Diversity is an easy catchword. It might only be a way of seeing and of talking about what the status quo allows. But real diversity includes a way of hearing. Who will you listen to? Who has the voice? Being in, writing from, and hearing London requires taking on the multitudes – because London houses them all. Voices penetrate the brick, glass and traffic congestion. The choir of London is neither sober nor quiet. Voice distinguishes a novel, and from Charles Dickens to Zadie Smith voice has been a way for novelists to interrogate the seemingly infinite possibilities of London characters.
A London cast also requires outsiders and outliers, as it did for the ‘best of times’ or the ‘worst of times’ in Dickens’ era: a representation of London that is true to its complex urban maze, where so many have come from elsewhere and where displacement, the search for belonging, and the importance of work are key themes. London books deal with hardship, and often feature the displaced and the marginalised - the anti-heroes of new fiction.
For my novel, Higher Ed, I chose five outsiders, who are all trying to find a way ‘in’. Revolving around the effects of austerity measures in contemporary London, the novel engages in different areas of the society affected by the economic crisis, in particular the public sector and higher education, in which workers face job losses and massive budget cuts. The five strands of the novel are interwoven to form an ensemble of characters who appear to have little in common, but who, beneath the surface, share a London that is sometimes brutal, sometimes tender, always intriguing. Relationships are forged, broken, and people, whose complicated inner lives seem unknowable to others, search for real connection.
In literature, an astute outsider can show us how to navigate the ruthlessness of a society. Londoners might feel lonely at times, but we are connected beneath the surface, by our desires to work, to play, and to thrive as individuals among millions.
Below are a few other novels written with the multitudes in their sights and sounds. Some might call it writing with diversity in mind, but I like to see it as telling like it is, of participating in the rich life of London.
Sam Selvon, Lonely Londoners – Bayswater
Now a classic, first published in 1956, this was the first London novel to give outsiders a voice, and in their own accent. In witty calypso-like episodes, and with a structure that circles alienation, Selvon’s ‘boys’ are estranged in the ‘beast winter’, and even in the ‘sweet, lazy summer’. After many years, they get nowhere in the failed postwar promise of the motherland. The narrator engages in London via a stream of consciousness for the Windrush generation, who arrived to racism and ‘a fog sleeping restlessly over the city’.
Zadie Smith, White Teeth – Cricklewood
Undeniably alive, funny, brilliantly irreverent, this novel set a new standard for London voices in literature, and new ways of accepting who we all are, together and alone; our backgrounds clashing, or futures converging. Smith’s characters are simultaneously comic and tragic, with a strong sense of their own complex place in the London choir.
Andrea Levy, Small Island – Earl’s Court
A polyphony of voices, a weaving of time and characters, a depiction of London that breaks the mould and forces us to look again at what we believed we knew about postwar Blighty: Levy’s novel re-presents London history and makes way for other writers to do the same.
Luke Sutherland, Venus as a Boy – Soho
Sutherland’s character is a small island boy from Orkney whose life becomes destroyed by his own magical gift for sex – providing his partners with a kind of supernatural transcendence. With swagger and jazz in its sentences, the novel gives us a London through the eyes of a compassionate outsider, and it ultimately challenges the laws governing culture, beauty, and even physics, as the main character slowly turns to gold. The anti-hero has his apotheosis in this novel.
Bernardine Evaristo, Mr Loverman – Hackney
A long married couple: a man in his 70s who has hidden his true sexuality for the entire 50 years of marriage; his wife who bears life thanks to her devotion to God – Evaristo’s characters sing with the struggle to be true to themselves. It’s a duet of shame and pain, in fragments, in humour, and in tender exploration of what lies beneath the surface of Londoners we think we know.
Olumide Popoola, this is not about sadness – Finsbury Park
This is a small book with a big voice, its spoken-word fluidity interweaving the lives of a young woman from Soweto and an old woman from Jamaica. They listen to each other; they reach across age and culture to speak about love and sexuality. The poetry of Popoola’s writing is respite for lonely Londoners.
Tessa McWatt was born in Guyana, grew up in Canada, and has been living and working in London for nearly two decades. She is the author of five earlier novels and her new book Higher Ed gives voice to Londoners we rarely see in fiction – from EU migrants to students and public sector workers
