Lead Review
- Book: Edgware Road
- Location: North London
- Author: Yasmin Cordery Khan
3.75*
Much of the novel is set around Edgware Road, top of Park Lane and going West. There is also a trip to Karachi and some of the novel is set in Oxford, which mixes it up a little. The story is set partly in the 1980s and moves on into the early 2000s. The author manages the timelines terrifically well and captures the feel both of time and place. Back in the 1980s, there is mention of Wimpy’s and one of the characters drives a Datsun (remember those?), and she slides in other ephemera that set the novel firmly in the era. She inserts familiar people like Adnan Kashoggi (arms dealer) and Victor Lownes (Mr Bunny Club / Playboy Enterprises), and even Hugh Hefner drops in. The demise of the BCCI Bank, and the money laundering at its heart, also features and feels like a precursor to what is going on in oligarch-land today. The story will particularly appeal to readers who are familiar with the period.
1980s. Khalid Quraishi has landed in London from Pakistan and has a daughter Alia with Suzie. He has a deep seated gambling issue and has to hustle to keep his life on the straight and narrow. It works on occasion but his desire to live the good, ritzy life is overpowering, and he manages his life accordingly. It does not, however, predispose him to being a particularly interactive and responsible family man.
Going into the 2000s, the novel picks up on his daughter Alia’s story. She is in Oxford teaching English on a short term contract at the university. Her father simply disappeared from her life when she was quite young, and then subsequently his body washed up in the sea. She has a sense that he was perhaps murdered, given his flighty lifestyle and his desire to improve his lot; discovering the truth of his demise very much becomes her quest. She needs to understand why he didn’t make the rendezvous with her at the tube station of the title and he then never contacted her again. We know why early on.
The writer is hugely talented and really takes her readers with her. The trajectory of the narrative is a good one, yet I feel there are some weaknesses. The elements that make up this story seem a little boxy – there is indeed an elision and juxtaposition but the connecting stories sometimes sit together just a little uneasily. It feels like she might have chosen the elements she wanted to include in her novel, right at the outset, and then determinedly strove to feed them in, even though the narrative perhaps was organically finding a life of its own and heading elsewhere. For example, politician Mark Denby slides in, but he doesn’t feel like an overly helpful or interesting addition to the narrative. The fate of BCCI plays a reasonably important part and given the weight accorded to the dark shenanigans of the bank, it doesn’t to my mind significantly add to the story. I just so wanted the author to flesh out her characters – they were sketched, with such consummate potential, that it seemed a shame not to capitalise on them.
This is a talented author, who has a strong writing style and I look forward to seeing where she goes next.
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