East End Review

Tag: book review

  • An Unreliable Guide to London – book review

    An Unreliable Guide to London – book review

    "Top-notch city writing" - An Unreliable Guide to London. Photograph: Timothy Cooke
    “Top-notch city writing” – An Unreliable Guide to London. Photograph: Influx Press

    An Unreliable Guide to London looks and sounds like a bit of a gimmick. The title positions it as a humorous alternative to the city’s latest Lonely Planet publication, while the front cover – laden with hackneyed London graphics and brandished with the tagline “bad advice – limited scope – no practical use” – is the type you might expect to find attached to an unwanted stocking filler. The content, however, is of an altogether different nature.

    The idea for the collection, which contains more than a few exceptional stories set in some of the capital’s lesser-known locations, arose during a conversation over meatball subs at a Tottenham retail park. Editors Kit Caless and Gary Budden of Influx Press sat together wondering why publishers weren’t printing books about the parts of London they knew and interacted with on a daily basis. “What novels had we read set in Hanwell, Cricklewood or Barking?” they asked.

    Inspired, they brought together 24 diverse contributors from across the city, before launching a successful Kickstarter campaign to give new literature to a London “that exists on the periphery of the imagination”.

    An Unreliable Guide… is divided into four sections – West, North, South and East (in order) – and draws on areas as far apart as Wormwood Scrubs and Exmouth Market, and then further again. Aki Schilz gets the collection off to a great start with “Beating the Bounds”, but it’s Eley Williams’s bizarre and brilliant “In Pursuit of the Swan at Brentford Ait” that really sets the work alight.

    Williams delves into the rich, ambiguous world of cryptid research, painting a mythological history of an over-grown swan believed to have long terrorised local riverbanks, with a plumage reported to be “dim smoky purple or a vivid electric pink”. She describes Brentford FC football chants that pay credence to the beast and details umpteen dangerous encounters stretching back centuries. It’s a stunningly strange tale.

    Budden’s own “Staples Corner (and how we can know it)” – about a trip on the 266 to Currys and PC World, dropped off amid a “web of underpasses and roundabouts, of concrete walkways and steps to nowhere… trapped in the fevered dying dream of a brutalist architect” – is another of West’s highlights, while Chloe Aridjis kicks off the North section with an evocative exploration of night, shadows and optical illusions in N1.

    Though M John Harrison’s “Babies From Sand: A Guide to Oliver’s Island, Barnes & the St Margarets’ Day of the Dead” is one of the weirdest, most-inspired pieces of short literature I’ve come across in a while, it’s the assemblage from East that is, for me, of most interest (primarily because I know the territory so well).

    The poet Tim Wells lyrically laments the loss of wanker-free record stores in Hackney, where back in the day he’d purchase reggae, drink beer and chat with mates, before moving on to get his fill of pie, mash, liquor and slippery eels at Cooke’s on Kingsland Road. Nikesh Shukla makes fine work of Tayyabs, the famous Whitechapel curry house, while Irenosen Okojie brings a dizzying, Borges-like tale of time travelling monks to Barking.

    As if that’s not enough, Marshman Gareth E Rees delivers a typically fun and enlightening account of a walk around Leyton Mills Retail Park – the car park, specifically – and co-editor Caless finishes things off with a probing series of politically-loaded vignettes dedicated to the forces tugging away at Exmouth Market; there’s spiced lamb, adulterous office sex and a bronze bust of Vladimir Lenin.

    Despite appearances, An Unreliable Guide to London is a formidable anthology of top-notch city writing.

  • On Message – writer and ex-bicycle courier pens memoir on wheels

    On Message – writer and ex-bicycle courier pens memoir on wheels

    Bicycle courier turned journalist and author, Julian Sayarer
    Bicycle courier turned journalist and author, Julian Sayarer

    As a bicycle courier, Julian Sayarer spent three years being a “tangible cog” in a world of multi-million pound contracts, greasing the wheels of the global economy.

    When Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008, he delivered the receivership notices to the bank in Canary Wharf, becoming a bit-part player in a major historical event.

    “It shows the quite humanised absurdity of the world economy that the couriers get paid £7.50 to deliver three sets of notices on a £50 billion bail out,” he recalls wryly.

    In his book Messengers, Sayarer, now a journalist and author living in Dalston, writes about being a cycle courier, transporting information from bank to law firm, learning London off by heart, and becoming intimately acquainted with kerbs, potholes and alleyways.

    Sayarer first started couriering after finishing university and returning from a year living in Istanbul.

