The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota

The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


It was only when I finished The Year Of The Runaways that I managed to figure out what wasn’t working for me. There’s a lot here that does; it was nominated for the Booker in 2015 and rightly so, it’s a big story of social realism,almost incomprehensible in scope and vision, attempting to tell the story of several youthful Indians who leave their homes and attempt to start over in the United Kingdom. It is hard, brutal and unforgiving, and this book shines a spotlight on the people at the heart of that. It made me think a lot about the Great American Dream and “The Great British Dream”, the shape of it and the truth of it. This isn’t a story that provides answers to that, instead it attempts to understand the grim and horrific edge of it. Life isn’t easy for our protagonists. It is psychologically, emotionally, bodily taxing. It takes from them as much as it gives. And sometimes what it gives is so very little.

Like I said, there’s a lot here that works. Sahota is a powerful and competent storyteller, though I wish he’d found a little more solidity at points. There were several key moments I missed because I just didn’t pick them up and ended up rereading, and those moments felt often intensely fragmentary and brief – when in fact, they proved definitive for the characters in question. I found a lot of interest in his story about the female protagonist – Narinder – and rather ached for more on her. Sahota is good and strong and this is a great book. It brings humanity into politics and asks us to see beyond the stories we are told. To the truth of them, however awful or wonderful it may be.

But it’s those fragmentary moments in the text that bothered me, those bits where the story shied away a little from delivering on the promise or the situations that it presented. It was as if it didn’t quite have the time to spare for them when, in some senses, dwelling on them was precisely what needed to be happen. There’s a balance to be found of course, in every story, and sometimes the pace or the scope can pull away from the moment at hand. When we go big, it’s so very easy to neglect the tiny precise moments. The small, brief stuff. And yet, when we go big as storytellers, when we write a story that is as immense and as scopey as this, it’s the tiny stuff that matters.





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