PATRICK NEATE IS A PROLIFIC WRITER based in London and, well, everywhere. His first published novel, a Trask Award winner, is set in the not-entirely imaginary African state of Zambawi. Musungu Jim and the Great Chief Tuloko tells the story of Jim Tulloh, a British student teacher who gets caught up in a revolution against a dictator with a penchant for latin maxims and no bollocks. Neate's second novel Twelve Bar Blues, winner of the Whitbread award, follows the African diaspora to the nascent jazz scene of Louisiana and the figure of Lick Holden, an instrumental but forgotten musical innovator. His most recent, The London Pigeon Wars, is a dark, brooding affair of identity crises and bank robbery, where the capital's hip-but-neurotic 'twirtysomethings' are dissected as squadrons of thinking pigeons battle for territory overhead. A highly respected music journalist, Neate has also produced a full-length work of non-fiction Where You're At: Notes From The Frontline Of A Hip Hop Planet, an odyssey from New York through Tokyo, Cape Town, Johannesburg to Rio charting the rise of hip hop to the status of global phenomenon.
My meeting with Neate coincides with the release of The London Pigeon Wars in paperback. Settling down for a couple of beers in a grubby boozer, I asked him what he'd made of the polarised critical reception his most recent novel had attracted, particularly the umbrage critics appear to have taken at his portrayal of talking pigeons.
Neate is unfazed and pugnacious: 'Quite frankly either you got it or you didn't. It's had like, fucking amazing reviews and fucking terrible reviews, and nothing in between.' He goes on to paraphrase two recent Sunday review articles, one of which described it as 'scintillating', 'exhilarating', 'a book about modern London that hits all the right notes' the other as 'full of stale truisms, some mad story about pigeons that doesn't make any sense'.
But then The London Pigeon Wars is in many ways a very different, and more demanding novel than its predecessors, and not just because of its references to 'geezs', 'coochies' and 'peepniks'. 'It's funny isn't it?' Neate muses, 'If you choose to do any kind of artistic expression which then enters the public domain, whether it's five people or five hundred thousand people who see it or read it, then you become known for that thing. But I don't feel that there is just one aspect to what I want to write about. The trouble is you get a reputation for writing in a certain way. I think those first two novels were of that specific style, the third novel was very different. I think that's why it has attracted a certain degree of criticism, because it's a jump.'
Given that Neate's first two published novels concern Africa and the transmission of African culture via the black diaspora, it is perhaps unsurprising that he has been to an extent, um, pigeonholed. However, the author is at pains to point out that this is more a result of the vagaries of the publishing world than any conscious decision on his part. Though he spent time teaching in Southern Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique after graduating from Cambridge, Musungu Jim was preceded by an earlier novel written when Neate was 23. He shrugs, 'I got an agent for it, and it looked like it was going to be published. Then it didn't happen. So the mythology came out first because it was what was published first. It wasn't necessarily what was in my head first.' Likewise, after the success of Musungu Jim, Neate went to his agent with three separate chapters and asked her to pick one: 'She picked Twelve Bar Blues so I wrote it. There wasn't much science to it. I'm quite prolific, basically. There are all sorts of strands - characters and styles of storytelling that I'm interested in.'
There is a disarming straightforwardness about Neate and his thoughts on writing. Whilst many have admired the imaginative narrative structures he employs - myths, blues scales, pigeons - when pushed to talk about them, he waves it all aside: 'A lot of people talk to me about the structure of Twelve Bar Blues, describing it as quite intricate and arch. I don't particularly see it like that. Insofar as the structure is interesting, it's only so in terms of helping me tell a story.' At the end of the day it seems that what Neate is really interested in is stories: conceiving them, researching them, writing them down, even standing up on stage and telling them. 'If I could get paid money and was good enough to tell stories live and be some kind of griot [storyteller] then I'd do that', he states. 'Basically all that concerns me is telling stories, and coming to it relatively young the only way that that was ever going to be possible was in the form of the novel.'
Neate's fiction can be seen as an attempt to incorporate this wider concept of story within the novel form. Musungu Jim and Twelve Bar Blues are both based upon the premise that embedded cultural stories and myths can inform the present even if their details are forgotten. In the former, the foundation myths of the Zamba act as a counterpoint to the adventures of Jim Tulloh in postcolonial Zambawi. Musa (a rastafarian witch doctor drawn from Neate's own experiences in Africa) relates the the stories of Tuloko, who became chief after remonstrating with a god for the good of the people, and who sets a test to seal his succession for any of his children to find what lies on the horizon. This test is passed only by his most diminutive child Zveko (Ant) who knows he already stands upon the horizon. As Jim becomes further embroiled in a succession crisis of a more revolutionary nature, these foundation stories give a more universal perspective to the chaos, outlining the tensions between ideas like the power of the individual and those of fate and nation. 'I have this idea that story is neglected as an idea,' Neate states, 'in that we all tell stories all the time in everything we do. There are cultural stories, and social stories and certainly when writing Musungu Jim and then Twelve Bar Blues there was that mythological structure that I was very interested in. I like the abstractness of mythology.'
