You Do What You Have To Do To Survive Essay, Research Paper
You do what you have to do to survive Run by Farrukh Dhondy 208pp, Bloomsbury, £5.99 Farrukh Dhondy is back in town. It seemed as though he had deserted the world of children’s books to be a TV commissioning editor and adult novelist, but here he is writing a modern teenager’s 18th-century rogue’s tale. Rashid, our 14-year-old narrator, is writing up his life story for his social worker. This takes us on a journey that includes close-up looks at one grandfather dying, the other (a circus strongman in prison) denying a murder, mules drug-running, a prostitute sharing her bed with our hero, a repressed paedophile collecting circus memorabilia, a GM farmer toting guns and Mum going AWOL. The action moves from London to Slough to Devon to Scotland and back to London, told in the style of Ali G crossed with Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones . The quest is this: Rashid’s mother, a Jewish exotic dancer, has an absent father (alive or dead?) who has left behind nothing but a few clues to his past life in a circus. The onward march of the book is provided by Rashid’s search for this man who, we learn, performed under the name of Josh Rabbit (a transmogrification of Rabinovitch). Though he’s a Rabbit, he is just about the only person we meet who is not on the run – that’s because he is serving a life sentence for killing Rashid’s grandmother’s husband. The search is made all the more urgent by Rashid’s situation; like Pinocchio, he has run away and is constantly meeting misfortune and falling into bad company. It isn’t our hero’s fault that his Bangladeshi grandfather dies in front of him on the floor of the council flat while Mum is off dancing in Israel. Hanging out with the schizoid ganja-selling Alice/Davinia, a teacher turned prostitute, and Dr Bronco/Das, a Rastafarian taxi-driver who also sells ganja, is more of a self-inflicted error. His arrival in the house of a modern-day Lewis Carroll is perhaps due to a misunderstanding. Dubbed Hervie the Pervie, this character is trying to create a circus museum while hoarding hundreds of snaps of lightly clothed boys. He doesn’t molest Rashid, but possibly touches up Rashid’s pal, and has to face an anti-paedophile mob. Rashid has nothing but sympathy for Hervie and, when the cops move in, hopes that he hasn’t mistakenly grassed him up. In rural Scotland, the police put in another appearance when Rashid finds himself hired as an armed shepherd. The “wild dogs” that the farmer feels threatened by seem to be his hallucination, until some eco-warriors (ah, the wild dogs!) start digging up his GM grass. The sideshow here is that the farmer’s daughter wants to kill him because she alleges that his genetic tamperings killed her mother. So, what with one thing and another, this book is as eventful as Humphrey Clinker , as low-life as Oliver Twist and as rapidly sequenced as Candide . It is clear to an adult reader that, like Voltaire, Dhondy is doing some socio-political targeting. Virtually everyone in the tale operates outside bourgeois norms: they make their money from sex, drugs and, if not rock’n'roll, then marginal showbiz. Even fusty old Hervie, the circus historian, is probably blowing his mind on magic mushrooms. At various times, the characters’ justifications for their activities – selling ganja, turning tricks, conning lonely old geezers, illegally migrating – sound particularly well-argued. Meanwhile, the authority figures in the form of the council, social workers, head teachers, TV documentary film-makers, mosque elders and the police come across as at best worthless and mostly malign. Is there a strange triangular motion going on here? Dhondy, from what one might call the alternative establishment, dips his pen in the merde , to provide a divertissement for the literate teenager. At first glance, Run might appear to belong in the same niche as, say, Robert Swindells’s Stone Cold , Melvin Burgess’s Junk or Benjamin Zephaniah’s Refugee Boy , but on closer examination it moves into new territory for children’s fiction. Unlike these books, there is neither decline and fall, nor fall and redemption. This is skidding along the bottom; to survive, you do what you have to do. It’s bumpy, it’s funny but, hey, that’s what the lower depths are like, man. Is it? &183; Michael Rosen’s most recent book is Lovely Old Roly , illustrated by Priscilla Lamont (Frances Lincoln).