REVIEW: Londonstani
Londonstani
Gautam Malkani
We move through a blessed world in which everything is redeemed by style.” An argument proferred by Booker Prizewinner John Banville which sounds beautiful yet commands little attention past its surface declaration. In the case of Londonstani, the latest hyped-to-heaven debut novel on the scene, it would seem to be a vindication of rights for what is a thinly veiled exercise in chic-lit.
The blessed world of which Gautam Malkani writes is that of a group of British-Asians in the hinterland of Hounslow, a flyover suburb of West London: Hardjit, the ring leader, a nineteen year-old Sikh determined his caste stay pure; Ravi, unwaveringly tactless; Amit, whose brother Arun is struggling to win the approval of their mother for the Hindu girl he loves; and Jas who narrates their journey, desperate to win their approval, desperate too for Samira, a Muslim, which in this story can only
ve a tragic trajectory. Londonstani is, to start with, uniquely told. A “gora” is being savaged by Hardjit for using the word “Paki”, while his posse urge him on. Jas, who alternates between describing a scene of vicious brutality and digressing into considerations about racial tags and “authentic rudeboy fronts”, speaks in both disturbing and strangely comic tones.
The central thesis of the rest of the novel, as Malkani explained in one of his articles in the Financial Times, is “the idea that if a boy’s maternal role model is stronger than his paternal one, he is likely to overshoot with his own definition of what it is to be a man and develop a form of hypermasculinity”. In the face of such subject matter, it is ironic that Londonstani’s principal problem is its distinct lack of identity.
The crudely drawn influences of its register — urban slang, textspeak, Bollywood, bastardised gangsta rap — only perpetuate the problem.
It is not as if Londonstani needs the oxygen of publicity, but that the furore — similar to the trajectories of other, much more deserving ethnocentric debuts of the past ten years (White Teeth, The God of Small Things, Brick Lane et al) — is swirling around a less-thanimportant book, one that wallows in rather than exploits its linguistic diversity, gives me even greater pause.
Whereas in White Teeth, author Zadie Smith fashioned the multicultural voices into an epic narrative, here, Malkani’s efforts descend into a bhuna of yoofy irritation once the shock-gimmicks of chapter one have worn off.
18th May 2006