The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
What your address says about you
Frances Wilson admires an ambitious study of how we label places – and the weird future of three-word postcodes
TTHE ADDRESS BOOK by Deirdre Mask 336pp, Profile, £16.99, ebook £8.12
his ambitious book is much broader and bolder than the title suggests. Deirdre Mask is only partly concerned with the significance of our addresses – why, for example, there are roads in Iran commemorating the Irish hunger striker Bobby Sands and streets in England that used to be called “Gropec---,” or what the 4,000 roads in Ukraine named after Lenin might otherwise be called. Her larger interest is in urban planning, but she also discusses the business of not having an address at all and what happens in those places, like Tokyo, where the streets have no name. Mask’s ultimate subject, however, is social and racial equality and, as she puts it, “how power has shifted and stretched over the centuries”.
The problem with writing about addresses is that you have to address everything from the building of the first clay hovel to the birth of the stamp, postcode and the internet. Accordingly,
Mask navigates her way from the slums of Kolkata to the straight lines of ancient Rome, via the numbered blocks of contemporary Tokyo, the westernisation of South Korea, the townships of South Africa, the epidemics of Victorian London, the design of New York, the restructure of Chicago, the earthquakes of San Francisco, the Irish Troubles, and the Iranian Revolution. The challenge for the reader is to keep up with her pace, because this is a journey filled with sudden diversions which lead to dead-ends, confusing crossroads, and no clear destination.
Between potted histories of cholera, the French Revolution and Japanese script, Mask’s argument is that addresses are a sign of identity: “In the modern world, you are your address.” An address is also a mark of democracy: only if you have an address are you entitled to vote. While street names can celebrate and instil collective memory – a problem when the street has different memories or chooses to remember different things – they are also a form of propaganda. Propaganda relies on simple messages and “what message”, Mask asks, “is more simple than a street-name?”
House numbers themselves were an Enlightenment project, part of the 18th-century obsession with rationality and equality. The idea of daubing numerals on to the walls of buildings was not to help us find our way around but to help others to find us out.
Houses hid their inhabitants but house numbers, Mask explains, gave the government “eyes”. Just as numbering loose sheets of paper gives them order, towns now became readable. Once property was identified, people could be taxed, rounded up for battle, named in censuses, put under arrest and imprisoned. House numbers, Mask shows, helped stop the 19th-century cholera epidemic by making it possible for officials to keep statistics, while in Manhattan the British numbered buildings in order to keep track of revolutionaries.
Not that numbering was necessarily logical. In New York the same numbers, randomly chosen, were used for several houses in a row, while in Victorian England, Rowland Hill, inventor of the modern postal system, complained that on one street the number 95 was flanked by numbers 14 and 16. When he asked the occupier why her house was not number 15, she explained that 95 had been the number of her previous address and so she simply removed the brass plate and took it with her. It was the equivalent of keeping the same phone number.
Today, buildings in Japan are numbered according to when they were built and in New York, Donald Trump changed the address of his Tower – “the most important new address in the world” – from 15 Columbus
Circle to 1 Central Park West.
The trouble was that Time Warner then built their own tower behind Trump Tower, whose address (25 Columbus Circle) they also changed to 1 Central Park West. Today, New Yorkers can pay $11,000 (£8,000) to change their address to something more appealing, while in London Deirdre Mask meets an architect working on a scheme by which people without homes can be given addresses regardless, thus helping them back into the workplace.
Addresses of the future will be weirdly robotic. In a scheme called what3words, Lycra-clad entrepreneurs have divided the world into three-metre squares and given each square a name made up of three nonsensical words which have nothing to do with commemoration, local culture or community spirit. The address of the Eiffel Tower is “daunting.evolves.nappy” and the middle of the Taj Mahal is “doubt.bombard.alley”. Used by the Mongolian postal service to deliver mail to nomadic families, what3words has the potential to become, for some people, their only address. Digital addresses will make some lives easier,
Mask concludes, “So why do I feel so sad?”
The 18th-century passion for equality and rationality led to house numbers
Just as Trinidad’s natural beauty and warm climate can blind tourists to its social deprivation, Ingrid Persaud’s vivacious prose style could almost make readers of her second novel overlook the violence at the heart of the story. I say almost because Persaud, like her fellow Trinidadian the late VS Naipaul, deftly exploits the potential in writing lightly of heavy subject matter.
Love After Love begins with a death, as long-suffering Betty snaps and kills her husband,
Sunil, after years of abuse. “That man only gave love you could feel,” recalls the widow, and it’s obvious that she and her teenage son, Solo, are better off without Sunil. After the death is deemed an accident, Betty takes in a lodger, Chetan, and the trio, who each take turns at narrating, live happily together. “I don’t want to
put goat mouth on it,” says Chetan, expressing his fear of tempting fate, “but days like this it’s as good as having my own family.” Their idyll is shattered, however, one night when Solo overhears Betty drunkenly confiding to Chetan about what happened to Sunil.
The boy is furious and leaves for New York, where he stays with his paternal uncle Hari. Back home, Betty is heartbroken while Chetan is coming to terms with his homosexuality – a complicated and dangerous thing in a place where homophobia is rife. “He spared my life but until you get planasse with the side of a cutlass you don’t know real licks,” says Chetan of the time his father attacked him for being “a buller man” then banished him to live on “the other side of the island”.
Later, Chetan meets a former lover and is shocked to hear that the man’s family accepted his sexuality. “His family loved him
no matter what,” says Chetan, which leaves him feeling unloved. Perhaps the novel’s title refers to the search for new love after old love dies. Solo is in denial about Sunil’s abusiveness, but Betty is reluctant to tell him the truth: “The shame would have been like getting the kicks and punches all over again.” Solo carries his own
sense of shame and cuts himself to displace his pain. At the lighter but no less truthful end of the spectrum, Persaud shows that one of the ludicrous paradoxes of not talking to your parents is that you keep hearing yourself talking like them: “Lord, I’m starting to sound like Mammy,” says Solo.
The three narrators’ voices are
distinctive and well-sustained. “When we were fed up playing we sit down, eat we belly full and relax we-self,” says Betty of a trip to a casino with her girlfriends. Persaud’s ear for dialect is unerring, she evokes a vivid sense of place and is particularly good at writing about cooking, listing the vegetables that go with curried cascadoux before enthusing: “I love that moment when the water hits the pot. It does be like a curry bomb exploding.” You can smell the spices and would be raring to get into the kitchen if only you could stop turning the pages of this enthralling book.
Trinidadian writers have a complicated relationship with Naipaul, but, reading Love
After Love, it’s difficult not to be reminded of the dialect and humour of his early novel Miguel Street (1959). In the chapters Persaud sets in New York, there are echoes, too, of Sam Selvon’s
Windrush classic The Lonely Londoners (1956), as Solo expresses his confusion at his new country’s quirks: “So, America have white people and people who look white but not white enough? This place crazy for truth.”
For the denouement, Persaud puts all her faith in the Aristotelian notion that offstage violence has the greatest impact. It’s a gamble, especially in a novel that thrives on the tensions generated by overlapping viewpoints, and it doesn’t entirely pay off. It feels abrupt to have one narrator delivering shocking news to another about somebody with whom the reader has lived for 350odd pages. But perhaps Persaud’s point is that, in reality, violence is never suspenseful and is usually a banal waste of human potential. Still, it is a jarring moment in an otherwise assured novel that, for all its concern with brutality, holds the reader in a joyful embrace.