Night Time in London
Whatever happened to the London night? This is is the question that Sukhdev Sandhu asks in his new project, the first part of which is now available on the web. The point of this “midnight traipse across the metropolis” is partly to protest against the morphing of “the London night” into something called “London nightlife” ruled by real-estate moguls, foreign investors, film directors, etc. But it also partly to restore to the city and to night-time a sense of the street, crime, poetry and grime.
For those who have read and enjoyed Sandhu’s London Calling the new project promises pleasures that one can be sure only this writer knows how to handle: a trudge through miles of sewers under the city; nocturnal travels in military helicopters with night-vision cameras; hours in the night spent with the nuns of Tyburn who pray for the souls of Londoners; midnights with the marine patrol on the Thames as they fish for corpses; jamming with East London DJs in towerblocks infested by the police. At one point in London Calling Sandhu had this to say about the writings of V.S. Naipaul: “Naipaul’s prose, so often praised by writers and critics, is crucial to understanding how narrow is his vision of London. He eschews embellished sentences, seeing in them evidence of mendacity and obfuscation. He prefers his sentences scalped and peeled. They are shorn of excess, of anything that might be considered ‘fine writing.’ As a result each page resembles a barren landscape, an emotional tundra. His paragraphs, weighted and measured, never arc or spin or fizz out of control. They are as heavy as breeze blocks–and about as aesthetically pleasing. They do not generate new rhythms. Nor do they experiment with syntax, just as none of his characters dares to embrace the sprawl and chaos of the city, but step back prudishly, sipping without gulping. In his books London is sapped of its vitality. His writing, then, may be graceful, but is metropolitan rather than urban. It lacks the vulgarity, the quickstep neologisms, the amped-up figetiness of the best London literature.” I had read lots of criticism of Naipaul before, but none that had been advanced on behalf of the street. There was no breast-beating about civilization; only a love-letter addressed to the city. This difference will now only grow. Because for Sandhu, it is a good thing that any place is an area of darkness.
Sukhdev is good on Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners in his book ‘London Calling’ - a novel that sparks the page with new rhythms, vernaculars, mixing registers and bringing Caribbean speech and language to tell the episodic story about the lives of 1950’s Caribbean Londoners. But that novel itself, whilst describing the gusto of the characters existence, their hustling comedy and adventures, also has a deep swell of melancholy, loneliness, even alienation and ‘emotional tundra’ lying beneath the narration of Moses.
Sukhdev criticizes on the basis that Naipaul’s sentences are not imitative of the excitement, looseness, edginess and dirty hustle of what London represents for him personally – but all this says is that it is not mimetic of how he views London. Which is fair enough, but it does not meet Naipaul on his own plane – it speaks on the assumption that London can only be rendered one way, that London writing must be only about ‘the streets’.
And to categorise this as a ‘narrow vision’ of London seems to me erroneous – Naipaul’s work contains depths if you disregard the mimetic fallacy – that prose and sentences have to represent in some way the ‘sprawl and energy’ of London, and it misses the point – that the way Naipaul writes about London tells you exactly what you need to know about his work’s response to the city – the loneliness, pitilessness, anonymity, fear, coldness. There is a kind of disapproval in Sukhdev’s description of how ‘none of his characters dares to embrace the sprawl and chaos of the city, but step back prudishly, sipping without gulping’. But maybe that is the whole point?
To describe this as a narrow vision simply because it does not concur with a grand vision of the city seems a narrow perception in itself. And it does a disservice to London – London, the greatest city, is all things, all landscapes, dirty, refined, fading, energetic, depressed, chaste, sluttish, intimidating, liberating. London contains everything – all responses to her are legitimate.
Comment by Harpreet — February 8, 2006 @ 6:02 pm