Going East

Rating:
Summary: "Treachery had held her hand, and told her fresh lies"
Review: As well as being a magnet for different cultures for hundreds of years, the East End has a reputation for being the face of traditional London. Asian families have replaced the white laborers and taxi drivers, the traditional old working class of East End. Wholesale shops now line deserted streets and the artless middle classes have followed, looking for loft space and bohemian scenery. A new tribe has staked its claim on East End. Today, new developments in Docklands and regeneration projects in surrounding areas are attracting an interesting range of people - from City professionals and financiers to artists and designers - and there is a stimulating and lively multicultural community centering on Brick Lane, Spitalfields, Petticoat Lane and the Columbia Road Flower Market. But there also remains a kind of sinister charm, a mythological history, and a rugged dynamism to this part of London.

This area of transience and change is the setting for Matthew d'Ancona's novel, Going East, which has a strange and exciting mixture of mystery and suspense. Going East centers on the young, upwardly mobile Mia Taylor. Mia's family has been incredibly successful ? they're beautiful, loving, well respected, close-knit, and very rich. The Taylors have something called the ?golden thread? ? a glittering fiber that encircles them, binding them together. They are celebrating Mia's brother's thirtieth with a picnic in the park.

Papa Taylor is a hard-working self-made man and Mama Taylor is the doting, but firm matriarch who has chosen a life of family rather than an ambassadorship with the Foreign Office. Tragedy strikes however, when the entire family, except for Mia, is killed in a bomb blast in her brother's apartment. A rebel faction of the IRA initially takes the blame, saying that the death of the Taylors was an unfortunate mistake and that they were actually targeting the apartment next door. As the story evolves, Mia realizes that there has been a terrible cover-up, and she is forced to expunge a dark secret at the center of her family involving political corruption and Islamic militancy.

In order to escape her demons, the grief ?stricken Mia gives up the high life of London's affluent Kensington - with the "skiing and skunk set of Fulham Road, the boys in their cricket jumpers, drinking Japanese beer and dreaming of Porsches full of blondes" - moving instead to London's East End where she grieves, works as a deputy manager at Echinacea, a grubby, new age community centre, and lives off her trust fund. She meets a variety of different people who changer her life in different ways, including Rob, a grubby East End rocker, Ringo an Indian who owns the local record store, and an alcoholic, but surprisingly well-educated transient, Tommy Bonkers whom she tries to help.

Going East is indeed literary. D'Ancona writes with a competent ease, and the outcome is at once a hybrid of high art and pop fiction. It's part political thriller, part romance, part travelogue, and also a type of sociological observation on the rich and poor. When Mia, in the second half of the novel, embarks on a search for her family's killers, the story becomes almost topical as she discovers that her family may have been victims in the war on terrorism. D'Ancona effectively plays with themes of money, power and corruption ? "the city sucks in money like a monster and spits out poverty when it can" - and he offers opinions on the local power shift within the East End from old world gangsters to contemporary Asian thugs. East End is a rich, vibrant, suspenseful and quite thought-provoking story, which is set in a vibrant world that is rapidly undergoing change, renovation and transformation. Mike Leonard July 04.



Rating:
Summary: Fleet Street to the East End mean streets
Review: When Mia Taylor loses her entire family in a horrific incident, she loses a way of life and her sense of identity. The well-educated, upper-class Taylors enjoy the best that London society has to offer, a golden existence. Mia could never have anticipated the demise of everything she holds dear, nor can she easily recover from such a blow.

In her mid-twenties, Mia moves to the East End to purge her past and start over in a life unconnected to her history. She spends her energies at a local charitable agency, trying to make a difference to the people who cross the threshold of her new employer. Eventually, of course, Mia will be forced to confront the horrors of the past and deal with the feelings she buried with her family.

Then things get complicated. Mia is challenged in ways she hasn't anticipated, as a voice from the past contacts her and a new romantic interest threatens to arouse her long-dormant emotions. Family history resurfaces with a vengeance and Mia's responds by shutting everything out, even her chance at romance, diving recklessly into the nightmare scenario of the accident, knowing that is where the answers lie. From the world of socialites and high-finance to the mean streets of the East End, Mia follows the meager clues as she uncovers them. It seems she hasn't hidden herself so well, after all, when her old acquaintances are able to track her activities at will.

The more the past encroaches upon the present, Mia is less able to deny the reality of her situation: the two worlds of her life are not nearly as separate as she believed. For all its good manners, the upper-class indulges in the same vices as the poor, if with a bit more discretion. Subtlety not her strong point, Mia awakens some sleeping giants best left alone, sending a ripple of violence from Fleet Street to the mean streets.

The author surrounds the mysterious deaths of Mia's family with the trappings of class, either the lifestyle of her formative years or the more realistic drudgery and daily danger of those who coexist in poverty. But this plot is frequently implausible and loses direction midway through. Finally, the convoluted storyline is a bit tedious for all the sociological contrasts between rich and poor; even Mia's blundering attempts to solve a crime on her own is inordinately clumsy. Considerable effort goes into tying this story together, from MP's to common criminals and terrorists, a bit of romance interspersed to lighten the dismal atmosphere of Mia's world. The author's best intentions are obvious, but his protagonist cannot quite manage the weight of this plot, handicapped by her youth and consequent indiscretion. Luan Gaines/2004.