    “You’re pedalling around London, sometimes coughing your guts up because of the air quality, or you’re sick but don’t get sick pay and so have to go to work anyway. But I was in my early 20s and on balance it was enjoyable, diving between gaps in traffic and hammering it hard across the city for your next delivery.”

    In 2009, Sayarer broke a world record for cycling around the world, recounted in his first book Life Cycles. The previous record holder, Mark Beaumont, had the backing of corporate firms and sponsorship deals. So when Sayarer broke the record he not only stuck it to his arch-rival, but to the man too.

    But returning to London, the victory began to seem hollow. A world-record on your CV doesn’t always help your job prospects, and soon Sayarer slipped back into cycle couriering.

    Messengers is set around 2010-11, after Sayarer had returned from travelling, and the initial thrill of darting around London on two wheels had made way to misgivings about the future.

    “There’s lots of notions of readjustment in it,” he says. “Cycling through Kazakhstan, you’d get people inviting you in to have tea in their yurt, and then you go back to the City, which is money motivated, fast-paced and frequently hostile – so there’s quite a lot of reflection on the nature of the modern city.”

    The word “precarious” comes up more than once in our conversation, a word that describes the profession in several ways.

    Before the dawn of email, a bicycle courier could eke out a living, but now couriers are among the ranks of the lowest earners. In return for risking their lives each day they are made to work as self-employed contractors – meaning no pension contributions, no sick leave and no holiday pay.

    But despite the physical exhaustion, the poor pay and the lack of prospects, there is also camaraderie amongst cycle couriers, a subculture and sense of community that marks it out from other professions.

    “It’s an urban community and it has its rituals. You have the alleycat racers who organise races where messengers will compete against each other, you’ve got the courier world championships held in places like Chicago, Warsaw and Lausanne where couriers from around the world would race.

    In London, couriers would hang out at the former Foundry pub, which lay on the corner the junction of Old Street and Great Eastern Street.

    “There’d always be a gathering of couriers out front drinking tinnies from the off-licence, which is probably one of the reasons why the pub couldn’t survive,” Sayarer reflects.

    As more vital information is driven online, cycle couriers will only become less needed and it might not be long before the profession disappears completely.

    Sayarer tells me that when he was a courier, colleagues and friends would be able to get by through living in a squat – something no longer viable since squatting a residential building has been criminalised.

    “It’s a genuine community that’ll look after people who maybe are a little rough around the edges but still have that right and need of a community, and I think the modern city is squeezing people out of space for that sort of thing,” he says.

    A time came for Sayarer when the thrill of careering through traffic gave way to a fear of doing it for the rest of his life. Now 30, he can look back at couriering as a chapter of his life that has come to a close.

    However, he is aware that not everyone doing the job has that luxury.

    “It’s all well and good having this social tourism and saying this is a job with a shelf life and eventually you get out because it’s hard,” he says.

    “But you need to talk about the people who don’t get out of that job, who are going to do it for the rest of their working lives and never manage to get the breaks to move on.

    “I think it’s something I would have always wanted this book to bring out.”

    Messengers: City Tales from a London Bicycle Courier is published by Arcadia Books.
    RRP: £8.99 ISBN: 9781910050767

    Julian Sayerer will be reading from Messengers on 7th April at Pages of Hackney
    pagesofhackney.co.uk

  • Skinning Out to Sea book review – Naval gazing

    Skinning Out to Sea book review – Naval gazing

    An illustration from Skinning Out to Sea
    An illustration from Skinning Out to Sea

    At 15 and a half, having bunked off most of his final year at school, Mick Hugo ‘skinned out to sea’. In other words, he gave in to the nagging urge to ditch his native Hoxton, and joined the merchant navy. It was the early 1960s and he was leaving behind the unlikely prospect of a chance career in the film industry, in favour of ‘horizons’.

    Half a century on from leaving the service, Hugo, now a builder by trade, has written 100 or so pages about his time working on the world’s oceans. His thoughts on various aspects of the seaman’s experience, which have remained roughly etched in his memory, represent a kind of challenge to conventional literature.

    He writes in a raw, rugged style, untamed by any pretentious notions of a burgeoning literary life. As a result, Skinning Out To Sea is fresh and bracing, delivered in a manner befitting a boozy pub chat. Its sentences are often long and can feel unchecked, which, though occasionally jarring, contributes to a rambling style that’s lifted by Hugo’s clear knack for poetry.

    Comprised of 20 short chapters and accompanied by a series of the author’s own evocative, if scruffy, sketches, the book covers myriad subjects. It details raucous exploits in far-flung ports, the day-to-day grind on deck, the social structure of the ships’ crews – which operate almost like allegorical micro-societies – and, of course, the wild exchange of pranks.

