What an extraordinary book. It reminds me of a magnificently woven carpet whose eclectic style combines oriental, East- ern European and Hebraic adornments. Threads are abruptly snipped and left dangling. Curry and blood-stains are spattered upon it, causing confusion and alarm. Gavron’s work defies categorisation. It is not a collection of short stories. It is not fact and it is not quite fiction.
The single theme that binds this cleverly researched book together is East London’s Brick Lane. The author includes sagas of silk weavers, manuscripts from the Civil War, Elizabethan poems, short stories, cartoon strips and newspaper quotations concerning the grisly ‘plasticater’ Gunther von Hagens. Even Boswell manages to get a rather randy look in (although it is unclear what connection he had with Brick Lane).
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