[I read this 2011 novel in sections, writing about a long chapter or two before reading on. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the book as I read it.]
13 June 2025
First two parts (of five): April, May
This is Stephen Kelman’s debut novel, and he’s set a tricky conceit for himself. He’s decided not only to have an eleven-year-old African boy tell the day-to-day story of his recent arrival in London with his family, but to open on the day a local Black boy has been killed on the street: ‘You could see the blood. It was darker than you thought.’ It’s an almost identical stabbing to the one that killed Damilola Taylor a decade or so before, Kelman’s inspiration for the novel. Before this one happens Harrison, the African boy must have been having to learn fast about how things work on his high-rise estate and in his secondary school. He tries to be a London kid, aiming to blend in with the other boys’ way of doing and saying things. But two months in England is not enough for our boy. He does his best to take on the laid-back manner of adolescent boys talking about sex and fights, but he doesn’t really get it. His home culture is still too fresh, and he’s still childishly wide-eyed about things he’s never seen before. Jumping in urban puddles! The yellow-blonde hair of his favourite girl! His first ride on the Underground!
He’s trying to make sense of the stabbing, while still unsure about the way anything really works. There’s the constant irony we feel as readers as we see him starting to think he will soon be able to prove himself. He has unbranded trainers everybody mocks, but he is the fastest runner in Year 7 so they must be OK. He takes the older boys’ talk literally, or misunderstands. He tells his older sister’s friend Miquita he isn’t going to let her suck him off, having no idea what it means, and thinks a virgin is a girl who isn’t married yet. When the leader of the top Year 11 gang lets him think he can join, we wonder what his motive is, especially when he starts to set challenges. The only reason Harrison doesn’t set off the school fire alarm, an offence punishable by immediate exclusion, is that he can’t break the glass.
And into this world, in which Harrison has no idea how much of an innocent he is, has come this stabbing. He knew the boy, and had been thinking he could be his friend. He would love to solve the crime, and decides to find out what he can. His friend at school is Dean, whose red hair has no doubt always made him another outsider. He’s as innocent of street culture as Harrison, so the idea of them becoming detectives to solve the murder seems fine to him. We’re in a Just William world of amateur sleuthing, based Dean’s knowledge of TV shows and Harrison’s admiration of his knowledge. They seem genuinely to believe their search for fingerprints and blood will lead them to what the professionals have missed. They are surprised when their search of the local ponds with torches only reveals a bent bicycle frame.
It’s a harmless pastime, but some of the things Harrison notices from day to day could well be important. They aren’t a part of his sleuthing with Dean, but Kelman definitely wants us to notice. When Harrison is out on their ninth-floor balcony one night—he likes to feed ‘his’ pigeon—he sees someone in a hoodie reaching for something under the bins on the ground. It’s shiny, and he wonders what if it could be if not a knife. The figure isn’t necessarily a boy…. And later there’s something much more clue-like. His sister Lydia, two years older than he is, has been given a bag of clothes with what could be blood on them. to take to the estate laundry to bleach-wash. It seems to have some connection with the leader of the school gang, X-fire (or Crossfire’)…. What’s going on? Are things as obvious as they seem?
Meanwhile, all the time, this is about one boy’s immigrant experience. Harrison’s Ghanaian slang and occasional slips of the tongue, speaking of their lives in Africa in the present tense. His endless delight at every new thing, like the size of their tower blocks, ‘higher than the Jamestown Lighthouse.’ His affection for what little wildlife there is in inner-city London, like his friend the pigeon and the bird’s nest he would have liked to save from a tree blown down by high winds. Once the men have come to remove the tree—they wouldn’t even let him keep a stick as a souvenir—he’s very uneasy about the hole left where it used to be.
His relationships with his parents seem conventional enough, with his mother the heroic presence in his life who provides everything he needs and his father, still in Ghana with their baby sister, reassuring him on the telephone what a good job he’s doing as the man of the house in London. It isn’t so easy to read his sister Lydia. She’s only two years older, and sometimes plays silly games with him as though they are both still kids. But is that just a smokescreen designed to put him off the scent of her own new life in London? Her friends, who often come to the house when their mother is at work a night, pretend to treat him seriously but clearly see him as the annoying little brother. Who knows what they make of his talk of being sucked off by one of them?
And we’re always aware that the version he’s giving us is only what he’s been able to piece together. There’s a huge amount that is a mystery to Harrison. Like, how did the family get to come to London from Ghana? How did they get a furnished flat? Why does his mother have to give money to the mysterious Julius, who lives with their aunt in Tottenham and carries a baseball bat called the Persuader? (That’s who they are visiting on the Underground.) Why does the aunt regularly burn off her own fingerprints? And is Harrison’s mother’s job really working nights in a maternity hospital?
Two months into the novel’s five monthly-titled sections, I don’t know where Kelman is going with this. Maybe that’s the point.
