“God help the first backpacker coming for a week who meets Simon Topp across the desk the day after Millwall have been beaten.”

Enter the arbitrary world of London Terminal C that cynical young immigration officer Henry Brinks inhabits, where any non-EU citizen approaching immigration control had better watch their footwear. According to Henry, the wrong kind of shoes indicates a “knock-off”. He describes such a victim, an African wearing a shiny suit and white plastic boat shoes sporting oversized tassels. He is fated to refusal before he even reaches the desk: “Anything with tassels and you’re asking for trouble.” Meanwhile, Argentineans get baited over the Falklands, and a long-resident African couple is interrogated on the colour of busses in Bath before getting refused.

Henry just wants to get by. He doesn’t want confrontation, he doesn’t want to make accusations he can’t back up. He wakes up from dreams where he is drowning and choking on passports. His goal — and the goal of every officer at Terminal C — is to get an easy posting in Sandgate-on-Sea, a port visited by a mere two boats each day.

Former immigration officer Tony Saint captures the day-to-day routine of the arrivals hall. You can breathe in the close, tense atmosphere of the room, filled with shouts and the boom-boom-bang of stamps getting whacked on passports. When a flight arrives, the chief officers come out “sniffing the dirty air for someone to knock off, someone to bounce.” Performance is measured in the number of knock-offs. Many use delaying tactics or pick from the queue those who they think are quick refusals — keeping an eye out for the dodgy footwear, no doubt. However, Henry goes for the easy shoo-ins in his pursuit of an easy life.

Saint fires off the one-liners and blunt, barbed dialogue while providing a stream of sharp, satirical character cameos. Meet the team of Special Branch officers “who occasionally interrupt their three-year drinking contest to intercept a few known criminals”. There’s the Asian “poacher turned gamekeeper” clad in Elvis-style threads who takes particular delight in harassing black arrivals, the old-timer who fondly remembers the good old days when immigration officers had the pleasure of knocking off Italian and French waiters: “When EC citizens became exempt from immigration control, a little piece of Ken died.” Meet the Fleisches, an American mother and son team who always travel with a pair of ornate ceremonial knives intended to murder the Queen in their pursuit of a feud dating from the time of Charlemagne.

While the laughs come fast, it’s a very bleak laughter as you’re shown a world where racism and the exercise of power that “would make your average South American generalissimo froth with envy” are the norm. Laugh at these funny guys all you want — but they hold life and death in their hands. You can feel the desperation in the “pen” or holding area where refugees are sent: ”It is a dark place, with a perpetual air of impending trouble and its own unique smell of spilled coffee and sweaty feet. Turks, West Africans, Tamils, Somalis… Many showing red-eyed signs of being detained in the pen for several days, children making half-hearted attempts at play.” ’Refusal Shoes’ reveals absurdity of borders and the whole repellent and grubby business of policing them.

With all this going on, I found the actual plot incidental. The book opens with one immigration officer committing suicide amid hints and whispers of dirty dealing and corruption. Cut to Henry Brinks getting mistaken by a Triad member as his white-haired contact, because poor Henry had just bleached his hair in an attempt at trendiness. The Triad member mysteriously disappears from detention and Henry is looking over his shoulder, dodging serious heat(“You’re not refusing people, you’re not doing your job.”) and frame-up threats from his bosses. And then he catches a glimpse of the disturbing Mr Xiao in the West End…

The injection of this thriller element felt like a rather half-hearted distraction, and proved to be the weakest aspect of the book. In this sense ‘Refusal Shoes’ reminds me of former PC Ike Eze-anyika’s novel ‘Canteen Culture’ — another contentious inside view of law-enforcement from the perspective of a black copper. I can enjoy a good thriller like anyone else. But it does seem a shame that authors writing on timely and controversial themes often seem compelled to shoe-horn a great wealth of material into breezy crime caper mode. Saint’s deft comic timing made me forgive the rather silly twist at the end, but I was still left with a feeling that this book isn’t all it could have been.

With its dark subject matter and great wit, ‘Refusal Shoes’ was a potential ‘Catch-2’2 for the 21st century. Instead, it’s an entertaining if slight book that sheds some light on a murky area of public life.

And that’s not such a bad thing either.

Rosanne Rabinowitz’s published fiction includes stories in The Third Alternative, Visionary Tongue and Roadworks, plus a contribution to The Slow Mirror: New Fiction by Jewish Writers and Deep Ten. She has reviewed books for TTA as well. She lives in South London with a venerable 16-year-old cat, and sometimes works as a freelance sub-editor on various magazines and websites. She has also been a life model, oral history researcher, part-time mental health worker, full-time doley and an editor of the late great Bad Attitude, a feminist mag ‘devoted to the overthrow of civilisation as we know it’. A graduate of the Sheffield Hallam MA in Writing, she has completed Noise Leads Me - a kind of anti-capitalist vampire novel set in Brixton ( looking for a forward-thinking publisher unfazed by genre boundaries!). Currently she is working on a second novel about a woman leader of the Adamites, a wild, anarchistic free-loving movement in 15th century Hussite Bohemia.

© 2004 Laura Hird All rights reserved.