While some of that novel’s themes remain – as does the buttonholing linguistic verve – Mister, Mister is more layered, more slippery, almost mirage-like at times, concerned with the inadequacy of language and identity while glorying in the infinite bounty of storytelling, always teasing and rug-pulling as to how and why Yahya ended up where he is. I take a long time to form an opinion politically it’s why I don’t tweet so muchĪkin to a retooling of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations for the 9/11 generation, it might fox anyone expecting a retread of Mad, narrated in a testosterone-fuelled demotic by three teenage boys (as well as their migrant parents) caught up in race riots on a north London estate after a shocking murder resembling that of Lee Rigby. The book starts with Yahya held as a terror suspect, having recently returned from Syria – and he’s just sliced off his own tongue, spilling his life’s twists and turns solely in writing for the eponymous Mister, the shadowy British official quizzing him. When I was younger I dreamed of a project that would transform you – where you’d be a different person at the end of it – and that’s certainly been true of this, but I wouldn’t want to do it again.”Ī difficult second novel, at least for the author, Mister, Mister is a rollercoaster coming-of-age picaresque, set against 40 years of bloodshed in the Middle East, from Desert Storm to Islamic State, and narrated by a fatherless young Londoner, Yahya, half-English, half-Iraqi, raised in a refuge by Muslim women before becoming a poet-preacher whose tub-thumping lyrics echo dangerously around the world in an age of keyboard warriors only too ready to step out from behind the screen. “The university gave me a room and a desk no lecturing, just writing.” Then the pandemic hit. For the author of 2018’s Booker-longlisted In Our Mad and Furious City (or Mad, as they handily call it), the zigzag itinerary has become a routine: the new book, initally sparked by the controversy surrounding Shamima Begum, was completed during a three-year fellowship at Cambridge, which they took up in 2019 shortly after becoming a father. The book is set partly in east London, where we’re meeting before they catch an evening flight home to their wife and two young children in Malmö, Sweden.
G uy Gunaratne is sipping lemon and ginger tea at the end of a larynx-taxing week recording the audiobook of their latest novel, Mister, Mister.
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