May
I didn’t mention—and I’m not making this up—that from time to time, there’s a short italicised section told from the point of view of a pigeon. Maybe Kelman wants to give us a different kind of outsider’s view, one that sees all human life and wonders what the hell is wrong with us. Maybe, given the novel’s title, the pigeon is Harrison, trying to make a home in a hostile urban environment he isn’t fitted to. Maybe.
The bad influence of the Dell Farm Gang, the one Harrison would love to be a part of, seems to be all-embracing. It’s certainly embracing more of Harrison than is good for him, so that his next test involves knocking over an innocent old man so the gang can rob him. It ought to be an existential crisis for Harrison, but it seems not to be. He knows the man from the Africans’ church his own family attends, and he tries to pretend he’s somehow not to blame for the terrible shock the man endures. I don’t know if Kelman is making a satirical point. This boy, brought up to believe completely in an almost childish version of Christianity—even his mother seems to think God in his Heaven is literally above the clouds they flew over to get to England—is capable of entirely misunderstanding what wrongdoing really means. He isn’t happy for the old man’s trouble, but he isn’t devastated by his own culpability. He just needs to prove himself, that’s all.
The gang seems to have touched Lydia too, through her friend Miquita. She isn’t denying there was blood on the clothes she washed in the laundry. What she tells him is that it definitely wasn’t the dead boy’s blood, it was Miquita’s. It’s to do with girls’ stuff he wouldn’t understand, she tells him. Which is true, so if she wanted a smokescreen it would be a good one to use to deceive her naïve younger brother. She uses the same excuse about the carnival costume she’s been so proud of up to now. She goes to dance class, is proud of her parrot costume with its feathers… but towards the end of this chapter she’s cutting the costume into rags, telling Harrison it’s all silly, and so is the dancing she does. She lets him help her drop the diaphanous shreds of cloth and feathers to the ground form their balcony, and soon the little kids stop playing with it and it disappears into the other assorted trash.
Meanwhile, Harrison has his friends. On the estate there’s Jordan, a lost older boy whose only pastimes seem to be vandalism and showing Harrison who’s boss. Their games of kickabout become an excuse for him to slam the ball into Harrison, or anybody else, as hard as he can. And after the carnival he collects bottles, not to take back to the shop like the boys used to do in Ghana—Harrison tells us the story—but to throw as high as he can to watch them smash on the ground. Harrison joins in, and is thrilled by the rush he gets from it. Then there’s Terry Takeaway, someone he’s mentioned a lot as he hangs around the estate, who just pinches anything he can lay his hands on and tries to sell it. Harrison accepts this is just how it is in London, and spends time with Terry without judging.
Is Harrison as lost as the people all around him? We might say he has his unshakeable faith in God and the religious truths his parents have brought him up to believe. But we’ve seen how he doesn’t extrapolate from them into an understanding of his own behaviour and that of other people. It’s the same irony we’ve been reading about all along. We can see what he can’t—but, equally ironically, what the pigeon can—about what is really happening to him. He can pretend all he likes that after pushing over the old man he was soon so far past him he hadn’t really been there… but he’s got enough sense to take off the coat he’d used to cover his head and drop it down the rubbish chute.
He might have childish talks with his sister or anybody else about what God can see, make up stories about how the toy binoculars he won in a raffle will help him and Dean to find clues that God will miss—does he really believe it?—but, somewhere, he knows something isn’t right. Is he missing the real clues there seem to be all around him? Whether they really are clues or not doesn’t matter, because what he’s seeking comfort in are the certainties there used to be in his life. His running speed proves his cheap new Diadora shoes are as good as anybody’s, doesn’t it? His girlfriend Poppy, the blonde one with glasses, says they are the best, so that’s all right. And anyway, there’s always God in his heaven, isn’t there?
His detective work with Dean is just as comforting—they are both sure they will find the clues the murderer is bound to have left, and they are on the lookout for shifty looks and other sure signs of guilt. Meanwhile, he tells us all about the new certainties he’s learning. Doesn’t he just love listing them? They are like mantras, helping him through a world he understands even less than he realises.
And how have I managed to mention knives only once? A knife is what killed the boy, and Damilola Taylor—and the boys around him talk about them, all the time. Jordan shows him how to hide one down the side of a trouser-leg, and he tries it out at home. He doesn’t think he’ll do it for real—but there are a hundred pages left of this novel, and we know how susceptible he is to the suggestions of the other boys. What if his next test involves a knife?
June and July—to the end
[Spoiler alert—stop reading if you don’t want to know the end!]
Ah. Was this inevitable? Of course it was. How could this author, with his particular interest in the Damilola Taylor case, have gone for any other ending? Answer, he couldn’t. Harrison is a naturally open-minded, inquisitive boy. His favourite teachers are those who tell him a lot of new things, and he’s been noticing things of his own from the start. But he only arrived a few months ago, and he still doesn’t have the experience to piece together not only the evidence that’s come his way, but how dangerous it is for him to know what he does. He uses made-up scales of success and failure, or winning and losing, not understanding that the would-be gang world he’s stumbled on looks at things very differently. Before the end, he and Dean find the dead boy’s wallet, covered in blood. Naively (or stupidly?) they keep it as evidence to be examined, and Harrison has to bring it out when the gang makes him turn out his pockets. And, in their hearing, Lydia has blurted out that Killa, a gang member who is also Miquita’s boyfriend, is a murderer. The accusation appears to shock Killa to the core—and by now, we’re very near the end of the novel. Is this the crisis at last? Will Harrison even survive it?
