Another Kind of Concrete

by Koushik Banerjea

The three R’ routemasters, reading, rioting.

Intoning this mantra K., a bookish young boy, ducks the fare but not the issues in this darkly comic coming-of-age tale largely unfolding in a city and an era where culture, people, even the local architecture, appears to be in open revolt.

It’s 1977 and the Queen’s Silver Jubilee and, along with the pomp, it’s punk that’s in full swing. South of the river, the polyester-clad natives are in uproar. They don’t like the kids with colourful streaks in their hair, and they most certainly don’t like the ones with colour in their skin. K. is one of those kids, marooned with his family in a sea of hostility. His parents, both refugees, view that as a small price to pay for starting over after the mayhem of Indian Partition. When threats are made and bricks start to fly, long-buried demons of the past resurface. And as summer wears on, unresolved issues culminate in a grim local dance of law and disorder.

If England was dreaming, it’s wide awake now. Festooned with streamers and safety pins, while in its shadows something primal has begun to stir. London in extremis. Just below the surface, and sometimes not even that far, Another Kind of Concrete .

362 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 27, 2020

About the author

Writer. Been making stuff up for a long time. Finally found a way of calling it a job.

Reviews

[Bookread2day]

My review is on my website www.bookread2day.wordpress.com
Twitter @bookread2day
Instagram book_read_2day

This book brought back my memories of when I used to stay with my Nan during the school holidays in London. My nan often took me to Lewisham shopping, where the heart of this story takes place.

I found Koushik Banerjea writing easy to follow and I believed in things happened, the author also managed to bring back my childhood memories of being on a bus in London in Lewisham.

My favourite character was a Indian young boy that was named as simply k, who was a well spoken English school boy. K liked to dodge his bus fair on the way home from school in Lewisham. He knew the Indian conductor’s name as Vic, that he thought was rather an odd name for an Indian bus driver, as his aunts and uncles were Kakas or Kakimas. While K is the last school boy on the bus a crazy riot the bus comes under fire with eggs thrown at the bus windows, but K isn’t afraid.

K’s uncle lives in his family home who I think it’s really a bit jealous of his nephew as he thinks K is annoying with his good English thinking K is too much of a perfectionist with his nouns and pronouns. It brought tears to my eyes as uncle has hit him, but K never told anyone, not even his little black girl friend Michelle, who K loved playing with her hair braids in the quietness of the school library.

It just goes to show you can never judge a book by its cover as set within in this story the sentence often comes up another kind of concrete, and that’s why on the front cover is a picture of concrete. Another Kind of Concrete is a beautiful literary fiction tale that has blended coming-of-age, love, and in my own view jealously, and with the rage of rioting.

[Trina]

A young boy, ducking the fare (and not for the first time), finds himself on a bus in the middle of a riot. The story plunges straight into the troubling events of August 1977 in south London, which have since become known as ‘The Battle of Lewisham’. It’s Jubilee year and the end of another long, hot summer, of which there were several that seemed to go on forever in the mid-1970s. Punk might have been raging across the capital, but the bus and its fare-dodging occupant, K., are both effectively off the timetabling grid as the ensuing chaos of the riot engulfs the streets. It is an unexpected place to hear the firing of the starting gun for what is billed as a ‘darkly comic coming-of-age’ story. And perhaps it sets the tone for much of what follows, which barely adheres to the conventional principles of a bildungsroman. So, while the expected touchstones of home, school and the shifting allegiances of family and friends are certainly in evidence throughout, the physical and mental landscape being drawn up is distinctive, to say the least. Home is the ‘hostile environment’ of a fairly unpleasant-sounding housing estate, school a barely concealed containment facility for a feral cohort, and family an embattled unit under pressure from within (the presence of a mysterious uncle with a dark past), as well as from without (the indifference, if not outright hostility, of the ‘proper authorities’ – teachers, police etc – to the family’s ongoing targeting by local racists).

The story takes a number of detours to explore what brought the boy, K., to this situation on the bus in the first place. And to shed light on what happens next. It goes back and forth in time, from pre-and-post-Partition Bengal in the 1940s to 1970s London (and in the case of the boy’s grandfather, takes the story even further back, to the early 20th century). It is multi-vocal and multi-layered, and beautifully captures the precariousness of a society, and culture, seemingly in a state of near-constant crisis. The boy would rather play cricket, or read dictionaries, but discovers that sometimes a fancy lexicon or ‘playing with a straight bat’ simply aren’t enough. And if the joys of ‘word salads’, girls and sport jockey for position in his young mind, then the story doesn’t shy away from the more malign influences, including, perhaps, that of his uncle, that he is often subject to. It is one of the strengths of the writing though, that this tension between the playful and the painful is maintained all along without slipping into either sentimentality or victimhood. For the myriad cruelties on offer, this is no pity party, and all the stronger for it. Resilience, resourcefulness and the artful instincts of smart, urban urchins hold sway even as hands are thrown and basic civility breaks down. Girls, and boys, just want to have fun, after all, though what shape that ‘fun’ takes is anyone’s guess in this story.

