Guy Gunaratne’s debut novel, In Our Mad and Furious City, was set in the council estates and migrant enclaves of a London that few politicians acknowledge, and in the immediate aftermath of the 2013 killing of soldier Lee Rigby by two British-Nigerian converts to Islam. A literary La Haine, owing more to Wiley than to Peter Ackroyd, it presented the capital as noise: Lon‑din, a city contaminated by an imperial past, a place where “constant, punishing memories are left to spill into one another”.
The follow-up, Mister, Mister, also begins and ends in London, and has as its backdrop a series of Islamist terror attacks across mainland Europe. It is inspired by the myths and stories surrounding “Jihadi Jack” Letts and Shamima Begum, modern apostates accused of travelling to Syria to carry out the murderous bidding of Islamic State. Who were they? What had turned them into monsters? They became tabloid fodder, political phantasms, at once overanalysed and underknown.
Yahya Bas, the narrator of Mister, Mister, grew up believing he was a monster. Telling his life story in the form of fragments directly addressed to an unnamed official, he explains that he was a breech baby who has limped through life bow-legged. He grew up stammering, was labelled “goatboy” and “cripple” at school, saw himself as a “slack-jawed idiot-boy born to a mardy household”. Part-Caliban, part-diminutive Oskar in Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, he’s a freak who sees through the crookedness of the straight world.
Yahya’s upbringing is complex – a bit of a mess. His father, Marwan, came to the UK from northern Iraq in the late 1980s but hasn’t been seen for decades. His white mother, Estella, is depressed, self-harming, often subdued. The pair of them live in a refurbished home for ayahs in east London, initially set up for Indian domestics brought to England by their colonial employers at the end of the 19th century and now shared with runaways and battered women who eke out a living as cleaners and cooks.
The building is unruly, a circus, a haven for lost souls. If it kindles memories of Dickens’s London that’s no coincidence; early on, with self-conscious theatricality, Yahya roars: “Have me drawn, quartered, stoned into a pulp for all I care – have at it!” Later, he spends time at Bleaker House Immigration Removal Centre. The youngster both longs for the world and recoils from it. He’s puzzled but also captivated by his uncle, a soapbox muezzin whom Yahya accompanies on trips to the Edgware Road branch of Morrisons in front of which, with what Gunaratne likens to the bathetic melancholy of Tony Hancock, he declaims religious verses to indifferent passersby.
But Mister, Mister isn’t really about London. It could be located in any modern city – Paris, Malmö, Brussels – in which young Muslims have come to be feared as the enemy within. Gunaratne renders Muslim London as mixed, mutable. Some of the most vital scenes take place in a Poplar school, subsequently demonised as an indoctrinating madrasa, where Yahya runs into students from posh Saudi families, UAE aristos who speak “glassy high English”, and bearded Somali kids with holiday homes in Mogadishu.
Is Yahya sick? He says he’s assailed by spectres he can’t control. He cites cockney visionaries such as William Blake, is open to “mad seers and angry fools”. Some of those signals come from television; later, via dial-up and broadband. By the time of Abu Ghraib, Yahya is in a click trance. He’s become a virtual junkie mainlining pixellated images of tortured and abused brown bodies. What he feels is less rage, and more a self-reflexive shock and awe: “Some separate self, who was all eyes and sensation … This Other Yahya – ghostlike, within me and without – was like a secret friend at times.”
At this point Mister, Mister really flares into life. Yahya, discovering he has a gift for religious poetry, channels the lexical energy he finds on radicalist chatboards – inventive user names, scrambled syntax, intense punctuation – and gives himself the moniker Al-Bayn (“bayn” meaning “in between” in Arabic, as well as sounding like “Albion”, another Blakean resonance). He is treated by his fans as a street sage and by everyone else as a “Pound Shop Prophet of Stepney Green and Newham”, a virtual terrorist.
Both identities discomfit him. Suddenly he disappears – heading to Syria to look for his father. Or so he claims. He burns his passport, wanders for ages, may or may not be on the verge of a martyr’s death. He ends up in an unspecified “Free City” full of displaced people and misfits among whom he feels at home.
This wilderness phase of Yahya’s young life isn’t as precisely realised as his earlier years in London. It reads like a hallucination, a script he’s struggling to recall. Gunaratne knows readers will want to know what really happened during Yahya’s exile. The answers feel like fudges. In its latter stages, after an act of hideous violence, the novel teeters on the edge of op-ed didacticism.
Still, for the most part Mister, Mister is thrillingly unstable, as verbally roiling as a pirate radio broadcast, animated by a charismatic antihero prone to “rampant wilding bents”. At the same time, what makes it so important is how, like Preti Taneja’s Aftermath or the poetry of Bhanu Kapil, it’s also drawn to silence and hermeticism: to brown opacity. Historically, British Asian writing has been preoccupied with finding one’s voice, making a noise, becoming politically audible. For all its verve, Gunaratne’s novel is most powerful for the way it gestures towards a new aesthetic imperative. Ellipses, tactical disappearance, strength in muteness.
• Mister, Mister by Guy Gunaratne is published by Tinder (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
