In 'Hot Stew,' Fiona Mozley Takes Aim at Gentrifying Cities
“Wealth is meant to trickle down,” writes Fiona Mozley with a waggish wink in Hot Stew, describing a character's "pleasant feeling of his own largesse" as he doles out a generous tip. Anyone living in a capitalist system like the one Mozley lambasts in this novel knows one thing to be true about wealth: it all too rarely flows downward.
Four years after the publication of her Booker Prize-nominated debut, Elmet, Mozely returns with her sophomore effort in Hot Stew, a sprawling, ambitious work of social realism about Londoners whose messy lives converge in the city's storied neighborhood of Soho. Millionaire developer Agatha Howard is dead-set on "blank-slating" a ramshackle building to transform it into luxury condominiums, but first, she must evict the longtime tenants, including the workers and patrons of the property's secret brothel, as well as the barflies at its popular ground floor pub. Hot Stew is populated by a lively cast of characters, including struggling actors, disenchanted businesspeople, vagabonds, sex workers, and down-on-their-luck magicians. Standouts amid this motley crew of winsome characters are Precious, a loving and principled sex worker who will stop at nothing to save the place she calls home, and Bastian, a wealthy but dissatisfied party boy who pines for an ex-girlfriend. As the characters' lives intersect unexpectedly, they join forces to fight the rising tide of wealth, power, and gentrification, raising enduring questions about the difficulty of making a home in an uncertain world.
Mozley spoke with Esquire by Zoom from her home in Edinburgh, where she shared insight about why the medieval period inspires her, how Charles Dickens influenced this novel, and what she hopes and fears for modern cities riven by income inequality.
Esquire: Where did this novel begin for you, and how did it take shape over time?
Fiona Mozley: The seeds of the idea came during the summer of 2013, when I was 25 and living in Soho in central London. I'd moved to the city and lived in house shares in Peckham; then a friend of a friend, who’s a long-term resident of Soho, knew of a room available above a pub that was in my price range. It was about to fall down, so it wasn't a totally legit living situation. I ended up living in this ramshackle old Soho building for four months in the summer of 2013. That, unsurprisingly, is where the idea of the novel originated. I didn't start writing it for another several years, until after I’d finished my first novel, but the idea came and the characters started to develop.
ESQ: You write about Soho with such fondness and such detailed intimacy. What about this neighborhood is so interesting to you as a setting for fiction?
FM: I do write about Soho with fondness, but I have an ambiguous relationship with it. It's an ambiguous place. It's a place that can be very accepting of all sorts of different communities. Over the centuries, immigrants have flocked to Soho; it's also been a place where there's always been sex and sex work in different forms. It's always been the epicenter of London's gay community, but also the center of arts and culture and food and film and music. It’s a place where exciting things happen, but it also has a dark side and a seedy underbelly. I'm drawn to locations that are mixed. They allow you to explore light and shade, as well as the ambiguity of places and people.
ESQ: When you say “over the centuries,” I’m reminded of how grounded in history this novel is. You open the book with a dazzling sweep of all the history that brought us to this moment in Soho. Elsewhere in the novel, you toss off sentences like, "In Moscow, Anastasia found a city caught between fat beginnings and slim endings; an empire decaying and regenerating all at once." Centuries of history are compressed in that one elegant sentence. What role does historical research play in your work?
FM: I did my undergraduate degree in history. I've always had an interest in history, and in thinking about the way history has an impact on the present, both in terms of the grand sweep of global history, but also personal history. The history of families and neighborhoods. I like to find ways to stitch those things together; the grand, large-scale history with the small-scale personal history.
ESQ: Does your background in medieval studies have a bearing on the way history and the past are braided into your work?
FM: Absolutely. I think one of the things that drew me to the medieval period was an interest in difference. At that time, society was structured in a very different way—it was a pre-capitalist society. There were inequalities and injustices, but they were of a very different kind. The glue that bound society together wasn't monetary, but rather based on personal relationships, for better or for worse. I don't have an idyllic view of the Middle Ages; I just find it interesting to examine those differences and the way that societies can be structured differently.
I think that does inform my work, because I like to take nothing for granted in terms of how we approach social questions. I always like to remember that it wasn't always this way, and it will be different in the future. There are possibilities for change because we've seen so much change in history. I think my sense for the issue of ownership, particularly in the UK, with regard to land and overcrowded cities, comes from that period.
ESQ: What's unique about those laws and issues in the UK?
