The Bricks that Built the Houses by Kate Tempest

Kate Tempest’s debut novel The Bricks that Built the Houses begins with a quote from William Blake, and the shadow of this great London poet lingers over the text. For Tempest, Blake is the poet of the city, the advocate of the children, the singer of the dispossessed. From here, the book shifts focus to three friends fleeing London with a suitcase full of money and trouble in the rear mirror. The novel then takes the reader back then further back, as we explore the decisions and mistakes that have brought these 20something Londoners to this pass, and then are told of the lives of their parents and grandparents.

What begins as a sketch is given more definition, more colour. There is a touch of Irvine Welsh in the opening scene of crime and drugs, and there are elements of Zadie Smith in the emphasis on the many threads of nationality and race woven into these characters and communities. Yet part of what marks this novel out is its incisive insistence on the physicality of speech. As characters punch and caress with language, their words will ‘hang’, ‘plummet’, or ‘fidget on the table like a frog on a hot pavement.’ Tempest’s close attention to language can also be seen when the fuller sentences of the narrative of the past give way to the shorter, choppier lines of a 21st century London of smartphones, Twitter and cocaine.

Unfortunately, after the deftness of the multiple character portraits and the deeply realised East London setting, the final chapters feel like they have been built on less solid ground. The scale of narrative coincidences and grappling of moving parts needed to build to the novel’s climax often feels a little clumsy. Instead, Tempest seems far more interested in building a fuller picture of how the young adults of this city are born of the political activism and racial tensions of their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. In spite of its propulsive opening, this is no crime thriller. Or, if it is, the real criminal is gentrification.

Throughout it all, though, the city reflects back on the characters; their fears and short-lived, hard-won joys. When two of these characters first meet and tentatively fall in love, the buildings around them are ‘twinkling’ in the cold. Yet Blake’s fearful London is never far away, and, as Tempest reminds us, it is ravenous: ‘sharp financial buildings rise like fangs in the city’s screaming mouth.’