Books

Review by Francis Sheppard

The Bus Driver’s Son – a title that speaks of perceived low status. The experience of a family whose parents were born abroad. The difficulties they experience as they try to make their way in a world consciously hostile to them. The discovery of strength through the reading of history – a history uniquely theirs and a tale of resistance. The meeting with others whose history has much in common with theirs, for all its geographical proximity to Britain. The new identity with those born in Britain. (These are individuals who, unlike the majority, are prepared to take active steps to ‘integrate’ with the incomers.) To the reader’s astonishment, the courage the main character finds in the comic hero, Superman.

It is a story of triumph over the odds, of youthful adaptability counterposed by adult stoicism, of the power of myth and heritage to forge resilience into a human being, it is about self-restraint over righteous anger.

It is also an early novel in this writer’s development. I understand that critics have anguished over novelists’ early work, some seeing brilliance in its purest form, as in The Catcher in the Rye, others pointing to writers such as Hilary Mantel, whose craft developed as they wrote successive novels. To put it least kindly, The Bus Driver’s Son has a plethora of cliché and phatic dialogue and an absence of inventive expression. The style is colloquial, without any of the ingenuity with which established writers of fiction use the narrator’s ‘voice’. Sukvinder Grewal should read all that is contemporary in ‘liminal’ story-telling, and re-write sentences till they come out hard and true.

And yet. For all the uncertainty about location (could be set in the United States or Australia just as much as Midlands England, hence perhaps the use of Americanised spelling) and the excessive attention that is given to the details of name-calling and the fights that ensue, the novel reads reasonably well. In the Yiddish saying, stories that have good outcomes are worth telling.

And yet, again. The book has all the elements of Young Adult-directed writing. The hero is one with whom many teenagers might identify. The straightforward language in which is told is accessible to inexperienced readers. The physical book itself is well-bound and firmly covered. Intentionally, it is not a lengthy read. I look forward to an expanded version, in which some of the cultural issues raised are examined more fully and closely.