Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English is a deeply disturbing book. This scenario playing out around the life of its main character and narrator, Harrison Opoku, always feels uncomfortably real. For the most part, these are scenes that inner-city dwellers go through every day, while the outcome is thankfully still rare, despite the fact that such events often seem like everyday occurrences.
Harrison Opoku is eleven years old, seventh year of secondary school for British readers. He is into many things that interest inner-city children. He is athletic and regularly tells us that he is fast, he is faster than most, especially when he wears his brand new trainers, if brand logos can be drawn on felt tip, that is. However, we doubt that the evaluation of him is based on anything more than a competitive race to the next lamppost along a sidewalk where there are only a few old ladies and gentlemen.
It’s prone to youthful exaggeration, and most experiences are the best, biggest, and coolest in at least a million years. He is also prone to the novelty of youth, where the mundane is revealed as special. This is one of the great achievements of Stephen Kelman, in the sense that one feels authentically inside the psyche of this almost pubescent boy without being forced to live the experience.
Harri is competitive and regularly awards himself points in imaginary games that often involve activities as spectacular as spotting particular governments going around inside a laundry machine. He lives in a tower in a place that looks like London but could be anywhere in Britain. One feels an oppression, a claustrophobia that permeates the thoughts of everyone involved. It’s all local, to the point where the end of the street is actually quite far away.
Harrison Opoku, however, was not born in Britain. He came from Ghana and still has vivid memories of his African family and culture. However, to say that he is a son of two worlds, or of two cultures, would be a mistake. Harry lives his own life, the only life he has, and it comes with whatever amalgamation of beliefs and cultures he has assimilated so far. He is a black, African boy, it is true, but labeling him as such ignores that the greatest influence in his life is the here and now. And the here and now is the city center of Great Britain.
He goes to school, where he meets some teachers who get by and some who don’t. School is a priority, but seems to be very low on the list. Her friends and acquaintances largely attend the same institution and some of them can be trusted while others can be trusted to screw you. Some of them steal your dinner money. Some of them sell you drugs. Some of them stick compass points in your thigh to make you scream in class and get in trouble. Some of them carry knives. And use them.
In this great anonymous city, Harry inhabits a rather small world. He has a crush on Poppy, who thinks she might be with him too. He never strays far from his home, because that may be someone else’s territory, a different gang, who probably treats him like an immigrant. And there has been a problem. A child is dead, stabbed, and the police have intervened at the scene of the crime. But for Harri, what has happened is close to home, perhaps too close, and he decides to solve the crime that currently baffles the police. He devises a strategy and plays to its enactment. This involves becoming an expert in fingerprints, in making footprint casts, in noticing and collecting evidence. Someone must surely be noticing his activity.
Throughout Pigeon English, Harri talks to the pigeon that picks up the food he leaves outside his window. The pigeon seems to know what Harry himself suspects. And so we move between the serious and the playful, the real and the fictional, with boundaries marked by zip codes, street names, and imagining lives that only those involved can see. We learn to inhabit the world of this eleven-year-old boy, to share his novelty and understand his reality.
Investigating a murder, dodging drug dealers, staying out of cracks in the pavement, it’s all a game. Until it isn’t.