I was also struck by how young some of the protagonists were, particularly to be doing, and ‘exploring’ the things they seemed to be getting up to. They are 8, 9, 10, 11 years old, swear like sailors, and seem highly precocious, which is troubling in its own way. But again these details are offered in a matter-of-fact way, as if this was just another routine feature of ‘70s life, along with racism, brutality and long hot summers. Indeed, it is also not long before some of the industrial language used by these kids recedes into the background, and loses its shock value, which I suppose is rather the point being made.

In addition, there is fantastic attention to detail here – clothes, music, patterns of speech – which draw the reader in to a world that they might not be familiar with. Windrush, Partition (India/Pakistan), post-war London, punk, reggae, skinheads, hippies, era-specific pop music, to name a few. It is an utterly absorbing portrait of a family, an individual, a society, and a culture, experiencing the seismic upheavals of a turbulent time. This was a powerful tale, beautifully written, which was even more impressive when considering that this is a debut novel. Given how good this book is, it really should be more widely known. Not just one of the best ‘coming-of-age’, but one of the best London novels I’ve ever read - it stands right up there with Selvon’s 'The Lonely Londoners' and Kureishi’s 'The Buddha of Surburbia'.

[Jitna Bhagani]

Koushik Banerjea's debut, Another Kind of Concrete is an interesting story inspired by real events in 1970s England, when the country was knee-deep in the racist and fascist ideals of the National Front. Banerjea evokes emotion as he tells the story of K, a London boy born to Bengali parents. Parents that have survived the partitioning of India, uprooting their lives and resettling in London, and the prejudices that come along with it. Banerjea tells a powerful tale of inequality, of keeping one's head down and acquiescing to abuse just to survive -- an often unspoken but common truth of immigrants and the children of immigrants born in the UK in the 1970s and thereafter.

This book is emotional, raw, and a strong insight into class and race, issues that many Britons (again, immigrants, and the children of those immigrants) still face today. The book is raw and honest, and made me want to read more about race riots and class struggles in England (particularly of interest to me, a British-born Indian diaspora child of immigrants) and I even approached my parents to ask them about their own experiences of coming to the UK in the 70s.

I found some of the language to be wordy and sometimes unclear, but the story itself is powerful and well worth a read. This book is an elegant debut and I look forward to reading whatever Banerjea writes next!

**Thanks to The Book Network and the author himself for their generosity and opportunity to read and review this book (gifted to me as part of the virtual book tour for Another Kind of Concrete via The Book Network)

[cait]

i was gifted this as part of the promotional book tour and loved it - read all of my thoughts on another kind of concrete here! https://thoughtsinsmallprint.home.blo...

[Prof John Hutnyk]

Started: I've been editing other people's writing for a living for years, but the best writer with whom I've had the pleasure, an active tornado / aficionado of mixed metaphors that needed only a very light sweep, has now perpetrated a massive novel. As if crushing Rudyard Kipling's assassin into Fred Perry fashions with a John King inspired Hobson Jobson tattered globaloid South Londonium Times. The relevance of decades past is still present in the farcical form of politics now, but the evocation and detail of growing up then is rendered in sentences packed with explosive meanings. I've only started it today - birthday reading - but it does not disappoint.

Updated: This is a partition novel, but only in the way that Ritwik Ghatak or more recently Moinak Biswas's films are partition novels. Nothing of the cod Imperialism of Freedom at Midnight or Viceroys House here (those two anyway are the same elite-prejudicial Rolls Royce chauffeured India 'tour' schlock).

It is a novel you'll read and worry that there is no way your kids can survive school. The only glimmer of hope would be to turn all schools into libraries, with a caged ball pen outside for soccer fanaticism for those who won't read. Teachers are uninterested, overworked, and only the librarian has the time to even look and see who her students were, So Rachel wets herself through stress, K negotiates that national front and sweaty red-faced headmasters. The caretaker of the school almost the lone conduit of common sense in the first half of the book - K adding letters [co and ide] to spell confide where the caretaker was failing to wash off the NF graffiti.

