Master storyteller and Whitbread Novel Award-winner Patrick Neate has written a funny, provocative and daring tale of London high- and low-life set among the capital’s twirtysomethings. Featuring performance poetry; murder; Trafalgar Square’s only fried-chicken induced battle; hat selling; bank robbery for the middle classes, love (and other social ailments); as well as pigeons – lots of crazed, angry, thinking pigeons – The London Pigeon Wars is both a comic fable for our times and an exciting bird’s eye view of life (and death) in the city.
‘Neate is a fine writer who loves and is sincerely playful with stories’
Spectator
‘Sharp humour and characterisation [with] a real gut-punching shock that sends the reader back to the beginning to reappraise everything that has gone before’
Observer
‘Neate builds up his cast with pointillist aplomb, fashioning for them crises of faith and identity which wouldn’t feel out of place in George Eliot or Henry James’
Time Out
‘Impressively bold … has plenty of thrills and surprises and offers a bird’s-eye view of the trappings of modern urban life’
Irish Independent
‘An original, quirky richly funny and strangely disturbing novel. A delight to read’
Sunday Tribune
‘Dazzling, strikingly imaginative’
Metro
"Picture this: two niks converging from two sides of the Square. At ground level, of course, they're nothing but two more phyzogs in the sea and their trajectories as random as the foolish sparrows who don't know where to look for the next foodchit. But now fly with me to Nelson's feet and enjoy a bird's-eye view and scope the way those two niks cut through the paisley swells like two motor boats on a collision course and you know there's something up.
I peeped it, of course, but I wasn't much into contemplation at the time (none of us pigeons were). Instead the home flixture is freeze-framed in my mind like a picture postcard of my first sight of that unspectacular greysen and the unilluminable nik I like to call mishap (for fear of the syllables of his proper name). They greysen was deep in thought and he paused for one instant as though track-stopped by a memory. Seeing this, Mishap took a detour and perched beneath the transparent, upturned nothingness where a lion should stand (that's confused a reckless blackbird or two, I can tell you). Then the unilluminable nik stood up and was walking towards the greysen. He was devouring unilluminable stuff on the move with all the voracious relish of a rat with a carcass.
What followed? I couldn't tell you with any exactitude because we were gone, diving towards the Square in a pack. I couldn't tell you who was at our apex either so it's the history of events that informs me it must have been Gunnersbury. But, trust me on this, it's not important because in those days, when a pigeon dived, you dived with them with no more sense of why or who than a babchick accepting a bottle. Gunnersbury? Well...the way I scope it, these days, I realize that she was not defined by the random choice to dive but by its consequences and how that fact impacts upon your consciousness, consciousness thereof and, indeed, contemplation therefore, is up to you. Next thing I knew, I was hovering above a rubbish bin as two birds tucked in at exactly the same time. Again, it is only retrospect that names them as Gunnersbury and Regent, the magpie-looking geez who went on to form the Pigeon Front.
For some reason - I don't know why - I scoped for the two niks and spotted them disappearing into the paisley. I have a vague recollection that I wondered how their path might plot from above. I didn't contemplate it but, nonetheless, I figure that still might have been my first tug of consciousness. But I was quickly brought back to the rubbish bin by the sound of a warning coo which, I should explain, was about as foul-mouthed as us pigeons got at the time.
Gunnersbury and Regent were teetering on the rim and fighting over the unilluminable stuff, tugging at either side and squawking like two squibs trying out their calls for the first time. This might not sound remarkable to you (especially if you're one of those pretentious 'you are what you eat' fellows who cannot enjoy a mean without the proper manners and accoutrements). But look at it like this: that bin was overflowing with all kinds of delicacies like baps and bisquits and best bits (there was probably even a squirm or two if you had a taste for soul food and were prepared to dig deep). And here were Gunnersbury and Regent scrimmaging over that stuff that comes in a red and white carton. We'd all seen the stuff a thousand times before but none of us ever went near it with its slippery texture and stink like death, so god knows how you illuminate those two pigeons' behaviour. A 'mishap' and that's the verity."
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