west – Notting Hill, Ladbroke Grove, Shepherd’s Bush – that they called home. A 180F meal sustained Vince and me through another five hours of motoring. Now that’s what I call cost-efficient.L’Arche outlets: autoroutes throughout France. We finished off with fresh coffee from the expresso machine: buy a 7F token for a caffeine hit that will see you through till dawn.Relaxed by wine, well fed on good food and perked up by a Grade A stimulant, we headed off into the night. We polished off our mains and savoured our desserts: a delicious unsweetened tarte aux pommes let the apples do the talking; oeufs a la neige was rendered “perfect” by a sugar-shot of rich caramel.