Nofel Nawras is a new name to readers, and his first novel, Brighton Funk, reveals a deeply thoughtful writer whose insight into teenage experience fifty years ago is astonishing.

 

Nawras’ narrator is Naseem, fifteen and a half years old in 1972, of mixed Arab inheritance, with a step-father who hates him, a mother who is afraid of her husband, and has two small children to care for. Nas is an introvert and proud bunker-off at a boys Secondary Modern School. Except that is for English lessons, taken by Mr Easton, who is approaching retirement but who nevertheless manages to keep the class under control by making Monday afternoon English Literature unusual and interesting. Nas is enthralled by literature, and in line for taking a single O Level, quite an achievement for a council house child who has been judged as useless at eleven, and therefore consigned to the lowest level of secondary education with no expectation of academic understanding or achievement.

 

It’s very hard to maintain the input required to achieve this though when your best mate, and Nas’s great friend, hovers on the edge of delinquency. Johnny’s ambition is to become someone, rich and important, but he and Nas are slowly drifting further into the edge of crime to achieve this. Nas’s view of the world changes when he meets Abigail, a girl from a background that couldn’t be further from his. Nawras draws us into the different worlds which then make up Nas’s life, the dysfunctional home life, the possibilities offered by Mr Easton’s recognition of Nas’s deep empathy and ability with literature, Johnny’s gradual slide into crime, and the life and love which the relationship with Abi promises. Nawras treats the teenagers’ relationship with great understanding, engrossing readers with the complexity, uncertainty and excitement of something which is passionate, physical and at times problematic. We feel it is all overwhelmingly true to life as Nas copes with the difficulties, the triumphs and the sorrows of adolescence.

 

This is an outstanding book, poetic, terrifying at times, but with great depths which surely come from the author’s heart.

Bridget Carrington