ANT006 - Tales of London
This week, I look at novels not just set in London, but with the city as their life-blood and muse.
London’s streets have always struck me as alive. Teeming with mass and energy. You feel them long before you see their concrete. Their presence is more than the people that walk them or mingle in loud crowds. Everything you do in a city is a conversation with them, a push and pull. They become you and make you who you are. They are a close friend or even a relative to some, an enemy to others, a god to a small few. They have been quiet for days, hushed by the cold of Winter, but I woke up this morning and all I could hear was their song.
This issue is about them.
It’s no surprise that so much great literature is centered around cities. They are the front lines of society, where the future is made and the past is etched into every crevice. Perhaps the greatest human experiment, they force the world to live cheek to cheek, squeezing different cultures together to force out new art, music and ideas. To walk through them is to see the world, impossible not to feel inspired, and London is one of the greatest examples.
An old city, the weight of its past is everywhere, clear in the relatively low lying centre, mish-mash houses where streets were turned to rubble in the war, mazey, cobbled alleys you can picture Jack the Ripper slinking through. Juxtaposed with a relentless modernity, the only constant that it is a little bigger with each moment. The incessant clatter as it fills every nook of space to thicken and grow. Hammers the sound of its aching muscles, drills its panting lungs.
Through all this, it ticks on like an old caesium clock. So tied to the weather that the build up towards summer storms takes on a carnival feel, a primal excitement to the mood as if building to a crashing crescendo that needs to happen before there can be calm. Winter’s greys blur the sky, river and concrete together to subdue its energy, but it bubbles through all the same. The buzz of the young and the refusing to grow old, of ambition and curiosity, freedom, madness, desire.
There are stories on every corner. Both on an individual level - the stray cat of a man slinking through puddles of light, the stressed young mother in Tescos - and the collective - something profound about so many lives intertwined and yet alone, a million breaths rising and falling in unknown unison, traffic looping overwhelming infinity.
These are the books that bring those stories to life, forever colouring how I view the place I call home.
“There's a lot of tension in London, but then you realise it's always been there, in its history, and that the best thing about London, that there's always been this tension.”
King Krule
Charles Dickens is a name inseparable from the city of London, so many of his works are set within it, but it is his collection of factual accounts Night Walks that makes it the sole focus. Suffering with insomnia, he began to stroll the city late at night, glimpsing its poverty, drunken-ness and madness first hand. Sharing these experiences, the book reads as a fascinating series of vignettes that illuminate the camaraderie and stoic joy to be found in even the most seemingly down and out pockets of the city.
But the river had an awful look, the buildings on the banks were muffled in black shrouds, and the reflected lights seemed to originate deep in the water, as if the spectres of suicides were holding them to show where they went down.
Charles Dickens - Night Walks
Another infamous Londoner, George Orwell’s love-hate relationship with the city is front and centre of much of his writing. Down and Out in Paris and London documents his time sleeping rough in Embankment and Trafalgar Square, while in The Road to Wigan Pier he wrote of London as “a sort of whirlpool which draws derelict people towards it, and it is so vast that life there is solitary and anonymous.” This dreary yet poetic view of the city is central to Keep the Aspidistra Flying, where a writer forces himself into poverty through bad choices but also intentionally, driven by his disillusionment with modern society. All of Orwell’s writing draws heavily on his unique life and this no different, the truth echoing through it.
The next seven months were devastating. They scared him and almost broke his spirit. He learned what it means to live for weeks on end on bread and margarine, to try to ‘write’ when you are half starved, to pawn your clothes, to sneak trembling up the stairs when you owe three weeks’ rent and your landlady is listening for you. Moreover, in those seven months he wrote practically nothing. The first effect of poverty is that it kills thought. He grasped, as though it were a new discovery, that you do not escape from money merely by being moneyless. On the contrary, you are the hopeless slave of money until you have enough of it to live on—a ‘competence’, as the beastly middle-class phrase goes.
George Orwell - Keep the Aspidistra Flying
It’s fitting that many novels set in London are driven by crime - part of its charm is the sense that you are never far from the underworld. Martin Amis’ London Fields is one of them, but it’s a murder tale like no other. Nicola Six is, as Amis puts it, a murderee - searching for her murderer. When the narrator, a writer, walks into a dodgy pub that could be one of many in Hackney, she might have the man to document it, but it’s never quite that simple. It’s an incredibly inventive plot, but the books genius is in the witty, perfectly observed cast of down and outs.
What a gift. This page is briefly stained by my tears of gratitude. Novelists don't usually have it so good, do they, when something real happens (something unified, dramatic and pretty saleable), and they just write it down?
Martin Amis - London Fields
Murder, sex and infatuation are also key to Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square, another story set amongst London’s grimy pubs and lodging houses, this time taking us to West London’s Earls Court with the beginning of the war towering in the horizon. Its central character, the alcoholic George, is plagued by schizophrenic blackouts, during which he is compelled to kill the woman he is in love with. Hamilton brings a seedy world of pub philosophers to life with biting humour.
Those were the days when the three of them were smoking their first pipes, growing their first moustaches, having their first drinks and going with their first women, glorying in their release from meaningless discipline, in the prospect of earthly pleasures and an independent existence.
