A bird's-eye view
Nick Seddon
THE LONDON PIGEON WARS by Patrick Neate Viking, 02.99, pp. 483 ISBN 0670912646 When Patrick Neate's second novel Twelve Bar Blues won the Whitbread prize in 2001, beating off stiff competition from Ian McEwan and Helen Dunmore, the judges said in a rapturous statement that it set 'a high standard for modern fiction', which was something of an exaggeration because as good as it is, it did not. It did, however, establish Neate as a fine writer who loves and is sincerely playful with stories. Moving between Louisiana in
the early 1900s, modern America, and an imagined African state, stories both sprawling and squat get caught in the slipstream of other stories to form a picaresque romp. The narrative project of his third, more compressed novel is similar.
A large chunk of the tale is told by a pigeon called Ravenscourt, whose pidgin banter at once resembles the stuttering fluidity of rap music, the comic squawking of Keehar in Watership Down and the Russian-rooted argot of A Clockwork Orange. To tell stories in terms of beginnings, middles and ends, he says, 'is all well and good for babchicks at bedtime but will never illuminate all of a narrative tangle'. Animals have frequently been used for fantasies, fables and literary jeux d'esprit, but birds are scarcer and speaking pigeons about as common as flying pigs. Yet fictions become real when one's sense of the fictional colludes with the actual, and Ravenscourt describes a terror that is oddly familiar. When raiding factions of warrior pigeons engage in the skies above London, corpses rain down concussing people and pummelling cars and rooftops.
Unfortunately, to represent worried Londoners, Neate gathers together an unattractive bunch of twirtysomethings' whose cause is not aided by another, anonymous narrator who clearly doesn't like them. They swap logos like Pokemon cards, deal in tedious `suburbanities' and get drunk. They are — and they form — a cluster of stories and the narrative veers off to delve and curl through their shared and hidden pasts; but it's difficult to give a tinker's cuss for the television presenter known as the 'croupier in a bustier', or the bankrupt businessman whose marriage is failing, or the 'superhero' who cheated on his girlfriend with a stuck-up hat designer.
The return after ten years of an old university friend called Murray brings a new impetus to their lives. Murray's always been something of a social hand grenade: but the charismatic and enigmatic prankster they recall ups the ante by suggesting they rob a bank. Against the backdrop of avian war, the suspense grows when they get keen, but the plan is aborted after a botched gun deal involving a dead pigeon and a dead person in a Brixton car park. While the group fragments in fear and guilt — only to reunite in a humorous and happy ending — Murray, who's losing his marbles, wants to finish what's been started. In the closing sections Ravenscourt casts light on Murray's `unilluminable' history, and this touches our hearts and helps us truly to care. But throughout the book it's difficult to repress the feeling that texture and nuance of character have been sacrificed to ingenuity of structure and style. Whatever high standard Neate was supposed to have set for fiction, it seems he has not quite lived up to himself.
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