The commendably subversive heroine of this debut novel is Relebogile Naledi Mpho Moruakgomo. You’ll understand why I wanted to write that in its glorious fullness. You’ll also understand why lazy Londoners are relieved when she calls herself Eddie.
Eddie can’t get her play scripts accepted. Do they lack the right colour, or is their author’s own colour and gender the issue? (“I was all too aware of my brown skin, of my feminine form.”)
Anyway, with the eager connivance of coffee bar contact Hugo Lawrence Smith, her antithesis in sex, ethnicity and social background – he throws a mean party in his Primrose Hill pad with its chandeliers – Naledi conceives a scheme of such cunning and deviousness your eyeballs will bulge.
The ruse starts with mischief and daring. It darkens. In a just-Brexited Britain, xenophobia and disparity keep pulsing. Hugo swells from a supporting role to co-protagonist. A smarmy agent moves from calling the aspiring authors nothing to calling them “darling”.
Eddie – she’s gay, which brings yet another dimension of discrimination, especially with her conservative Christian mum from Botswana – has a success, with her play set in a Britain that exiles its unproductive citizens. Then she has a setback. She prolongs and complicates the initial deception.
Other characters and relations assemble, fracture, reappear. Beautiful Belle makes good, then makes even gooder. Social media trolls make things vile. Brixton and Holborn, where most Asian restaurants are predictably owned by white folk, swell into increasingly rewarding settings. Events are spread over eight years and a couple of continents. Jay, who was born in Botswana and raised in the West Midlands, does well to keep it all kicking along to a talky, tricksy ending.
A big cast, with a lot of walk-on parts. Agreeable caricatures: the receptionist with a PhD in condescension; the top-selling and back-biting novelist; Hugo’s mum, elegant to the point of enervation. Mock reviews and interviews studding the narrative are gruesomely convincing: “THE ARTIST AND HIS MUSE … IDENTITY, ART AND INSPIRATION”.
As an exposé of racism and gender bias in the arts community, The Grand Scheme is punchy and pertinent. (Sky News has reported a 2024 survey finding that 75% of black theatre professionals in the UK feel they’ve encountered discrimination in their careers.)
As fiction, it has its wobbles. Brand names litter the text: “rolling up Golden Virginia tobacco into a Rizia paper … Creed Aventus Men’s Cologne … the 2011 Taittinger”. We get told things, rather than shown them, a fair bit. Sometimes, we get lectured. Dialogue can lurch or lumber: “[My play] is a socio-politically dense piece of work, and in my position of privilege, there could be room for doubt concerning my authentic connection to it.” Well, yes. And clunk.
But there’s acuity, inventiveness, energy. Moderate the didacticism, deflate the dialogue, and Jay’s next Entrance Left could be one for your watch list.
The Grand Scheme of Things, by Warona Jay (Footnote Press, $36.99), is out now.
