Lucas Bostock is an industrious Jamaican immigrant, part of the so-called Windrush generation of post-War migration to Britain from the Caribbean and other erstwhile colonies. Bostock and his wife, Rhoda have fled their island in the sun under murky circumstances. The couple set about making a life for themselves in London, one converted building at a time. Rhoda works as an auxiliary nurse, whilst Lucas — a skilled constructor — steadily builds up a portfolio of properties, bought in a run-down state at knock-down prices, and mostly rented out to fellow West Indians. Fed up and humiliated by her husband’s prolific infidelity, Rhoda walks out on Bostock with their only daughter, Maureen. Rhoda makes the agonising decision to leave behind three sons, Samuel, Neville and Vincent in the care of their bad-tempered and foul-mouthed father. The couple eventually settle on an informal custody arrangement by which Rhoda can see her boys more regularly. Nevertheless, some schisms can never be repaired.

 The four children tread their own paths, studiously avoiding their father’s wish to follow him into the builder’s trade. Samuel and Vincent occupy extreme ends of ambition; one almost ruthless in climbing the greasy pole of (New Labour) politics, the other drifting aimlessly through life, despite initially seeming destined for great things. As children — legitimate and otherwise — and grandchildren extend the Bostock lineage, their story straddles the latter part of the 20^th Century into the 21^st, witnessing and intersecting with the monumental changes in their beloved London and beyond.

Ferdinand Dennis’ latest novel, Concrete Dreams, is hardly reinventing the wheel with his exploration of post-War migration and one family serving as a microcosmic representation of a broader phenomenon. The author remains judiciously vague about how much is autobiographical.

There’s nothing new under the sun. No original stories to tell, just original ways to tell them. Dennis initially succeeds. For several riveting chapters the author crafts a convincingly complex portrayal of Lucas Bostock; a man at once cruel, exacting and self-centred yet given to redemptive displays of vulnerability. If instantly disagreeable, he never quite transmogrifies into an over-simplistic villain. The reader gains insight into Bostock’s sorrowful orphaned childhood and his complicated relationship with his sketchy adopted brother, Horace and even more complicated relationship with his adopted sister, Jean.

Dennis populates the novel with a multitude of colourful characters. It’s the artful handling of Lucas’ interactions with family, miscellaneous tenants and would-be friends that paints a credible, if still realistically just-out-of-focus portrait of the man. The reader oscillates from being troubled by Lucas’ choices to deep sympathy for him; misunderstood even when well-intentioned, on account of his habitual gruffness.

In addition, Dennis creates a literary theorist’s wet dream by messing with the narrative voice and focalisation part way through the text. The once non-intrusive narrator steps out of the shadows to deliver his own (now homodiegetic) unrelated narrative about life in an unnamed diverse London neighbourhood, and his run-ins with a volatile younger neighbour and his indulgent mother. These detours instantiate some of the richest storytelling in the novel and include the most deliciously vivid descriptions (‘…the T-shirt, epidermal in its tightness, accentuated his tapered torso…’), although the source of the anonymous narrator’s omniscient knowledge of the comings and goings of the Bostocks et al. is never clarified.

Some of the novel’s strengths nevertheless turn out to be its weakness, not least the aforementioned cast of thousands. As Dennis introduces extended narratives from the perspective of the Bostock offspring, the story becomes more diffuse and unfocused. The further we move away from Lucas, the more threadbare it gets. The female characters are done a particular disservice. Whilst there are a few decent enough earlier chapters detailing Rhoda’s inner world, this soon peters out. Maureen’s characterisation is lightweight. Big emotions are projected onto her but little attention is paid to the motivations behind her misanthropy and pathological selfishness. Her outsized hatred for her father compared to her siblings — considering they each have reasons to resent him — is given short thrift. As is her aversion to other black people outside of her immediate family, with only a short and overly-tidy reference to this distancing towards the novel’s denouement.

Arguably, the biggest narrative quibble is reserved for the portrayal of Samuel’s teenage sweetheart and first wife, Sylvia. Her perspective is roundly ignored, seen mainly through the unreliable lens of other characters already predisposed to dislike her. Sylvia is denigrated and vilified with little back story to justify it, notwithstanding clashes with Rhoda.

Samuel eventually abandons Sylvia and their children for Elena — his younger, white, middle-class mistress.  And they live happily-ever-after.  Compared to oblivious Sylvia, Elena is portrayed at first as  a savvy, radical Left-wing activist and later a sophisticated centre-Left politico, useful to Samuel’s own growing aspirations. An upgrade if you will. Of course, Elena is not given much of a voice either. She’s little more than a plot device; a convenient, angelically-depicted foil to Samuel’s supposedly wretched Black ex. So charming is wife number two, that she apparently manages to win over the spurned Sylvia, who holds a never-to-be-extinguished torch for her untouchably impressive estranged husband.

What’s so frustratingly unrealistic is that none of Samuel’s relatives challenge him on walking out on his family, given their own fractured history.  Everybody loves Sam. The misogynoir would be comical if it weren’t so painfully and treacherously cliché. It seems a few older British-Caribbean male writers are yet to confront their problematic attitudes towards black women.

Other narrative sins eventually stockpile. Dennis sometimes throws the thesaurus at his text, trying out three synonymous highfalutin words where one would do.  The quality of dialogue ranges from inspiredly authentic (again, interactions involving Lucas or the enigmatic narrator stand out) to clunky and unnatural. The chronology of the novel is also haphazard. Infrequently specifying a year, the author nevertheless refers to timelines; nebulous enough for a degree of plausible deniability but leaving sufficient room for inference to work out that these dates just don’t add up. The children jump from infancy to adolescence with baffling speed, for instance. The anonymous narrator is supposed to be speaking from the vantage point of the 2020s, and yet he describes his troublesome neighbour’s switch from a Nokia to a Blackberry as if it’s the latest craze; a couple of decades late. The C-19 pandemic isn’t even mentioned; an omission so gaping it detracts from the credibility of that subplot.

This is one of a number of major oversights that perturb the narrative flow. By contrast, certain other subplots seem cynical, specifically Vincent’s incestuous romp with the half-sister the rest of his siblings refuse to acknowledge. That time and energy would have been better spent plugging plot holes.

Dennis endeavours to recognise the role of the Christian faith in the lives of many Black-British migrants, namely through Rhoda’s confused theology and Neville’s mid-life Damascene conversion and subsequent vocation as pastor. However, whilst the author is sympathetic and earnest in these efforts, references to belief often lapse into stereotype. Critical thinking is set in opposition to faith and science is at loggerheads with religion, encapsulated in Vincent’s Dawkins-style (lazy) New Atheistic rants and Neville’s inability to engage with his younger brother beyond quoting scripture ineffectually.

In the end, Ferdinand Dennis’ Concrete Dreams, much like some of his ill-fated characters, doesn’t live up to its initial promise.

Concrete Dreams by Ferdinand Dennis – out now (Peepal Tree Press)

This review also features on the I Was Just Thinking blog.