Londonistan Calling (Page 4)

As long as nonwhites have been in London, people have been trying to imagine the city without them. In 1601 Elizabeth I declared herself "highly discontented to understand the great numbers of negars and Blackamoores which...are crept into this realm." In 1788 Philip Thicknesse complained that "London abounds with an incredible number of these black men...in almost every village are to be seen a little race of mulattoes, mischievous as monkeys and infinitely more dangerous." And more recently, Bridget Jones's Diary, Notting Hill and Match Point have filled film screens with a lily-white fantasy not unlike that of Seinfeld or Will & Grace. The characters of Londonstani drive one more nail into that colorless coffin.

Of course, the fact that this imaginary white London has overcome all evidence of demography does not in itself lend merit to every nonwhite creative response to it. While Malkani's portrait of teenagers flirting with petty crime is lively, it falls short as a literary exploration of how this South Asian youth subculture relates to the post-9/11 British and global culture. The politics that nourish the plot with dramatic tension and energy, racial violence and pressure, appear but are never examined. The title suggests more than a tale of adolescent reckless abandon with an ethnic flavor, and yet at times that's all the reader gets.

Malkani ignores direct engagement with the political context, which reduces his characters to a series of stiff and purposeless actions; they are all function. This vacuum also makes the pacing of the book somewhat awkward. The first third meanders; in the second the story finds its rhythm; in the third it unravels at an almighty speed, which leaves you thinking that Malkani was merely chasing a punch line.

At times Malkani also clearly lacks Welsh's confidence that his audience will grasp the full meaning of his words. Having taken the bold step of putting the dialogue in the vernacular, he occasionally feels the need to overexplain rather than trust that the (mostly white) audience will figure it out. Twice, within three pages, he explains that "coconut" denotes a race traitor who is brown on the outside and white on the inside. This is a common dilemma for a nonwhite British writer, but Malkani's solution only yields a common problem--fluent text labored by footnotes for readers unfamiliar with street slang.

But when Malkani steps back and lets Jas and his crew drive the novel, it comes alive. Like teenagers everywhere, their primary concern is to define themselves before others do the defining for them.

"People're always tryin' to stick a label on our scene," Jas complains.

That's the problem with havin a fuckin scene. First we was rudeboys, then we be Indian niggas, then rajamuffins, then raggastanis, Britasians, fuckin Indobrits. These days we try an use our own word for homeboy an so we just call ourselves desis.

To that list of labels imposed by others we can now add, if some are to be believed, "threat to national security" and "enemies of national identity." Whoever lives in the Londonistan of American commentators and their handful of British counterparts, few of them appear to be Londonstanis.

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