Book review: Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year Of The Runaways is powerfully exhilarating

Sunjeev Sahota’s book follows the paths of three Indian migrants who have wound up in Sheffield, trying to build new lives.

When I first heard, back in late 2010, that a new writer by the name of Sunjeev Sahota was soon to release a debut novel that would attempt to enter the mind of a Sheffield-dwelling, British-Pakistani suicide-bomber, my hopes for the book were not high.

Ours Are the Streets was reportedly inspired by the attacks on London of July 7, 2005, and to my mind it looked like yet another example of the kind of work that is likely to emerge when a writer is exposed to an episode of great historical moment, and succumbs to what Norman Mailer referred to (following September 11) as the novelist's need to write a rapid, hot response.

The temptation is understandable: if nothing else, we can appreciate the writer's excitement at happening upon a subject. But Mailer was, I think, right to urge caution: we have John Updike's dreadful novel, Terrorist (2006), to remind us just how dangerous the decision to write even a relatively unhurried reactive work of fiction can be.

That Sahota was able to avoid the grave that Updike fell into with such apparent blindness is testament to the strength of his literary sensibility, and to an imaginative capacity that made Ours Are the Streets feel naturally occupied with the matter of politics without becoming politicised, and without compromising the novelist's commitment to irony and uncertainty. It was also wonderfully written: one can see why the book secured Sahota a place among Granta's Best Young British Novelist's of 2013.

The Year of the Runaways might also be categorised as a reactive, political novel, only in this case Sahota's concern is not the phenomenon of the rise in Britain of reactionary Islam, but the experience of a group of Indian migrants struggling to forge a life in Sheffield.

Sahota approaches this theme by offering a third-person account of the lives of three Indian men – Tarlochan, Randeep, and Avtar – who inhabit a house crammed with fellow migrant workers, and of a British-Indian woman, Narinder, who is married to Randeep (he feels that she has the power to transform his life) but lives apart from him in a flat that he has secured for her.

Sahota introduces us to their stories by focusing alternately on the four individuals’ lives in Sheffield, and on the history that has propelled each of them into a life that is suffused with the twin anxieties of uncertainty and hope. We read at length of Tarlochan, a chamar (“untouchable”), and his attempt to escape an India in thrall to a strict caste system; of Avtar and Randeep, sometime neighbours, whose uncertain lives in India, threatened by ignominy and unsettled by desire, encourage them to pursue their lives in Britain; and of Narinder and her struggle to reconcile the array of competing ideologies – of civic duty, religious virtue, cultural rectitude, and her own sense of moral decency – that coalesce in the life she leads as a British-Indian who is also a devout Sikh. And between each of these episodes we return to Sheffield, and to the lives the characters are attempting to forge there.

This is a popular way of structuring narrative but it can be difficult to manage successfully: with each chapter the writer has to successfully re-enchant the reader.

Sahota does, eventually, manage to do this: the history of each character is rich and carefully imagined, and adds depth to the account of the lives they are living in Britain. But they are also laboured and frustrating.

These qualities might be leavened were there more in the way of literary interest to keep the reader engaged, but the language of the book – for what turn out to be good reasons – is not as vibrant and immediately arresting as that we encounter in Ours Are the Streets, and the plot proceeds ponderously – at times elusively.

Many readers, I suspect, will be tempted to send the book windmilling across the room before things have started to slot into place; and your reviewer makes no secret of nursing such an urge. It takes at least 100 pages for the novel to gain any real traction and there is simply not enough energy or life on the page to sustain the book for that long. But if you can persevere with it, then the cumulative effect of the novel is quietly but powerfully exhilarating. It might not be as dazzling as its predecessor, but, given time, it shares its power to entrance.

Matthew Adams is a London-based reviewer who writes for the TLS, the Spectator and the Literary Review.