Early in the first lockdown of 2020, Emma Tarlo, then a professor of anthropology at Goldsmiths, is introduced by a friend to two men who lived in a wild corner of Regent’s Park. Nick, a white man of 64, and Pascal, a Parisian of Algerian Berber heritage, who have been companions on the streets for 16 years and shared their pastoral nook under the hornbeams for the past five, do not consider themselves homeless. “I’ve never identified with the term ‘homeless’,” Nick tells her, “except as a category that the police might put on you.” As others welcome the policy of providing accommodation to rough sleepers during the pandemic, he and Pascal quietly resist any efforts to move them on, remaining in the home they have made with the tacit agreement of a sympathetic park manager. As Tarlo’s working life loses all recognisable structure, her daily excursions to the park to take the men food begin to reconfigure not only her routine but her understanding of freedom, connection and privilege.
There is always a danger that this kind of narrative can take on a middle-class saviour cast, and Tarlo is keen to stress from the outset that the relationship she builds with the men and the ragtag entourage that gathers around them is wholly reciprocal; she offers hot food, while in return they offer companionship, wide-ranging conversation and an alternative perspective that begins to shape the author’s view of her own life. The book – written with the men’s blessing – works hard to maintain a balance between affording Nick and Pascal the dignity of their chosen way of life, and not romanticising its extreme hardship and dangers.
“When I try to describe Nick and Pascal’s way of living to friends and acquaintances outside the park, I find myself up against this poverty of language,” Tarlo writes, “and encounter a barrage of negative value judgments and stereotypes attached to the idea of living without a structure that conforms to our conceptions of a home.” She is shocked to discover that the Vagrancy Act of 1824, drawn up in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, still criminalises homelessness. “To regard the world as your home, as Nick does, is not permissible, it seems, unless accompanied by a physical structure.”
Tarlo, who has previously written books about the global hair industry and the relationship of Muslim women to fashion, defines her work as an anthropologist to her new friends as “really about taking an interest in people and their lives”. But even as she spends more time exercising this curiosity by learning fragments of their histories, she grows increasingly aware of all the ways in which cultural anxieties are stifling the discipline in academia. Laudable and necessary efforts to decolonise anthropology result in endless meetings in which no one can agree on shared definitions of basic concepts. “Where once I felt I knew how to frame a subject with care and sensitivity, today every topic and the words associated with it seem fraught with peril as to whom they might upset and whether I even have the right to speak on the subject at all.”
Through her conversations with her friends in the park, a new understanding of what constitutes freedom grants her the courage to leave a job that is generating impossible levels of stress. “Nick and Pascal have taught me that security, however important, is not the only thing in life.”
Even having this choice is evidence of her own privilege, as she acknowledges, but Nick – who has lived on the streets for 20 years and repeatedly describes his life in the park as “a privilege” – is also firmly assured of his own agency. “I’m here as a sort of two-fingers-up, in a way,” he says. “I could live differently but I’ve always preferred being outdoors and I’m not that interested in possessions.” She observes how deeply invested the two men are in their relationship with the natural world; the care they take to tread lightly and tend their corner of the park. But by the end of the book, it becomes clear that their agency is always contingent, and that the author’s involvement must also be on their terms.
Tarlo writes engagingly, peopling the book with lively peripheral characters and literary references. She is conscious of the artificiality of imposing form on these scattered and fragmentary conversations: “To compose it into a single narrative is to give it a structure that goes against its very nature.” Perhaps inevitably, then, some parts can feel like filler. But the end result is a deeply empathic book that, like Alexander Masters’s Stuart: A Life Backwards or Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, asks its reader to look beyond their prejudice or pity, and to forge connections with the curiosity and attentiveness that is the essence of anthropology.
Under the Hornbeams by Emma Tarlo is published by Faber (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy oat guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
