Hot Stew - Fiona Mozley

Soho in London is famous for its colourful character and Fiona Mozley certainly manages to show a good cross-section of that in her latest novel Hot Stew. It follows the fortunes of a very diverse selection of characters who interact only peripherally with one another, which is perhaps a fairly accurate way of describing how those of different classes, races and sexual orientation all interact in the real world. They are however all part of the complex ecosystem of life interaction as it operates in Soho. Or perhaps fails to operate as, like anywhere in London, population shifts and business ventures change quickly and often and the old ways of operating might no longer be fit for purpose.

Certainly “the oldest profession” is struggling to maintain its traditional presence in the district. One of the central characters, Precious, a young black woman who work in the sex industry there, decides to put up a fight against the rent increases that are being imposed as a way to force her and her colleagues out of the area so that it can be gentrified and more profitably exploited by property owners. That’s the tactic being imposed by Agatha, a wealthy businesswoman who owns most of the properties in Soho through her father’s old-style ill-gotten crime gains.

Drinking at the Aphra Behn bar nearby is Robert, a former heavy who worked for her father back in those days. He has taken to hard drinking and making visits to the ladies there, like Precious. Lorenzo is a young gay man who is Robert’s sometime drinking companion. Struggling to find acting work, he is encouraged to try for a TV show by his friend Glenda. Bastian used to know Glenda when he was dating her friend Laura before he finished with her to be in a more “suitable” relationship with a girl from his own social class, Rebecca. It’s clear however that this relationship is no longer working.

Also among this diverse group you’ll find 'Paul Daniels' and 'Debbie McGee' (as they are known), two of Soho’s problem drugs users who are known for doing magic tricks on the street and sleeping rough in a basement there. Debbie – real name Cheryl – has however gone missing down one of the holes that are part of the whole reconstruction going on in the area, and she’s not the only woman to have disappeared in suspicious circumstances. There are other peripheral characters in this “hot stew”; a policewoman investigating the disappearance of the women, local politicians, journalists and photographers.

It does initially seem like Hot Stew is just about the colour and the variety of life in Soho; character studies of types of people who frequent the area. That in itself is fascinating enough, each of them with their own individual struggles that you are keen to explore, but Mozley does seems to show that the sum does does add up to considerably more than each of the parts. It’s not just about change or modernisation, but it shows how difficult it can be for everyone to adapt, to change, to find their place in the world and cling onto it as something important, something defining.

If we don’t have that then what do we have, and if we lose Soho as we know it, do we also lose something defining about London? Or perhaps change inevitable and we have to let go, which just makes the humanisation of it all the more poignant in Mozley’s beautiful novel.