The ghosts that haunt Brick Lane

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).

We are introduced to Inspector Abberline, in the late summer of 1888. The inspector has the unenviable task of catching a fiend they call Jack who stalks Whitechapel by night. Three women have fallen victim to his knife. Who could this ripper be? Rumours abound. A vampire from Transylvania? An escaped ape, half beast, half man? Just as our flesh is in mid-crawl, we are whisked halfway across the world to Bangladesh to sigh over the poignant fate of Motosir Ali. Motosir lovingly tends his paddyfields, but has no money to clothe and feed his wife and children. He is forced to borrow from a money-lender who gradually takes over his land. Motosir is promised enough cash for his airfare to England, where he is assured of a job in a Brick Lane curry house. Whilst on the bus heading for Dakar a passenger informs him that the money he has received is but a fraction of the amount he will need for his journey to London Motosir has been swindled.