London as a ‘Brutal’, ‘Hutious’ City: Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English (2011)

Abstract

The story of Harrison Opoku, an 11-year-old Ghanaian immigrant to South London, Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English was reportedly ‘discovered on a literary agent’s slush pile’ (Aspden 2011, np) and, much like Malkani’s Londonstani, was the subject of a fierce bidding war between publishing houses; indeed, one which — as with Londonstani — eventually saw a handsome six-figure sum being paid to secure the rights to a debut novel. However, in contrast to the supposed commercial ‘failure’ of Malkani’s novel, Pigeon English proved, in financial terms at least, to be a rather good gamble for Bloomsbury. Short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2011 — a year in which the Prize’s judges controversially declared that they wanted to celebrate and promote ‘readability’, and were accordingly criticised for ‘populism’¹ — Pigeon English has sold extremely well (125,000 copies in the UK as of February 2014). It also received a great deal of attention from the literary mainstream. Many reviewers were extremely positive about it, and — while a good number suggested that it was somewhat overhyped, and while almost all criticised one particular aspect of its narrative — few were unequivocally negative about Kelman’s debut. Moreover, in contrast to Londonstani, Pigeon English did not cause confusion over what its supposed ‘significance’ was. Many picked up a novel entitled Londonstani by a British Asian journalist called Gautam Malkani expecting to be offered an ‘authentic’ insight into the lives of young, disadvantaged ethnic-minority Londoners, and were disappointed to discover that what they were reading was nothing of the sort; not only were the characters that populated the novel not particularly disadvantaged, but its narrator/protagonist was not even, it turned out, a member of an ethnic minority.