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Journalism of Courage
Nayan Olak, a central character in Sunjeev Sahota’s new novel The Spoiled Heart, is told by his friend Richard: “We’ve all got identities, mate. Not just you lot.” Nayan is from a working-class South Asian background, the second generation of an immigrant family. Richard is White. Both of them work at Unify, a union of labourers in the post-Brexit United Kingdom. Nayan is standing for elections for the general secretary of Unify; if he wins, he will be the first non-White person to serve in this office. He is an old-school Leftist, who began his career on the factory floor and believes that working-class solidarity must overcome divisions of race, gender and other identities. His challenger is Megha Sharma, also from a migrant background, but more privileged. She is more invested in identity politics and equity.
After a few statements by Nayan on the White working class being left behind are made public by Megha, Richard joins her as a running mate. “I can see how the world is going. Has already gone. I’m White working class. I’m going to own that. I’m going to fight for my people.” Through the characters of Nayan, Megha, Richard and Nayan’s running mate, Lisa-Marie, the novel reveals the fractured landscape of leftist and liberal politics, the debates over class and race, and the near impossibility of building solidarity in a world where populism and right-wing politics are on the rise. Sahota creates the kind of political novel of ideas that is increasingly rare.
The initial jousting between Megha and Nayan culminates in a Diwali celebration, where a confrontation between them escalates to a moment of disaster. Its aftermath is a social-media hurricane that singes everyone who is a part of it. Politics — dirty business at the best of times — is an incomprehensibly maddening swirl in our apocalyptic age. Sahota describes it in theological terms: “Betrayal was an original sin that could never be atoned for. No amount of apology would ever be enough. The sin, the gathering around the heretic, the stoning, the whole sorry religious tapestry. Were we simply back there?”
Sahota is himself from a migrant background: his grandparents arrived in the UK from Punjab in the late 1960s. He has worked in marketing and currently teaches creative writing. Two of his previous novels, The Year of the Runaways (2015) and China Room (2021) have been shortlisted and longlisted, respectively, for the Booker Prize. His previous books, too, have engaged with contemporary political developments. For instance, his 2011 debut, Ours Are the Streets, was inspired by the July 7, 2005, London bombings and tried to explain Islamist radicalisation among immigrants in Britain.
He, however, is also acutely aware of the challenges of representing multiple voices and viewpoints. Perhaps, as a nod to the difficulty of representation, Sahota creates several layers of narration. The book in the reader’s hands is purportedly the result of research by Sajjan Dhanoa — “brown, educated, a writer” — who has escaped his rural Derbyshire upbringing, the “bare infinitives and rusty vowels”. However, as the Covid-19 pandemic sweeps through the UK, he returns to his roots to interview the characters in the book, tell their story. Dhanoa himself appears sparingly in the book, often in parenthetical commentary. He implicates the author in the narrative, brings him knee-deep into the mud and blood of the plot.
The novel’s heart is not the sweeping political narrative, but a more personal family mystery. Nayan Olak’s mother, Muneet, and son, Veer, perished a few years before when his father’s shop and house burned down as a result of vandalism. Much of Sajjan’s research is aimed at finding out who is responsible for this. There are sufficient red herrings and distractions, lies and cover-ups, misunderstandings and poorly worked-out conclusions to give the narrative a sort of kaleidoscopic variety. Every time it turns, a new pattern is formed, till finally, almost in the last few pages of the book, the devastating revelation of truth. In our post-truth world, inundated with information, Sahota makes the reader pause: “We can’t know everything. We mustn’t know everything.” Does this lack of knowledge make us innocent or into medieval witch hunters?
Beyond the plot, the novel derives its texture, its density, from Sahota’s quicksand-like deceptive language. Despite several timelines and subplots, the novel does not indulge in fashionable structural performances. Instead, it is solid storytelling, incidents and episodes following each other almost imperceptibly, till the reader is seduced, provoked, entrapped into caring — empathising — with the imperfect and wounded characters. Only rarely does one come across a line like this: “How eagerly we men proffer ourselves”. These are like counterpoints in the seductive harmony of Sahota’s novel; they make one sit up and take notice.
