City of Tiny Lights
Publishing House: Riverhead
Rated: NONE
WorkNameSort: City of Tiny Lights
In the 21st century, a private eye does not operate in a monochromatic world, especially in London. Cutting across the city in search of a mark, he’s likely to come across Jamaican gangsters, Indian chop-shop proprietors, prostitutes from the West Indies and maybe, just maybe, an Irish cop. This is the world of Tommy Akhtar. Born of a Ugandan mother and an Indian father, the hero of Patrick Neate’s new slapstick noir City of Tiny Lights needs to get paid. As the novel begins, a hooker named Melody Chase arrives at his office, looking for her missing friend Natasha. Not long after he signs up for the job, Tommy discovers Natasha’s last john was Anthony Bailey, a local politician who has just turned up dead at a Holiday Inn.
Off we are to the races, as Tommy, like so many PIs before him, winds up in over his head, though somewhat more in touch with his moral center. Neate, who won a National Book Critics Circle award for his global tour of hip-hop, Where You’re At, is an instinctual writer. He seems to plot things out on the fly. As a result, this book lurches and veers across the page like a drunk heading for the toilet; its terrorist subplot eventually seems a bit extreme. But the prose is something else. Agitated and robust, self-conscious yet wry, it taps out the city’s ethnic beat ‘ revealing how those in power march to a song much of the population cannot hear. Sitting in a car, looking out at commuters, Tommy says: ‘I clocked the faces of executive gents, fixed on the lights of the car in front as they pictured their frumpy wives at suburban doors â?¦ I clocked the faces of white-van drivers, indicators flicking impatiently as they planned their next short-cut, their veins pulsing the same rhythm at the temple. Welcome to the city of tiny lights. It takes you a lifetime to get somewhere you’ve no particular desire to go.â?� That is, of course, until you read this novel. Then it seems terribly interesting.
This article appears in May 17-23, 2006.