In Twelve Bar Blues myth, tradition and the modern world come together on the outskirts of New Orleans as forgotten trumpeter Lick Holden parps the first raw notes of a new musical narrative.
'The main thing I considered was that this music was essentially African music. A lot of the signature parts of the blues are African.' For Neate, as for the characters in the novel, music is a receptacle for tradition which connects people with their roots. Amidst the novel's densely plotted pages is a story-strand whereby Lick's musical articulation of the pain of growing up black in America's deep south during the 1920s and his search for an adopted sister - Sylvie ('who wasn't no blood relation') - are mirrored by an ancient tale of his ancestors - a tale whose resolution lies latent in Lick's soulful cornet.
'I think there is a kind of cultural language which is almost genetic. When I was a kid we all used to sing 'we all live in a yellow submarine', but I was probably sixteen when I found out it was a Beatles song. It had become part of my cultural heritage. This is the idea of tradition I'm interested in: stories being lost, stories that still inform things even though the reason for their telling has been forgotten. I also like this idea that there are small people too, who you don't hear about, yet who have a profound impact on society.'
There is a certain irony in the fact that Neate has been targeted by writers like India Knight for being 'a glorious example of the English public-school boy who wants to be black', one who exploits his subject for his own pernicious ends: 'The irony is that when anything racial happens, like when those two girls were shot at New Year's, I get the broadsheet press calling me asking me to write stuff about gun crime in the black community. I'm from fucking Putney, what do you want me to write? For them I'm easy because I'm white. There's only a certain number of black journalists you could get to write that. The fact that people don't admit stuff like this goes on is tedious.'
Not only did Neate respond to Knight's newspaper article in kind, giving a perceptive account of the commercialisation of black culture for white consumption, but deals with this issue directly in the novel that Knight was criticising. Twelve Bar Blues constantly refers to the 'mouldy figs', so-called aficionados who espouse cosily commodified and pre-packaged notions of jazz and its history. Neate is clearly no mouldy fig: his view is longer, and more complex. As he puts it, 'I'm even more ridiculous because I go further back, I'm even further removed. People go on about me being obsessed with Africa and black culture, and I'm not really. I just tell the stories that I want to tell, those that I find interesting.'
And tell those stories he does, and he visits a lot of subjects that most white writers feel uncomfortable dealing with. Outspoken against racism, Neate is equally outspoken against the woolly pontification about racial issues in the press.
'You see people in these dizzying circles of liberalism that just drive me round the fucking bend. They're like: ' Ok, we're multicultural,' and David Blunkett says everybody has to learn to speak English, and everyone says 'Oh no, that's terrible, they should be allowed to pursue their own culture.' And yet you get issues like forced arranged marriages, and they go 'But that's not allowed, there allowed to pursue their own culture, but not like that...' So, then, what? Clitoridectomy is wrong, is it? 'Yeah', they say, 'that's really wrong.' You talk to the so-called liberal intelligentsia and find out that they just don't have any fucking opinions. They're just trying not to offend anyone. I'd much rather just stand up and go: 'I think female circumcision is wrong'. Or be it Zimbabwe, I'd rather say, 'You know what, I think it's none of my fucking business.''
Perhaps the most interesting thing, Neate feels, about his first two novels, is his decision to write them in the first place: 'That's a fascinating reflection on how the world works. It shows a kind of transculturalism.' This word, and it pops up a few times in our conversation, has come in certain circles to denote a type of attitude, a kind of post-nationality that recognises the increasingly porous nature of the conventional geographical and cultural boundaries that have historically marked out national identities.
'I think identity is now less innate. To an extent you are your background, your race, your class, your sexuality. But most of the facets of identity are less inscribed now than they've ever been before.' Neate accompanies this observation with an anecdote from the time when he was considering his hip hop project : 'Where You're At: Notes from the frontline of a hip hop planet.
'I was talking to my friend Charlie Dark (musician, writer, and host of Blackatronica at London's ICA) about my decision to write Where You're At - about why as a white middle class kid growing up in London I got into hip-hop. What the connection was. And he just went - 'What are you talking about? What else were you going to get into? Everything else was shit.' And you know what it is probably as simple as that. It was either that or I was going to become a goth. And the goths were really naff.'
