Who Will Remain, the second novel by author Kasim Ali, is a classic tale of tragic greed, brought into the modern-day, working-class Pakistani community of Birmingham. Yet, much like the classics, the predictability of the plot in no way diminishes the novel’s effectiveness. As always, the agonising inevitability only lends to the tension.
It opens with Amir, our protagonist, attending the funeral of his cousin, Saqib, who has died after being stabbed in a gangland fight. Amir is suitably horrified by his death, yet his bitterness towards his own ongoing poverty outweighs the horror. This obsession with wealth is Amir’s tragic flaw, and from it the plot ensues.
Certainly, some of Ali’s sentences are clunky, and at times the dialogue can feel a little like unnatural explication. Also, some of the characters, especially Amir’s fellow students, can feel like stereotypes, although I will say that this characterisation doesn’t especially rankle – so many people are stereotypes, as much as we’d like to think otherwise, especially students.
And perhaps this is especially forgivable here because of Ali’s moments of stunning incisiveness. Early on, upon entering the flat of his much wealthier friend and feeling as though he shouldn’t be there, Amir “ ... glanced behind him as he’d walked through to see whether he’d left a trail of dark behind him, his poor f**king up the carpet”.
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Another fascinating aspect of this novel is Ali’s depiction of the rage and stagnation that coerces “good boys” such as Amir into crime. There’s an eye-opening moment when Adnan, the gang’s leader, describes to Amir the seemingly inescapable bind they’re in:
“All the money I have is from white mans, that’s what taking power looks like, not just walking down the path they made for us, hoping that maybe, one day, we might be able to have a job or wear a suit that makes them respect us, nah that’s not the f**king way, this is the f**king way ...”
The rage contained in these characters bristles palpably from the page. It also offers some understanding into the desperate situation of disaffection among young men in Britain and, increasingly, in Ireland. Although it could easily have felt like sermonising, Ali succeeds in conveying a particular sociological message through truly propulsive writing. Here we have a good old Dickensian novel. Lovely stuff.
