Rudeboy Guide to London

Hardjit’s muscles abet his obsession with racial purity; Amit has a domineering mother; and all you need to know about Ravi is: “I jus mouthin off cos I got me a high sex drive, dat’s all, man.” With three of them having failed their A-lev-els, their lives move in a predictable groove from fights to flash cars to fit women, until they get pulled into a complicated scam involving mobile phones that takes the rudeboys to a higher level of gangsterhood than they’re really capable of handling.

I’m not going to give the plot, except to say that there’s a twist in the tail, delivered right at the end that’s supposed to land as hard as one of Hardjit’s punches. It works, forcing you to go back to the novel and read it again—which might have been Malkani’s biggest mistake.

Londonstani comes apart on second reading like a cheap clockwork toy, revealing that its closest literary cousins are more Tanuja Desai Hidier and Nick Hornby than Irvine Welsh and company. Two key plot points involve an In-dian family imploding around a marriage where the groom’s mother feels “disrespected” by the lack of brownnosing by the bride’s family and the perils of a relationship with a Muslim girl whose three brothers would carry out the Hounslow equivalent of an honour killing if she went out with someone from another religion.

There are pages and pages of (very useful) shopping advice for men. There’s a nicely done primer on how to get into London’s hippest clubs and restaurants and what to do once you are there. And behind all the gandah lines and the overuse of fuck as a punctuation mark, I was delighted to discover that this was, at heart, a story with several morals. If you want the Porsche and the posh flat with the latest Bang & Olufsen system, plus the company of soni kudhis, do your A-levels, apply to Cambri-dge, get an MBA. And if at the end of this you’ve turned into a corporate gangster in an Armani suit whose most terrifying weapon of choice is an ability to deliver long and tedious lectures on the complex workings of the black market and VAT, get back to the basics: love your mom and dad, don’t disrespect your family.

Forget the stuff about Londonstani being a brilliantly subversive work and showcasing an “authentic”, raw, original voice; don’t even get into the debate over whether it’s the politics of race or gender that lie at the heart of this book.

Gautam Malkani’s real achievement is that this cheerfully mongrel novel is the product of a successful mating between the contemporary clean-cut Bollywood family film and Hornby-style Lad Lit, with an Asian Dub track playing somewhere in the background. If there’s a term for this, it’s got to be Moby Dick Lit, innit?