FM: Property inequalities in the UK go back centuries because of our unique relationship with the aristocracy. A lot of land is still held by a few families, and I'm interested in that, but I'm also interested in how there have been rapid changes. In the novel, Agatha is not from a very old family at all—her father came from nothing—but she's acquired a lot of land because of the huge social changes that happened after the Second World War. That’s something we did see: after London was bombed extensively during World War II, there was a real slump in property prices. People who had the means went around buying up a lot of this property.
London is a place that attracts wealth from around the world. A lot of London is actually owned by people in the United Arab Emirates or Russians. Just today, there was an article in The Guardian about how much property in London is owed by Sheikh Mohammed, the president of the United Arab Emirates. There’s a long tradition of injustice when it comes to ownership of land.
ESQ: This novel is undoubtedly contemporary, but parts of it struck me as almost beamed in from a different era. I'm reminded that the large scale social realism of Dickens or Balzac, as well as the surrealist tradition of writing about London. Do you see this novel as influenced by those works, or in conversation with different historical forms of fiction?
FM: Definitely. I think the style of prose is quite Victorian in places, though that wasn’t really a conscious choice. I found myself adopting this 19th century style and I just went with it. I worried a little bit about that, because the fashionable style at the moment is very pared back, and I do like that style, but this novel isn’t that. It’s quite melodramatic in places, and quite grandiose, so I just went with it.
My biggest influence for this novel was Dickens, particularly later Dickens, when he writes in a very surreal way about London. Dickens is thought to belong to social realism, but he was also incredibly surreal. His later novels, like Our Mutual Friend, Little Dorrit, Bleak House—those are concerned with land ownership and have all sorts of characters from different walks of life. They try to construct a sense of the city, but the city is a moving beast on its own terms. In Our Mutual Friend, there's this sense of flooding and water and drowning; we get lots of imagery of London's waterways. I wanted that style to seep into Hot Stew. In Hot Stew, there's a lot of discussion of eating and being eaten, or being eaten alive, or eating the pineapple while it tries to eat your intestines. There’s also being eaten by the city and regurgitated by the city. I wanted to hone in on the gastric channels of the city; I think the idea to construct the city in that way stemmed from Dickens.
ESQ: Something else about the novel that feels of a different time is the way you play with caricatures. What was your aim in playing with cliches, or with less dimensional characters?
FM: I really like investigating literary tropes, so I never see cliches as necessarily a bad thing. I'm often interested in why something became a cliche in the first place. I'm also interested in working out how that cliche can be used to explore a particular situation. I wanted the whole novel to be larger than life, and rather melodramatic. I wanted characters’ behaviors to be almost artificial, in some situations. I wanted this novel to wear its artifice on its sleeve; I wanted to investigate ideas of artifice and fiction and representation. I always wanted it to be clear that these were characters in a novel, not real people. That was a deliberate move that I hoped would lead the reader to think about the nature of art.
ESQ: It's really a fantastic feat, how you've got over twenty fully realized characters here. What was your process of managing and inhabiting such a large cast of characters?
FM: Early drafts of the novel were a lot longer. It seems like there are a huge number of characters packed into a small space because the novel is now quite an average length, but it was originally much longer. I wanted to explore the connections between people, so I’d create one character, then think about the connections they could have. As the cast of characters grew, I started to piece different people together. Some characters started out small, but became larger. For example, Anastasia was never meant to have as much room in the novel as she had, but she barged her way in. Candy, who is a minor character, became one of my favorite minor characters, but she started as just a name. Although she's not a huge character, she did take on a life of her own. My strategy was to follow where those paths led me, then pare it back later.
ESQ: Is there a principal character who became a favorite, or whose story spoke to you more than others?
FM: I think Precious is my favorite character. I wanted her to be a really humane character. I think she’s the life and soul of the novel. I quite like Bastian, too—I really challenged myself with Bastian, because I wanted to present this guy who, on the surface, has everything going for him. If I met him, I’d find him annoying, because he has everything anyone could ever want. But actually, there's more going on underneath the surface. I wanted to explore that, and to challenge my assumptions about people. I might have certain assumptions about the kind of person he is, which aren’t necessarily grounded in reality. I wanted to give him an inner life and a journey of self-realization.
ESQ: In an interview you gave when Elmet hit shelves, you mentioned that your biggest challenge as a writer is writing about sex. How did you go from feeling that way to writing this book very much concerned with sex and sex work?
