Review

On this page, we thought it would be fun to try and prompt some discussion of new books; particularly those a little beyond the famous and fashionable. Therefore, every month or so, we're asking one of our visitors/ listeners/ readers/ watchers to write a review which will be included on the Book Slam Podcast and published here.

This month Mimi Hall reviews 'Harare North' by Brian Chikwava. If you've read 'Harare North' and you'd like to comment, send us an e-mail to forwhatitsworth@bookslam.com and we'll post it on the page. If, on the other hand, you'd like to do our next review, email us at everyonesacritic@bookslam.com.

Thanks!
Patrick

'Harare North'
by Brian Chikwava
(Jonathan Cape)

‘Harare North’ is the stunning debut novel from Zimbabwean writer, Brian Chikwava, and the startlingly individual narrative of a nameless young man – a proud Mugabe supporter – arriving in London from Harare.

‘Always choose what you believe in over what you know,’ he warns us early, but we soon find the line between what we think we know and what we want to believe is ever shifting. We are in the slippery hands of a narrator whose dizzying account compels us, whose rough poetry charms us.

After a spell with frosty relatives, our protagonist arrives in Brixton carrying a battered suitcase. His childhood friend, Shingi, welcomes him and together they eke out an existence. They work, pool their meagre wages and enjoy bursts of cheer. But within the house there lurks violence and duplicity, and amidst the increasingly disquieting atmosphere, a pretender is exposed and our narrator’s brutal past is revealed. Jobs are lost and drugs are found – the brittle order fractures.

Brixton is brilliantly conjured, as big a character in the story as any other; Electric Avenue, the ‘mental backstreets,’ the market where Shingi fruitlessly: searches for records by the ‘Red Hot Piri-Piris’, and the chestnut tree, beneath which the ‘crazy ones’ gather.

Throughout ‘Harare North’, truth assumes guise after guise: a snake splitting crowds, a termite ‘crawling in the open’, or a great rock of granite crashing down.

Ambiguity is rife and where you least expect it – in the seemingly-conclusive results of an HIV test, even where one person ends and another begins. As our narrator aptly says, ‘you no longer know whose story belong to who.’ We are deep inside his head, tangled in belief and delusion, fears and dreams. His mantra – ‘life is not fair’ – treads the line between peevish excuse and all too comprehensible lament.

At one point, he throws a challenge to the reader: ‘You think you know me?’ But his behaviour, while repellent, is rarely nonsensical. We are a long way from ticker tape statistics and lazy sound bites about the asylum seeker experience.

As the narrator’s chaotic and conflicted world crumbles, we join him in his dark and tightly knotted place. What we see, depends on how much we are willing to look inside ourselves.

At once comic and touching, disturbing and desperate, Chikwava’s work dazzles with a brave complexity. ‘Harare North’ is a fearlessly explorative story told in a lifting, rhythmic voice that dances across the page and left me spinning.

Previous reviews:
'The Crossroads' by Niccolo Ammaniti: reviewed by Yinka Akindele
'Submarine' by Joe Dunthorne: reviewed by Claire O'Brien
'The Believers' by Zoe Heller: reviewed by Hazel Marshall
'The Idea Of Love' by Louise Dean: reviewed by Darren Lee