The perilous porousness between our on-line and offline worlds is the spark for Nicolas Padamsee’s tinderbox thriller about two teenage boys. Deeply astute and devastating in its commentary on immigrant communities, England Is Mine joins a brand new era of politically charged novels – together with Megha Majumdar’s A Burning and Priya Weapons’s Your Driver Is Ready – in exposing the facility and pitfalls of on-line platforms.
Two youths, David and Hassan, whose intertwined tales are instructed by turns, are college students on the similar faculty in east London. David is a strict vegan and has few buddies. He doesn’t plan on going to school (“There could be no studying novels anyway, he thinks. There would solely be criticising novels for his or her heteronormativity, their whiteness, their Europeanness, their whateverness”). As an Anglo-Iranian, he perpetually feels the burden of the query “The place are you from?” His mother and father are divorced. Between caring for his susceptible father on the one hand, and bickering along with his overbearing however well-meaning mom on the opposite, he’s pressured to flit between two homes however not often feels at dwelling.
He places all his religion and teenage angst into music – and his hero, Karl Williams, harking back to Morrissey from the Smiths. A collection of bigoted feedback get the singer-songwriter in hassle, and, quickly sufficient, he’s cancelled. The information additional unmoors David. Slowly at first, then very swiftly, he begins to lose himself to the far-right corners of the darkish internet – stuffed with trolls, rows and racists.
In the meantime, Hassan, a West Ham fan, dutiful son and diligent scholar, is drifting other than his childhood buddies, who care much less about grades and extra about medication and ingesting. He finds it onerous to shrug off feedback that reveal “the way in which white folks in Britain see Muslims”, and is set to defy false perceptions and get into Goldsmiths. However a violent, racially motivated encounter in a park involving each boys radically alters their life trajectories.
Scarred by this occasion, David begins to lose his sense of self. He lets himself fall prey to – and finally take part in – the anti-Islam rhetoric to which he’s uncovered on-line. Hassan, who was an harmless bystander, turns into his enemy and due to this fact his sufferer. Within the pages that comply with, he’s diminished to nothing greater than “the Muslim” in David’s thoughts; David turns into “the Aryan”. Now, there’s no room for nuance.
The tempo, which is skilfully sustained by way of 300 pages, quickens as notifications from Twitter (now known as X) and YouTube pile-ons hold telephones buzzing, then steadies as the 2 boys face violent moments within the streets. Whether or not David is within the mosh pit at a gig or caught up in Name of Responsibility, whether or not Hassan is enjoying on-line Fifa or volunteering for a Muslim Youth Centre helpline, the novel by no means loses sight of the reader, whether or not they will relate to gamer and soccer tradition or not.
Padamsee tackles tough points – cancel tradition, freedom of speech, on-line radicalism and neo-nazism, masculinity, racial identification, and herd mentality – with a deftness uncommon for debuts. For his second-generation immigrants, searching for some semblance of belonging in an alienating world, the stakes get ever larger.
As the 2 youngsters come of age – their beliefs hardened, their hearts damaged – we’re left questioning our politics and ethics. Who attracts the traces between proper and left, proper and flawed, and what occurs when these traces are redrawn, or fully erased? England is mine. England is mine. England is mine. When the nation you name dwelling doesn’t think about you one in every of its personal, who or what is going to you reside – or die – for? Typically all you’re left with are determined, hole cries at the hours of darkness.
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