'Written by Dominik Szcześniak with art by Rafał Trejnis, London is an outsider's view of the capital, a graphic novel about what it's like to be a European worker in the city and unsure how you fit in. It's the kind of story that seems obvious and one that everyone thinks they know all about. In reality the issues of coming from one country to work in another are more complicated than you might think.'
The blurb for London says that it's an 'outsider's view of the capital', that it would be exploring life in the city for people from outside the UK, and the things that they have to face once they move there. Whilst I agree that the book does explore some of the aspects of the lives of immigrant people coming to Britain, their difficulties in finding work and places to live, I'm not sure that there's much in this book that makes it connected to the capital itself. Other than a few panels where we see things like London underground stations this could very well be any city in the UK.
I think the book is less about the city of London, and more about the people who come to Britain hoping to find a better life. People who flee war and violence, people who are escaping poverty, people who just want a better life for themselves and their loved ones.
Unfortunately, I never felt like I was able to get to know any of the characters that populate this story, thanks in part to the skipping around of the timeline, but also thanks to everyone feeling very similar to each other. The book follows Mickey, a man who has travelled to London from Poland and is working in construction and decorating to earn money so that he can return to Poland a richer man. Whilst this itself would make an interesting story and an engaging character to follow it's also the motivation for the majority of the other characters in the book, and other than the way they're drawn there's little to separate or distinguish them from each other.
One of the other issues that I had with the book, and I feel should be spoken about so that other readers aren't taken by surprise, is the amount of racial slurs that appear in it. I'm sure that some of this is realistic, that there are work places full of white people who like to joke and talk about minority groups in derogatory ways, using some of the most disgusting language they can, I don't want to read that. You can make people racist without resorting to using the N-word a dozen times. The only thing this does is makes me like the book less, especially as there are not voices there challenging these views, and they're simply allowed to exist within the work.
I was really hoping to like London, as I have with the other Europe Comic books I've read, but this was the least enjoyable of their books. I never made any connection with it, the story and characters bored me for the most part, and the racism inside it put me off. This is not a book that everyone is going to enjoy.
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