Albion’s child

A charismatic ‘pound shop prophet’ leaves London for a city full of fellow misfits in this thrillingly ambitious story of a terror suspect

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, 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, 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 bowlegged. 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 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.

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!” The youngster is puzzled but also captivated by his uncle, a soapbox muezzin whom Yahya accompanies on trips to the Edgware Road branch of Morrisons supermarket in front of which he declaims religious verses to indifferent passersby.

Mister, Mister could be located in any modern city in which young Muslims have come to be feared as the enemy within. 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.

Yahya cites cockney visionaries such as William Blake, and is open to “mad seers and angry fools”. By the time of Abu Ghraib, Yahya has become a virtual junkie mainlining pixellated images of tortured and abused brown bodies. He feels a self-reflexive shock and awe: “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.

Suddenly he disappears – heading to Syria to look for his father. Or so he claims. 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 reads like a hallucination, a script he’s struggling to recall. 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”.

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.