My Goodreads review of Pigeon English

Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Another of my 2011 Booker short-list collection. This time it took a while to grow on me, as I am not a huge fan of writers using a narrative voice which cripples their vocabulary at the same time as anyway removing their authorial omniscience by virtue of being in the first person. In this case the first person in question is an 11 year old Ghanaian schoolboy in a somewhat deprived British inner-city which naturally has a huge impact on the language. There have been several books written from the perspective of a child narrator in recent years and it is perhaps in danger of being overdone. The other aspect I had a problem with and never really warmed to was the pigeon. At times we are privy to a pigeon monologue and while the pigeon and its spiritual interaction with the boy and his story can be taken as purely symbolic and perhaps in keeping with the boy's nature (and nurture) this never worked for me.

For the rest though, this is a very confident first novel and one which, despite my initial misgivings, I came to be seduced by. The boy, and the world through his eyes, came to be very real and engrossing and I was surprised to find that I was looking forward to getting back to the novel and sorry when it ended. I did see the ending coming, I have to say, and it is one of those which I felt was probably the right one at the same time as wishing it had been different. How accurate the portrayal of ethnic urban youth culture and the challenges of immigrant life are, is impossible for me to judge as this is not the world I live in or in which I grew up. It does come to feel very real though and effectively underlines the fact that, despite differences of race, language, religion, sex etc., there is a core of common ground for humanity in the way we experience the world through needs, hopes,fears,relationships and desires. The skill of the writer became clear when I realised that I (or the eleven year old me still somewhere in my subconscious) was having no trouble identifying with young Harrison despite all our differences. I am happy to say that despite those initial misgivings I really enjoyed this book. I won't mind if writers stop pretending to be children for a while though.

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