Graffiti Palace

Graffiti Palace is a claustrophobic novel that feels longer and denser than the page count.

Monk is a black (mixed race) Los Angelean caught up in the 1965 Watts Riots as he tries to come home to his partner Karmann, heavily pregnant in her shipping container home by the docks. Monk is a kind if urban curator, copying down gangland graffiti in his blue notebook, interpreting it and thereby understanding the ley-lines that run through the suburbs. Normally he is allowed free passage by the gangs and the cops, his knowledge is priceless intel for everyone concerned.

But in the riots, the rules have changed. Nobody trusts anybody. Every encounter might end badly, progress through the suburbs is painstakingly made, block by block, doubling back, lying low.

This creates a road trip novel - albeit a very short road trip across the chaotic, anarchic city. Each chapter provides a fresh encounter for Monk. He meets the Fruit of Islam, murderous Chinese laundry owners, psychics, police, graffiti artists, drug dealers, an elderly Japanese yakuza woman, Godzilla, more gangsters and a mortuary technician. There are occasional references forwards and backwards, but there's a real feeling of dungeons and dragons - a series of barely connected discrete incidents. It is jerky and there is little feeling of real progress - or indeed, the passage of time.

The strength of the novel is capturing the diversity of life in the ghetto. It is set at a particular point of time and space, and the range of people going about their lives amidst the riots, as the city burns. It is a narrative device, sure, but the descriptions drip with authenticity. They create depth and meaning into signs and symbols that most of us will never even have noticed. They also create a misleading sense that life in the ghetto is varied and exciting; the reality is that without Monk, these worlds would never meet. The monotony of people's lives is occasionally hinted at but doesn't quite come through. It's all just a bit too exciting.

When the end comes, it feels like a relief. A somewhat sudden relief. Spending time with Monk, never able to see beyond the next junction, is terribly claustrophobic.

Overall, this adds up to something that is quite hypnotic and surprisingly captivating. It shouldn't work but it does.

This is extraordinary fantastical historical fiction, a stunning reinterpretation of The Odyssey, set in August 1985 in Los Angeles where the arrest of black Marquette Fry by white police officers ignites six days of the Watt Riots. Graffiti expert and curator, Americo Monk, is famous for his detailed documentation of the area's writings on the walls, a valued and much sought after knowledge. Usually, he can travel in safety through dangerous gang territories but as he attempts to reach his makeshift home of containers and his pregnant girlfriend, Karmann, all that Monk knows is thrown up in the air as he negotiates back and forth in a transformed and incendiary atmosphere in a sweltering LA. It is an astonishing and perilous journey, his adventures reveal a phenomenal and diverse range of colourful below the radar characters that inhabit LA's underbelly, brimful of a myriad of little known and subversive cultures.

Monk's unforgettable encounters include the real, the supernatural, the mythic and the surreal, such as Mexican and Chinese gangsters, killer bees, witches, and the Nation of Islam leader, Elijah Mohammed and so much more. Lombardo writes in vibrant prose, richly detailed descriptions with powerful imagery on the burning issue of race, as relevant today as in the troubled and traumatising past of the US in the 1960s. This is far from a perfect novel, but it is original, disturbing, unsettling and compelling storytelling set amidst the chaos and anarchy of the Watt Riots as LA goes up in flames. The narrative is staccato and overblown at times, and it took me a little time to get into the story, but once I did, I was completely and utterly hooked. This may not be a book for everyone, but it was a book for me, brilliant, beguiling, entertaining and thought provoking. Just fabulous! Many thanks to Serpent's Tail for an ARC.