Gabe’s ambling but contented life is upended when the body of a Ukrainian kitchen worker, Yuri, is found in the dungeons below the kitchen. An inquest rules the death accidental, but Gabe, who has seen the corpse, is haunted by the sight and dreams of the dead body every night.
Another kind of haunting soon begins, this time in the form of Lena, an enigmatic, waif-like prostitute from Belarus, who was hiding in the basement with Yuri to escape her pimp. Gabe is inexplicably drawn to Lena, who is living in London illegally, and in one of the novel’s improbable moments, asks her to move in with him. Much like all the other resolutions on his list, Gabe fails in his daily resolve to stop sleeping with the mysterious, taciturn Lena, whom he distrusts but is helplessly drawn to.
The affair causes Gabe to lose the woman he intended to marry, which is a pity because Charlie is one of the most engaging and well-rounded characters in the book - wry, introspective, ironic. Her disappearance from the novel is our loss.
One of the ongoing concerns of the novel is Gabe’s inability to communicate with his gruff, dying father, Ted, who, along with Gabe’s grandmother, Nana, are the novel’s two stock characters, seemingly created only to act as defenders of that old, elusive quality called Britishness. Nana, especially, seems to spend her old age railing against Pakistani immigrants while protesting that she is not a “racialist.’’
As Gabe’s clashes with the older generation demonstrate, Ali’s ambitions for this book are greater than merely documenting one man’s midlife crisis. She is trying to say something about the uneasy mishmash of clashing cultures that is contemporary Britain.
