Book review: Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman

Published on Thursday 17 March 2011 12:37

PIGEON ENGLISH BY Stephen Kelman Bloomsbury, 288pp, £12.99

Stephen Kelman is a debut writer with a bit of a buzz around him. Partly it comes from being highlighted recently as one of the BBC's Culture Show's debut writers to watch, the kind of list that always appeals to the media. But it also comes from having produced an authentic and audacious first novel. Not many white British men would have the nerve to step into the shoes of a young Ghanaian-born boy who has recently moved to this country, or deliberately to echo the life of murdered schoolboy, Damilola Taylor. But Kelman clearly believes boundaries are there to be crossed.

When we meet him, Harri Opoku is 11 years old and living with his midwife mother and older sister, Lydia, in a block of flats on a housing estate where gangs rule. The Dell Farm Crew is run by X-Fire and his compatriots, Killa and Dizzy. Harri's main task is to outrun these older boys when he needs to: he and his friends are regularly targeted for pocket money, their trainers, whatever the gang figure they can sell. But a boy from the estate has just been stabbed to death - Harri and his friend Jordan stare at the blood-marked ground, wondering who could have done it.

Because he is newly arrived in an alien country, Harri is the perfect observer for any author. He notices language differences ("In England there's a hell of different words for everything. It's for if you forget one, there's always another one left over"), but also needs to let his imagination run wild. One night, a pigeon lands on the flat's balcony and pecks from Harri's hand - forever after, he appeals to it, a symbol of freedom, a creature that can fly away and leave the estate behind, but that also lacks family, the people that Harri needs. He laments the absence of his father and baby sister, left behind in Ghana to raise enough money to join the rest of their family.

Harri is also tantalisingly sympathetic as a character. He has compassion for the dead boy, for his bullied friends, for the bespectacled Poppy in his class who becomes his girlfriend. His sister, Lydia, meanwhile, is not so fortunate: she has befriended the increasingly corrupted Miquita, girlfriend of Killa, thereby bringing the gang culture that Harri needs to avoid so much closer. Violence is all around - Harri's Auntie Sonia sports bruises she claims come from suitcases falling on her, or trips down stairs, when sharp-eyed Harri knows by the way boyfriend Julius treats her, that that isn't the whole story. Kelman doesn't try to impersonate anyone, and he doesn't try to make race an issue the way that another white writer trying to convey the experiences of black immigrants might have felt compelled to do.One funny moment is all it needs - when his mother tells his aunt that a woman in labour in the hospital refused to be handled by her, and called her a "fuzzy-wuzzy". Neither his mother nor his aunt have the faintest idea where this expression could have come from, or what it could possibly mean, and resolve it must have something to do with the sound his mother's shoes make on the polished hospital floors.

Harri, therefore, like all good heroes, is an innocent, but there are boundaries he almost crosses: X-Fire makes him take part in an assault and robbery but Harri can't see it through.

Other tests forced on him are failed miserably, too. Harri could have been a gang member, but he doesn't have the stomach for it. Compassion for others and a real intelligence prevent it, so he and his friends decide to put their outsider status to good use and try to find the killer of the young boy on the estate.

There is, of course, a sad inevitability to Harri's hopes and dreams. Throughout, his voice is sharp but young, full of patois but often formal and proper, too. He shows the pain and the exhilaration that come from being an immigrant in a strange country, the strange wonders that are revealed and the dangers that are ever-present, too.

It is a bold but at the same time sympathetic and humane beginning as an author by Kelman. It will be a while before the buzz about him dies down.