This book, the debut novel from Kae Tempest (you know, that poet who wrote this), was - well, I'd like to say the best novel I've read in ages, but truthfully I've read loads of incredible novels this year, but seriously, this one is a stand-out fresh one. I acquired it at a hippy-run bookstall at Glastonbury and basically read most of it in two big sittings over a family holiday in a hippy-run cottage in the Forest of Bowland in North Yorkshire - sat with a brew and the dog and a thousand midges on an impossibly comfy armchair on a wooden porch overlooking a small lawn which past a rickety fence is a sheer drop through dense brackeny foresty areas down to a river which I could hear all the while; yes, it was a very nice holiday, even though I had to do loads of dissertation reading during it (and also leave halfway through for a job interview), and this book comprised my recreational reading for it. You don't need to care about my holiday, I'm just adding a little texture as this post will be in the middle of all the super-brief academic backlog ones.
Anyway - it's a novel about young Londoners: gregarious dancer Becky and her jealous boyfriend Pete and his coke-dealing sister Harry and her partner-in-crime Leon; it's about the adults peopling the families and communities constraining and defining who they have and can become, the deep-running fragility of human need for connection; all characters whose roles have emotional impacts on the main four are explored in bleak and beautiful portrait with astonishing depth and clarity; Kae Tempest has a knack for conveying huge and tiny shades of feeling with a linguistic deftness that will make you laugh and cry and catch your breath in your gullet and sit back slowly with your hand rubbing the back of your neck as you softly murmur 'fuck', and the London that they paints is alive, is dismally brutally gloriously random and messy and gentrified and alienating and home and you get a tangible sense of place and community (or lack of) for the characters throughout: honestly, the plot may be pretty straightforward but it is pulled off with a dazzling, cinematic, heartbreaking and life-affirming prose, and a cast whom you'll know like real acquaintances by the time you finish - all of which add up to make this a bingeable (one up from readable) and supremely rewarding novel.
Read this if you like Very Good fiction.
Anyway - it's a novel about young Londoners: gregarious dancer Becky and her jealous boyfriend Pete and his coke-dealing sister Harry and her partner-in-crime Leon; it's about the adults peopling the families and communities constraining and defining who they have and can become, the deep-running fragility of human need for connection; all characters whose roles have emotional impacts on the main four are explored in bleak and beautiful portrait with astonishing depth and clarity; Kae Tempest has a knack for conveying huge and tiny shades of feeling with a linguistic deftness that will make you laugh and cry and catch your breath in your gullet and sit back slowly with your hand rubbing the back of your neck as you softly murmur 'fuck', and the London that they paints is alive, is dismally brutally gloriously random and messy and gentrified and alienating and home and you get a tangible sense of place and community (or lack of) for the characters throughout: honestly, the plot may be pretty straightforward but it is pulled off with a dazzling, cinematic, heartbreaking and life-affirming prose, and a cast whom you'll know like real acquaintances by the time you finish - all of which add up to make this a bingeable (one up from readable) and supremely rewarding novel.
Read this if you like Very Good fiction.
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