A few years ago, I went to hear the great Ali Smith speak during a festival hosted by the National Centre for Writing in Norwich. Her talk was predictably inspiring, so it felt deflating that the first audience question was from an aspiring author of a certain age who launched into a lengthy diatribe against a publishing industry he claimed was overfocused on youth and novelty. “Shakespeare wouldn’t be published today,” he said with a final, confusing flourish. Paul Mendez’s Rainbow Milk feels like a response to this kind of nonsense, a novel that does what great debuts do – bringing an originality of voice and vision to the form, refreshing our ideas of what is possible in fiction.
Mendez’s novel plays out through two time frames that reflect upon and inform one another. The first is set in the Black Country in the late 1950s and follows ex-boxer Norman Alonso, recently arrived with his wife, Claudette, from Jamaica. Alonso is decent and honest, meeting overt and covert racist brickbats with the same level-headedness. Andrea Levy is a clear touchstone for Mendez and he brings to the quiet dignity of Alonso’s life a warmth and humanity reminiscent of Levy at her best. This narrative is a painful, powerful record of the Windrush generation.
The second storyline, set almost 50 years later, explores both how much and how little has changed for a young, ambitious black man in Britain. Former Jehovah’s Witness Jesse McCarthy has been cut off from the tight-knit Midlands community in which he grew up. He comes to London, where he falls into sex work, looking to fill the void left by the absence of faith and family with loveless hook-ups and drugs. Then a chance encounter changes everything.
These two stories build into a novel of huge power and emotional impact, written in language that is sharp, distinctive and often beautiful. 2020 has been a year of superb debuts and Rainbow Milk is among the best.
• Rainbow Milk by Paul Mendez is published by Dialogue (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15
