Wimmy Road Boyz by Sufiyaan Salam review – electric debut at Manchester’s Curry Mile | Books

Three twentysomethings “drive and dream of an impossible night on the endless road. moving like a crowd on a crazy road, destination: where else? manchester, wilmslow road, the curry mile, yo!” This is the opening of Sufiyaan Salam’s high-octane book, written mainly in the limited characters of gen Z – and you’re on board.

The Boyz are British Pakistani friends in their 20s. Immy is “something of a bad boy Muslim slut who doesn’t text anymore”; Khan is “the mogul mowgli himself … the kind who recites Warren Buffett’s epigrams like hadiths”; and Haris has “ideas that do not extinguish, philosophy wounds”. Everyone wants to escape – from the past, the present, someone else, or themselves – and they gather for one night “traveling injured in a rental car to what could be the natural end of a relationship that is beginning to fade”.

Immy’s heart “starts going crazy, going up to 140bpm like a dirty song”; Haris “couldn’t help but feel his east collide with the west… it was 1947 in his life, yo – everything split”. As they run away from their heartaches, it’s the unspeakable things between them that threaten their bond.

The famous Wimmy Road, which is a “shisha-haze mecca of evil and magic, a jannat-ul-firdous of kebab houses and jalebi bars”, turns into “no man’s land, this land without women, this land of corruption and bollocks”, showing the deterioration of society. Violence cools, then overflows. Things break down, the three in the middle can’t handle it. Soon, the boys “split into three as a small group from which their parents were expelled”. Will they find a way back to each other – and pull themselves together again? The plot of the movie is fast paced, yet Salam is always in control of the wheel. Nothing about Wimmy Road Boyz is hidden: Salam puts his cards on the table. But despite the work of the show, when he finally hits the brakes on the story, the results are immediate, terrifying.

Here, the monarchy returns, repeating the “word”, disrupting the British canon (whatever that may be). Written in a multi-lingual essay that is clear and understandable at the level of sentences, the book combines many references – we meet DJ remixes of Sabrina Carpenter’s music and Sarah Ahmed’s lessons – and direct comparisons with Rushdie, KureishiGuy Gunaratne, Gautam Malkani. But for all the electric lights, slang and music, this is ultimately a book about the deep-seated, broken and lonely heart of British Asian men’s identity, fueled by the cultural narrative of the “good foreigner” and the expectations and prejudices that accompany it (“it’s better if you let it, inside it is with me.

Salam is a master of similes (“spitting his words like obama arrows – more smoke in there than he wanted, oops”; at the university, “brother was working like a party for brown boys – they’re all very annoying”). Hyphens serve as connectors between cultures: the boys have a “problem-shubble” night. Underneath the game is something sinister. History is always in the rearview mirror, much closer than it seems. With topics including “the hummus intifada”, “can the subaltern chill”, “the blood of the river”, this is a story that is rooted in South Asia’s historical and political environment (the partition of 1947, the displacement of the Mangla dams in the 1960s) as it is in Britain today. For the “hungry generation of the future”, Salam asks, what does survival look like? “Because isn’t it also true that the opportunities available to three brown boys like themselves are already limited?

Similar writings and others, the coming of age is met with international tears through British institutions to see masculinity, community and youth culture: “The government must be dissolved and torn apart, restarted… At one point in the night, Haris says: “Now I am trying to think if all people are not the only way in which power is controlled, waiting for it to disappear”. In Wimmy Road Boyz, Salam does the same with the appearance of the book.

Wimmy Road Boyz by Sufiyaan Salam published by Merky Books (£16.99). To support the Guardian, order your book from guardianbookshop.com. Shipping fees may apply.