Patrick Hamilton - Hangover Square
Continuing the gritty, underworld theme, poet Kae Tempest’s debut novel The Bricks that Built the Houses is a love letter to all of modern London - drenched in its diversity and excitement but also its tedium, violent ganglands and casual drug dealers. Kae’s lyrical prose turns itself to the novel form for the first time, flying off the page with a raw, uncut edge that leans on her background in the driving kick-snare world of Hip Hop.
Tip your chair back, stare into the eyes of someone hateful that you’ll take home anyway. Tell the world you’re staying faithful. Nothing’s for you but it’s all for sale, give until your strength is frail and when it’s at its weakest burden it with hurt and secrets.
It is a tale of young love in the city. A young love threatened by crime, circumstance and even the concrete itself. We join Becky, an aspiring dancer and reluctant masseuse, Harry, who is building towards her escape from the dread of a stale life going nowhere by selling cocaine to rich party-goers, and Harry’s sidekick, Leon, as they flee London in an old Ford Cortina. The suitcase of money alongside them is the elephant in the room. The plot then flicks backwards through the calamitous romance that preceded this moment, finely examining the tensions of morals, ambition, circumstance and careful balances of too much or not enough that define the city.
She is all London: cocksure, alert to danger, charming, and it flows through her.
Tempest’s London is a city made of its people - they are the bricks - “The houses are filled with people. The people are filled with houses.” As a result, no character is left unexplored, the pasts of an array of Londoners bought to life in unflinching bios that give the novel its 400 page length. These often lengthy detours might prove a distraction in lesser hands, but in Kae’s they give the story its reason and purpose. This is not just a love story, not just a crime caper, it is a story of all that is London. That is not to say that she avoids descriptions of the cityscape itself, for these are moments where her writing shines most brightly.
It gets into your bones. You don't even realise it, until you're driving through it, watching all the things you've always known and leaving them behind.
They're driving past the streets, the shops, the corners where they made themselves. Every ghost is out there, staring. Bad skin and sunken eyes, grinning madly at them from the past.
It's in their bones. Bread and booze and concrete. The beauty of it. All the tiny moments blazing. Preachers, parents, workers. Empty-eyed romantics going nowhere. Street lights and traffic and bodies to bury and babies to make. A job. Just a job.
A criticism I’ve come across is that it is over-indulgent in style - under-edited and a victim of the dreaded ‘purple prose’, something that it seems to be a literary trend to call out at any opportunity. Kae’s writing can undoubtedly fly away on its passion, a poetic background bleeding through, but that is what gives it a unique voice and magic. Perhaps it is due to a shared love of Hip Hop - a genre obsessed with metaphor and driven in large part by the joy of finding new ways to say things - but, rather than finding her more densely descriptive moments distracting or slow, her raging prose flew past me in vivid and cinematic bursts. As Kai writes, “One man's flash of lightning, ripping through the air, is another's passing glare. Hardly there.” For me, these moments bring rhythm to the page, echoing the blistering pace of the city.
Watch the city fall and rise again through mist and bleeding hands. . . . Nothing’s for you but it’s all for sale, give until your strength is frail and when it’s at its weakest, burden it with hurt and secrets. . . . Suck it up, gob it, double-drop it. Pin it deep into your vein and try for ever to get off it. Now close your eyes and stop it.
The Bricks that Built the Houses is a novel that is in many ways of it’s time and generation - brave, inclusive, satirical in moments, steeped in a sense of place that informs everything - yet continues on from those such as London Fields and Hangover Square to add to the tradition of literature that brings London’s darker or more unkept edges to life in a way that will remain in relevant forever.
“Everybody’s looking for their tiny piece of meaning. Some fleeting, perfect thing that might make them more alive.”
Kae Tempest - The Bricks that Built the Houses
Leah Mclaren brings the in-between moments of the city to life in her ode to Liminal London.
I find it a comfort to know I am living in a place where, at any given moment of the day or night, terrible and wonderful things are happening to everyone all over the place and there is absolutely nothing I can do about it.
Take a tour through the places, and pubs in particular, that inspired George Orwell’s view of London.
Throughout his peerless writing career he elevated the city above the sum of its parts – not by fixating on the buildings that lined its bustling streets, but on the people that walked them.
Elif Shaf with wonderful musings on the wisdom of untranslatable words.
They carry within them fascinating clues to the soul of a culture or a community, the heartbeat of humanity.
With the New Year coming up, learn from Coach Erika’s annual review process, one that values reflecting backwards as much as planning forwards.
Taking one hour to reflect on your year gives your brain the chance to reframe, rewire, learn, and improve from whatever this year has thrown at you, and it sets you up for a better approach to tackling whatever next year has in store for you as well.
Carrying on from the featured book, it would be remiss not to feature one of Kae Tempest’s spoken word performances here. This performance of second album Let them Eat Chaos at the Battersea Arts Centre brings the narrative album to dazzling life.
I’m taking a break for Christmas, so A Novel Tribe will return on Sunday 7th January. If you’re feeling the Christmas cheer, the best present you could give me is to share ANT with someone you know. Simply forward this email or link them to the website.
Enjoy the festivities and see you in the New Year,
MQ.