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Fiction Review The writing's on the wall

CALUM BARNES recommends a novel about a graffiti enthusiast decoding the signs of the times during the 1965 Watts riots

Graffiti Palace
by AG Lombardo
(Serpent's Tail, £14.99)

“A RIOT is the language of the unheard,” Martin Luther King once famously remarked and in Graffiti Palace AG Lombardo concerns himself with the language of those unheard during the 1965 Watts Riots in Los Angeles.

The novel's protagonist Americo Monk finds himself on the opposite side of town when the riots break out and it's through his peregrinations that we experience the maelstrom of those febrile August days.

A self-described “urbanologist,” Monk is a connoisseur of the graffiti that decorates LA, meticulously copying tags into his notebook which, he believes, will allow him to read and decode the city and, ultimately, the US. Its built environment becomes a palimpsest, a record of its history of racial oppression and injustice and, if graffiti is the writing of the unheard, the riot is their physical utterance.

In this retelling of The Odyssey, Monk is returning to his home at the harbour where his girlfriend eagerly waits and, on the way, he encounters a vast panoply of the marginalised.

From the headquarters of the Nation of Islam and the seedy dens of cocaine-dealing gangsters to Voodoo queens preaching their esoteric philosophies, Lombardo conjures a shimmering mosaic of the city. Monk’s quixotic quest to obsessively record the city’s graffiti is his attempt to become a historian for those left behind who otherwise leave no trace on the city’s fabric.

Lombardo borrows heavily from the Thomas Pynchon playbook, with zany character names, contrived acronyms and frivolous ditties bound together by a hallucinatory logorrhoea. Such postmodern proclivities can occasionally grate — the knowing winks to the reader in its flash-forwards to a future of heightened technological surveillance reminiscent of “science fiction paperbacks” come across as trite and ultimately unnecessary.

These moments only serve to occlude the novel’s obvious resonances with a current moment marred by the routine social cleansing wrought by capital, aided and abetted by unchecked police forces.

It's a book that works most effectively as an imaginative psychogeography as, in scintillating and erudite prose, Lombardo’s phantasmagorical rendering of a city in the throes of revolutionary tumult elevates the riots to a Manichean struggle between good and evil, one that sadly continues to the now present of those science-fiction paperbacks.

A novel of searing intensity, the occasional screwball humour of Graffiti Palace never obscures its urgent moral dimension. After the din of police sirens has dissipated, from the rubble there is still the possibility of building a city for the unheard.

 

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