Poor, old, lonely and living in a dilapidated house on London’s Portobello Road, Mary has little to look forward to until she chances upon Cub, a British-Jamaican boy with whom she strikes up an awkward friendship. Soon mutually dependent, for dark and dubious reasons that neither will readily admit, their lives become entangled in an increasingly surreal and uncomfortable way, with horrifying consequences.
Originally published in French in 2013, The Living Days is an unflinching and at times brutal look at life in the metropolis in the first decade of the 21st century. London is a pulsating, powerful city that contains extreme poverty, violence and racism. It is a divided city, its inhabitants siloed according to circumstance. Mary and Cub’s relationship can be seen as an attempt to build an alternative reality, to create safety within a net of illusion. But as the boundaries between real life and the imagination become increasingly blurred, the fragility of body and mind becomes ever clearer. Mary’s descent into utter delusion is a stark reminder of the pitfalls of ageing; Cub’s life at home with a single mother struggling to bring up her children at a time of economic precarity is a bleak reminder of what younger generations all too often face.
