The House on Utopia Way by Stefan Mohamed

I would like to thank the author for a copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review

Published – Out Now

Price – £4.99 ebook

A dame walks into a detective’s office and asks him to find a missing girl. A familiar setup. You might have seen it before.

Or maybe not. Because this detective is woken every morning by a talking magpie, and the reflection he sees in the mirror doesn’t belong to him. And before he can start looking for this girl, he needs to find out if she ever existed in the first place.

Welcome to the nameless city, a fractured metropolis where geography is malleable and reality is relative. Where consensus is a memory, and memory is the least reliable currency around.

And wandering these shifting streets, Johnny Orange. A ‘sort-of detective’, trying to uncover the truth in a world where the concept no longer applies…

As the band REM once said ‘Nonsense’, isn’t new to me’ but my appreciation for the surreal side of fiction has gone on a journey. Like many I first encountered it Lew Carroll and I had a strong aversion – that felt silly more than useful. Over time I think I have learnt to embrace stories prepared to do something a little weirder with genres. Last Year I really enjoyed my trip to Jeff Vandermeer’s Area X where spy, horror and more genres all got played about with to heart’s content or Stark Holborn’s Triggernometry series where the wild west is composed of duelling mathematics outlaws. The stories are allowed to cut loose, surprise us and yet do hold a mirror up to us as well. The weird is a great way to have a different look at our world. In Stefan Mohamed’s extremely creative and fascinating The House On Utopia Way we get a noir tale with a surreal difference that explores a fractured world in more ways than one.

Nursing a bruised noise Johnny Orange wakes up tot eh usual talking magpie dropping off his cigarettes (strawberry flavour) and avoiding the reflection that isn’t his in the mirror. In a city where people have t be wary even travelling streets as they lose their sense of reality Johnny has a reputation as  ‘sort-of’ detective  - someone uniquely able to navigate the ‘patches’ that make up the city and concentrate on his goal without losing too many memories. A new client has asked him though to help locate his favourite waitress who no one now remembers being there. A robot has also lost her son and there may or may not be Nazis to navigate.

Structurally Mohamed uses the framing of the noir detective novel. Johnny delivers the first-person narrative and initially with the classic mix of world weariness and humour so many detectives possess but very much from the off these are the mean streets of Chandler but something much stranger. The noir novel is not unknown to have characters changing identity, not telling the truth and unusual characters to meet but this is a world where people may change gender and appearance as you’re talking to them, a city comprises of completely different areas from a twee faux English country street to islands of creative drug makers and few stay out late in case the police arrive and you’re never seen again.  Mimes can be dangerous; animals can talk and there are people to best not mess with. Everyone is a little aware of this but its accepted or at least tolerated while Johnny seems to at least know some of the rules and has the ability to keep going but as we find his own memories are fuzzy even as to his own past.

Mohamed uses the traditional mystery plot of a missing woman to help us get our bearings in a world that seems to us not to make much sense. As Johnny goes looking for clues, we get to see the strange effect travelling from one patch to another has on people’s minds and how everyone just accepts the changes. People say cultural references we will recognise but no one really knows what they mean. Historical figures get mentioned but their exploits are very different from reality. Gradually we sense while on one level this isn’t right, we also start to think this world does have some internal logic of its own and perhaps Johnny’s mystery is more linked to why this world is the way it is than simply another missing person to find. We are dropped in the deep-end and I really liked that as readers we have to both pay attention to these clues but also be prepared for things not to make immediate sense.

The cast grows with Johnny meeting a very genial drug maker named Creak, Octavia a woman who lives in a faraday style cage of books to keep reality as it was and a young teenager robot named Arthur. We get rescue attempts on Nazis but a giant bunny costume is involved and manages to be both tense and funny at the same time. There is fun piecing clues together, being proved right but also a growing unease that we feel that Johnny doesn’t see what we do as to why this world isn’t making sense. The second half of the book really exploits that moving more into perhaps more of a big quest tale than a detective story and johnny just ploughing on to find answers which increasingly we think suggest they centre around him. Mohamed even plays with format as first person shifts to third and even second. We get poems that point to the wider story appearing in books and overall, the writing switches from funny, to melancholic to eerie with panache and again keeps us on our toes as just as much the world’s reality is in flux, so it appears is the book’s own text. The ending is both satisfactory, ambiguous and open-ended which really suits this kind of story

All of which alone makes it worth reading btu I like the surreal to have a point and one thing really struck me is that in many ways you can see our world in this fractured one. A world of many different societies all occupying the same space but seeing the world very much from their own viewpoints from the little Englanders with delusions of grandeur to the ravers on drugs or the shops were no one pays too much attention to who really serves them. It’s a world where nazis exist, everyone says it’s a bad thing, but they seem to have their own places and be left alone to do whatever they want. With exactly what you would expect being the result. An Asian character may find when she presents as white she gets much better treatment and so while everything is strange and fantastical I think there is commentary on how our world is itself myriad laid on top which few of us really interrogate. Mohamed asks the questions who does such a set up benefit and the answer lies in plain sight. It is an intriguing and smart analysis I really was impressed by.

The House On Utopia Way is a unique experience. Funny, strange, emotional and a very good mystery. If you enjoy a trip into the weirder side of fiction and are prepared to go with the rise to learn this world and its characters, then I think you’re going to enjoy this trip a lot. Highly recommended!