London has lengthy been each literary character and setting, displaying its many various faces in fiction from Oliver Twist to Mrs Dalloway, Zadie Smith’s NW to Andrew O’Hagan’s newly revealed Caledonian Highway. Now Evenings and Weekends, the debut novel from an Irish spoken-word artist and playwright, captures its heady spirit throughout a heatwave in 2019, giving voice to the dilemmas of 30-year-old Londoners navigating queer identification, monetary precarity and emotional dedication.
Set largely over one sweltering June weekend, this vivid realist novel adroitly manoeuvres a sprawling interlocking forged across the hipster haunts of north and east London, together with Kingsland Highway, London Fields and the Hampstead Heath swimming ponds. Shifting between a number of views, Oisín McKenna interweaves particular person and collective expertise and anthropomorphises town as “a physique beneath stress, drenched in sweat and panting”.
His electrical, broadbrush vignettes of city life recall Kae Tempest’s novel The Bricks That Constructed the Homes and Vivian Gornick’s memoirs. Like Tempest, one other spoken-word artist, McKenna’s language is extremely sensory. Susceptible to lists and poetic repetitions, he prioritises rhythm and circulation over the avoidance of cliche: Dalston Superstore looks like “heaven on earth”. Some phrases are surprisingly awkward and pedestrian: “the pong of weed is normal”.
But his intimate prose plunges you into his characters’ psyches as every confronts a turning level. Maggie is 12 weeks pregnant and planning to offer up her artsy London life for suburban heteronormativity along with her boyfriend, Ed, a cycle courier with a secret. Maggie’s finest pal, Phil, is in love with his housemate, Keith, however he’s only a sideshow in Keith’s open relationship. Callum, Phil’s brother, is getting married, however he’s removed from sorted. A drug supplier liable to benders, he’s upset about his mum, Rosaleen. In the meantime, Rosaleen is attempting to inform Phil about her most cancers analysis. By their tales, the novel explores the problem of bridging the hole between our internal lives and the facade we current to the world, and of connecting throughout generational and emotional divides.
A public drama unfolds alongside these non-public ones: a whale has washed up on Bermondsey seashore, quick turning into an web sensation (the incident is clearly impressed by the three whales that beached in London in 2019). Because the characters go to, talk about and venture themselves on to it, the whale kinds a focus, connecting the dots between particular person and shared expertise.
Evenings and Weekends arrives on the heels of Keiran Goddard’s I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning, which traces the impact of dwindling alternative on younger working-class lives; financial necessity and life’s momentum have pressured each novels’ characters to put aside their desires. In the meantime, Holly Pester’s latest The Lodgers explores the impression of the housing disaster. In Evenings and Weekends, Maggie and Ed should endure a humid downside to afford Dalston, so asthmatic Ed wheezes as he works. Phil has discovered a group within the mouldy Bermondsey warehouse he shares with 11 others, however they “may very well be evicted at a second’s discover”. These characters are usually not 22, however round 30. Fairly than feeling excited concerning the child, Maggie can solely “shudder in disgrace at how ill-equipped she was to offer a steady future to herself, not to mention anybody else”.
McKenna has a knack for pathos and doesn’t shrink from tugging on heartstrings, significantly within the case of Rosaleen, whose Dublin upbringing in a poor Catholic household, self-doubt and behavior of self-repression have hobbled her capacity to precise herself. The mundanity of her interactions along with her husband and the banality of her Instagram submit in Westfield are so poignant that they border on pitying.
Phil’s storyline captures the longing and marginalisation of rising up homosexual in suburban Basildon, dreaming of escape. In his transferring depiction of out and closeted LGBTQ+ characters scuffling with their relationships, traumas and the precariousness of their very own freedom, McKenna has created a young portrait of latest queer London.
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For even because it utters a howl of rage at damaged, late-capitalist Britain, Evenings and Weekends is a love letter to town – the prospect it presents to forge your personal identification, and the interconnectedness of city life. Evoking the carefree summer season earlier than lockdown, it bottles the exhilaration of youthful need and risk, in addition to the accompanying instability.
