Exit Management by Naomi Booth review / How to survive in London

 

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Exit Management by Naomi Booth review – how to survive in London

This compelling tale of people scrabbling for purchase in the capital is peculiarly appropriate to our current crisis

Nina Allan

Friday 23 October 2020

L

ondoner Callum is struggling to stay afloat both mentally and financially. While his brother has left home and started a family, Callum still lives in Croydon with his mum and dad. His good looks and personable manner have landed him a job with GuestHouse, a bespoke service that pairs super-rich clients with luxury temporary accommodation. He finds the work amenable but oddly discomfiting, a world of half-lives that appears to mirror his personal feeling of stasis. Of all the clients he has to deal with, only Joszef provides him with something approaching fulfilment and a moral centre. Joszef is a Hungarian art dealer who came to London as a refugee following the 1956 uprising. He has made a good life for himself, but with his health in decline he finds himself retreating into the realm of memory, and has no one else to share his stories with but Callum.

Into their world comes Lauren, a young woman fleeing from an abusive background in the north of England and desperate for security and validation. Her cramped bedsit in Deptford is her escape hatch from the deprivations of her childhood, but it is a symbol of them, too. Lauren knows she deserves better, and as she scrabbles for purchase on the career ladder she becomes ever more determined to claim her share of life, no matter the cost to others. Lauren works in the HR department of a City trading company and specialises in “exit management”, which consists mainly in informing troublesome employees that they are fired. (If you happen to have seen the George Clooney movie Up in the Air you will know the score.) A chance encounter with Callum – and more particularly with Joszef’s house in a leafy and desirable part of London – sets the three on a trajectory that will be devastating but ultimately transformative for all of them.

With London so much at the centre of our national life it is not surprising that the London novel has always played an important role in our national literature. From Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year to Guy Gunaratne’s In Our Mad and Furious City, the capital has been portrayed as everything to everyone: a haven for misfits, a hell of deprivation, a pressure cooker of the mind, body and senses. Exit Management is an original and welcome addition to the canon, not least for its disconcerting timeliness. Our responses to Naomi Booth’s depiction of a city already teeming with disparate sources of potential biohazard cannot help but be informed by the current pandemic, even though the words we are reading – “important always to limit physical contact with different surfaces in central London, in order to mitigate against the risk of infection” – portray a landscape and a way of life that is already part of the past.

In a genre that has traditionally been dominated by men, it is particularly gratifying to read a London novel written by a woman. Booth’s vision of the city is grim and unforgiving, yet in its unmasking of the harsh reality behind the gleaming facade it is revelatory and passionately human, with even the novel’s title functioning as a double-edged sword. Exit Management encompasses class and generational conflict, the recursive nature of history, how the individual’s struggle for freedom in a compromised world is a reflection yet ultimately a negation of embedded systems, of the corrupting influence of the status quo:

And what does she really know of this city? Living at the edge of Deptford for two years and not speaking once to anyone born there ... She hadn’t wanted to know the history of the place. Hadn’t wanted to hear the words massacre and black kids and killed at a drinks reception she’d helped to organise. All she’d wanted to know was the best route to walk to the station to avoid the indigenous poor, and the best place for a strong sweet macchiato. Why couldn’t people keep things clean?

Booth’s first novel, Sealed, set in an Australia facing the twin challenges of the climate crisis and a new and deadly pandemic, worked as a radical and dynamic realignment of the overworked tropes of post-apocalyptic fiction. The characters in Exit Management prove similarly resilient and similarly surprising, teetering perpetually on the brink of personal catastrophe yet remaining possessed of an unrelenting and admirable determination to survive. “You’re alive, aren’t you? So there is hope.” Compelling, formally innovative and beautifully conceived, this is an unusual and deeply rewarding novel that is both politically resonant and peculiarly appropriate to our current predicament.

THE GUARDIAN