![]() ![]() He couldn't stop for donkey hours."Īs well as describing the estate's own "pidgin", "Pigeon English" refers to a feral pigeon Harri comes to believe is watching over him. When the boys watch a local dog choke on some lager offered by its alcoholic owner: "Every sneeze made a new sneeze. "It's called the murder weapon." Kelman has already been much praised for his ability to write from an 11-year-old's perspective, but here, as often in the first half of the novel, Harri's voice feels laboured and faux-naïf.Įlsewhere, Kelman blends Ghanaian slang such as "Asweh" ("I swear") and "hutious" ("frightening") with familiar London-ese to fresher and funnier effect. "We're looking for the knife the dead boy got killed with," he explains. ![]() After the seemingly random stabbing of an older boy outside a fried chicken shop, Harri and his friend Dean turn amateur detectives, scrutinising the estate and its dysfunctional inhabitants for clues. Pigeon English, which draws heavily on the killing of 10-year-old Damilola Taylor on a Peckham estate in 2000, weaves this suffering into a murder-mystery of sorts. But gradually his sister, aunt and even his mother, forced into moral compromise in her struggle to give her children a better life, are implicated in the violence that pervades estate life. Harri's surroundings bristle with half-understood menace, most obviously from the alcoholics, dealers, petty criminals and teenage members of the Dell Farm Crew gang who shadow the estate. Along with the shock of emigration and the usual preoccupations of growing up – whether lovely blonde Poppy Morgan will sit next to him in art class, whether his Diadora trainers can outrun his classmates' Nike Air Max – he must negotiate tougher problems. Pigeon English opens as Harri has just moved to the Dell Farm estate with his mother and older sister, Lydia, leaving his father, grandmother and baby sister, Agnes, behind in Ghana. The novel's world of urban grime and casual violence, of course, could not be more distant from such media plaudits.
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