    Portions of the text that stand out include recollections of when a troubled crew mate, Brummie, threw himself overboard into the black waves, and of a charismatic man-about-town, Lenny, who, it turned out, was in a relationship with a rather more unkempt male steward. The former description, which is accompanied by the original logbook account, offers stark insight into what was at stake for some at sea, while the latter is handled with a confident balance of humour and sensitivity.

    Moreover, Hugo’s equating of the initial arrival of British sailors in blissful Tahiti centuries ago with taking acid for the first time is worthy of considerable praise.

    Cover-Scan-620

    While you might expect an abundance of tales of ill health and strife from a book of this sort, Skinning Out, for the most part, provides the opposite. Other than a period spent locked up in New Zealand – for reasons that remain unclear – Hugo’s personal experience comes across as largely positive and full of wonder. It was a chance to see the world, which for a working-class lad from the East End in those days was otherwise rare, and he relished it.

    He describes the pleasure of jobs that entailed weeks at sea without respite: ‘If it were a longish passage, work would settle down to a relaxing pattern of day work, watch keeping and sobriety. No TV, no radio, no newspapers, regular meal times, sufficient sleep… and predominantly tropical weather with constantly changing astronomical night skies, no family responsibilities, no bills to pay… Aye, ‘twas hard!’

    There is, however, a political undercurrent tracking the decline of the merchant fleet, touching on events like the seamen’s strike of 1966, which arrived in tandem with Hugo’s own political coming of age. This episode pretty much marked the end of his nautical career; but for a brief comeback with the highly desirable Australian merchant navy, he resigned himself to a life on land.

    At home, Hugo would “slip back into the fold” and take his place “among the huddle on the corner”. He applied some of the skills he acquired as a seafarer to decorating for his money, but he always harboured creative ambitions, painting and sculpting away in his parents’ council flat. Now, at 70, he’s produced something special: Skinning Out To Sea is a modest triumph.

    Mick Hugo will be in conversation with the writer Ken Worpole, and will also read from his book, on Thursday 10th March 2016 at 7pm.

    The event will be held at Brick Lane Bookshop, and is free (including a glass of wine) but booking is essential – click here for more information and to book a place.

    Skinning Out to Sea is published by Bowline Books. RRP: £10. ISBN: 9780993429507

  • Book review: Thirst by Kerry Hudson

    Kerry Hudson by Eleonore de Bonneval
    Kerry Hudson by Eleonore de Bonneval

    The idea of a novel exploring the relationship between a trafficked Russian sex-worker and a gentle young security guard who catches her shoplifting sounds risky. It’s the kind of glittery rescue narrative that if poorly handled could make for a fairly unpalatable read.

    But from the deft fingertips of Kerry Hudson, author of the award-winning Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-cream Float Before He Stole My Ma, comes a second novel so sweetly pitched and dexterously structured that any such concerns seem, in retrospect, completely absurd.

    Hudson knits together the disparate lives of Alena and Dave, a troubled couple who find commonality in their gut-wrenching loneliness. Both dealing with dark and twisted pasts, they enjoy comfort in one another’s tentative company – almost as if working the other out provides a moment’s relief from their respective realities. It’s a relationship hanging on tenterhooks.

    Lured to England by her mother’s oldest friend, Alena is fast submerged in a thickly veiled London underworld, where she’s forced into a brutal pattern of rape, threats and violence. Hudson writes her backstory with unflinching detail, layering her sparky central character in folds of horrifying experience. The scenarios are unnervingly believable and thus all the more difficult to stomach.

    Dave’s story, on the other hand, seems a nip less devastating. Having moved above a Hackney Kebab shop after life on a Roehampton estate comes to a difficult end, his is an existence of dull routine and pipe dreams of escape. He’s kind, handsome and would do anything for the lost, vulnerable girl he’s come to share his bed with. Though, always assuring himself of his own good nature, there are surprises in store.

    In contrast with the heavy subject matter, the prose is clean and delicate – elevated by the author’s acute observations of the nuances in everyday city-life. Of an afternoon in the Dalston flat that Dave and Alena inhabit, she writes: “The windows were all open, letting in a soup of early-evening Hackney air: dirty pavement, exhaust fumes, kebab meat.” It’s real and romantically grim.

    Thirst is an accomplished, if grey, portrait of two characters who might be anyone walking past on the street, sharing a quiet drink in the pub, or hiding in the corner of a gallery cafe. With uncompromising concern for literature’s underexplored people, Hudson’s work is an education. It’s quaint, multi-dimensional and damn tough to swallow. Don’t miss a word she writes.

    Thirst is published by Chatto & Windus. RRP: £12.99. ISBN: 9780701188689