A story of class, gender and property ownership told through the interconnected lives of the residents of one London building and the real estate heiress who wants to tear it down.
The novel, a complex mosaic of urban life, has an extensive dramatis personae ... Worried that I might get confused, I started jotting their names down and drawing lines of connection between them. I ended up with a spiderweb scrawl. Not that I needed it. Just when I thought I had reached the point when I couldn’t meet another person, the superficial introductions stopped and the deeper story began to play out ... This novel works a bit like Soho itself. It starts one lunchtime, midsummer, on a street corner at a restaurant table. You begin to take note of the place and its people and their often faintly bewildering habits. Mozley’s prose is simple but acute — if sometimes a little too much like a screenplay. Her piecemeal observations of appearances, habits and actions, her fragments of direct speech like snippets of overheard conversation, her sudden quick plunges into the mind of a character slowly build, snippet by snippet, adding texture and understanding ... Mozley is adept at descriptive detail that doubles as an aperçu ... Stock characters develop swiftly into believable people ... The Soho Mozley captures with such intensity is not a mere locality. It is a microcosm of swarming humanity.
Fiona Mozley’s Hot Stew is a tale of villainous gentrification inspired by those Soho raids ... a novel of ownership and kinship, domain, dominion and dirt. But where Elmet was quiet and clenched, Hot Stew is gregarious. Mozley has traded Yorkshire gothic for West End burlesque... Hot Stew corrals a bustling cast, ensnared in a web of politics, intimacy and power ... a surprisingly decorous novel. It borders on the squeamish about the squelching, ordinary realities of bodies and desire, while kinks become glib punchlines. Mozley is decorous about the politics, too ... At its best, it recalls the kind of capacious, rollicking satires Britain produced in and around the Thatcher era – ambitious, scathing and damn good fun. If only Hot Stew had more heat.
There’s a dazzling panning shot at the start where she introduces us to almost all the major characters without pausing for breath ... Like Dickens or Balzac, Mozley is interested in breathing life into cliches, using two-dimensionality to gain breadth and social reach. Mozley has a background as a medievalist academic and her ease with typologies, with tavern life, and indeed with bawdy good-heartedness, may owe something to that period ... Mozley’s achievement is to create room for ambivalence and nuance, even when the book’s world is drawn with such cartoonish vigour. Are the police right to want to crack down so vehemently on sex trafficking that they end up destroying the lives of prostitutes? Are the prostitutes right to mock the feminists who urge them to protect their bodies from men? ... In an age when so many novelists of Mozley’s generation take refuge in the dystopian, she has reinvigorated large-scale social realism for our times.