The prose is like, I dunno, Paella, an old curiosity shop, two million mutinies, trinkets, and your great grandmothers sewing box all rolled into the one jumble: Tales of bundled decay as travellers spill their guts, pens scratch paper, the storyteller's art leaves the lasting impression of a solitary tear rolling down a rugged cheek. The familiar landscapes of the Postcolonial city made strange by mixing college street and Canning Town, but hardly strange at all. page 91

Finished: On FB I wrote that being ill was my excuse for catching up with novels, but I interrupted the stream of hackery to give a progress report on this as its the best book I've read in ages, despite that I am half way through, and despite the book persuading me that no child should ever be entrusted to the English school system (no disrespect for teachers as they have no time to teach - the ancillary roles of school librarian and caretaker the only sites of care, time, hope, as is the case so often). Despite even, maybe because of, the cantankerous voice, so resounding with alliterated simile, each page has its puns, jibes, jabs and jaw, I'm only half way through, but wanted to note the progress (and how mixing College Street and Canning Town makes strange landscapes familiar). The middle section on the mother of K is really astonishing, not just because of the angular history that has been there all through the book - I'll perhaps later track all that, I could have a guess at most of the missing footnotes - but because of how brilliantly the mother's inner life has been rendered, intimately understood, lovingly portrayed, so that at present, half way through, I'm thinking contemporary literature here takes a step forward at last from the all fine but almost formulaic earlier epochs of - 123 sounding off down the years: - Rushdie, Kureishi, Kunzru... or Lessing, Coetzee, Smith... for sure beyond, Hornby, McEwan, Self ... but don't take my word for it, I'm still reading it - here is the author himself snapshotting a London bus in Lewisham on a particular day in the summer of '77 - and this is just a taster...


Kaushik Banerjea's Another Kind of Concrete, 2020. There is a new one coming later this year.

[William Mazzarella]

Koushik Banerjea's magnificently exuberant debut novel is, for one thing, a study in the power of language. Language as budding intimacy: two young kids finding refuge from the casual brutalities of the classroom in the quiet of the school library, tracing new words on each others' backs. Shelter and desire in the curve of a letter. Here is a modernist pleasure in form, but also the beginnings of tactical leverage at a time when beatings are served hot with no questions asked. Something like mastery when precious little else feels like it belongs: "Always a god feeling when a situation seems tailor made for its own sentence" (434). In the end it's about being able, against all odds, to make a world, your own chosen community, in which you actually want to live.

'Another Kind of Concrete' is also a love letter to a city that is at once an inexhaustible resource and a ravenous quagmire. A young sailor walks the streets of 1960s London: "all the area's secrets, and a lot more besides, are right there, in front of him, in front of everyone. Carving their own patterns of desire and despair, of so much lust and longing, in the mud and mayhem of the city's ancient tongue" (100).

Equally, this is a story of refugee loss amid razing violence during the Partition of Bengal - and the recognition of the unchosen freedom that comes from homelessness: "So they recoil from all they've ever known and leave behind the primal myth of place" (186). What appears in the place once filled by the treacherous comfort of belonging? An archive of your own invention, premised on the rigour required to withstand a world that doesn't want you. A dismal dawn, washed up on the shores of "a grim little place called England" (194). The dilemma that K inherits a couple of decades later has already been lived by his parents: how to make a world when the world is falling apart? How to know how to handle "the threads that bind as well as the ones that unravel" (190).

Not being able to fall back on a past that has been shattered means being vitally attentive to the potentials of the moment. K's mother, during her early days as an immigrant in England, quickly understands this ambiguous gift of presence: "It dawned on her that the first major shift that needed to happen was a temporal one. The key to any future happiness lay in what she did now. How she lived, how she thought, and in that sense, if in no other, this called for a change of season, from past to present" (207). And here is a key to something more than survival: "her courage and determination that this life will be lived no matter what. Not simply endured, but lived, really lived" (221).

Such living is never given; it depends on hard-won rigour. The rigour that resists the boot boys, in whatever form history sees fit to send them: "Bloodied defiance and system rigour, the swamp-fevered red of survival" (60). The very quality that is shamefully lacking in "that defeated look on Gavaskar's face" (108) as the India cricket squad caves, once again, to the joyous force and, not least, the triumphant Blackness, of the West Indians. This is, then, equally the rigour of an unflagging devotion to form, to an economy of gesture, the effortless style of new arrivals from the Caribbean: "All that languid, so defiantly bespoke, no matter what the insult" (256).

Steely when it needs to be, 'Another Kind of Concrete' discloses its own kind of tenderness. Amid all the ducking and diving across time and space, across all the surfacing, connecting, and confronting, this is a story about "lives which were never small, even if they were contained" (271). A masterful debut.

