We are back in Sahotaland, in his fourth book, The Spoiled Heart. His Booker-shortlisted second book, The Year of the Runaways, was about three migrants, the horrors that force them to leave their homeland, and their struggles in the UK. In his next book, China Room, longlisted for the Booker, a case of mistaken identity, love and transgression wreak havoc on a woman’s life.
In The Spoiled Heart, race and identity politics impact the characters in different ways. Taken to the small town of Chesterfield in Derbyshire, we look around, taking in its drab features, the bent church spire, the desolate car park, the empty town centre, the washing lines off the railways, the grubby semis, the sad gardens, the damp foreboding as one character puts it. Then, we are introduced to the main characters, whose lives we will come to examine a bit more closely.
There’s Nayan Olak, indefatigable defender of the working people, running for the post of General Secretary of the city’s biggest union. There’s the enigmatic Helen Fletcher, the object of Nayan’s interest; there’s Pyara Olak, Nayan’s dementia-afflicted father; Brandon Fletcher, Helen’s diffident son; Megha Sharma at the union office pitching herself as Nayan’s rival in the upcoming elections. And of course, the lives of all these characters start to loop together in less than simple ways.
This is a two-toned story, and while the two tones are quite different, they don’t create any discordance together. In the fore.
