A documentary film crew records the burial of an unknown woman pulled out of the Thames seven months earlier, a police detective who worked on her case arrives just too late for her interment, and we enter a labyrinth of stories set in contemporary London, where identity and uncertainty go hand in hand. A Stranger City is a mystery of sorts, but certainly not the genre kind. The newly retired cop Pete knows that police work “isn’t all clues and puzzles like you read in books or see on the telly”. Instead the unidentified body provides a curious touchstone to a broad cast of characters, provoking them to confront their own sense of self, so that the “stranger” in the title oscillates between noun and comparative adjective.
London has always been a multicultural city. The great Anglo-Saxon scholar the Venerable Bede called it an “emporium for many nations who come to it from land and sea”, and that was in AD731, when the English were the newcomers. Its diversity has demanded a plurality of voices, a polyphony you find from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales onwards. Linda Grant, an astute chronicler of social history in fact as well as fiction, is well placed to enliven this tradition. There is a richness in this novel, found in a migrant experience that is deeply embedded rather than distinct from its environment. Everyone has a complex heritage; even comfortable, integrated lives seem precarious. Francesca, a bourgeois art-history graduate, has Persian Jewish grandparents, refugees from the Iranian revolution who whisper Farsi to each other only in the safety of their bed. Grant is a keen observer of how bizarre tactics of assimilation can become. Neil, the wannabe PR guru with a Lebanese ancestry, calls himself Marco so that people might think his family is Italian. The only constant in identity is its unpredictability, and at the moment of a shocking hate crime even the exact nature of racial abuse becomes uncertain.
With a corpse in London’s river as its starting point, A Stranger City makes a bold reference to Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, with watery themes of depths and shallows. As strong currents pull below a reassuring surface, the superficial becomes seductive. Francesca is “most aroused by … the decorative and the ornamental”. And virtual worlds replace real intimacy. “Wow, you have to be a bit clever these days to have a private life,” says Marco, when Pete explains that the case of the drowned woman remains unsolved partly because she was unrecognised on social media. Like Dickens, Grant uses multiple narratives in an attempt to locate and challenge what he called the “voice of society”, and she has a clear purpose in searching for it now.
Though never directly mentioned, Brexit is the spectre that haunts this novel, and it’s clear which side of the debate the author is on. There is an unease in all of the characters, a feeling that a terrible mistake has been made, that tolerance is disintegrating despite, or perhaps because of, the overconnectedness of modern life. We may be lost or forgotten, but we’re all under surveillance, mostly by ourselves. “People are always looking and holding their phones up and you’re being seen,” reflects Chrissie, an Irish nurse who goes missing on the same night as the dead woman. “And they upload you to Instagram and tag you and that’s it, you’re public property.”
The uncertainty of observation becomes a theme, perceptions and even realities changing with each point of view. The city itself is a storyteller, with urban myths that feed off the paranoia of a collective unconscious, and topographical digressions that take us into the realm of the absurd. At one point Francesca goes through a passageway under an aqueduct and enters the Island, a “geographical anomaly” occupied by the families of council waste operatives, with a retired circus elephant stabled in a lock-up garage. Grant plays with the real and the imaginary as the narrative drifts into the realms of speculative fiction, seeding dystopian images of deportation transports and prison ships.
It may all seem a bit too discursive, but the real achievement of A Stranger City is the way in which its narrative is as fractured and uncertain as the London it portrays. And despite its contemporary relevance, the novel avoids becoming a “state of the nation” tract – it’s far too emotionally intelligent for that. It’s as much a novel of feelings as ideas, and this is what makes it a compelling read. At its heart is the need for belonging, something we all share yet can put us at odds with each other. At a time when dangerously inert notions of national identity are on the rise once more, Grant reminds us that humanity is a migrant species: we are all strangers.
• Jake Arnott’s The Fatal Tree is published by Sceptre. Stranger City by Linda Grant is published by Virago (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.
