For good or ill, black West Indian culture is synonymous with youth culture in Britain today. Even among white teenagers, a Jamaican inflection (‘buff’, ‘bruv’) is reckoned hip. The ‘Jamaicanisation’ of British cities quickened after Jamaica’s independence in 1962, when more West Indians migrated to Britain, and London was poised to become the most Jamaican city in Europe.
Zadie Smith is well placed to chart the vagaries of life in mixed-up, mixed-race Britain. Born in 1975 to a Jamaican mother and a British father, she grew up in the ethnically multi-shaded London borough of Brent. Her marvellous new novel, NW, crackles with reflections on race, music and migration in Brent’s north-west suburb of Willesden.
Out of Willesden’s urban ethnic ferment Smith weaves a mesmeric story of social self-improvement, ambition and dashed hopes. Spiked with Jamaican vernacular (‘blud’, ‘batty’), the novel follows a group of Londoners who were born on the same Brent council housing estate.
One of them is a black man of Jamaican ancestry, another is a white woman of Irish extraction, another is a grizzled Rastaman with messianic notions of Africa. At various points in the narrative, their lives intersect and sometimes violently collide. North-west London, in Smith’s estimation, is a place that seems to have lost its moral bearing, riven by gangland murders, muggings and violent street altercations.
Michel, a French-born African migrant, runs a hair salon off Harlseden High Street. Unusually for a black businessman, he listens to that most English of pop groups, the Kinks, whose Noël Coward-like observations about the British class system and village green seem far removed from his native Marseilles. Michel’s 35-year-old wife, Leah Hanwell, is a white philosophy graduate and charity fundraiser. To her annoyance, she is teased by her Afro-Caribbean workmates for having married a ‘buff’ (good-looking) French African hairdresser and Kinkophile to boot. Leah has a baby on the way, yet fears motherhood as drudgery.
Each character is accorded a proper past. Leah’s old comprehensive school friend, Nathalie Blake, for example, is a barrister of Jamaican ancestry, who has risen gratefully above her council estate roots. Yet all is not well with Nathalie. In spite of her handsome, mixed-race banker husband and outwardly perfect home, she appears to be losing her way in life. Nathan Bogle, a local bad boy and drug user, still has a hold over Nathalie. Life has been a disappointment to Nathan ever since primary school; with his sense of social inferiority and grievance, he may (or may not) have fatally stabbed a man on a Kilburn street. At any rate, Nathalie senses danger in Nathan’s company.
Along the way, Smith introduces a cast of minor characters, among them a former Mod and CND campaigner, Phil Barnes, and a Camden School for Girls junkie dropout called Annie. With her fine-tuned ear for dialogue (‘You’re a proper old leftie, Barnsey, proper commie’), Smith charts their disappointments in love and their sense of social disorientation.
Not much goes on in NW but, for all its uneventful narrative, the novel draws the reader in irresistibly. Written in a witty, street-savvy prose, it captures a flow of poetry off the London streets (‘open top, soft-top, drive-by, hip-hop’). Willesden, in all its polyglot confusion, is portrayed as a vibrant streetscape of Afro-wig emporia, pound shops and massage parlours. Brocaded with pages of concrete poetry and typographical eccentricities out of B.S. Johnson and David Foster Wallace, NW is a caustic, sometimes lyrical fiction for our times. Zadie Smith’s previous novel, On Beauty, came out seven years ago; it has been worth the wait.
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