It’s an impressive feat to have two of your first three novels nominated for the Booker Prize but it’s one that Sunjeev Sahota achieved with The Year of the Runaways and China Room. His fourth is a politically charged tale of Nayan Olak, a workers’ champion running to become general secretary of the UK’s biggest trade union.
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Having lost his mother and infant son in a house fire some years ago, which in turn led to the breakdown of his marriage, Nayan is entirely focused on his work, so he’s surprised by his unexpected attraction to Helen, a young woman lately returned to her hometown, having fled it years earlier in mysterious circumstances, and his affection for her son, Brandon. As he builds a connection with both, it initially feels that their purpose is simply to become surrogates for the family he lost, but their story presents some clever twists.
Nayan’s politics, however, are his true passion and when he finds himself in competition with a colleague, Megha Sharma, their rivalry offers some fascinating scenes, each revealing different experiences of what it’s like to be a non-white working-class person in Britain. Nayan is dismissive of race, while Megha believes it’s a crucial element in the struggle for financial equity.
A political debate towards the end is utterly compelling. The arguments of both candidates stand in fierce opposition to each other and yet each comes across as coherent and logical, forcing the reader to recognise that one can be as liberal-minded as one wants but, without the lived experience of racism, it’s impossible to understand how to overcome it.
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The narrative voice, however – that of a writer who has come home to tell Nayan’s story – can feel quite jarring. An early editor of mine once told me to trust in my story and cut the gimmicks, and I found Sahota’s mixture of first and third person to be an interesting conceit but one that hurts the novel. One might also wonder how this narrator, who pops up only occasionally, has access to private moments between the characters.
But it’s a small complaint when faced with such committed storytelling from a writer unafraid to explore difficult social problems from multiple viewpoints.
