I really tried to get into this book but never really did. Still, thank you Net Galley for giving me this book!

Guy Gunaratne’s debut novel “Mad and Furious City” received widespread literary prize acclamation: winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize and Jhalak Prize; shortlisted for the Goldsmith’s Prize and Gordon Burn Prize; longlisted for the Booker Prize (where it should have made the shortlist) and the Orwell Prize.

It was set in a North London (Neasden) housing estate (The Stones) some-time in the late 2000s and took place over 48 hours, in the tinderbox atmosphere immediately after the murder of an off-duty/back-from-service soldier by a black man which has further inflamed the racial and religious tensions in the area which include a radicalised Muslim group based around the local mosque and a group of White racists/nationalists planning a provocative march through the area. It was written in a third party point-of-view style with short chapters progressing largely chronologically between three young men and was noticeable for its embrace of Grime culture and its vibrant London-slang language.

This the author’s second novel also examines racial and religious tensions but over a longer period and in a Bookseller interview last year, they said “This is the story of a single life, but also the last 25 years – from Britain in the 1990s, 9/11, to the Iraq war, 7/7 and its aftermath. Yahya Bas is a chimera of shorts – rootless, villainous, othered by almost everyone he meets, yet undeniably familiar and entirely British.”

The conceit of the novel is that Yahya Bas, a radical Islamist terrorist-sympathising, Western-hating poet is in a UK detention centre having surrendered to British troops in Syria (where it is important to note he went not to fight but to trace the fate of his father who he never knew and who went out to the area as a fighter many years previously).

Now subject to questioning by an interrogator Yahya refers to simply as “Mister”, Yahya has cut out his own tongue to stop the questioning and instead sets out his life story in his own words in writing. The novel we read is that story set out in 185 short sections from his birth (Sections 4 and 5) to his time in the detention centre (Sections 167 onwards).

As he says himself

"My story, for the purposes of what you wanted could have easily fitted on a list:
1. Born Bas, Yahya, British-Iraqi, Iraqi-British.
2. Disabled. Delinquent – raised in poverty.
3. Radicalised against Western intervention in Iraq.
4. Gains notoriety promoting works of anti-Western hate.
5. Absconds from the UK – abandons known family.
6. Spends several years in exile. Stateless. Displaced.
7. Returns a pariah. Tail between legs."

But in practice there is a much longer story and much more nuanced story to tell – and told it is across the 185 sections. As an aside I was not entirely convinced around the device – it largely read like a standard fictional past tense narrative (however false that is – we have become used to it so a justifying device can always seem a little unnecessary) other than for the frequent titular insertion of “Mister” in the narrative – and I was unable to follow why that would appear in a written account. Also with Yahya a language-loving poet this did not particularly read to me like a distinctive enough voice.

The story begins with his unusual upbringing in East Ham – with his mother living in a Islamic association-run womens’ refuge centre, where the part crippled boy (with a twisted hip) is raised communally by a group of other mother’s and by a caretaker Uncle Sisi Gamal who invites him to his library and starts an early life love of Islamic-poetry and obsession with current affairs (at age 6 in 1991 telling him about the Iraq war).

He then joins his local multi-cultural primary school where he faces increasing racial and religious hostility, while at the same time Sisi Gamal teaches him about the Quran and takes him on his Islamic street preaching outings, and Yahya himself builds his knowledge of both Islamic poetry and classical English literature.

Shortly before 9-11 he joins as an Islamic school – and I have to say one of my initial struggles with the novel is when his Uncle loudly celebrates the 9-11 terrorist attacks.

The resulting anti-Islamic backlash in London seems to turn the teenage boy into more of a radical and after he meets a group of other poetry loving children at his school he starts to perfect his aural performance of poetry. He is also further radicalised by the second Gulf War and the appalling abuses of Abu Ghraib; where the horrified anti-West BTL comments on message boards help him to shape and then post his first public poem which begins

"Western wind
When wilt thou cease
That the red and blue may burn"

Before the poem takes a far more violent and incendiary turn.

Over time his poems go viral and he starts to perform them in public (the first time at Speakers Corner) and he eventually adopts the name Al-Bayn after a poem to the “martyrs” of 7-7.

I have to be honest it was at this point that I, even knowing this was a fictional novel, was waiting for Yahya to be arrested and the key thrown away.

And when he chose to go to Syria and then panicking announced himself as a British citizen was rather baffled as to why he would be flown back.

So, for me the novel backfired as if its idea was to help us understand what motivated Yahya and his non-fictional equivalents it had the opposite impact on me; although to be fair Yahya himself realises I think how he has been poisoned by the world.

"103. METAMORPHOSIS What exactly made me vomit out half my insides, Mister, I can’t say. I do think, though, that language, like rivers and seas, get polluted with what’s expelled into them. And that sort of pollution goes both ways, Mister. It sickens you. And when it’s used to carp and cuss, and degrade, the sickness can snag at the senses.
Words change the perception of things and other people. At its worst, in a kind of crazy regurgitation, whatever you say ends up defining the world. Making actual and true what once you’d only imagined. I’d been reciting, I think, for so long and for so many years, that it’d made me sick.
After washing off Ibrahim’s window, I realised I didn’t like what language was making of me. Didn’t like what I was becoming, Mister. I’d become a kind of gobbler, a consumer of the world’s bad news, and I was sick of the feed. I wanted it over."

The book concludes, in a David Copperfield opening style:

"Whether I turn out to be the hero of my own life, or the villain of yours these pages must show"

And I have to say for me the verdict was unambiguous villain.

But I think overall this is a book which causes us to question our ideas of national identity, of right and wrong – even if in my case I felt is more reinforced by pre-existing prejudices.

So recommended if not really one that worked for me.

My thanks to Headline for an ARC via NetGalley