[China]

There’s enough detail here that it can at times be hard to follow, particularly as a few of the characters are identified by initial rather than name (which gets interesting when K.’s “funny name” comes up). But I enjoyed this so, so much. The synopsis of this book doesn’t do it justice—it paints this as a 1977 punk cliche, when in fact this is so little about music and culture and really about the history and racial tension and outsider treatment that lead to a movement.

It’s the pre-and post-Partition immigration story of a multi-generational family, and addresses the bonds among characters who are Black, Indian, and otherwise looked down upon; it addresses sexual assault, and the submissive role of a wife, and the general sense of pessimism that strikes when you’re lower middle class, all without giving off any sense of pity or guilt.

I’m really glad to have watched and read certain works prior to reading this because there are parallels; the general story shares similarities with Blinded by the Light, though Another Kind of Concrete isn’t at all sentimental. The way this builds up and paints a picture around several families, leading up to a climate of violence, isn’t unlike In Our Mad and Furious City (which I recommend alongside Another Kind of Concrete). And I’m glad to have learned about the nasty turn of the Teddy Boy (through a biography of Vivienne Westwood, strangely) in preparation for this story.

Koushik Banerjea has a fantastic eye for detail. Young athletes being recruited from a neighborhood in which they play with whatever resources they have—why would recruiters come here? How K. as a boy thinks of Thatcher as funny. The observation of someone who speaks “properly, not like the dinner ladies at school.” He’s really good at *showing* race and class disparities. And his taste in music is also apparent—this book has the first reference to Showaddywaddy I’ve seen in about 13 years, grasps the joy of “My Boy Lollipop,” and is absolutely about a concrete jungle. There’s lots of sneaky praise for Indian food, rightly so, and a tastefully quiet subplot about boys discovering porn for the first time. There’s reference to what it takes to be thought of as English rather than foreign, and though this is largely about a boy coming of age, the female characters are respectfully written. Will easily be giving this a reread in a couple of years.

[books4chess]

"But the truth is, she crossed oceans to get here, and long before that she swallowed libraries whole,
ingesting formulae, and philosophy, and the careworn circles of history"

Trigger warning: racism, racial slurs, sexual assault.

Banerjea's debut novel is absolutely captivating and a must-read for anyone interested in the experiences of first generation migration into British culture in the 1970's. The book flits between a diverse group of characters of different ages and backgrounds. His writing highlights the collective problems linked to the idea of 'us vs them' which is laces all the different stories together.

I'm grateful for the repetition of the age of the first protagonist, K. It was necessary to reflect on the challenges faced from such a young age and easy to forget and project other circumstances onto the characters. Peppered into each story are powerful little wins, a variety of perspectives and great self-awareness of the troubles ahead, even for the characters under the age of 10.

I adored the writing style and although the beginning was a little slow, the 400+ pages are easy to devour quickly with reflections such as "the beauty of another tongue, she thinks, the present never purely lived in one register".

4.5 / 5.

Thank you BookSirens for the Ad PR-gifted book in return for an honest review.

[Jess]

After being gifted this book by The Booknetwork.co.uk and Koushik Banerjea in exchange for an honest review I was unbelievably excited to read something not just new to me but new to the shelves! And Banerjea's novel is one that definitely needs to be stocked!

I was apprehensive at first because the writing style was quite different to my usual reading. It's present tense and almost a stream of consciousness but once I got into it I found the delving in and out of narratives in this way reflected the turbulent terrors of growing up in London in the 70s and a war torn Bengal.
Despite being slightly confusing to follow, I felt a bigger conversation was at work, stories allow us to see things from a completely different point of view and this novel in particular allows us to experience the confusion, witness the racism and prejudice, and understand how much one can persevere in life through schoolyard bullies to political revolt.
If you enjoyed novels such as The Kite Runner, this has a similar tone and theme. It is intense and not to be read light heartedly but it feels real and important!

[Chinaski]

Bought this after hearing the author being interviewed on Robert Elms' BBC London show. He was a compelling guest with an interesting take on an array of subjects (music, football, London tribes). I'm glad to say, his debut novel doesn't disappoint. Ostensibly the story of a second generation British Asian kid - K - growing up in working class London during the white heat of 76/77 - it is much more than that; switching time frames, there are vivid descriptions of the events in Bengal that lead to K's parents' landing in SE London, an evocative diversion into hippy 60s Notting Hill and, most poignantly, a wholly believable account of K's mother negotiating life as a newly arrived, educated immigrant. For all the unwelcome stares and comments, it is the warmth and humanity of her encounters that shine through and linger.
I'm guessing there's a danger Banerjea's debut will get lumped into some British Asian/ ethnic literature section - that would be doing it a disservice. This is simply a great novel full stop, by an author with an original narrative style and voice that deserves as wide an audience as possible. Intrigued to see what he'll come up with next.

