Book review: Harare North

Published on Friday 1 May 2009 17:12

HARARE NORTH Brian Chikwava Jonathan Cape, £12.99

THE unnamed protagonist of Harare North is no ordinary asylum seeker. He is not, as he claims, a victim of Mugabe's repressive political regime, but a political thug for whom things have gone wrong. Once in London (aka Harare North), he finds a Brixton squat where he lives with "illegals" including a woman who rents her baby, two eco-friendly drug addicts and several rats. So begins an astonishing debut novel by Brian Chikwava.

One of the most striking aspects of this novel is its language. Written in the first person, the voice is erratic and not easily identifiable. While portions sound authentic for a Zimbabwean of this character's background, others are more reminiscent of cockney, "posh" English, Jamaican patois or West African pidgin. Such a potpourri runs the risk of being confusing or distracting. Yet this same language might be interpreted as part of the novel's brilliance for it reflects a protagonist who has appropriated London's many speech patterns, thereby making it difficult to put him into the straitjacket of one single immigrant experience. The protagonist becomes an everyman, albeit not a likeable one, who captures the reader's attention and compels them to keep reading.

Anyone who has read Chikwava's short stories, including his award-winning 'Seventh Street Alchemy', will know that the author has a gift for evoking place. With deft descriptions reminiscent of Samuel Selvon's Lonely Londoners, a reader will smile in recognition at the "ice-cold sun hanging in the sky like frozen pizza", or the curious civility of Londoners that is friendly only in form. Chikwava employs wry humour to comment on a country that names its pubs after deceased monarchs and appears more concerned with dead whales floating down the Thames than human corpses.

Harare North is a powerful immigrant story, but it is also much more than this. It addresses, amongst other things, society's fear of unruly youth and the struggles of a growing underclass.

This book is one of those that come around every couple of years offering something new, and not for novelty's sake, but in the sense of revealing something vital about the times in which we live.