Three twentysomethings “drive and dream of an impossible night on an endless street. moving as a massive through mad sticky traffic, destination: where else? manchester, wilmslow road, the curry mile, yo!” Thus opens Sufiyaan Salam’s high-octane debut novel, written largely in gen Z lowercase – and you’re in for a ride.
The Boyz are British Pakistani friends in their early 20s. Immy is “something of a bad-boy muslim slut who don’t never text back”; Khan is “the mogul mowgli himself … the type to recite Warren Buffett epigrams like they’re hadiths”; and Haris has “a mind that never switches off, philosophy subreddits doing bares”. Each is looking for an escape – from their past, present, someone else, or themselves – and they come together for one night “cruising and bruising in a hire car towards what might just be the natural elastic endpoint of a friendship beginning to fray”.
Immy’s heart is “going crazy, up 140bpm like a grime track”; Haris “could not help but feel his east collide with the west … it was 1947 in his soul, yo – all everyting split apart”. As they drive away from their individual heartbreaks, it’s what remains unsaid between them that threatens their bond.
The eponymous Wimmy Road, that “shisha-haze mecca of mischief and magic, a jannat-ul-firdous of kebab houses and jalebi bars”, transforms into a “colossal no man’s land, this motherless haunt, this world of corrupt piss and bollocks”, reflecting the deteriorating mood of the characters. Violence simmers, then overflows. Things fall apart, the trio at the centre cannot hold. Before long, the boys “split into three like the subcontinent from which their forebears had been displaced”. Will they find their way back to each other – and stitch themselves whole again? The cinematic plot speeds along, yet Salam is always in control of the wheel. Nothing about Wimmy Road Boyz is subtle: Salam lays his cards on the table. But despite the foreshadowing work, when he finally hits the brakes on the narrative, the effect is immediate, a raw shock.
Here, the empire raps back, reclaims “the p word”, subverts the British canon (whatever that may be). Written in breathless multilingual prose that fizzes and crackles at sentence level, the novel blends an impressively cross-disciplinary wealth of references – we meet a DJ remixing Sabrina Carpenter tracks with Sarah Ahmed lectures – and commands comparisons with Rushdie, Kureishi, Guy Gunaratne, Gautam Malkani. But for all the electric banter, slang and song, this is ultimately a novel about the deep-set silences, fractures and loneliness at the heart of the British Asian male experience, encouraged by the societal narrative of the “good immigrant” and the expectations and prejudices that accompany it (“it’s better to let it all stay with me, inside. keeps it small, innit”).
Salam is a master of simile (“he’s spitting his words out like obama’s missiles – more venom in there than he intended, oops”; at university, “bro was catching firsts the way feds catch brown boys – all too fucking easily”). Hyphens serve as hinges between cultures: the boys are in for a night of “trouble-shubble”. Beneath the playfulness lies something sinister. History is ever-present in the rear-view mirror, closer than it appears. With chapter titles including “the hummus intifada”, “can the subaltern chill”, “bloods of the river”, this is a story as rooted in south Asian historical and geopolitical fissures (the 1947 partition, the 1960s Mangla dam displacement) as it is in present-day Britain. For “a generation all but starved of a future”, Salam asks, what does survival look like? “for is it not also true that the possibilities available to three brown boys such as themselves are already limited? how far back has the rubik’s cube been rigged?”
A literary performance like no other, this coming-of-age meets state-of-the-nation novel tears through Britain’s social fabric to examine toxic masculinity, community and youth culture: “the state needs to be abolished and done ripped apart, started over … a mould going back to the empire days”. At one point in the night, Haris says: “now i’m trying to think if all of humanity isn’t just a funnel through which energy is directed, waiting to be manipulated”. In Wimmy Road Boyz, Salam does just that with the novel form.
• Wimmy Road Boyz by Sufiyaan Salam is published by Merky Books (£16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
