The Fortune Men: Shortlisted for the Costa Novel Of The Year Award by Nadifa Mohamed
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2021 SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA NOVEL AWARD 2021 ' Chilling and utterly compelling , The Fortune Men shines an essential light on a much-neglected period of our national life' Sathnam Sanghera, author of Empireland Mahmood Mattan is a fixture in Cardiff's Tiger Bay, 1952, which bustles with Somali and West Indian sailors, Maltese businessmen and Jewish families. He is a father, chancer, some-time petty thief. He is many things, in fact, but he is not a murderer. So when a shopkeeper is brutally killed and all eyes fall on him, Mahmood isn't too worried. It is true that he has been getting into trouble more often since his Welsh wife Laura left him. But Mahmood is secure in his innocence in a country where, he thinks, justice is served. It is only in the run-up to the trial, as the prospect of freedom dwindles, that it will dawn on Mahmood that he is in a terrifying fight for his life - against conspiracy, prejudice and the inhumanity of the state. And, under the shadow of the hangman's noose, he begins to realise that the truth may not be enough to save him. 'A writer of great humanity and intelligence. Nadifa Mohamed deeply understands how lives are shaped both by the grand sweep of history and the intimate encounters of human beings' Kamila Shamsie, author of Home Fire 'A novel of tremendous power, compassion and subtlety, it feels unsettlingly timely' Pankaj Mishra Read more
The Fortune Men is Nadifa Mohamed’s third novel, shortlisted for the 2021 Man Booker Prize. It tells the story of Mahmood Mattan, a Somali sailor who is wrongfully accused of murder and hanged in Cardiff, Wales in 1952. Like her other two novels, Mohamed transports us with aplomb to a little known place in the past. Her second novel, The Orchard of Lost Souls, takes place during the Somali civil war in the 1980s, as seen through the eyes of three women. And her first novel, Black Mamba Boy, is based on her father’s life in Yemen in the 1930s and 40s. I spent my teenage years in the former steel town of Pittsburgh in the 1980s and I vividly remember its sluggish rivers, the rusted factories, some still belching smoke and fire into the hazy sky, and the neighborhoods we held our breath to drive through because they smelled so strongly of chemicals. There’s no wonder that Mohamed’s industrial porn descriptions of Cardiff resonated so hard with me. “He enjoys watching the nightly, industrial spectacle: the dirty seawater appearing to catch fire as vats of rippled, white hot furnace slag from the East Moors Steelworks tip into the lapping evening tide.” As a mid-century port city, Cardiff is incredibly diverse, with intermingling populations of Jews and Jamaicans, East and West Africans, Arabs and Brits and Indians - gambling, drinking, raising families, celebrating holidays, praying in mosques and churches, setting off to sea. It’s a difficult, often dirty life, and no one comes through the narrative unscathed. Indeed, it’s an indictment of our present day society that so much of the anti-Black racism of the 1950s still exists today, down to the Black and brown people who crowd the prisons in the UK and America. Mohamed’s goal is to tell the human story: not the shocking headlines about an illiterate petty thief who lies and cheats and is an easy target for the police to accuse of murder... but the person behind the spectacle, the loving father of 3 young sons, the beloved husband of a Welsh woman, the adventurous charming devil-may-care polyglot, the style hound, the terribly young man whom the British justice system fatally fails. Indeed, it is Mattan’s audacity and fearlessness that fell him in the end. As Mohamed says in an interview, the British state indicts him because he is undaunted by their power and authority. He claims a fierce equality with his former colonizers and for that “he had to be crushed.” I am a huge fan of litanies, and Mohamed’s are pure joy to read: “Its patched up spires, wooden handcarts, haggard chickens and bloodied rabbits hanging from butchers' windows, mothers pushing baby carriages with fierce abandon, the broad ivory dome of the town hall blackened with soot, shop fronts drooping loose letters like earrings, teahouses with tuppence specials on buttered bread and a cuppa, boarded windows, fenced off bombsites.” She scatters these lists throughout the novel, creating a visceral atmosphere and setting for the story. Mohamed is no less skilled with deepening our understanding of characters -- from major ones like Violet, the murder victim, a middle-aged Jewish shopkeeper, Diana, her grieving sister, and Berlin, who is Mattan’s hero and champion even as his case falters -- to minor characters like Tahir, a sailor gone mad with electro-shock therapy, and Taiaiake, a Mohawk from Canada from whom we hear the hateful history of human zoos in Europe. And of course, Mattan is at the center of this story, his reckless sullen demeanor concealing what the reader comes to understand as fear, pride, a language barrier, and his utter disbelief in the miscarriage of justice taking place before his eyes. The story picks up speed as it goes, and travels far and wide, in geography and time. We go back to Mattan’s childhood, meeting his elderly disabled mother “with her albatross love,” and hear about his travels down east and southern Africa, starting at the tender age of 14. His extraordinary sailing adventures, over all the seven seas, take place in his early twenties, and it’s both hard and tragic to recall that Mattan was only 28 when he was killed by the British government. Mohamed speaks of her love for the collaborative nature of semi-autobiographical work and I love the idea of the writer communing with the past through archives, research, travel, and interviews. Ultimately, it is an act of imagination that summons the story, and in this regard, Mohamed does not disappoint. The Fortune Men is a heartbreaking and sensate personal story that reaches across continents, across time, and across history, becoming a tale for all time.
ASIN -> B08KVPK5Q8 Publisher -> Penguin (May 27, 2021) Publication date -> May 27, 2021 Language -> English File size -> 3109 KB Text-to-Speech -> Enabled Screen Reader -> Supported Enhanced typesetting -> Enabled
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