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A review by spygrl1
City of Tiny Lights by Patrick Neate
3.0
I have been waiting a few days to write about this book because I wasn't sure what I thought or how I felt about it. But now I've finished Intuition and I'm itching to try to explain how incredibly kick ass it is, so I have to deal with Tiny Lights first, and I guess the contrast kinda clarifies things.
I adored Neate's London Pigeon Wars. OK, I didn't always get the pigeon parts, the weird bird patois, but I stuck with it and I can't immediately recall any other literary ending that has affected me so deeply.
City of Tiny Lights shares one obvious trait with Pigeon Wars: a nearly incomprehensible patois. This time it's not British pigeons, it's just Brits. It's modern noir recounted by a suitably debauched and haunted detective (a Paki detective, really a Ugandan-Indian-British detective). I was out of my depth with the slang and the references -- particularly that damn Cockney rhyming slang. Porkies = pork pies = lies. Why all the bother? What's wrong with just saying "lies"?
It's not just the language; it's the culture. The book is a detective story, sure, but it's a detective story that touches on ethnicity and class and politics and terrorism and civil liberties and bombings ... and I'm sure that if I lived in London I would have been getting more out of it. It's not that I can't grasp the concept of racism or classism, but the divides in England are not quite the same as those in America. The prejudices and the stereotypes are different.
Synopsis:,/b> Tommy Akhtar seems to live on a steady diet of booze and cigarettes. His story open in classic noir fashion -- looking back, he should have shoved the dame right outta his office. Of all the gin joints in all the world, she had to walk into his, ya know? The dame's a chesty hooker who wants Tommy to track down her ho-mate. Tommy soon finds that the Russian pro's disappearance coincides in time, place, and manner with the bloody bludgeoning of a politico. And from there it's nothing but trouble.
I adored Neate's London Pigeon Wars. OK, I didn't always get the pigeon parts, the weird bird patois, but I stuck with it and I can't immediately recall any other literary ending that has affected me so deeply.
City of Tiny Lights shares one obvious trait with Pigeon Wars: a nearly incomprehensible patois. This time it's not British pigeons, it's just Brits. It's modern noir recounted by a suitably debauched and haunted detective (a Paki detective, really a Ugandan-Indian-British detective). I was out of my depth with the slang and the references -- particularly that damn Cockney rhyming slang. Porkies = pork pies = lies. Why all the bother? What's wrong with just saying "lies"?
It's not just the language; it's the culture. The book is a detective story, sure, but it's a detective story that touches on ethnicity and class and politics and terrorism and civil liberties and bombings ... and I'm sure that if I lived in London I would have been getting more out of it. It's not that I can't grasp the concept of racism or classism, but the divides in England are not quite the same as those in America. The prejudices and the stereotypes are different.
Synopsis:,/b> Tommy Akhtar seems to live on a steady diet of booze and cigarettes. His story open in classic noir fashion -- looking back, he should have shoved the dame right outta his office. Of all the gin joints in all the world, she had to walk into his, ya know? The dame's a chesty hooker who wants Tommy to track down her ho-mate. Tommy soon finds that the Russian pro's disappearance coincides in time, place, and manner with the bloody bludgeoning of a politico. And from there it's nothing but trouble.