PIGEON ENGLISH by Stephen Kelman reviewed by Dianne Hofmeyr

Pigeon English is seen though the eyes of an 11 year old boy recently arrived from Ghana, but it doesn’t fall into the category of young childrens’ fiction.

It opens with the aftermath of a murder.

You could see the blood. It was darker than you thought. It was all on the ground outside Chicken Joe’s. It just felt crazy.

Jordan: ‘I’ll give you a million quid if you touch it.’

Me: ‘You don’t have a million.’

Jordan: ‘One quid then.’

Harri observes:

The dead boy’s mama was guarding the blood. She wanted to it to stay you could tell. The rain wanted to come and wash the blood away but she wouldn’t let it. She wasn’t even crying, she was stiff and fierce like it was her job to scare the rain back into the sky.

And with these few words on the very first page I'm completely hooked and completely in the head of the main character, Harri. What brilliance!

Harri decides to start his own murder investigation with his friend Dean on the case. His surroundings bristle with half-understood menace, from drug dealers, alcoholics, criminals and the members of the terrifying Dell Farm Crew gang who stalk the estate and whose leader X-Fire (Crossfire) gives Harri tasks to prove himself. But Harri retains his fresh ebullience in his newfound world of high-rise flats, escalators with teeth trying to eat you, the underground, a new slang language, fights with his sister, fending off her friend Miquita who is trying her best to seduce him, the first flickering of love for a girl called Poppy and an aunt who burns off her fingerprints so that she gets to stay in the country.

This is a first novel for Stephen Kelman but what a debut! Publishers were bidding for it and against strong competition he made it to the short list for the Man Booker 2011. So what makes Pigeon English such a ‘break-out’ novel? For me it all boils down to voice. Kelman has captured it perfectly – both the voice of the protagonist and his own authorial voice. And the fact that he writes so convincingly of what he knows. In the run-up to the Man Booker I heard him on a panel with the other five finalists where he told of growing up on a Council Estate. He only had to look out his window to see the gangs and the culture of crime.

The novel’s name is a play on the estate's ‘pidgin’ English, a patois that Kelman captures with conviction (and has fun with too) and the feral pigeon with pink eyes that Harri comes to believe is watching over him.

In 1994 I wrote a novel seen from the eyes of a boy at a time of incredible violence in the backstreets of Johannesburg South Africa, when people held kangaroo courts and necklaced victims (by putting burning tyres filled with petrol around their necks and shoulders so they couldn’t escape) and gangs mowed down people with AK-47’s. It went on to win the M-net Award with J.M. Coetzee on the shortlist. I mention it because I know how hard it is to balance a story about hope and childhood innocence against a background of harsh reality without being too dramatic or too mawkish.

Kelman has found the perfect pitch. Harri balances on the edge of innocence with fresh energy and enthusiasm against the squalor of poverty, drugs and violence. One can’t help but be thoroughly charmed and moved by Harrison ‘Harri’ Opoku, aged 11. It's a wonderful read.

PIGEON ENGLISH – Stephen Kelman published by Bloomsbury

ISBN 978 1 4088 1063 7

www.diannehofmeyr.com

Return to REVIEWS HOMEPAGE

THE WISH HOUSE by Celia Rees

The Wish House reviewed by Dianne Hofmeyr

I loved this book. I grew up rebellious and grumpy. At age twelve on holiday in a new city, I once asked my parents to walk on the other side of the road to me. They being kind, loving and understanding parents, complied. Later as an awkward fourteen year old all I wanted to do was get away from what I thought was my very humdrum, ordinary family. I lived in a small seaside village and in the summer of ’61 when a local artist asked me to help in his studio/shop I thought I had reached the pinnacle of sophistication. So when I read Celia Rees’s The Wish House I had a strong sense of déjà vu.

The Wish House is that perfect story that tells of this transition between childhood and a very different more adult world that confuses and excites. Rees has said on the backflap: ‘Everyone has special places and special summers, special people, that combine to create times they will never forget.’

Richard on his annual camping holiday in Wales goes exploring and finds the passions, undertows and intrigues he yearns for in the messy, bohemian lifestyle of the summer people living in the Wish House. The contrast between his own caravan-holiday family experience and this family with its rowdy mealtimes, pot-smoking son, half-naked mother and brooding artist father, is vast. He can’t keep away. And he especially can’t keep away from the daughter Clio, with her dark hair and mysterious violet eyes.

Celia Rees constructs her novel in a compelling and mystical way, adding new dimensions brush stroke by brush stroke so that just when you think you know what's happening, something new is revealed. She’s clever at with-holding information. The reader, like Richard, is almost beguiled into believing one thing when in fact the reality is something else.

The way Richard and Clio meet up in the forest is a perfect example of her ability to capture an inchoate moment that leads breathlessly on to something far more powerful. The forest with its wildness and lack of containment unleashes in them both a wild playfulness. Their energy and awkwardness goes into playing highly imaginative almost childish games of gods and hunting that bring them to edge of what Richard truly wants to experience… a sexual encounter.

The characterisation is superb. Clio, Richard’s obsession, could easily have in a lesser writer become a cardboard figure but Celia Rees manages to imbue her with unexpected reactions so the reader, like Richard, can’t pin her down. She remains remote almost adult, but in brief moments, the shellac of her character cracks to reveal the fragility of her youth. These surprising moments of vulnerability are what make Celia Rees’s writing so powerful... that and her ability to evoke scenes, whether a crazy bonfire moment on the beach or a wild Bacchanalian feast, or the bleakness of the caravan park itself, that imprint as vividly as film in the mind.

