By: Rachel Aspden (of the The Observer)
Date: Sunday 13 March 2011
Stephen Kelman's debut is sympathetic if overhyped portrait of the frightened boys behind Peckham's gangs
The story of Stephen Kelman's debut novel Pigeon English is the unlikeliest of fairytales. Not, however, for its protagonist, Harri Opoku, an 11-year-old Ghanaian immigrant caught up in gang warfare on a south London estate, but for its author. After being discovered on a literary agency's slush pile, Kelman's manuscript sparked a bidding war between 12 UK publishers and was finally secured by Bloomsbury in January 2010 for what his agents described as a "high six-figure sum".
Since then, the hype has only intensified. Even before publication, Pigeon English has appeared on best new novel lists from Waterstones to the Guardian, and its (relatively) edgy credentials were cemented when the BBC commissioned an adaptation directed by Adam Smith of the E4 teen drama Skins.
The novel's world of urban grime and casual violence, of course, could not be more distant from such media plaudits. Pigeon English opens as Harri has just moved to the Dell Farm estate with his mother and older sister, Lydia, leaving his father, grandmother and baby sister, Agnes, behind in Ghana. Along with the shock of emigration and the usual preoccupations of growing up – whether lovely blonde Poppy Morgan will sit next to him in art class, whether his Diadora trainers can outrun his classmates' Nike Air Max – he must negotiate tougher problems.
Harri's surroundings bristle with half-understood menace, most obviously from the alcoholics, dealers, petty criminals and teenage members of the Dell Farm Crew gang who shadow the estate. But gradually his sister, aunt and even his mother, forced into moral compromise in her struggle to give her children a better life, are implicated in the violence that pervades estate life.
Pigeon English, which draws heavily on the killing of 10-year-old Damilola Taylor on a Peckham estate in 2000, weaves this suffering into a murder-mystery of sorts. After the seemingly random stabbing of an older boy outside a fried chicken shop, Harri and his friend Dean turn amateur detectives, scrutinising the estate and its dysfunctional inhabitants for clues. "We're looking for the knife the dead boy got killed with," he explains. "It's called the murder weapon." Kelman has already been much praised for his ability to write from an 11-year-old's perspective, but here, as often in the first half of the novel, Harri's voice feels laboured and faux-naïf.
Elsewhere, Kelman blends Ghanaian slang such as "Asweh" ("I swear") and "hutious" ("frightening") with familiar London-ese to fresher and funnier effect. When the boys watch a local dog choke on some lager offered by its alcoholic owner: "Every sneeze made a new sneeze. Even Asbo was surprised. He couldn't stop for donkey hours."
As well as describing the estate's own "pidgin", "Pigeon English" refers to a feral pigeon Harri comes to believe is watching over him. In the novel's weakest passages, Harri's street-smart observations give way to portentous prose in which this pigeon-protector reflects on magpies, poisoned grain and the fleeting nature of human existence: "I owe it to all of you, a cheap act of confederacy against the drip-dripping of ill-captured sand." The attempt to shoehorn yet more significance into a narrative already heavy with "relevance" falls flat.
Metropolitan excitement over Pigeon English is no surprise – the young French-Algerian writer Faïza Guène created a similar stir when she introduced the Paris banlieues and their verlan slang to French literary fiction in her 2004 debut Kiffe Kiffe Demain. Pigeon English (which comes packaged with reading group discussion points such as "Has the novel in any way changed the way you think about youth gangs, knife crime or urban poverty?") does an admirable job of revealing the frightened teenage boys behind gang members' tough façades. But it is too conscious of the gulf between its subjects and its inevitably middle-class readers to be truly convincing.
(Credit: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/mar/13/pigeon-english-stephen-kelman-review)
Stephen Kelman's debut is sympathetic if overhyped portrait of the frightened boys behind Peckham's gangs
The story of Stephen Kelman's debut novel Pigeon English is the unlikeliest of fairytales. Not, however, for its protagonist, Harri Opoku, an 11-year-old Ghanaian immigrant caught up in gang warfare on a south London estate, but for its author. After being discovered on a literary agency's slush pile, Kelman's manuscript sparked a bidding war between 12 UK publishers and was finally secured by Bloomsbury in January 2010 for what his agents described as a "high six-figure sum".
Since then, the hype has only intensified. Even before publication, Pigeon English has appeared on best new novel lists from Waterstones to the Guardian, and its (relatively) edgy credentials were cemented when the BBC commissioned an adaptation directed by Adam Smith of the E4 teen drama Skins.
The novel's world of urban grime and casual violence, of course, could not be more distant from such media plaudits. Pigeon English opens as Harri has just moved to the Dell Farm estate with his mother and older sister, Lydia, leaving his father, grandmother and baby sister, Agnes, behind in Ghana. Along with the shock of emigration and the usual preoccupations of growing up – whether lovely blonde Poppy Morgan will sit next to him in art class, whether his Diadora trainers can outrun his classmates' Nike Air Max – he must negotiate tougher problems.
Harri's surroundings bristle with half-understood menace, most obviously from the alcoholics, dealers, petty criminals and teenage members of the Dell Farm Crew gang who shadow the estate. But gradually his sister, aunt and even his mother, forced into moral compromise in her struggle to give her children a better life, are implicated in the violence that pervades estate life.
Pigeon English, which draws heavily on the killing of 10-year-old Damilola Taylor on a Peckham estate in 2000, weaves this suffering into a murder-mystery of sorts. After the seemingly random stabbing of an older boy outside a fried chicken shop, Harri and his friend Dean turn amateur detectives, scrutinising the estate and its dysfunctional inhabitants for clues. "We're looking for the knife the dead boy got killed with," he explains. "It's called the murder weapon." Kelman has already been much praised for his ability to write from an 11-year-old's perspective, but here, as often in the first half of the novel, Harri's voice feels laboured and faux-naïf.
Elsewhere, Kelman blends Ghanaian slang such as "Asweh" ("I swear") and "hutious" ("frightening") with familiar London-ese to fresher and funnier effect. When the boys watch a local dog choke on some lager offered by its alcoholic owner: "Every sneeze made a new sneeze. Even Asbo was surprised. He couldn't stop for donkey hours."
As well as describing the estate's own "pidgin", "Pigeon English" refers to a feral pigeon Harri comes to believe is watching over him. In the novel's weakest passages, Harri's street-smart observations give way to portentous prose in which this pigeon-protector reflects on magpies, poisoned grain and the fleeting nature of human existence: "I owe it to all of you, a cheap act of confederacy against the drip-dripping of ill-captured sand." The attempt to shoehorn yet more significance into a narrative already heavy with "relevance" falls flat.
Metropolitan excitement over Pigeon English is no surprise – the young French-Algerian writer Faïza Guène created a similar stir when she introduced the Paris banlieues and their verlan slang to French literary fiction in her 2004 debut Kiffe Kiffe Demain. Pigeon English (which comes packaged with reading group discussion points such as "Has the novel in any way changed the way you think about youth gangs, knife crime or urban poverty?") does an admirable job of revealing the frightened teenage boys behind gang members' tough façades. But it is too conscious of the gulf between its subjects and its inevitably middle-class readers to be truly convincing.
(Credit: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/mar/13/pigeon-english-stephen-kelman-review)
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