Your Life Without Me by James Meek review: a deeply original novel 

James Meek is surely one of Britain’s best writers. Wide-ranging, dogged and profoundly invested in the things he writes about. His essay-reportage covers everything from Scottish wind farms to Greenlandic politics; it is highly controlled writing.

Meek is an expert at getting inside the neglected communities that he writes about – and exposing the larger forces of corporate and political power that shape their lives. There are few journalists with more intellectual commitment out there. 

His fiction is equally fascinating. Your Life Without Me is a deeply original novel, telling a somewhat strange but ultimately endearing story. Our central character is Mr Burman, a schoolteacher of English at the end of his career. But Mr Burman was born in a different time to the other characters in this book: his daughter, Leila, and a former pupil, Raf. 

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Much of the narrative is of Mr Burman reflecting, after his wife’s death, on the choices and chances of the younger and stronger people around him. Most interesting is his relationship with Raf – a complicated, fickle and destructive young man fighting to not end up like his former and favourite teacher.  

Meek, as usual, takes us in some unusual directions. Raf is a demolitionist, who takes Leila to Bulgaria for a project. This is where Meek is most at home – taking apart the ambitions and projects of forgotten industrial centres, and the ambiguities that they throw up.

Just how will the locals reconcile the destruction of their community centres when offered much larger prizes? What, when push comes to shove, is more important about St Paul’s Cathedral, for instance, than a Bulgarian industrial plant? 

These problems are posed not in an easy tone of moralising, but in an open-ended and subtle way. Meek is constantly throwing up questions into the air; his readers allowed to catch them wherever they choose. 

Mr Burman’s descriptions are wonderful – taking in the blandest of left-behind towns with a brutally honest eye. And they’re heartfelt, too. In some writers this would seem trite, but in, for example, the setting of a Starbucks queue, discussing “a megacorporation overcharging you for the mercy of steamed milk from some cow version of the Matrix”, it’s somehow funny. 

In many ways that is what Meek is interested in – getting his finger on the pulse of our contemporary experience. And it’s done with such panache and originality that it really is worth it. Don’t expect conventional plot lines or mesmerisingly exciting characters. But this is a moving and original novel from a writer of real integrity.  

Your Life Without Meby James Meek is out now (Canongate, £18.99).You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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