This Lovely City by Louise Hare

Debut novel featured on Sara Cox’s Between the Covers (Series 1 Ep. 4)

It’s set in London in 1948 and 1950 and focuses on the discovery of a body and how this impacts the lives of the two main characters Lawrie and Evi, who are a couple. Lawrie has arrived from Jamaica on Windrush, which docked at Tilbury in 1948, but it’s important to remember that mixed-race Evi (with Sierra Leonean and Irish heritage) is part of Britain’s mixed-race population that predates Windrush. The novel captures the different cultural needs of Evi, who has known no other country yet is in search of a community to belong to, and Lawrie as a 19-year-old Jamaican, dealing with disillusionment and homesickness in England, but who has a strong sense of identity.
The music scene plays an important part in the novel: it’s a bit of a side hustle for Lawrie and most of his band mates. It’s also a place of camaraderie and longer-term career options for the musicians, In reference to the pardner scheme, it reflects this black support network, which was to play an important part in black acquisition of property in the UK. The music scene when contrasted with other scenes in the book is also telling of a kind a racism that is more or less comfortable with black people as entertainers, but not necessarily as social equals in other respects (living next door, doing the same jobs, being bosses etc.). In reference to this Lawri says that he feels ‘trapped in a foreign land and used to parading himself before a paying audience’.
The novel portrays some of the iconic images of Windrush passengers in their trilby and fedora hats in one of the first descriptions of Lawrie after he comes home after a night playing his clarinet with the band. It also describes the air raid shelter in Clapham, which accommodated Windrush arrivals who didn’t have places to go when they first got here, making me as a Londoner curious to know more about some of the legacies of World War II in the capital.

Although it deals with some uncomfortable topics, it’s a very good read. I can’t wait to see what Louise Hare has in store for us with her second novel, which is out next year.


FloMar

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