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In Our Mad and Furious City Guy Gunaratne author 9781472250193 Books

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In Our Mad and Furious City Guy Gunaratne author 9781472250193 Books

This novel takes place over 48 hours in the lives of three young men living in or very near the projects (i.e. estates) of London. It’s a hard, gritty, and unforgiving environment with little hope for escape. The boys’ fathers are absentee, dead, or severely handicapped, and except for the case of Arden, the mothers are mostly off-scene as well. Keeping with the trend these days, the story is told in alternating perspectives, shifting between characters at a fast clip—just a handful of pages for each character’s perspective before the perspective switches again. The estate dialect takes a bit of getting used to, but I didn’t have any trouble after the first few sections. There’s plenty of page-turning momentum and dramatic events to drive the plot, and I appreciated the unique perspectives (maybe more unique for American readers). The events in the book are plenty bleak, some may even say too bleak. I was wishing for a touch more humor or lightness, but the story was powerful and affecting. I wouldn’t be surprised if this novel makes it onto the Booker Prize shortlist (it’s on the longlist now). Some are even predicting it will win the Prize. I’m not sure I’d go quite that far yet without reading more of the other longlisted titles, but I wouldn’t be disappointed if it won. It’s certainly a worthy contender and one of the best books I’ve read this year.


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In Our Mad and Furious City Guy Gunaratne author 9781472250193 Books Reviews

A gritty, excellent read set over a couple of days on a tough estate in London during riots the pain, the pointlessness, and the thread of hope. Tight, lyrical writing, pitch-perfect dialogue, and a range of characters you care about and root for right to to the end. It's more than a novel it's an important opportunity to walk in other shoes--and see, once again, that we all have the same hopes, fears, love. From a purely technical standpoint I also admire the book's structure and Guy Gunaratne's handling of the characters as he unreels this very moving story from so many points of view. Great book.
My initial reactions to this book were “what do these words mean” and “what is going on”? The first question was because the narrative is written from the perspective of half a dozen very different characters of which four are teenagers from inner London, whose everyday language is very much of the street. During the early chapters I found urban dictionary very handy but as the book progressed I became more comfortable with the terms.

My second question was because I could not easily fit together the characters although I felt confident that the author would bring them together in time. This he did but I was then left with concerns over the timelines as I could not reconcile the generational gaps.

However, even if you share my concerns please persist with reading the book. It will be worth it.

All the characters are either first or second generation immigrants living on an inner-London estate and Guy Gunaratne explores in depth many of the challenges they face as they cope as best as they can with living in a densely populated area with a mixture of races and backgrounds. In the Acknowledgements section he uses the apt term “survival”.

In Our Mad and Furious City is written in a gritty, uncompromising style. It is sombre most of the time, bordering on depressing, eased by a little humour and some guarded companionship between the boys.

As I said above Gunaratne concentrates on the lives of immigrant families and what might be referred to as “native British” people are restricted to the police and some racist mobsters. Whilst he is right to highlight the challenges of immigrant families, I believe that most of the issues covered are shared by all relatively poor people in our inner cities. In particular I am thinking of the struggle to make a living on basic wages, coping with inadequate, cramped accommodation, prejudice and bigotry.

You will probably find In Our Mad and Furious City hard to read, hard to follow and short of pleasure. You will also find it impossible to ignore, hence my award of four stars.

Book Reviewed on Whispering Stories Book Blog
*I received a free copy of this book, which I voluntarily reviewed
Felt contrived and too self-aware.
Brilliantly constructed and crafted. Intelligent and poignant.
A skillful, gripping, but ultimately disappointing (I hate to be a spoiler, but there is no outcome in the plot to spoil) and very depressing first-person account of the lives of first generation immigrants (West Indian, Irish, Muslim) and their parents over a couple of days in a high-rise London estate. I have to own up that I read it partly because of my interest in Montserrat, and the mention of Montserrat patois by another review - the West Indian family are two Montserratians and their London-born son . . . but it is very puzzling as to why the author decided that his West Indian characters should come from Montserrat, because their speech and inner monologue shows not the slightest shred of Montserratian speech, and his few references to Montserrat are laughably inaccurate ("I was off to old Britain and saying goodbyes by the Plymouth station"; "Sat in a cab rumbling along Bone Hill . . . The road from Plymouth dock into town was long and loving, smelling all the way of mud and wet grass . . . I make it out in the distance, Maisie mother's roof by the lighthouse, next to the pier where the fishing boat was moored"). This is a vanishingly trivial gripe in the context of the novel as a whole, but still a puzzle - why choose to be specific about something you don't need to be specific about, when you get it wrong? Despite its depressing picture, I enjoyed the book and did not want to put it down, wanting to see what would happen next . . . until the last few pages, when it became apparent that nothing much would be concluded or resolved at all.
This novel takes place over 48 hours in the lives of three young men living in or very near the projects (i.e. estates) of London. It’s a hard, gritty, and unforgiving environment with little hope for escape. The boys’ fathers are absentee, dead, or severely handicapped, and except for the case of Arden, the mothers are mostly off-scene as well. Keeping with the trend these days, the story is told in alternating perspectives, shifting between characters at a fast clip—just a handful of pages for each character’s perspective before the perspective switches again. The estate dialect takes a bit of getting used to, but I didn’t have any trouble after the first few sections. There’s plenty of page-turning momentum and dramatic events to drive the plot, and I appreciated the unique perspectives (maybe more unique for American readers). The events in the book are plenty bleak, some may even say too bleak. I was wishing for a touch more humor or lightness, but the story was powerful and affecting. I wouldn’t be surprised if this novel makes it onto the Booker Prize shortlist (it’s on the longlist now). Some are even predicting it will win the Prize. I’m not sure I’d go quite that far yet without reading more of the other longlisted titles, but I wouldn’t be disappointed if it won. It’s certainly a worthy contender and one of the best books I’ve read this year.