Sunjeev Sahota’s new novel ‘The Spoiled Heart’ spares no one

When I was in my second year of University, in my first International Relations class, my professor played comedian Bo Burnham’s video. In it, he merrily – almost giddily – sings, “Private property’s inherently theft / And neoliberal fascists are destroying the left”. This is narrated by Socko, a sock puppet who has just returned from “a frightening, liminal space between states of being, not quite dead, not quite alive”. British novelist Sunjeev Sahota’s protagonist in The Spoiled Heart, Nayan Olak, is similar to Socko in three ways: his political ideologies, his transitional state of being, and finally, the fact that his voice, and therefore his story, is entirely dictated by the invisible hand that props him up.

Being brown in small-town England

Politics – in its broadest and most minute sense – forms the meat of the novel. Mainly the range of leftist politics and the growing fractures between a) the need for identity-specific schemes; and b) the inherent fractures that identity politics promotes. The set-up is simple: a community of NRIs navigate being brown in the small English town of Chesterfield. The residents need immigrant business (and labour) but resent their presence. It's a familiar tale and, at times, almost seems trite: “Surely no...

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