Books: Multicultural London ends not in cross-fertilization, but in paranoia as a way of life, mutual incomprehension, egotism, and solipsism

Zadie Smith’s London

by Theodore Dalrymple

The novelist explores the tensions of living in a multicultural city.

The title of Zadie Smith’s new novel, NW, refers to NW6, or Kilburn, an area of London that in my childhood was solidly working-class Irish.

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The social significance and meaning of London postal districts can change with time. In my childhood, N1, which includes Islington, was tough and working-class; but now, Britain’s best-known writers, as well as the rich apparatchiks of New Labour and the mass media, live in its eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century houses and squares. The borough council of Islington was once famous, or infamous, for its identification with what in Britain is known as the Loony Left: it spent public money on special gymnasium mats for lesbians, for example. Indeed, “Islington” was shorthand for all that British conservatives most despised.

The title of Zadie Smith’s new novel, NW, refers to NW6, or Kilburn, an area of London that in my childhood was solidly working-class Irish. Many of the Irish immigrants who flooded into England during the twentieth century first lived in Kilburn—though it is often forgotten that nearly half of Britain’s Irish immigrants were of the aspiring middle class or highly educated, and these, instead of moving to Kilburn, melted quickly into the general population. The many Irish who moved to NW6, however, chose it because its boardinghouses and rooms, of the less commodious Victorian and Edwardian kind, were cheap.

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... a bleak assessment of multicultural society, which ends not in cross-fertilization, as in fusion cooking, but in paranoia as a way of life, mutual incomprehension, egotism, and solipsism.

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