The city of cranes: major construction project in London
Photo: Henry Nicholls / REUTERS"Troubleville" is what Londoners call the fictional Freetown settlement from Parker Bilal's new detective novel "London Burning", because violence and unrest occur again and again between the run-down brutalist buildings. Those who live here do so because they can't afford anything else - and some would do a lot to get out of here.
The ideal breeding ground for crimes of all kinds. But for many also the only possible home: "The settlement here is not exactly the greatest place in the world," says one resident, "but it is still something special." One of those places that the public won't notice until they go up in flames again. Or when real estate speculators cast a covetous look at it.
Parker Bilal
Photo: Ulf Andersen / Getty ImagesCalil Drake, Bilal's protagonist, also comes from Freetown. He grew up here in poverty, the son of an alcoholic single parent, was radicalized Islamistically at an early age, but found a way out, went to Iraq as a soldier and later joined the police. An apparent model cop who quickly made a career and left Freetown behind. But just as Chinatown in the neo-noir classic of the same name is not only a specific place for Jack Gittes, but also a state of mind, a reminder of past failures, Freetown Bilal serves as a cipher for Drake's earlier misconduct.
Marked by the Iraq war
The demons of the past are always waiting in the future. Drake will meet her in Freetown, which is where his current investigation leads him. It's a test for him. After an important witness who was in his care had died two years earlier, he was demoted, and rumors of corruption made the rounds.
Drake desperately needs an achievement to restore his reputation. And the double murder on the construction site of a future luxury high-rise building is spectacular enough for that: the wife of the multi-million dollar builder and a Japanese art collector are found dead under a pile of rubble.
A punishment in the sense of the Sharia, suspects Rayhana Crane, a freelance psychologist who Drake is put to the side by his superiors. Whether as a minder or helper remains unclear at first. Like the police officer, Crane is still heavily influenced by her time in Iraq. At that time, she provided reports on the stress disorders of soldiers - a patient she classified as harmless later blew himself up.
Sometimes together, sometimes in parallel, the two of them investigate, soon discovering a lead that leads to a kidnapping in Iraq ten years ago. And to the dubious business around the countless major construction projects in London today. A multimillion-dollar business for which financiers from all over the world scramble, not all with exclusively legal means.
What the construction boom means for Londoners
London, the city of cranes, has changed more radically in recent years than few other major Western European cities. "London's skyline is out of control," wrote SPIEGEL in 2014.
Every new skyscraper is a monument to the vanity and greed of its builder, the foundations of the competition - this is how the TV series "Gangs of London", currently on Sky, shows the British metropolis. While the series takes the construction boom as the occasion for a spectacular gangster drama and above all shows the perspective of the profiteers, Bilal is interested in what the changes mean for the city and the people who live in it.
The immigrants, for example, who come to London to build a new, better life for themselves and who are the victims of a merciless turbo-capitalism. Exploited as cheap labor and put on the streets when they are no longer needed.
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"There was now a jumble of luxury properties along the riverside," and the super-rich "were terrifyingly quick to transform the city into a kind of death zone in which there was no longer any room for mere mortals." Bilal describes a world in which democracy has long been nothing but a facade, a facade that is getting more and more cracks, and through these cracks we see snippets of what is really happening.
What we see there is undisguised greed, the willingness to unite to jointly plunder the city; Alliances that can turn into violence at any time. On the other hand, Bilal shows how social peace in the melting pot London is becoming increasingly fragile - he leaves no doubt that there is a direct connection here.
Parker Bilal is the pseudonym of the 1960 London-born writer Jamal Mahjoub, who became famous for historical novels. As Bilal, he has written a sextet of crime novels from 2012, which are set in Cairo, "London Burning" is the start of a new series.
Mahjoub said in an interview that Bilal is a pragmatist, both in terms of his worldview and his way of writing. He doesn't want to alienate his readers with an overly literary approach. And perhaps that's how he describes the problem of the novel: "London Burning" works excellently as a biting commentary on current social upheavals and the economic and political conditions that cause them.
On the other hand, Bilal tells his crime plot structurally and linguistically quite conventionally, too rarely breaks the well-known scheme of murder-investigation-investigation. Which is not to say that "London Burning" failed, it is a solid police procedural with two cryptic protagonists who make you want more - it could only have turned into a much better novel if Bilal had given his readers a little more confidence would have.
Parker Bilal: "London Burning". rororo; 488 pages; 12 euros; from the English by Ulrike Thiesmeyer.
Icon: The mirror