No, he won’t—but, as his life drains away in the last moments of the novel, we don’t know who has stabbed him. For long minutes, he has been running home, focusing on the longed-for moment when he knows he will be safe. When he reaches his tower-block. When he’s on the stairs. When he’s closed their door. When he’s turning the tap for that drink of water he urgently needs…. But these are all in an imagined future, and he’s only just in the building’s lobby when it happens. ‘I didn’t see him. He came out of nowhere. He was waiting for me. I should have seen him but I wasn’t paying attention. You need eyes in the back of your head. / He didn’t say anything. His eyes gave it all away: he just wanted to destroy me and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I couldn’t get out of the way, he was too fast. He just bumped me and ran away. I didn’t even see it go in. I thought it was a trick until I fell over.’
It’s obvious who did it, isn’t it? Killa had the motive, and we know he’s got form. But Kelman has chosen not to have Harrison say the name, and we know somebody else who might have done it. After his mother had caught Harrison in a mindless game of throwing stones at buses with Jordan, she had made him promise not to go anywhere near him. Ever since, Jordan has been mocking him, and Harrison takes a childish revenge. He plays with the new radio-controlled car his auntie gave him, pretends he is going to let Jordan have a go—and then goes into his flat and slams the door in Jordan’s face. This is a classic case of Harrison behaving according to his own made-up scales of justice, or whatever they are. But Jordan is the boy who boasts about carrying a knife, and is the only one Harrison has actually seen flaunting one. It might not seem likely, but I think Kelman is making the point that a trivial slight might just as easily lead to a stabbing as a murderer’s fear of discovery.
Have there been other clues that Harrison has got himself in far too deep? Lydia, two years older, doesn’t need her mother to tell her to pull away from her friendship with Miquita when she crosses one line too far. There’s been a set-piece scene when Miquita pretends to want to teach Harrison how to kiss—but her deep probing with her tongue leads to a swelling in his underpants that terrifies him. He thinks she’s somehow broken him forever—while Lydia pulls her off him. Meanwhile, the detective work goes on, supposedly undercover—until Takeaway shouts up to them in their hiding-place. The older boys become suspicious….
Harrison, of course, doesn’t see the danger-signs. It’s Dean, a confident climber of drainpipes, who discovers the dead boy’s wallet on a flat roof. They keep it as evidence they mean to take to the police eventually, but the older boys have become more suspicious than ever. They ambush the younger boys in the basketball court, unused since the murder took place there, and find the wallet. Things are looking very threatening, until the arrival of Lydia seems to save them. But it’s more complicated than that. It’s in a row she has with Miquita, who suffers Killa’s abuse so she can pose as his girlfriend, that Lydia refers to him as a murderer. Killa, clearly in shock, draws away from everyone, looking haunted and completely wired. Harrison, of course, thinks he’s safe.
And why wouldn’t he? He is thinking far more about his bid for acceptance and status among his schoolmates, which, surely, he can confirm in an upcoming race. He’ll be running against the only other boy with any chance of winning, and… Harrison is the one who wins. He’s made it, he’s reached the top, and he’s euphoric. As he and his school friends break up for the summer holidays, and his girlfriend Poppy confirms that they’ll be back together when she comes home from her European holiday (!), his success is assured. His long journey home begins… and we know how that’s going to end long before he does.
Meanwhile, what’s a pigeon to do? Earlier, there had been a section in which it had been mobbed by magpies, told from its point of view. Aside from the italicised text and the odd detail, this could almost be Harrison’s experience: ‘They came from nowhere, I didn’t have a chance to get ready. Four of them. First I feel a whuuump at my back, of breaking air and collapsing space. Before I can turn around he’s on top of me, the big male, he leans over my shoulder and sticks his black beak in my face, I see his beady eyes shining with dull intent, him and his cronies mean to make me pay for some perceived slight or another …’
This foretells Harrison’s stabbing, his ‘He came from nowhere.’ Now, as the blood makes a growing puddle on the lobby floor, he wonders if he is dreaming:
‘I looked up, you were perched there on the railing watching me, your pink eyes weren’t dead but full of love like a battery. I wanted to laugh but it hurt too much.
Me: You came. I knew you would.
Pigeon: Don’t worry, you’ll be going home soon. When it’s time to go I’ll show you the way.
Me: ‘Can’t I stay here?
Pigeon: It’s not up to me. You’ve been called home.
Me: It hurts. Do you work for God?’
…
‘Just relax. Everything’s going to be all right.’
There are a few lines more, as Harrison leaves the world. ‘I just wanted to remember. If I could remember it would be all right. Agnes’s tiny fat fingers and face. I couldn’t see it any more. All babies look the same.’
And that’s it.
We can read it for you wholesale 