Ashley_TakeABow
Well-Known Member
My dreams.
Alain looks very tired and skinny here.
The Observer today does its annual thing of picking the 10 biggest debut novels (in the UK) for the year, and one of them in particular (from the title onwards) sounds like it might be of interest to some frequenters of this site...
England Is Mine, by Nicolas Padamsee (Serpent’s Tail, 11 April)
A politically engaged, urgently plotted coming-of-age thriller with a wicked satirical streak, England Is Mine – the debut novel by Essex-raised writer Nicolas Padamsee – digs into the grim world of online neo-nazism via the story of David, an Anglo-Iranian A-level student and music lover at odds with his right-on peers over his loyalty to a Morrissey-ish singer-songwriter, cancelled after a bigoted rant.
The book sends up Twitter-era controversies over free speech while keeping in sight the emotional stakes of a subject often dominated by bad-faith argument. David’s terrifying, heartbreaking descent – from seeking solace in first-person shooter game Call of Duty to wielding an actual gun – was, for Padamsee, a nightmarish thought experiment by which he pictured losing the hard-won sense of identity that music gave him as an unrooted teenager from a German-Indian household.
“Probably the strongest sense of belonging I’ve ever felt has been in the sway of a Libertines concert, hugging strangers, falling on the floor, being picked up by them,” says Padamsee, 33. “For someone [in that position], the stakes can be very high if mainstream society says you should stop listening to this artist. For David’s friends, it might only be like swapping Adidas for Nike, but he’s built his identity around this [singer] – if they take it away, what’s going to replace it?”
The radicalisation of a second-generation immigrant was, he knew, the territory of names such as Hanif Kureishi, Guy Gunaratne and Kamila Shamsie, but Padamsee spied a gap for exploring the internet’s role in 21st-century extremism. Signed within days of his agent submitting it to publishers, the book was drafted over three years of study at the University of East Anglia; hoping to appeal not only to his well-read supervisor but also the friends he’d made over the years playing video games online, Padamsee sought the tang of early Michel Houellebecq (“some people might sympathise with the ogreish elements of his characters, others see them as total satire”) as well as Irvine Welsh’s ability “not to speak over his characters”.
Behind everything lay the memory of a few days Padamsee spent in his mid-teens in the uneasy company of Raskolnikov, the murderous antihero of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. “I wanted you to come along a few steps, then be pushed away, then come along again; for the reader, and myself, to be questioning herd thoughts.”
Did you ever want to be a singer yourself?
I’d have loved it. I wrote a lot of lyrics in my teens, but I absolutely cannot hold a tune! After a while I had to accept it’s not happening.
What was the hardest thing about writing England Is Mine?
Making video gaming interesting on the page to somebody who’s not in the moment frenziedly racking up kill streaks. Getting those scenes right required a lot of chiselling – and actually a lot of playing Call of Duty again.
Now that you’ve written it, do you find yourself anxiously looking at the headlines?
I try not to think about it. There can be that confluence when you’re engaging with dangerous ideas; Houellebecq’s Submission came out on the day of the Charlie Hebdo attacks. But there’s a serious challenge in these waves of radicalisation. To counter it, we need to understand it. Psychologists and sociologists have data and statistics but entering into the head of a far-right radical is something they can’t do. There’s an irresponsibility in the medium of the novel and for novels to have their own terrain in society, they need to exploit that.
No. But, you'll love it.
Moz mention, first song, from this mad Glaswegian punk band: