'The Peckham Experiment' by Guy Ware

May 2024 - 'The Peckham Experiment' by Guy Ware

In May we read Ware’s 2022 novel which covers a huge amount of ground in its 200-odd pages.

Our protagonist is Charlie, who provides us with a monologue that is told, increasingly drunkenly, during the evening of the British general election of 2017, as he tries to write a eulogy for his twin brother JJ for his funeral service the next day.

The boys grew up in Peckham and were orphaned during the war. They were part of the Peckham Experiment at the Peckham Pioneer Centre and came into a world where quality healthcare and housing was a right. They both develop careers in housing – JJ as a local authority architect and Charlie as a Quality Surveyor. Charlie looks back at their lives and careers and the compromises they have made.

Charlie is originally quite hard work for the reader – his narrative is digressive, circular, and although he is a witty interlocuter you have to stick with him. It’s quite clear he’s an unreliable narrator (aren’t they all?) and although his monologue is ostensibly about JJ, we realise that he has been telling his own story.

I could have been you

“I could have been you” is a frequent refrain, from one twin to another, estranged after the novel’s final tragedy; Charlie’s own pain from evacuation and war is a thread of darkness that Ware reveals as he gets increasingly drunk.

Political events provide the scaffold to the novel at a local and national level, and Ware skilfully recreates the machinations of local government as civic ideals and the call of the free market collide.

Central to the novel is the collapse of Rochester House (a thinly disguised Ronan Point, which partially collapsed in Newham in 1968) and the diagnosis of “progressive collapse” resonates wider than this particular tower block. Charlie tells us that “the universe is not moral and history has no arc” but the choices that both men make weigh heavily on them.

The novel derives particular weight from its timing – the general election was a week before the Grenfell Tower fire which hangs over the novel even though Ware does not include it in the novel.

What readers thought

Occasionally, readers felt that Ware cleaves too closely to the political history of the 1960s and 1970s, and that this pulls the novel out of shape. Readers were also critical of the novel’s final sections, where a series of spectacular events close Charlie’s narrative – these were seen as incongruous to the tone of the rest of the work.

However, there was praise for Charlie’s narrative, and Ware’s group scenes, which felt very true to life, particularly the parties and social events. This is a powerful novel which we would recommend.

Further research

We also took a look at the collections from the London County Council and the Greater London Council (GLC) in relation to housing in London during the twentieth century. You can explore these records further via our collections catalogue and more images can be found on the London Picture Archive.