The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
This novel makes even radicalisation drab
Nicolas Padamsee’s tale of unhappy young men has good intentions, but reads like a liberal thinkpiece
334pp, Serpent’s Tail, T £14.99 (0808 196 6794), RRP£16.99, ebook £9.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ
Nicolas Padamsee’s debut novel, England Is Mine, is a story of radicalisation. Its dual narrative switches between David, an increasingly disaffected teenager of mixed Iranian and British heritage, and Hassan, an east Londoner and David’s college coeval whose life pivots around a Muslim youth centre and his father’s takeaway. This switch between perspectives is a helpful study in contrasts; but as well as signposting the young men’s inevitable collision, it quickly seems more like the presentation of archetypes than of two rich inner worlds.
When we meet David, he’s obsessed with a thinly-veiled Morrissey-type singer, called Karl Williams, who soon finds himself “cancelled” for expressing Islamophobic sentiments on stage. This leads to tension and debate at home, not least with David’s stepsister Zoe, who – in one of many examples of dialogue that feels like a Guardian column shoved into quotation marks – tells David: “Speech isn’t harmless. It has consequences. If it had no consequences, what would be the point of protecting it in the first place?”
Padamsee edits the magazine Arts Against Extremism, one aim of which is to promote writing that goes about “blurring black-andwhite narratives and encouraging empathy”. Yet David, it’s made clear from the off, is an ideal candidate, to the point of caricature, for being hoovered up by the alt-Right-incel world. He’s isolated, resentful and fractured; the freedom and belonging he feels when watching Karl, his idol, is something rare, something he can’t articulate to his former military father, who “is now a general handyman hirable on TaskRabbit”. David’s feelings of powerlessness are exacerbated when he’s bullied, and later assaulted, by a group of Muslim boys from his sixth-form college, ending in his being urinated on in an underpass.
Meanwhile, Hassan is distancing himself from old friends – the same boys who micturated on David – as their marijuana-smoking and belligerence comes to seem alien and old hat. He gains confidence through a telephone befriending scheme via his local mosque, spending a regular hour on the phone with the lonely local elderly. Yet after an attack by an Islamist terrorist in Paris, Hassan is also assaulted in the street, leading to some further sociologyvia-dialogue: “There have been Islamophobic hate crimes
everywhere,” Hassan’s mother tells him (and us). “I have heard about people being threatened, harassed, intimidated, assaulted and all the rest… It is so predictable.”
The same terrorist attack proves the catalyst for David’s longforeshadowed plunge into Aryanism and outright hate. He begins to plan a real-life, rather than virtual, assault on those he sees as the enemy within, with a little help from a gun bought on the dark web. But after even his beloved Karl betrays him, by recanting some of those comments about Islam, what’s left to play out is a sordid sort of misery, once again painted with the broadest brush: “David raises the toilet seat and takes a p--s, fixing on the flecks of s--t in the bowl. This is his way of cleaning it… A 21st-century Aryan knight.”
There’s something to be said for Padamsee wanting to focus on the banality of this brand of evil. David, an avid gamer, posts the inevitable online manifesto before his real-life mission, and kits himself out to look like a Call of Duty avatar. (“That it only cost a tenner,” he thinks, “is remarkable.”) The final set-piece is well rendered, and there’s something slightly harder than dramatic irony in David’s Iranian heritage and the eventual reception of his actions both online and in the press; this speaks to the flattened discourse that attends such atrocities.
It’s a pity, however, that in looking to reproduce the tone and syntax of various linguistic cesspools, Padamsee’s own prose style has to be sacrificed. It’s clear that he can craft visually rich sentences: “The blue and pink Cinderella wardrobe by the communal bins of the Mendip Road council flats looks comically out of place. A van with lemon eyes fusses past.” But too many sentences are expositional: “He should have spat at Hassan and made it clear there will never be sharia law in England, not while he is alive.” England Is Mine is full of social commentary that may be authentic, but is rarely artful.