A Stranger City

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Random characters are drawn together in this book which is much about London as the people who inhabit it. In fact the genesis of the novel, Grant says, dates back to 1992, when, as a journalist, she attended the burial of an unknown woman drowned in the Thames. Perhaps it's an intentional bit of meta-commentary on making connections in London that we only get to know the main characters as one-dimensional stereotypes. To Grant's credit, she saved the situation a bit in the end with a relative straightforward recitation of what happened to each character, and I did appreciate that . In this way, it follows on from a lot of other London novels, featuring a range of characters who come together in different ways and emphasising how important the city is in this.

It’s the type of book that will be nominated for some obscure literary prize hailed as an insight to modern London. Linda Grant, an astute chronicler of social history in fact as well as fiction, is well placed to enliven this tradition. People are always looking and holding their phones up and you’re being seen,” reflects Chrissie, an Irish nurse who goes missing on the same night as the dead woman.London may seem to defy narration – “too large, too ancient, too many layers”, as a character in Linda Grant’s new novel A Stranger City suggests – but the novel’s powerful portrait of the city proves the opposite. And despite its contemporary relevance, the novel avoids becoming a "state of the nation" tract - it's far too emotionally intelligent for that. Which is ironic, since so many of them came to London precisely to enjoy a broader, global perspective and experience culture and sophistication. It is of course, or was, a real place, off Evering Road in Stoke Newington, finally demolished in 1970, though for Francesca it has the quality of a dream. I found this a very engaging read that I would expect to be very popular with book groups given its scope for discussion.

A little disorientating at first (in some ways like the experience of moving to London), the novel falls into a rhythm, highlighting coincidence and connection, and how in such a big, busy, diverse city, anyone's lives can intersect. It reminded me so much of "my" part of Tower Hamlets, such contrasts: poor Bengali families piling up in flats, on one side the hippy, somewhat luxurious flats build on the Three Mills island; on the other side the old Victorian cemetery. Brexit Britain is explored through the brilliant connectivity of seemingly unrelated characters - each facing their own difficulties, aspirations and regrets - whose stories are synchronised by the discovery of an unidentified body.It may all seem a bit too discursive, but the real achievement of A Stranger City is the way in which its narrative is as fractured and uncertain as the London it portrays. There needs to be a new word to describe this genre of modern literature - it's not exactly dystopian but authors place the setting in the near future with some potential horrors, usually the result of Brexit. A Romanian holds the key to the missing woman but is too afraid of the police and deportation to assist. Already, travelling around continental Europe, I have been interrogated by a few well-meaning German and even Australian couples I encountered, asking me what the hell is actually happening with Brexit. Then it concerns itself with exaggerated racial tensions: acid attacks, people avoiding going out, other leaving London to go back home, deportations.

The book explores a whole host of people who are connected to the suicidal woman by the most tenuous of strings. Reviewer Jake Arnott, writing in the Guardian, describes this homage to an ever-evolving city, as being ‘.The funeral of an unknown woman is taking place as this book opens; her body has been fished out of the River Thames, an apparent suicide from jumping of London Bridge. A Stranger City is centred on the imagined enclave of Wall Park, below the North Circular, though readers familiar with Bowes Park, Myddleton Road and the New River will recognise the neighbourhood. In the novel, the young woman becomes Chrissie, an Irish nurse who coincidentally goes briefly missing at the same time as the unidentified woman ends her life jumping from London Bridge, and becomes something of a calm centre connecting a disparate cast list of modern Londoners.

I have always enjoyed Linda Grant’s preoccupation with personal presentation and there is plenty of that here (I am thinking particularly of Marco and his reinventions of himself as his story unfolds). And as he says, pondering the “good city” on an elegiac boat trip down the Thames, “you couldn’t have London without foreigners…and “if you took a DNA test you found you were all sorts”. It’s a London book and it’s a book that is framed by immigration and the ongoing consequences of the UK referendum and the 52% majority in favour of leaving the EU. S. Peter Dutton, who finds himself obsessed with identifying the drowned woman; Alan McBride, a documentary film-maker who at the instigation of Dutton creates a documentary about the woman, and Chrissie, an Irish nurse who was herself briefly a missing person. The group includes the investigating detective, recently retired, and his wife, the TV documentary maker, (who puts together a show about the woman), and his wife, the Irish nurse who briefly disappeared on the same night and was mistaken for the dead woman and her ex-flat mate, a hard-nosed, cynical young man with a chip on his shoulder.The Iranian Jews, so quintessential Persian: the grandparents who never truly integrated and the granddaughter - British yet Persian deep down; the film/documentary maker; the policeman who lives and breaths London, who gets obsessed with his last case; the British-Lebanese PR guy overly concerned with his appearance who loses what's most important to him, but still manages to reinvent himself, the Irish no-nonsense nurse, the queer professor and all the other secondary character who add even more color to this world.