Writing Against a Fixed Lexicon of Terrorism in Patrick Neate's

Yvonne Rosenberg ‘Stop Thinking Like an Englishman’ or: Writing Against a Fixed Lexicon of Terrorism in Patrick Neate’s City of Tiny Lights (2005) In a post-9/11 geopolitical climate, Tommy Akhtar, the protagonist of Patrick Neate’s novel City of Tiny Lights – published in 2005 shortly before the 7/7 bombings – lives a life of various identities in multi-ethnic London: a Ugandan-Indian, a ‘Paki’, an ex-mujahideen, Marlowe- wannabe, cosmopolitan, Londoner, and an Englishman. Yet, he always stays in the position of the immigrant because the often limited contemporary view of the other has led to the perception of internally homogeneous groups. In the course of the novel, it becomes clear how central the issue of fixed labels is in a society characterised by the linguistic and cultural need to taxonomise, securing apparently coherent identities. This article has two closely connected goals. The first is to discuss racial and cultural identity as metaphysical concepts, which inflammatory reporting, however, has often engrained in society as biological facts. The second and more important aim is to stress the need to re-formulate seemingly fixed concepts like alterity and terrorism in order to open up perception and to avoid racial stereotyping. Therefore, I will analyse the connection between the construction of meaning, the linguistic games and the cultural codes in Neate’s novel. London-born author Patrick Neate, who won the 2001 Whitbread Novel Award for his second novel Twelve Bar Blues, has a strong interest in writing about questions of identity, ethnicity, and racial discrimination. In his latest novel City of Tiny Lights1 he tackles problematic issues of contemporary multi- cultural metropolitan life, such as racialised anxiety and white narcissism, in a post-Chandleresque detective plot. The text is steeped in images of cross- cultural urban life in a geopolitical climate after 9/11: published in 2005, shortly before the 7/7 bombings, the novel deals with several attacks on the London underground. The prototypical setting of a hard-boiled detective novel is the American metropolis: like Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, the main characters of traditional American detective fiction tend to be ambivalent and non-locatable, walking the line between good and evil in a corrupt and often violent society. In contrast, classic English gentleman detective fiction is often set in London or the countryside, presenting a more or less idealised society, which is disturbed by a mysterious murder, as epitomised by Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. Placing an ethnic hard-boiled sleuth in London discloses the heterogeneity, 1 Patrick Neate, City of Tiny Lights (New York: Riverhead Books, 2006). All further references appear parenthetically in the text. 356 Yvonne Rosenberg individuality and inconceivability of the British metropolis and its inhabitants. As the narrator-protagonist in Patrick Neate’s novel puts it: ‘Amazing all the worlds you never see in this city because of your own particular London lifestyle’ (p.241). Both types of detective fiction claim that the solution to the mystery of a murder, the punishment and identification of the culprit, will inevitably lead to the stabilisation of social order. Characteristic of the murder detection plot is a process of analytical deduction, based on the symbolic order, which leads to a conception of the universality of truth and to the one and only solution of the puzzle: at the end all signifiers seem to reveal their significations, or in other words ‘[n]othing is more definitive, complete, and single-minded than the ending of a detective story’.2 Neate’s text changes this assumption by diversifying the two modes of genre fiction and some of its generic conven- tions. The novel questions commonsense reasoning and deduction based on ideologically charged premises and does not answer a desire for orientation. Thus, Tommy Akthar, the protagonist of Neate’s novel muses: ‘I decided to write down the facts of the situation as it currently stood. I found a paper and pen. I didn’t get far. I knew the facts of the situation as it currently stood and writing it down wasn’t going to help anyone but my biographer (Tommy Akthar, Private I, something like that)’ (p.267). Tommy Akthar is unable to find the truth by stringing together seemingly obvious facts based on mere commonsense thinking. In Neate’s hard-boiled novel, the plot’s brutality highlights the corporeal reality of violence and the vulnerability of society. Thus, crime is shown to be a social issue and therefore to refer to intersubjective relations and the community. The novel clarifies how the crimes are embedded in larger questions of national and postcolonial politics. Moreover, the novel points out that the protagonist’s Ugandan-Indian background is considered to be a social marker of outsider status. Standing on the margins of the dominant cultural discourse, the protagonist is definitely not in a position of social control. He is a Private Investigator and cricket aficionado who finds himself hired by Exoticmelody, a prostitute, to find her flat mate Sexyrussian, who disappeared two nights earlier. When the client with whom Natasha – alias Sexyrussian – was last seen, turns out to be a British MP who is found dead in a hotel room, Tommy is already fascinated by a case that promises more action than tracking down straying husbands. After tracking down Natasha’s whereabouts he cannot drop the case because he has this ‘strange affection 2 Susan Sweeney, ‘Locked Rooms: Detective Fiction, Narrative Theory, and Self-Reflexivity’ in The Cunning Craft: Original Essays on Detective Fiction and Contemporary Literary Theory, ed. by Ronald G. Walker and June M. Frazer (Urbana: Western Illinois University, 1990), p.5. .

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