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In Our Mad and Furious City

Guy Gunaratne

Start date: July 23, 2018

Finish date: September 20, 2018

Discussion: 2018 Longlist [MBP]

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2018 Longlist [MBP]

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What Members Thought

Jul 15, 2018 ns510 rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: man-booker-nominees

Loved this! An urgent, exciting tale of contemporary London, and those who live on its margins. I would love to see it on the Booker longlist this year! (update 24/7/18: it has been longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize!)

Isn’t it strange to think of how one city has many faces, and people can go their whole lives knowing a certain version of the city they live in, never knowing what another’s experience might be like.

”See London. This city taints it’s young. If you were from here you’d know, Loved this! An urgent, exciting tale of contemporary London, and those who live on its margins. I would love to see it on the Booker longlist this year! (update 24/7/18: it has been longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize!)

Isn’t it strange to think of how one city has many faces, and people can go their whole lives knowing a certain version of the city they live in, never knowing what another’s experience might be like.

”See London. This city taints it’s young. If you were from here you’d know, ennet. All our faces were pinched sour, even the good few I spent my early way with. We were all born into the menace from day dot.”

The story takes us to a housing estate community in London, made up mainly of struggling immigrants from various places of origin. First generation immigrants have different experiences to the younger ones who were born and raised in the city, but there is a sense of community and identity all the same. We meet a cast of five characters from the Estate, all with varied issues, their lives interconnected. A common theme is their internal struggle, social tensions, and how racism, violence and terrorism continually rears its ugly head, just with different facades. How do you live in a city like this? Forever angry and menacing? It will either make you or break you. In the acknowledgments, the author mentions this being a story of survival. It is that, but also of the continual cycle of love and hate and what you choose to become, the path you then take, in the face of it.

I really liked and admired the author’s writing style and how he chose to structure the novel. The novel is bookended by a prologue and epilogue, and divided into three main parts, which is further divided into three sections. Each section allows us to spend time with each of the five characters, and this is through a first person POV. This worked great as it allowed you to know them more intimately, in their own vernacular. I loved how there were subtle variations to the language used, reflecting a character’s unique heritage and upbringing, e.g. British road slang ‘bruv, bare’ vs Caribbean patois ‘wa-gwaan’ vs Irish ‘aye, like’. Interestingly, the younger ones seem to use a blend of these colloquialisms, forming a unique contemporary street language all its own.

I found each character interesting, and became more invested in each as the story went on. There was enough of a discernment to each person’s voice, and each character either grew or revealed more of themselves as the story went on. The friendship between the three young boys felt poignant, a source of camaraderie and brightness in a place that can feel claustrophobic and difficult to escape. An overarching narrative arc propelled the story along, and I couldn’t stop reading till I got to the end.

This was just so good. Ticked all the boxes for me; informative, intellectually stimulating, emotional connection, great characters, plot...I could go on. Certainly mad and furious, but also nuanced and accomplished and exciting -all the more so for a debut novel! There were a few little niggles, but nothing I couldn’t get past. I’m excited to see what the author comes up with next! ...more

20 likes · Like · see review

Jul 23, 2018 Rachel rated it it was amazing

Shelves: booker-2018, own, covers-i-love, 2018, literary-fiction

In Our Mad and Furious City is a frenetic and imperfect but unforgettable feat from debut writer Guy Gunaratne. Set in London over the course of two days, it tells the story of three boys and two of their parents, against the backdrop of an incipient riot caused by a local boy killing a British soldier. Yusuf, Selvon, and Ardan are three friends who live in or around a Neasden housing estate, trying to make a future for themselves in a city fraught with violence and extremism.

This book is a defi In Our Mad and Furious City is a frenetic and imperfect but unforgettable feat from debut writer Guy Gunaratne. Set in London over the course of two days, it tells the story of three boys and two of their parents, against the backdrop of an incipient riot caused by a local boy killing a British soldier. Yusuf, Selvon, and Ardan are three friends who live in or around a Neasden housing estate, trying to make a future for themselves in a city fraught with violence and extremism.