FM: I’ve found that if there's something I struggle to write about or conceptualize, that can be the seed of my most fruitful creative output. I don't know why that is. I think it's partly because I write to think through puzzling questions. The more perplexing I find something, the more I'm inclined to engage with it in my writing. I think one of the reasons I thought it would be difficult to write about sex is because I'm a bit of a prude. I worry about my family reading the book. Finally, I said to myself, "If you're going to be a writer, you've got to ignore that voice. You've got to be a bit daring." I wrote about sex because I wanted to challenge myself, and because I think it conjures up different social and political ideas as well as being a source of sensual and physical pleasure.
ESQ: Sex work is a fraught topic, with a heated debate underway in many countries about decriminalization. What were you concerns about approaching this subject, and how did you ensure that your portrayal would be sensitive and nuanced?
FM: I'm personally in favor of decriminalizing sex work. I've come to that position from reading a lot and listening to the viewpoints of sex workers. I really wanted to focus on presenting those women as human beings, first and foremost. I was aware that sex workers get a really bad rap in a lot of media—they either turn up dead or they're just there to titillate. I just wanted to explore them as people with inner lives, human relationships, and families. I didn't want to either glamorize sex work or present it as hell on earth. I just wanted to present a group of women who were trying to make a living doing work that wasn't the best work in the world. They didn't love it, but they'd had worse jobs. I found it to be quite a delicate balance. I obviously don't know if I've been successful—that's not for me to judge—but I just wanted to present them as people.
ESQ: The brothel operates as a cooperative, with the sex workers and their maids paying into a mutual fund for collective protection. Is that a structure you’d seen in reality, or is that something you dreamed up?
FM: The structure of the brothel and everything about it is imagined, because the situation in the walk-ups, as they're called in Soho, is very different. I wanted the brothel to be a centralized community. The way the law works in the UK means that if women are working alone, what they're doing isn't illegal, but if they're working together in a brothel, then it’s illegal. It’s a fine line they have to tread, where they obviously want to work together for safety, but it's illegal to do so.
I never wanted this novel to be journalism, because there's already been fantastic journalism and nonfiction written about the subject. I wanted to imagine a situation and use that situation to put forward various ideas. For that reason, it’s an imagined building on an imagined street in Soho, but I hope it reflects spirit of a lot of sex work activism, which does seem to be very feminist, as well as very concerned with cooperation and mutual support. The structure I devised was based on the spirit of things I'd read, but it’s not exactly how the Soho walk-ups work.
ESQ: Through the structure of the brothel and the protest scenes in which the sex workers fight to defend their business, you suggest that solidarity among the marginalized can affect social change. Do you believe that to be true?
FM: I do believe it to be true. I think making efforts to construct connections between groups of people is always a really good place to begin. I'm interested in how those movements can sometimes be co-opted by various forces or can become derailed by personality cults. But fundamentally, I think that the spirit behind those movements, in their purest form, is always a productive thing.
ESQ: As I look for commonalities between Elmet and Hot Stew, what strikes me is how both of these books are very concerned with property ownership, and with the struggle to put down roots in an uncertain world. What’s so endlessly narratively fruitful about that, for you?
FM: I like novels that have a central struggle around which lots of other ideas can float. With both of my novels, the central struggle has been over a piece of land, and more specifically with a group of people’s efforts to build a home coming under threat. That’s something that a lot of people of my generation are struggling with, whether in London or New York or any other major city. So much of the urban world is grappling with this, and it’s far bigger than millennials living in shared housing.
ESQ: What are your hopes and your fears, perhaps not just for London, but for all the cities stricken by this endemic problem?
FM: My fear is that neighborhoods will become completely homogenized. A place like Soho became famous because it had so many interesting communities. As soon as a place becomes famous and seen as desirable, big businesses move in and completely take away what it was that made those neighborhoods special. I can see a situation in which cities become completely owned by just a handful of venture capitalists, and everyone else is either paying rent or moving further out.
But I think if enough people voice their concerns, or if a lot of people forge networks of solidarity, there are all sorts of possibilities of cooperation. I'm big into co-operatives and the co-operative movement. What if and businesses and housing could be properly co-operative? There’s potential for that. The reason that I'm a novelist is because I can never think of good answers to the questions that I come up with. Writing novels means that you can explore different possibilities and not have to come to any conclusions. To solve this problem, I would turn to people who are much better at coming up with definitive answers than me—people who know about politics and activism, and have experience with actually doing the things that I write about. I can see it going one of two ways, I suppose. But the situation is untenable. Something's got to give.
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