In Our Mad and Furious City - Guy Gunaratne

"My daddy got here on the gravy train

I guess my mama had a real bad start to the game
They went walking and she took his name
Round here

....

Two little Hitlers in an old church hall
Some cheesy covers and those neighbors that banged on the walls
Andy says it's time to show them all
Round here"

                 ( Round Here - George Michael )

   This song  played like a sound track, while I was reading this book, a Man Booker long listed novel by Guy Gunaratne, whose father had moved to the UK from Sri Lanka, back in the early fifties.  This is in contrast to what ought to have been the soundtrack that the book offers in it -  the bars and rhymes of London Grime, their own response to 2Pac and Biggy. One of the five narrators is a Grime rapper moving to his bars. I hoped it would be a quick read, but I was wrong. Saddled with North London Sun Urban slang, I had to withstand the dampened speed.

This novel is set inside of two days, as chaos breaks lose in a restless  North London Sub Urban neighbourhood, in the aftermath of the killing of an off duty soldier. We have five narrators here - three youths, and two of their parents, all from an immigrant lineage.  The chaos, which breaks lose towards the final 15%-20% of the book, is kept as in a tinderbox, with Gunaratne's own pace so tensed up, that it floods over to the mind of the reader. I guess, if that was Gunaratne's aim, to leave the reader anxious, restless and tensed, building it up till the final blow up, he was successful. Throughout the narration we are in the minds of these individuals - a mother who has fled Belfast as a girl in its worst times, her son, a colored man who had left his Caribbean island to find a new life, and his determined, amateur athlete son, and Yousuf of Pakistani origin. If you think you will meet anyone with Sri Lankan roots even as a passive character, think again. There are Indians, Serbians and Somalians, as passive characters, for it is clear that Gunaratne's had a story to tell on how to fit in  this neighbourhood. Towards the latter part of the book he hints of this in not so indefinite ways.

"So here it all is, this London. A place that you can love, make rhymes out of pyres and a romance of the colours, talk gladly of the changes and the flux and the rise and the fall without feeling its storm rain on your skin and its bone-scarring winds, a city that won’t love you back unless you become insoluble to the fury, the madness of bound and unbound peoples and the immovables of the place."

Gunaratne hints that although fascism as presented by Mosley in the late fifties may no longer be obvious, given it is no longer "refined" to be "ultra-nationalist",  White Racism as well as radicalised muslim youths - the two feed off each other, over any convenient incident - is very much prevalent. Yet, he hints there is hope for those who came over to find a new and a  different life. I felt that Gunaratne hints that as long as you keep yourself away from the waylaid traps, which even the setters don't identify them as such, you can find that new life. Further, I sniff that the very reason why Gunaratne was careful to leave off any Sri Lankan immigrant from the whole story,  was to portray by practice that "ghetto ethnic" mentality is best left alone, if you want to find a new life in a new land. ( It is also possible that Gunaratne, a second generation Londoner is naturally far from his ethnic roots.)

So, within this chaos of two days we see that some youths find their way, not withstanding their paralyzed fathers and alcoholic mothers, however bleak their daily lot appears at first. Yet, I cannot but again help noticing the community the author has picked to portray, who falls. Gunaratne clearly feels that ethnic or communal feeling in your adopted home, makes others restless, and one feeds off the other in a viscous cycle to blow up sooner or later.

As a digression;

What makes a good book ? Is it one that creates for you a comfortable environment in which one can cozy up ( like I did recently with Ondaatje's Warlight ?), or is it a book which successfully creates the mood,, atmosphere and feelings that was the author's intent in writing his or her work ? I firmly believe  it is the latter. I'll be lying if I said that I enjoyed reading this book from cover to cover. I had even thought of giving this book three and a half stars. But then, as I concluded reading it, the subtle messages that were Gunaratne  aimed to convey to the reader, dawned upon me. And the chaos, the tension  made sense - even skillful in how the author did it. For the author has crept out behind me in stealth, and just as I thought I was done with it, he shows me his not so obvious messages. And I was then, impressed ! Gunaratne is a writer and a player. The player in him, excelled, once the author in him as meddled with the reader's mind.