The story is interspersed with descriptions of paintings from Clio’s father’s retrospective exhibition. But Rees uses a very different language for these descriptions. The words are coldly analytical and dispassionate even though they are describing scenes with undertones of sexuality that reveal a tangled web of intrigue. The removed voice adds texture and expands and almost reflects as if in a mirror for Richard, his own sexual awakening and experience of what happened that summer.

As in all her books, Pirates, Witch Child, and Sorceress, Celia Rees writes strong female characters so that even though this story is essentially about Richard and told through his viewpoint, the reader feels it's also Clio’s story. For them both, the summer has been a period of growing up that evokes deep memories. In revisiting the summer through Clio’s father’s retrospective exhibition, Richard is able to see it as a capsule in time and is able to move on.

Highly recommended for someone who wants an unusual and vibrant read that perfectly captures a moment of vulnerability.

The Wish House published by Young Picador UK in 2005 ISBN 978-0333947395

The Wish House published by Candlewick Press US in 2006 ISBN 978-0783629519

Reviewed by Dianne Hofmeyr www.diannehofmeyr.com

Celia has a blog up today Sat 8th on ABBA http://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.com/2011/10/notebooks-celia-rees.html

Return to REVIEWS HOMEPAGE

Grahame Baker Smith’s FArTHER flies off with the 2011 Kate Greenaway – Dianne Hofmeyr

There are books for children who need fluffy chickens and cuddly bears at certain times in their lives - and there are books for children who need to fill their imagination. If you want to be visually transported into a dream world that stays with you long after the book is closed, and if you admire the work of Peter Sis and Shaun Tan, then rush out immediately and buy FArTHER. It will awaken your dreams and those of the child who shares the story with you.

FArTHER with its incredible endpapers that could have leapt from Leonardo's notebooks, and its illustrations that have me rubbing the pages to make sure they're not real pencil, ink and paper collage, is a triumph not just for Grahame Baker Smith but also for Templar Publishing.

I first notcied Grahame Baker Smith's work when Leon and the Place Between, written by Angela McAllister, and also published by Templar, was shortlisted last year for the Kate Greenaway. Who can resist a magic show with pure magic in the illustrations?

But in FArTHER we have a story that bores deeper into our inner psyche. Slightly dark with its themes of death and hope and renewal, which might seem heavy in a picture book, but not in the hands of Grahame Baker Smith, where a father who dreams of flying goes off to war, never to return, but instills in his son the courage to soar.

Don't we all want our children to soar?

Grahame Baker Smith creates a world where the story plays out against a wild sea with a lonely house clinging to haphazard rocks. One can feel the wind and taste the salt in the air. The rock seems to epitomize the father stuck solidly to the earth even though he'd rather be airborne and the boy's realtionship with his father unfolds almost like a dream sequence. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Baker Smith doesn't wake in the night and write out or draw his dreams. Perhaps like the dream that comes to the father in tones of sepia with a dash of red - 'a busy bossy dream that would not leave him alone.'

Each page is filled with detail that demands another inspection. Strange symbols tease - the bright red poppies against the rocks - the white goose standing at the feet of the father while he despairs of ever flying - the eyes that convey the dream. The contraptions that he imagines and builds are beautiful machines with delicately spiralling cogs, gilded cages and fluted and folded wings that appear more like paper origami, or finely beaten foil with spines that suggest ancient fishing rods. Mechanical yet strangely organic, bringing to mind the contraptions built by the Wright brothers in that lonely shed on Kitty Hawk Beach in North Carolina some hundred years ago.

Perhaps I'm beguiled by the adolescent boy climbing the tree to stare out at the world. My teenage son used to climb a gigantic pin oak. I'd come out and find him in the topmost branches at a death-defying height standing still and silent. What was he imagining? And what does the boy in the story imagine? But however much we are beguiled by the illustrations, we haven't been tricked. It's not the medium that tells the story. It's the story that tells us. It's a big story but a convincing one. And Grahame Baker Smith engages the reader in his fictional world because he himself is engaged in the real world. He underpins the story with a truly human sense of desire, hope, fragility and loss.

Grahame Baker Smith seems to paint and draw and use photography and scan natural material and makes things from paper and fabric and generally play around with them in Photoshop in the same was as the father plays in his workshop with pieces of paper, foil, fabric and sketches to produce his dream. This recent work is radically different from his past illustration as in Little Pilot or his version of The Velveteen Rabbit. It's a big brave leap that has paid off. On the CILIP website, after winning the Kate Greenaway he says: 'It's been an extraordinary, painful, joyous, frustrating and wonderful trip. The only thing that has kept me going through all the ups and downs is a connection to my imagination.'

And what an imagination! FArTHER surprises and enthrals. Give this book to all fathers of sons and to all children who dream and need their imagination filled - and even to those who don't - because afterwards they will.

FArTHER by Grahams Baker Smith

edition: Hardcover £10.99

publisher: Templar Publishing 2010

ISBN 978-1-84877-126-0

Reviewed by Dianne Hofmeyr http://www.diannehofmeyr.com/

http://the-history-girls.blogspot.com/ A Heady Mix - Poetry and Perfume in Ancient Egypt

Return to REVIEWS HOMEPAGE