Andrew Braithwaite

Forget Shakespeare, Tennyson, Dickens: the torch of the British wordsmith lately finds itself burning in the hands of, uh, hip-hop MCs? With the UK's underground hip-hop creeping into the U.S., rappers like Mike Skinner (aka The Streets) and Dizzee Rascal have become ambassadors of England's penchant for linguistic artistry. So who better to continue the exposure of Anglo wordplay to the MTV kids than a performance poet and DJ from London?

Novelist Patrick Neate's story revolves around seven friends--"twirtysomethings," as he calls those whose ages hover on either side of three dimes--ten years removed from college and leading respectable, if zestless, London existences. The crippling state of stasis that's crept into their lives becomes self-evident when Murray rolls into town like an impish ghost pulling a bag of Cat-in-the-Hat tricks. Murray, the madcap college friend who's been AWOL for ten years, returns to pull his mates' lives out of the London doldrums. As it happens, he's also linked to the event named in the book's title. Neate intertwines his friendly spice-up-your-life story with short meditations on the notion of pigeon memory and consciousness, told through the voice of an old pigeon named Ravenscourt.

Ravenscourt narrates the story of the factioning of the pigeon population--initiated by an event known as "Trafalgar," where the future leaders of two pigeon armies tussle over the remnants of Murray's discarded box of KFC. The old bird's speeches appear as short interludes between chapters of the principal narrative. Employing the voice of Ravenscourt, Neate instills playfulness and the charm of London street vernacular into the deliberations. The pigeon language is slick and inventive, both in its rhythm and in a lexicon that takes a couple of chapters to grasp: the prose is littered with references to "geez" (dudes), "coochies" (ladies), "peepnicks" (those silly humans), and "squirms" (worms, of course).

Ultimately, it's the distinctive language and the smooth interconnectedness of the two stories that pushes Neate's work beyond a simple story of yuppie renewal. The pigeons go to war and disrupt everyday London, Murray recalibrates his friends' bounce, and Neate tells it all with a winking mischievousness and that sexy, grimy London cadence. Know wha' I mean?

The London Pigeon Wars

By Patrick Neate

Farrar Straus &Giroux, $24, 272 pages

(2004-06-22)

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