Londonstani delivers manipulating ‘devices’
It was with some narrowing of the brows that I picked up Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani. The North American dust jacket is a piece of delicious eye candy, but absolutely littered with glowing words like “electric,” “ball-grabbing” and “brilliant.” One British review of the book even gave the silliest praise modern society has yet produced by calling it “an ethnographic bombshell.”
I really want to love this book. But no matter how high the aspirations of the author or how interesting the literary devices used, I couldn’t escape the realization that they were devices. The book does have verve and freshness, but at its heart it is a machine designed to deliver a single twist ending, a clockwork thing with little flexibility. And the ending, though reeeeeeeal twisty, left me with the dreary feeling of being manipulated.
Malkani writes from the point of view of Jas, a socially inept young man accepted into a gang of Pakistani boys. He wraps around them, finding acceptance and pride in the thug lifestyle they provide. Jas narrates his life through a truncated and bizarre dialect of Anglo-Indian slang words, street lingo and text-message grammar. Whether you like or hate this device, it’s unabashedly ambitious.
There is a long literary history of appropriating dialect to create realistic characters and enforce the social differences that inhere in language. The difficulty is that if it doesn’t succeed effortlessly, it works against its own purpose, seeming much more forced and artificial than otherwise. No matter how surprising at first, there’s only so many times I can read “U a Paki jus like me. Even tho u b listening to U2 or someshit. Are u 2 scared 2 look at me?” before it starts to rub thin. He also falls occasionally into more didactic habits – interludes with Jas’s former teacher and a later mentor might as well be labelled “social commentary here.”
Malkani really succeeds in his absolute demolition of bling culture. From Jas’s viewpoint we watch a flashy and stylish lifestyle ultimately crumple like aluminum foil. He exists in a universe shrinking through violence, arrogance and materialism, contracting into a bleak and hollow point. The boys are brutal, misogynist and existentially void. Being substantially empty themselves, they impose that view on the world around them. They live on the indulgence of their indolent suburban families, and pursue the lives of amateur criminals. Jas himself began as a thoughtful and introspective boy, but his internal monologue is so crippled and perverted that he is unable to express even the most basic facts about himself. Malkani’s critique is accurate, and intellectually compelling.
As appeared in the Ottawa XPress – Oct. 05, 2006
http://www.ottawaxpress.ca/books/books.aspx?iIDArticle=10499
