A Home from Home by George Alagiah
George Alagiah's A Home from Home is out now
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Tuesday, 12, Sep 2006 12:01
Published by Little, Brown, out now, hardback, 278 pages, £17.99.
In a nutshell.
Autobiographical. Comic. Moving. Insightful. Political.
What's it all about?
George Alagiah seeks to compare his own immigrant experience with that of the UK's in the last 40 years. He arrived at a south coast boarding school in 1967 and was forced to "sink or swim", before adapting to the British way of life completely. The process was a painful one but ultimately satisfying, as Alagiah makes very clear. He contrasts his own life with the development of closely guarded ethnic communities in more recent times, criticising their alternative immigrant experience as being incomplete and ultimately going against the multicultural society of which he is so proud a member.
Who's it by?
George Alagiah currently presents the Six O'Clock News on BBC1. He was born in Sri Lanka but from the age of five grew up in Ghana, going to boarding school in Hampshire. He has presented World News Today since the programme's launch, having joined the BBC in 1989. His previous bestselling book, A Passage To Africa, dealt with his experiences of the African continent.
As an example.
"I want to personalise the debate about multiculturalism, about immigration and about identity because that is where its subtlety is revealed most poignantly and accurately. I want to give names to the numbers, characters to the statistics and emotions to the theories."
Likelihood of becoming a Hollywood blockbuster
Alagiah's lifestory could easily be worthy of a film - but it lacks an ending. That doesn't mean to say that the wider narrative, which is the real subject of his book, couldn't be retold in a film which traces the story of an immigrant boy who grows up in east London - and ends up watching the generation below him head towards a self-destructive disaster in last year's July bombings.
What the others say
"Such universal regard can betoken studied blandness and an unwillingness to challenge the status quo. Alagiah is an outsider whose RP accent and urbane manner have made him the voice of the establishment. Yet his new book, a part-memoir, part-political treatise called A Home From Home, reveals an underlying unease first prompted by a friend at Durham university's surprise that his parents were Asian." - Tania Branigan, The Guardian
"Normally newscasters hide behind polished smiles - rarely writing books of greater controversy than eulogies to eccentric cats, etc - but A Home from Home is chewier fare." - Jasper Gerard, The Times
So is it any good?
Alagiah's central warning of an "Apartheid Britain" is certainly attention-grabbing - but that says something about the nature of the book's appeal. Although this is very much a personal and thoughtful memoir of his own experiences, it's also a searingly political indictment of race relations in the UK as they are today. Some might say that to completely enjoy A Home From Home a taste for the cosy autobiographical style is as essential as an interest in the changing nature of Britain's multicultural society. But that's not how it works - interest in the latter inevitably arises out of engagement in Alagiah's personal anecdotes. That is the book's greatest achievement, therefore: it shows that politics really is about everyday life.
7/10
Alex Stevenson