This book is a defiant look at the classism, racial tensions, and anti-immigration sentiment that plague not only post-Brexit Britain, but also the previous generation's Britain; it deals in the enduring and intractable nature of violence and the ways in which that ties into national identity for the second-generation immigrants whose voices propel the novel forward. The violence in this novel isn't specifically tied to one race or religion - one of the older characters reflects on fleeing Northern Ireland during the Troubles; another remembers arriving in London from the Caribbean only to find himself confronted with the Keep Britain White movement in the 1950s. Gunaratne's depiction of the cyclical and relentless nature of violence can be disheartening, but this novel is more about the choices the characters make, the strength it requires to turn away from brutality and not engage with it.

Written entirely in different dialects whose cadences and vocabularies vary depending on whose point of view chapter it is (one family is from Ireland, another from Montserrat, another from Pakistan), Gunaratne's prose is gritty and colloquial but also elevated to the level you'd expect from a literary novel (something that Sebastian Barry failed to do convincingly in Days Without End, I thought, but which Gunaratnre manages with aplomb here - I was simultaneously convinced by the authenticity of the narration and impressed by the prose).

So here it all is, this London. A place that you can love, make rhymes out of pyres and a romance of the colours, talk gladly of the changes and the flux and the rise and the fall without feeling its storm rain on your skin and its bone-scarring winds, a city that won't love you back unless you become insoluble to the fury, the madness of bound and unbound peoples and the immovables of the place.

But, as I mentioned above, I don't think it's a perfect novel; the frantic pace leads a few unwieldy moments, like the awkward inclusion of a sixth point of view character for only a single chapter, or Gunaratne not giving the novel's climax much room to breathe. I couldn't help but to think it could have been improved by another 50 or so pages, but at the same time, it's such a snapshot piece that in a way I admire all Gunaratne was able to achieve with its brevity.

Only halfway through the Booker list, but this one feels like a winner. ...more

20 likes · Like · see review

Jul 24, 2018 Robert rated it really liked it

In keeping with the themes emerging from this years’ Man Booker Longlist, In our Mad and Furious City focuses on the environment and the individual. In this case the city is in question is London, more specifically the housing estate areas and the cast is a diverse and multi-racial one.

There isn’t a plot per se. What the reader is presented is five viewpoints, all interconnected and all are representative of life in London and how this city makes them act. There’s Irish Immigrant Caroline, a vic ...more

9 likes · Like · see review

Aug 15, 2018 Tommi rated it liked it

Shelves: manbooker-2018, goldsmiths-2018

3.5 -> 3

What a fine debut novel, fresh and quickly read. Yet, I thought there was a little too much packed in here, and therefore it falls short of a coherent whole – although one could argue that the heterogeneity is partly the point, a true depiction of the novel’s location. The ending was brilliant, but it didn’t compensate enough for some of the elements earlier, like the only female character’s story classically revolving around rape, doubly so. I appreciated the different voices here, and ...more

9 likes · Like · see review

Aug 29, 2018 Gwendolyn rated it it was amazing

This novel takes place over 48 hours in the lives of three young men living in or very near the projects (i.e. estates) of London. It’s a hard, gritty, and unforgiving environment with little hope for escape. The boys’ fathers are absentee, dead, or severely handicapped, and except for the case of Arden, the mothers are mostly off-scene as well. Keeping with the trend these days, the story is told in alternating perspectives, shifting between characters at a fast clip—just a handful of pages for ...more

3 likes · Like · see review

Sep 03, 2018 Kelly rated it really liked it

Shelves: man-booker-2018

Is this just going to be a contrary year with the longlist in the sense that every book I was excited about disappoints and every one I was ambivalent about is amazing? Literary gods take note: I am fine with that if I can be wrong and read some good literature in the process.

If In a Mad and Furious City doesn’t make the shortlist I will be shocked. It features a diverse, if small, cast of characters all living within the parameter of a less affluent London borough. Three of the main narrators - ...more

1 like · Like · see review

Dec 09, 2019 Wesley rated it liked it

Shelves: booker-2018

My ranking of the 2018 Booker Longlist:
1. Milkman
2. Everything Under
3. Mars Room
4. The Long Take
5. The Water Cure
6. From a Low and Quiet Sea
7. The Overstory
8. Sabrina
9. Washington Black
10. In Our Mad and Furious City
11. Normal People
12. Warlight
13. Snap

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