Stephen Kelman

Some novels teach you how to understand them. Unless you happen to be familiar with Scottish English, for example, Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993) will be a difficult read at first. Experiencing ‘Nadsat’, the extraordinary argot created by Anthony Burgess for A Clockwork Orange (1962), is dislocating for the first few pages, even if you know the Russian from which much of that novel’s teen slang is derived. But the language of both is immediately exhilarating and soon becomes comprehensible; much of the joy of reading them, in fact, is to be found precisely in the pleasure of dawning comprehension. Which brings us to Stephen Kelman’s debut novel, Pigeon English (2011).

Narrated by Harrison Opoku, an eleven-year old immigrant from Ghana who has recently arrived in London, where he lives with his mother and older sister in a high-rise, the novel makes use of Ghanian slang such as ‘adjei’, ‘hutious’ and ‘dey touch’. Although some of the language is easily understood - you only need to say ‘asweh’ with the stress on the second syllable to get it - it is not always the case that context makes meaning clear, which means that the use of unfamiliar words and phrases undermines rather establishes the coherence of the narrator’s voice. But then it could be argued that we are being placed in the position that Harrison finds himself in, strangers in a familiar yet old world, with all the attendant discomfort of not quite being sure if we are getting the drift. Even if Harrison does comes from a country whose official language is English, he is still an outsider to the many different ways in which that language is used in the UK. As he makes clear:

'In England there’s a hell of different words for everything. It’s for if you
forget one, there’s always another one left over. It’s very helpful. Gay
and dumb and lame mean all the same. Piss and slash and tinkle mean all the same (the same as greet the chief).'

However you receive the linguistic style of Kelman’s novel, which, apart from Ghanian slang, is full of the modern London patois which cultural elitists like to look down upon with a derisively delivered ‘innit’, Pigeon English succeeds in rendering not only the imaginative world of a child, but also the brutal Darwinian politics of the playground. Kelman captures well the way children leap from one subject to another, the way their world is bound by rules that are often taken very seriously, even as those rules seem to have been created in order to parody adult obsessions with limiting and transcribing reality: stepping on cracks in the pavement breaks the spell and ruins the summer; being the first to answer a question in class means you love the teacher; going round a puddle means you’re a girl. There is the almost superstitious belief in the naïve magic of symbols: a star on a flag ‘stands for freedom’. And then there is the automatic parroting of lessons learnt from adults: don’t buy pirate DVDs because the funds go to Osama Bin Laden. Harrison, like all children, is at the mercy of competing forces: one seemingly insignificant action may result in exclusion from a group, or adoption by it, in that ruthless game whereby you attempt to establish your individuality only by means of conforming to established laws and hierarchies.

At the centre of this novel is the charm of its protagonist. Harrison’s attempts to understand the relationship between giving respect and taking offence, of being cool but not too cool, intelligent but not clever, funny but not silly, good at things but not outrageously talented, is enough to make anyone no longer in school thank all available Gods that that is so. In the conservative world of childhood, it is an act of radicalism to be a genuine individual, for then the whole structure is threatened. It is to the author’s credit, then, that Harrison feels more of an individual child rather than a composite of stereotypes. This novel is less about plot – which, in essence, concerns Harrison’s attempt to find out who killed a boy in his deprived neighbourhood – and more about the inner life of a boy who is about to become an adolescent, a boy who has not yet lost the sense of enchantment that characterises childhood, even though the adult world - that terrifying realm of lust, hate, greed, power and violence, where games have consequences that cannot be laughed away - will not be kept at bay for too much longer. Harrison’s yearning for his father and little baby sister to be with them in London - his father has stayed in Ghana to work, his baby sister is with his grandmother - is the central absence at the heart of a story of absence. Pigeon English deals with the terrible rupture of sudden death and the disorientation involved in making a home of a new country. It’s about what is lost when we grow up, when we start to think that communicating with pigeons is childish and stupid, when we learn to be civilized even though we understand that being civilised first means lying to yourself and then lying to everyone else. Like Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993) and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003), Pigeon English is about the wisdom hidden in naivety, about the strength needed to be good, about how so much of what human beings do, can be described by the thoughts of the bird whose anthropomorphic musings are often sentimental, but which, as Harrison’s guardian angel and wise old elder, does have his moments:

'Do you want to know what I think? And I’ve been around long enough to have formed a few opinions. What your problem is, you all want to be the sea. But you’re not the sea, you’re just a raindrop. One of an endless number. If only you’d accept it, things would so much easier. Say it with me: I am a drop in the ocean. I am neighbour, nation, north and nowhere. I am one among many and we all fall together.
Or maybe I’m just a rat with wings and I don’t know what I’m talking about.'

Garan Holcombe, 2013.