This masks a deeper seriousness that goes to the heart of Neate's hip hop pilgrimage. Hip hop culture is often seen as a pernicious appropriation of black culture by global capitalism trying to sleaze its way into the hearts and minds of global youth culture by synergizing with some B-Boy credibility. Neate, whilst agreeing with broadly with this notion, also goes to great lengths to show that (as in any form of globalisation) this appropriation works both ways. Though it has been up to now the multinationals that have been doing the appropriation, on his whistle-stop tour of the world he shows how local streetwear labels in South Africa and disenfranchised communities in Rio's favelas have tapped into the 'cultural capital' of what has become the dominant popular culture. For Neate, this is a movement of reassertion for a cultural form that started as an expression of alienation, and went on to become a powerful signifier for identity. Following writers such as Du Bois and Walcott, Neate conceives of hip hop as a 'nation of the imagination' for the young and alienated of the world. To quote from the book: 'Hip hop culture (an admittedly diffuse phenomenon) is in a position of actual power that, I would argue, is unheard of for a pop cultural form...It is a power that can be used for inclusion opportunity and expression, if only it can reclaim its identity at an imaginary level.'
Neate's most recent offering, The London Pigeon Wars, continues this examination of identity, albeit in a more allegorical way. The story revolves around a group of London 'twirtysomethings,' graduates aged between twenty-seven and thirty-four, an age where identity crises sets in amidst a city that notoriously eats those who try and beat it. Typically self-absorbed, the gang default to those strategies - lazy attitudinising, personal manipulation, complacency -that make such an existence more bearable. Interspersed in the text is a story of London's pigeons who for a brief time become conscious. For Ravenscourt, our avian guide, this coming to consciousness allows not only the chance to reflect on his own pigeonness - especially as the pigeons start displaying markedly human traits, like engaging in internecine warfare for territory, but, from his suitably pigeony perspective, on the scratchings and squabblings of the 'peepniks' below.
Neate quotes Socrates. 'What is it?...'The unexamined life is not worth living', but most people lead the unexamined life. What I was trying to get at in the book was that you would think that in a nation that prides itself on freedom, an examined life would be more typical? Actually I don't think people examine their identity at all, nor how they interact with the world. The novel is kind of a call to all those characters, who I like, who I find very familiar - but very limited.'
Murray, a mysterious character who wanders back into their lives from the past, provides the foil for Neate to expose such flaws. Held in awe by humans and pigeons alike Murray represents the antidote to all his friends' complacency. When they fantasise about rectifying their overdrafts with a swift call to a local bank with a couple of shooters, It is Murray who manipulates them into putting their convictions to the test. Though a disturbing character in many ways, a force of reckoning, it's Murray who gains the readers sympathy.
'He's the one person who's honest about what's going on,' Neate feels, 'Murray just totally does what he does and believes what he believes and doesn't think about it at all.' Paradoxically, it is Murray who has more genuine thought than any of his mates. 'They all think that they think, but they're all just hopeless cases, desperately trying to show how deep and interesting they are, but actually they're all just mugs.'
A fitting illustration of this comes when a character called Tom states that the way people act during crises - terrorist acts and so forth - is learned by watching how people react on TV. He admits that, should a hand grenade be thrown into the room, he'd jump on it not out of any real altruism but merely because having watched loads of action films, he knew what was expected. Neate concurs that this type of unthinking consciousness is a major preoccupation: 'It is, to be honest, my fucking bugbear.' He pauses to consider what's to come next. 'Basically... I like fundamentalists. I like people who believe what they believe and will stand up and defend it. Not people who pretend they're open-minded yet will go and leap on every available hand-grenade because that's what they've been taught to do. I like people who believe things.'
As we finish our beers and get set to hit the road, I ask Neate about the lust for debate that drives his fiction. 'A driving force for art is tension,' he says. 'I've got a friend who's a Buddhist. His whole thing is about reaching this point of calm. I don't want to be calm. What have I got to be calm about? The world is not a calm place. I'm not calm. All the stuff I write is engaging me in debates I find interesting. Frankly I like the idea of controversy. I like the idea of pissing people off.' As we head out of the pub - Neate runs a literary nightclub up the road - he carries a tune from the jukebox out into the street. 'I'm just a teenage dirtbag...' he warbles. 'I love that song. ' The world may not be calm, but he sure seems to thrive on it.
The London Pigeon Wars - Twelve Bar Blues & Musungu Jim are published by Penguin.
Where You're At is published by Bloomsbury.