[Amanda]

Koushik Banerjea's debut, Another Kind of Concrete is a raw and honest depiction of the racism and prejudice sadly faced by many. It reads a bit like a stream of consciousness to me in parts and this helped to immerse you in the different characters and their feelings and attitudes. At times, this was a tough read with hard-hitting cruelty seen in everyday circumstances and it made my heart ache. I also felt this book addressed serious topics in a brutal way but it was also interwoven into the school yard politics of the young character K and his experiences of how peers and adults treated him. I did find the narrative difficult to follow in parts but the stories of the characters themselves remained strong and heart-wrenching.

Thank you to @booknetwork and @hark.athim for allowing me the pleasure of reading and reviewing for you.

[Reshmi]

I really enjoyed reading this novel. It’s characters vivid with their own quirks and baggage. I liked the character of the Mum in particular. The novel flits between the world of south london and the impact of partitioned India where families were forced to leave. Ofcourse you have the music, football and cricket and through each a commentary on English society during that time. But it also follows the ordinary lives of a immigrant family in a time where it was extremely tough coming from a particular background. The detail and quality of writing is impressive and I’m looking forward to the next novel.

[Judith A]

You open the book, and you are able to shadow a boy, K, from his roots in Northern India, to his animated remembrances of life in London. You can hear the different sounds, smell the food, feel for his struggles and triumphs. K's energy is palpable. His fearless pursuit of the unknown, and his overwhelming sense of curiosity, leads him down rabbit holes of adventure. The deep love for his ancestry, culture, and family is touching and heartfelt.
All together, an enjoyable romp, this lovely book is bound to please every armchair traveler. The realistic portrayal of it's time and place, is akin to watching a great film.

[Chelsea-anne Kennedy]

Book Tour
Another kind of concrete - Koushik Banerjea.

This story follows K in 1970s England, he was born to bengali parents who fled the partioning of india. It shows the racial abuse that many immigrants and children immigrants dealt with.

Its a very emotionally raw book. I struggled with the writing at first. It can be confusing to read. But once you get used to the authors style its a powerful read. The story is important and needs to be told.

Thanks Book Network and the author for this book in exchange for an honest review.

[koren ayres]

Absolutely brilliant novel. Read this book as soon as you can, and then read it again. Another Kind of Concrete pulls you in right from the start and doesn’t stop. Vivid, rich, complex characters (K’s Mother in particular for me), memorable dialogue with beautiful attention to language, and an absorbing plot full of conflict and tension and struggle and heartache that takes us back and forth through time and place. A stunning powerful original novel. Brilliant.

[Catriona Cooper]

Some beautiful pieces of prose and an engaging storyline.

[Scott]

A wonderful book, marvellous writing.

[LJ FRANKLIN]

K., a bookish young boy, learns to duck the fare but not the issues in this darkly comic coming-of-age tale which largely unfolds in a city (London) and an era (the 1970s) where everything, from the culture to the people, to the buildings themselves, seems to be in open revolt.

The three R’s: routemasters, reading, rioting.

Intoning this mantra K., a bookish young boy, ducks the fare but not the issues in this darkly comic coming-of-age tale largely unfolding in a city and an era where everything: culture, people, even the local architecture, appears to be in open revolt.

It’s 1977 and the Queen’s Silver Jubilee and, along with the pomp, it’s punk that’s in full swing. South of the river, the polyester-clad natives are in uproar. They don’t like the kids with colourful streaks in their hair, and they most certainly don’t like the ones with colour in their skin. K. is one of those kids, marooned with his family in a sea of hostility. His parents, both refugees, view that as a small price to pay for starting over after the mayhem of Indian Partition. When threats are made and bricks start to fly, long-buried demons of the past resurface. And as summer wears on, unresolved issues culminate in a grim local dance of law and disorder.

If England was dreaming, it’s wide awake now. Festooned with streamers and safety pins, while in its shadows something primal has begun to stir. London in extremis. Just below the surface, and sometimes not even that far, Another Kind of Concrete.

Thank you to @thebooknetwork.co.uk for this #gifted copy of this book. This is a raw and honest book that looks at some gritty themes of racism and prejudice through various characters. At first I found the characterisation and use of initials only a little confusing and found it hard to relate to the characters. But as I read on, and read through the events and experiences that are portrayed I was able to connect more. The perspectives of a younger ‘refugee’ were enlightening.