Love—and strife—in the time of Brexit

A Stranger City. By Linda Grant.Virago; 336 pages; £16.99.

AT THE END of the 19th century much of Europe was transfixed by the body of a woman that was pulled from the river in Paris. L’Inconnue de la Seine became a symbol of inscrutable beauty. Linda Grant’s shimmering new novel opens with an echo of that episode, as a female corpse retrieved from the Thames is buried in east London in 2016. But only Pete, a policeman preoccupied by the case, and Alan, a documentary film-maker, pay their respects.

“A Stranger City” is not a mystery; its real quarry is not a missing person. In place of a linear plot it follows the London lives of Pete, Alan and Chrissie—an Irish nurse who crossed paths with the dead woman just before her supposed suicide—and others in their orbits. Recovering from cancer, Pete’s wife resolves to escape the teeming city he loves. Alan marries a woman from a Jewish Persian family for whom “life was a perpetual game of snakes and ladders”. People covet and renovate properties, as Londoners do. For Chrissie, life is “a load of obligations to other people and trying to find the good times in them apart from all the boring shite”. Yet when her patients die, she realises as dawn breaks that “they’d missed it for ever now and you were still here with everything in front of you”.

Collectively these characters run a gauntlet of 21st-century urban horror: terrorism, racist violence, social-media vitriol. A viral video generates an alternative, online version of Chrissie, even as, in the physical world, the drowned woman remains unclaimed. Brexit-era xenophobia crescendoes. From a recognisable post-referendum present (“Aren’t you going home now?” a classmate asks the daughter of Alan’s German neighbours), the references modulate to an imagined sequel of mass deportations and prison ships in the Thames estuary. The meticulous detail of Ms Grant’s observations lends credibility to her dystopian leaps.

Amid these dramas, the unknown woman comes to seem symbolic, like her French counterpart. As Alan says, “She looked like anyone…a kind of blurred person.” She stands for the anonymity of modern cities and the effacement of identities by the internet—or for a society losing its sense of itself. She is everywoman; it seems almost that she was never truly there.

Until it turns out that she was a real person after all. Almost in spite of itself, meanwhile, Ms Grant’s book is as much a love letter to London as a lament, an ode to pink skin after sunny days and lost gloves waving from railings. London is indestructible, those German neighbours think: “too absorbed in its own individual business, too intent on getting to work and going shopping and having dates and affairs”. “It was impossible”, Alan reflects, “to tell London’s story; it was too large, too ancient…too contradictory”. Perhaps, but Ms Grant has made a pretty good fist of it.