‘It certainly ticks the prize-winning boxes’ – Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman

Pigeon English is one of the more high-profile books on the 2011 Man Booker longlist; not only is it Kelman’s debut – a debut that launched a bidding war between publishers and a reputedly whopping advance – but it’s landed him a place on this year’s ‘Waterstone‘s 11’ and the Culture Show’s ‘12 Of The Best’ authors lists. Plus I hear the people behind Skins are working on a TV adaptation already. Every budding writer’s dream, eh? So what’s the deal? Pigeon English is a council-estate murder mystery by way of Mike Leigh and Mark Haddon; told from the point of view of Harrison Opoku, an eleven year-old kid from Ghana who’s living in a tower block in London with his mum and his older sister, the book details Harrison’s stint as an amateur detective, trying to solve the case of a local kid – ’the dead boy’ – who’s been stabbed to death by persons unknown. As the police plead for witnesses to step forwards, Harrison’s mother is trying to hold her family together while waiting for her husband to join them in England, his neighbours are getting deported, and Harrison himself is auditioning to join the local teen gang, the Dell Farm Crew. So you’ve got a hugely multicultural background, an unsolved murder, knife-crime and gang violence, immigration, and, of course, the childish first-person narrator – it’s hardly surprising this one’s grabbed the attention of the Booker team.

Straight off, it’s a pretty quick and very entertaining read. Kelman’s prose conveys exactly the breathless enthusiasm and galloping emotions you’d expect from a boy on the cusp of puberty as he explores his London neighbourhood, searches for murder clues and worries about his baby sister back in Ghana. The language is that of a child, sure, but Harrison’s repeated colloquialisms (everything is ’brutal’, ’hutious’, ‘bo-styles’ and ’crazy’) are realistic and endearing, and his affection for his family and his environment is contagious. I think with a child-narrator you can run the risk of alienating your adult audience with a faux-naivety in description and emotion, but Harrison’s a very believable character and an indisputably sweet one, so Kelman gets away with it – and I’d dare anybody to read this book and not love Harrison at least a little. Likewise, the rest  of the characters are very lifelike (I especially liked Harrison’s sister, Lydia, and her nasty girl-clique) and his dialogue, in particular, stands out – I hear he’s tried his hand at screenwriting in the past, and I think that shows. The murder plot is slight enough, but it’s really a vehicle for the author to look at burgeoning violence amongst London’s youth, and, as such, it works, though the children’s investigation is a little too reminiscent of Haddon’s Curious Incident to seem particularly ingenious. Harrison’s family set-up allows a sideways look at immigration and integration, and I think the slivers of information we’re given about the various adults’ situations are mixed in nicely with Harrison’s own story – it’s well handled, avoiding, like I say, using Harrison too overtly as a device to illustrate greater social issues, though these issues are, of course, uncovered – but smoothly.

My main criticism is the actual pigeon in Pigeon English; this isn’t just a pun on the immigrant vernacular – it also refers to an actual pigeon that lands on Harrison’s balcony and is befriended by him. There’s several italicised sections throughout where we get the pigeon’s thoughts, and various incidents where it’s suggested that the pigeon intercedes on Harrison’s behalf. I’ve read an interview with Kelman where he said the pigeon was a metaphor for immigration and integration – pigeons are considered filthy and a menace and are driven away and derided. Fair enough; it’s a decent metaphor, it’s coherent and a kid bonding with an animal is pretty acceptable stuff. But when the bird starts philosophising, Kelman loses me – then it becomes a sledgehammer of a metaphor and lifts me out of an otherwise realistic text into a sketchy version of magic realism that, to my mind, isn’t at all successful. It’s neither weird enough nor integrated enough into the rest of the story to work – it’s just jarring. If you could read the pigeon’s narration as an imaginative insert by Harrison, I’d buy it, but the pigeon’s voice is too erudite and weary to come from Harrison. And I might overlook it anyway, only it’s in the very title, which highlights it to a degree that I find daft, seeing as it’s the most awkward element of the text.

Any Cop?: Or, to be more topical, is it Booker material? Well, on the one hand, I’d say yes: it certainly ticks the prize-winning boxes. Kelman combines an entertaining and insightful child narrator with telling glimpses into the bleak world of illegal immigrants and youth gang culture. So it’s definitely got enough hooks to snare an award; you can see why it got long-listed. But Kelman might fall on his own sword; with the previous Booker success of Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, and Emma Donoghue’s much-hyped short-listed Room last year, the child-narrating-bad-circumstances category might be full to bursting. And the pigeon gimmick isn’t going to help. It’s a very good read, with a fantastic ending (sorry, no spoilers here), and it’s both funny and sad; I’d be surprised if was the judges’ favourite, but I think it stands a good shot at getting as far as the shortlist in September. Kelman’s one to watch.

Valerie O’Riordan