“A Stranger City” opens as a female corpse retrieved from the Thames is buried in east London
of the 19th century much of Europe was transfixed by the body of a woman that was pulled from the river in Paris.became a symbol of inscrutable beauty. Linda Grant’s shimmering new novel opens with an echo of that episode, as a female corpse retrieved from the Thames is buried in east London in 2016. But only Pete, a policeman preoccupied by the case, and Alan, a documentary film-maker, pay their respects.“A Stranger City” is not a mystery; its real quarry is not a missing person.
Collectively these characters run a gauntlet of 21st-century urban horror: terrorism, racist violence, social-media vitriol. A viral video generates an alternative, online version of Chrissie, even as, in the physical world, the drowned woman remains unclaimed. Brexit-era xenophobia crescendoes. From a recognisable post-referendum present , the references modulate to an imagined sequel of mass deportations and prison ships in the Thames estuary.
Amid these dramas, the unknown woman comes to seem symbolic, like her French counterpart. As Alan says, “She looked like anyone…a kind of blurred person.” She stands for the anonymity of modern cities and the effacement of identities by the internet—or for a society losing its sense of itself. She is everywoman; it seems almost that she was never truly there.
Until it turns out that she was a real person after all. Almost in spite of itself, meanwhile, Ms Grant’s book is as much a love letter to London as a lament, an ode to pink skin after sunny days and lost gloves waving from railings. London is indestructible, those German neighbours think: “too absorbed in its own individual business, too intent on getting to work and going shopping and having dates and affairs”.
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