A Stranger City

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Though never directly mentioned, Brexit is the spectre that haunts this novel, and it’s clear which side of the debate the author is on. However, the somewhat fractured style, for all its continuity, ultimately obstructs emotional investment. The body affects only a few people, but in different ways, and from there the narrative weaves around their lives, as London's recent past unfurls and then moves into the near future. He meets a film maker who makes a documentary about the body and still no one comes forward to identify her.

The brief time that Grant has with her characters did not lead her to use Dickensian tricks, except for the most minor ones and there is a touch of Dickens in the description of the remnant of traditional London where an elephant was a bridge too far for me. Definitely not something I would ever normally choose to read, but I’m pleasantly surprised - thank you very much to Virago at Little Brown for the Advanced Reader Copy. I even enjoyed the surreal/fantastic element of the island accessible by a secret tunnel/house and the peculiar persons living there.

The central plot, such as it is, revolves around the discovery of a body of an unidentified woman whom no-one has reported missing, and a woman who is reported missing with a lot of social media fuss at the same time, but is discovered to be fine a couple of days later. A connection exists between them, not a strong narrative link, just the haphazardness of life in action. The group includes the investigating detective, recently retired, and his wife, the TV documentary maker, (who puts together a show about the woman), and his wife, the Irish nurse who briefly disappeared on the same night and was mistaken for the dead woman and her ex-flat mate, a hard-nosed, cynical young man with a chip on his shoulder.

I really enjoyed A Stranger City a book that begins with a body in the Thames and with a bold nod at Dickens's Our Mutual Friend . I am truly annoyed by this tendency to associate racial tensions and indeed deportation with Nazis and the Holocaust(jews were transported to concentration camps on trains), very dismissing of the actual Holocaust. We find a community that is diverse even within the United Kingdom, including Scots, Irish and migrants from elsewhere in England. Ultimately the message is we are all different, with our different origins, our different stories, yet we all come together to form something that is way bigger than we are!The copper investigating the fatal incident had no leads and is troubled by that; a documentary film maker, who just happened to be producing a series on missing persons, included her story. Against Smith’s stunningly clever wordplay and the depth of her characters, Linda Grant comes out second best.

The Clothes on Their Backs was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2008 and went on to win the South Bank Show Award. The characters are brought together initially by the mystery surrounding an unidentified woman drowned in the Thames but, as is the way of city living, coincidences keep them bumping into each other. Unsparing about what makes it ugly, cold-hearted, fractured; but also a hymn of love, full of characters so generously, so compassionately portrayed.When I spotted, a few years later, ‘Upstairs at the Party’ in a remainder bin for a couple of bucks, I thought I’d give her another shot.

The two women — DB27 and Chrissie — provide a means for Grant to explore social anonymity and insecurity, immigration and Brexit, and displacement. At its heart is the need for belonging, something we all share yet can put us at odds with each other. I did wonder why, but seen that the author is/worked as a journalist, I believe it has to do with the fact to nowadays, especially in London, Romanians are the second or third group of emigrants; so it does makes sens to be featured. Her work fits well with that of Amanda Craig, who has written a number of novels exploring London through its inhabitants, and John Lancaster’s ‘Capital’. The woven narratives evoke our urban patchwork - its autonomy and surprising intimacies, and I loved the way Grant vividly brought to life a multi-faceted London through deep observation of people and places that rang true.Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA View image in fullscreen Dark undercurrents … a corpse in the Thames is the novel’s starting point. Grant is pondering a “speculative future” about what could be though – “it’s not a prediction” – and the novel remains rooted in feeling and experience not politics – a celebration of London’s openness and possibilities, it’s “mouth wide open to the sea”, as much as it strikes a warning note about where we are now. The 2016 “Brexit” decision has also brought about a more open hostility towards outsiders, and in A Stranger City (as the title indicates) hostility is present in London as well as in the wider UK. It, claims Ms Grant, is partly autobiographical – and proves that she is an author certainly worth reading, with this or ‘We Had It So Good’ obvious starting points. London may seem to defy narration – “too large, too ancient, too many layers”, as a character in Linda Grant’s new novel A Stranger City suggests – but the novel’s powerful portrait of the city proves the opposite.