There are some choices you must make in life which truly feel like being at a crossroads. For Amir, the student protagonist of Kasim Ali’s second novel Who Will Remain?, that moment arrives when his childhood friend Adnan rocks up, now a savvy and loaded drug dealer. “These streets are paved with gold,” Adnan says of inner-city Birmingham. “You just need to know where to look.”
Growing up with so little money he has had to walk the hard concrete streets (which have never appeared gold to him) rather than take the bus and relying on his friend Mohsin to pay for pretty much everything, Amir is taken in by Adnan’s situation. There’s his swish car, the fancy house his parents live in (they don’t ask questions), but perhaps most of all there’s his confidence, his certainty about the future, his power.
All that is in short supply. This is Alum Rock in Birmingham, early 2000s, a grim name (referring to aluminium mining in the 18th century) for a three-kilometre area of England’s second-biggest city. Amir is surrounded by men who have made choices. His brother, Bilal, has a sweet-seeming gig working at a start-up after studying philosophy. His uncle is on a relentless treadmill of failed business pursuits. Adnan is the dealer, Mohsin the fast and loose mess, Slick a young man taken in by the manosphere.
Who Will Remain? is concerned with choice. As its title implies, some people have escaped Alum Rock. Yet most of the characters have similar houses and parents with similar values. So how far can we control our destinies? Amir can’t say why he chose to study engineering. The forces that drive him are mystifying, even to himself.
Ali deals with a clash of values between generations of British-Pakistani Muslims deftly and compellingly. This is where he grew up, after all. Themes of status anxiety, racism, class prejudice, the blow-out from the financial crisis and male anxieties over gender roles are all here — and all propelled by a pacey plot.
Lucy Kenningham is Comment Editor at The London Standard
Who Will Remain by Kasim Ali is out now (Fourth Estate, £16.99)
