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I hesitate at essaying about my “tourist in London” life. Having known one or more people who were in the Peace Corps in Africa, or who did the back packing thing in South America, or taught English in East Asia, I notice: Seldom do they explain “social studies” or tell stories, and very seldom does anybody ask them to.
I have been quietly observing this fact of human nature ever since one time I was at Speakers Corner at the university. (Weekly) As people milled around, anybody could line up to step onto a low stump for the day’s topic and say their piece. I would get so excited that, after I spoke, instead of stepping down I would jump. The topics were concerns about the broad world, such as “should we be sanctioning Nation X?” The answers were never obvious, and there was always a lot to say.
A speaker mentioned traveling through Afghanistan. This was during the Russian occupation—Wow! Luckily, the communists never caught up to him. Guess how many students went up to him as we milled around—the same students, of course, who would thrill to watching Indiana Jones—? No one. Just me! I learned something about people that day.
And so if you want to know what I found out about Central London, from my worm’s eye view, then I’d rather not say, but will say I very much recommend Three Rooms by Jo Hamya. (Published by Vintage, 2022)
Blurbs on the back cover:
“Resigned to renting forever and feeling guilty every time you buy a cup of coffee? You’ll want to read Jo Hamya’s urgent and intelligent debut.”
Evening Standard
“Cool, sharp and perceptive”
Stylist
“Intelligent, melancholy, funny and subtle”
Chris Power
…
Now, it’s always in vogue among literary types to denigrate “Hollywood,” and instead be striving for excruciatingly boring “accuracy.” OK, fine, let’s get all the Literary Correctness out of the way:
The cover has sexism, as the lady pictured is model pretty, but not racism, as she is Black, as is the first person narrator, to whom Blackness matters. Also Hamya, like her first-person narrator, is herself Black and, at age 29, is still officially, like her protagonist, a member of the younger generation. (Students said, “Don’t trust anybody over thirty!”) Her book is so well researched that—again the Correctness—it must have been lived. While Brexit was on. While her protagonist learned that the Turner portrait (as noted in my previous essay) was being prepared for the new10-pound note.
Jo Hamya’s character walks past the very gallery halls, walls and paintings I know, the very streets I’ve walked, and lives in the sort of dingy flats that are as old fashioned as my tourist flats.
(Back home I own my own flat, mortgage free, but if I started up a new life in Central London then I would be poor)
Hamya’s “three rooms” are three successive flats, while the hero works three successive London jobs, the first being a typical teaching for-a-thesis university job with a typical inability to find friends among teachers seen as the “other.”
I’m old enough to remember the “generation gap,” while Hamya’s hero is young enough to be constantly using her cellular telephone for social media. How interesting, how current, and how real. Truly, if you’re going to be poor in London then you should at least compensate by having a cell phone, and preferably a tablet too.
So there you are. I needn’t write about myself, because tourist attractions are on the web, while the “real London” you can find in Hamya’s Three Rooms.
…
…
Sean Crawford
Composed at 11582 meters, with a ground speed of 783 km/h
Or 38000 feet and 496 mph
May
2022
