When you look with your eyes, everything seems nice. But if you look twice you can see it’s all lies¹.

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton (Penguin)
Pages: 292
Type: Fiction
Age: Adult
ISBN: 978-0-2411-4414-5
First Published: 27th August 2012
Date Reviewed: 29th December 2012
Rating: 5/5

Leah opened the door to the desperate girl seeking money for a taxi to the hospital. Later she found out the girl was not who she seemed to be. It’s just another mistake in a long line of mistakes and disappointments for Leah, who has a good relationship with her French husband but many issues that she has not spoken about to anyone. Then there is Natalie, or Keisha, Leah’s best friend who seems to have a perfect life and a great job. And there is Felix who plans to be married and works at a garage. The characters’ stories may not always be connected, but for one element: London.

NW is a particularly experimental novel that explores the plight of those in the less wealthy suburbs of London; the ways in which they live, the ways they are stuck in their current lives, and the ways in which they try to move up in the world. The storytelling is split into three sections – experimental, regular storytelling, and a series of vignettes. Each section roughly focuses on a different character to present an overall visual of urban London.

The busy complicated writing of the experimental section mirrors the madness of London. For example there is one chapter in which Smith includes lines of songs in the middle of a description of a market, incorporating too a description of the individual people. Any confusion caused by the experimental writing (for example a lack of speech marks) is offset by the sheer artistry of the work – a chapter where words are used to form a tree, a visual painted with words, or the chapter called 37 that is about that number and is located on page 37. The vignettes, the latter section, demonstrate that one doesn’t have to include everything to create an effective and fully-described story, especially considering Smith titles each with a summary. So it is the case that just when you think the whole book is going to be ambiguous, because the experimentation goes on for a long tine, Smith turns to traditional storytelling. Indeed it could be argued that the length of the first section is a test for the reader, to see whether they trust Smith enough to go along with it, before the regular narrative takes shape in part two.

Owing to the different characters, the book does not have a linear narrative, and indeed the stories do not connect as much as the reader might assume they would do. The novel is more of a look at London and its people; the relationship between Natalie and Leah being an exercise in comparisons to show the effects of choices on a life, the different effects that “going up in the world” and staying where you were born can both have the same impact, as well as the impacts you would more commonly associate with the other – a switching of life happenings if you will.

Thus the book involves expectations. Expectations of parents for their children, unvoiced expectations, and those we place on ourselves. And what happens when expectations are met but do not satisfy? – Smith provides answers through the choices of her characters.

The story is mostly concerned with the successors of immigrants, Leah being the sole “main character” of white descent. This gives Smith the scope to view events from many angles and to highlight, if in subtext rather than words, the ordinariness of the life of the second generation.

On the way back from the chain supermarket where they shop, though it closed down the local grocer and pays slave wages, with new bags though they should take old bags, leaving with broccoli from Kenya and tomatoes from Chile and unfair coffee and sugary crap and the wrong newspaper.

You would expect such a book as the one described to be somewhat cheerless and to a certain extent that is exactly what NW is. But then the pressures of life are bound to be greater for many in a place which such a focus and determination as London has. NW shows how it can be for those living in a capital when they don’t quite fit the publicised demographic, and in doing so demonstrates how even those who want to change their status can find it difficult. Smith shows a glimpse of the way out, providing an alternative even if it is difficult or impossible to get there. Indeed it is this impossibility that makes the book poignant and at once both timeless and grounded in current affairs.

It may be different, it may be odd, it may present the important in new and sometimes baffling ways, but that is the way Smith chose to say what she wanted to say and as an overall product it works very well.

¹ “LDN” by Lily Allen.

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