Pigeon English

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The dead boy, who is never named, was a boy a few years older than Harri who was stabbed to death outside Chicken Joe’s. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, this coming of age [combined with murder mystery] grabbed me by the heart with urban London slang, ‘pidgin’ English. In this quotation, Harri tries to justify his desire to join the Dell Farm Crew by speculating that he could serve as a missionary for them. The title of this book, Pigeon English, is a play on words, echoing Harri’s idiosyncratic use of language, as he mixes British English with Ghanaian slang and Pidgin English (and, of course, the title also gestures to Harri’s love of pigeons). The ending was sad and strange and explained the device of the pigeon but, in my opinion anyway, the book would have been improved without it.

But I thought the story would have been so much better if a variety of viewpoints had been used: if, as well as Harri, we'd been able to hear from his mother, some of the older gang members, Lydia and Miquita, one of the teachers, the police, even the murdered boy. But it is too conscious of the gulf between its subjects and its inevitably middle-class readers to be truly convincing. Alongside people with English heritage, Harri encounters other Ghanaian immigrants, Somalis, Pakistanis, Latvians, and others.

I totally wasn't prepared for the ending, though I knew it had to be kind of abrupt considering how the book was structured. In a violent, gritty council estate, Harri struggles to get through the days, trying to solve the murder of a boy with his best friend, Dean; everybody is afraid to speak to the police, and the police, I sense, are afraid of going into the area. Harri's voice, totally annoying and nearly undecipherable at first, sticks to a cadence that ultimately becomes infectious and totally believable (despite its pidgin-y qualities) as the novel exposes its gritty street-life realities. Full of facts gained from CSI shows, they attempt to lift fingerprints and find DNA, sure that they can find the culprit and bring him to justice.

When a revered, older member of his church is attacked by the Dell Farm Crew with Harri as an accomplice, he is ridden with guilt and takes a renewed stance to avoid any more evil and unjust temptations. Instead, Harri, who is in Year Seven at his school, joins up with his friend Dean Griffin to solve the case of who killed the dead boy. For young, vulnerable immigrants like Harri, assimilating into a given culture and understanding its language, customs, and social norms, is not just a courtesy, but can—under certain circumstances—be a matter of life and death. Harri's repetitious, boring style grates very quickly and I thought to begin with that the voice in italics would be a bit of relief.

But, when his friend is murdered, Harri’s unswerving determination to find out the truth makes him vulnerable. It's very helpful") and thrilled to find a wealth of treats on offer at the local market, especially useful since it's his ambition to try every Haribo sweet in the world. As a former teacher of adolescents, I honestly believe my former students would have done a better job telling this story.

Harri is the first person narrator for most parts except for those that are spoken by the pigeon that visits him on their flat located on the 9th floor.his description of anything especially formidable as "hutious", and his wide-eyed, curious delight in his new and unfamiliar setting. Although Harri does not have a personal inclination toward violence, throughout the novel he faces pressure from the Dell Farm Crew to prove himself as a man by harming others.