In Our Mad and Furious City

I think about why it had to be a younger that done it. Why it was that when we saw the eyes of the black boy with the dripping blade, we felt closer to him than that soldier-boy slain in the street. But now I know this city and its sickness of violence and mean living. These things come in sharp ruptures that don't discern. It was the fury. Horror curled into horror. Violence trailing back for centuries, I heard as much in mosque and from rudeboys on road. So when the riots blew up in the Square, when the Umma came out and the Union Jack burned in the June air, the terror had become unwound and lightweight. Each of us were caught in the same swirl, all held together with our own small furies in this single mad, monstrous, and lunatic city.

Apparently inspired by the real-life killing of British soldier Lee Rigby in London in 2013 by Muslim extremists (and the subsequent anti-Muslim backlash), In Our Mad and Furious City covers two days of life in a low-income housing block in the wake of a similar murder. POV rotates between five local residents – ordinary people unaware of the bedlam soon to descend on them – and it would seem that author Guy Gunaratne's premise is that tribalism is the natural response of oppressed peoples, but that there are always those who can break those ancestral bonds and walk away from violence. I thought there were some really fine scenes in this book, but with some strange plot choices and a melodramatic conclusion, I don't think that it added up to more than the sum of its parts. I would rate three and half stars, and am rounding down against other titles longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize.

Ardan and I could not be more different on the surface. But that didn’t matter when our common thread was footie, Estate, and the ill fit we felt against the rest of the world.

Some early scenes revolve around young men gathering for a game of football in the grassy Square between the four towered block known as Stones Estate. Selvon lives off estate, but as he went to school with some of the boys who live there, he's part of the crew. Selvon is the son of Caribbean immigrants and he listens to motivational tapes, he runs and boxes, and his only goal is to escape the neighbourhood. Yusuf was raised the son of the local imam – his parents are Pakistani immigrants – but with his father now dead, he is under pressure from the fundamentalist new imam to turn his back on his friends and their world and recommit to the faith and lifestyle of his community. Yusuf is intelligent, well-spoken, and conflicted. Ardan is the son of a single mother – a Catholic escapee from Belfast during the Troubles; now a drunk and neglectful mother – and he is really the heart of the book: unloved and submissive, he has a talent and a passion for Grime music and would have the best chance of escaping the estate if he only had some confidence. As Selvon's father has recently suffered a debilitating stroke, all three young men are now essentially fatherless. Rounding out the five POV voices are Selvon's father and Ardan's mother. Taken together, these five perspectives paint a gritty picture of estate life with crushing poverty, constant threats of aggression, and people trying to find support amongst their various tribes. 

Although for the most part the impending violence takes place off the page – we learn that a group of Britain First nationalists and the Muhajideen from the local mosque are gearing up for a confrontation over the murder of the soldier – Gunaratne uses the memories of older characters to make the point that these confrontations have always happened (and presumably always will for as long as we separate ourselves into tribes). Ardan's mother, Caroline, was raised in an IRA family, and we see what it was like when she went to a rally that called for revenge attacks against Protestants:

The crowd threw itself forward, the floor shuddered with it. Damian stood with his mouth open, lost to it all. We both watched as the man grasped the air, his palms long and white, his ring that glinted against the light. He then shouted something I couldn't make out above the cheering and I stumbled with excitement. He walked offstage then as the crowd began howling themselves...They held up photos of the dead, the starved, the dying. I saw my brother join the shouts and the horrifying freedom in his eyes as he chanted. I raised my fists too and joined the chorus. Aye, there was I. My pale, youthful arms raised with my brother's.

Selvon's father, Nelson, joined the Colored Peoples Association when he first emigrated from Montserrat, and what he had thought was a rights group eventually turned into a Molotov-cocktail-throwing mob (apparently based on the Teddy Boy attacks on black West Indian immigrants in London in the early 1950s):

After all that we give for the cause, when the riot come, it was just the same as any other human collapse, the same loose and pointless frenzy. I never not understand the mind of furious men. The hard at heart, all of them hasty scrawled placard. For what? How we go from talking about we rights and decent living to being march out like foot soldiers bent and unthinking and hollow? We dusty group of angered blacks, my brothers and sisters them. How quickly honest talk is exchange for speeching, screaming about we numbers and we bodies and not we needs and means to live? How we plunge and grapple and seize all them loose ideas of unbelonging and offense.

And this easy provocation of the crowds continues into the present as Yusuf attends a rally at the mosque:

The chorus grew louder and I felt the crowd pulse with him. The thugs must pay for this abomination, he said. We were not to be intimidated by their barbarism. The noise grew louder though it was only Abu Farouk's voice I heard. He then thrust the Qur'an into the sky and called his followers to march together. The infidel would not get to August Road this day, he said. The Umma would march to meet them. We would go onward to the High Road and charge the white mob if necessary, and meet the savages in the street. A horrifying chorus rose. I remembered my father then. I thought of the beautiful world Abba described to me when I was young. How I held his Qur'an and recited verse on his podium. I looked around and saw what it had all become.

All three of these groups are linked by their outsider status – Catholics in 1980s Belfast, black Caribbeans in 1950s Britain, Muslims in present-day London – and in each narrative, the bullies of the majority groups have the police and the politicians on their side. And while in each narrative we don't see anyone from the POV of the oppressive majority, it seems pretty clear that although Gunaratne sees a violent response from the minority as understandable, he doesn't think of it as ever justifiable. And if that's what this book stuck to, I probably would have liked it more. Instead, there is a fundamental misunderstanding that leads to an ironic and melodramatic ending – with the arc of inevitability of a Greek tragedy, which is only forgivable in an actual Greek tragedy – and if the point is that individuals can escape their tribes and “choose love”, the author shouldn't have allowed Fate (or whatever his impetus was) to take over. (I had the same kind of negative reaction to the ending of Tommy Orange's There, There, for the same reason.) In a related complaint, there's a clunky thread around whether a character couldn't help but be morally corrupted by Western society (even if he was eventually told to take responsibility), and moreso, I didn't appreciate when a character lost control to his sexual urges and got all rapey. Maybe it's easy to lose individual control to radicalising speechifiers, to society and to one's own hormones – to unwittingly become mad and furious in a mad and furious city – but Gunaratne has created characters here from older generations (Caroline and Nelson, who were able to leave their poisoned tribes), and younger characters who have built their own tribe based on music, football, and familiarity, and their experiences aren't extrapolated to the larger situation. So what's the overall point? I don't know. But I am glad I read this – Gunaratne has an exciting and fresh voice and I look forward to something more focussed from him.

Man Booker Longlist 2018:

Snap by Belinda Bauer

Milkman by Anna Burns

Sabrina by Nick Drnaso

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

In Our Mad And Furious City by Guy Gunaratne

Everything Under by Daisy Johnson

The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner

The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh

Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

The Overstory by Richard Powers

The Long Take by Robin Robertson

Normal People by Sally Rooney

From A Low And Quiet Sea by Donal Ryan

I just barely squeaked in reading the Man Booker Prize shortlist this year - after having to order half the titles from England - and I really don't know if any of them stand out to me as "a real Booker winner to stand the test of time". In order purely of my own reading enjoyment, I'd rank the shortlist:

The Long Take
Washington Black
The Mars Room
Everything Under
The Overstory
Milkman 

* The prize was eventually won by Milkman, my least favourite of the shortlist, so what do I know? *