Pigeon English

Product Information

As retribution, Harri shows off the remote control car Auntie Sonia gave him, refusing to give Jordan a turn.

By advising Harri to "stay good" for as long as he can, Julius implies that there was a time before he turned to violence and feels some semblance of remorse. Julius explains to Harri that he uses violence to make a living, and alcohol to cope with the consequences of his actions. His preoccupations – supporting Chelsea, building a rapport with Poppy Morgan, a girl at school, keeping out of the way of his sister and her annoying friends – are entirely predictable, entirely childlike and entirely harmless.Recently emigrated from Ghana with his sister and mother to London’s enormous housing projects, Harri is pure curiosity and ebullience—obsessed with gummy candy, a friend to the pigeon who visits his balcony, quite possibly the fastest runner in his school, and clearly also fast on the trail of a murderer. It seems perverse to describe Pigeon English, with its spilled blood and wasted lives, as an optimistic book but, against all the odds, it is. However, considering that London, its customs, and its slang are constituted by different multiethnic factions, Harri adds to the culture rather than assimilating into it. In a violent, gritty council estate, Harri struggles to get through the days, trying to solve the murder of a boy with his best friend, Dean; everybody is afraid to speak to the police, and the police, I sense, are afraid of going into the area.

Harri is the first person narrator for most parts except for those that are spoken by the pigeon that visits him on their flat located on the 9th floor. Kelman, who grew up in the housing projects of Luton, England, is writing this novel in light of the surge of stabbings andknife violence happening in England. The pigeon takes over the narrative on occasion, which provides a more somber, adult-like viewpoint of Harri’s world. The playground represents childhood innocence, and the arson represents the destructive force of gang violence. I was reminded more of The Catcher in the Rye, whose narrator, Holden Caulfield, is also left to his own devices, lost in an environment which can neither contain nor protect him.His mother is trying her best to support her children as a nurse while keeping them safe and instilling good values in a world full of violence. I kept thinking of Simon Lelic's Rupture, which used multiple narrators to explore the issues surrounding a similarly shocking event - a school shooting - with far more effective results. He was also a Chelsea fan, and once defended Harri from older boys who were laughing at his short trousers; and those minimal encounters, coupled with the sight of the dead boy's mother "guarding the blood", provokes feelings of empathy, dismay and determination in Harrison. The story captures perfectly the wonders of childhood and innocence, even in such a bleak environment, in a way that made me remarkably nostalgic for my own schooldays.

Full of facts gained from CSI shows, they attempt to lift fingerprints and find DNA, sure that they can find the culprit and bring him to justice. Similarly, the defaced sign shows that rules, expectations, and norms are established by authority figures (governments and business owners), as well as ordinary people. But gradually, the involvement of the Dell Farm Crew – X-Fire, Dizzy, Killa, Clipz – becomes apparent, and Harri's inconvenient interest begins to make the reader worry for his safety.However, Harri's friend, Jordan, pressures Harri into acts of vandalism each time they play together.

Harri also befriends a Somali boy named Altaf, even though he’s “not supposed to talk to Somalis because they’re pirates. I tend to really like writing that has a distinctive sound, from the thick Scots of Irvine Welsh's work to the Edwardian slang of P. Pigeon English (which comes packaged with reading group discussion points such as "Has the novel in any way changed the way you think about youth gangs, knife crime or urban poverty?In the midst of this toxic environment (which made me wonder why they would leave Ghana in the first place; under the false assumption that a Western country is always better than an African one? Harri is a beguiling and very funny narrator, and Kelman has done a brilliant job of creating an entertaining narrative voice that's also thoroughly believable as that of an 11-year-old boy. But, when his friend is murdered, Harri’s unswerving determination to find out the truth makes him vulnerable. Plot so thin as to be utterly transparent, two narrative voices that are properly vexing, this doesn't have an awful lot going for it.