Middlesbrough is just 500 miles as the crow flies from Paris. For veteran local sprinter Richard Kilty, the “Teesside Tornado” representing Team GB in his last Olympics, the French capital must seem almost next door, having previously torn up the track in British kit as far afield as Rio and Tokyo, and for whom visiting the in-laws means a trip to Lithuania. It’s a shame then, that it wasn’t Kilty’s positive example linking the two cities this week, but twin instances of hate-fuelled prejudice, spilling over into social media and onto the streets.

The first was the row in Paris over the eligibility of Algerian boxer, Imane Khelif, to compete as a woman. After she defeated her Italian opponent in just 46 seconds, and it emerged she’d been disqualified on “gender grounds” by the International Boxing Association (IBA) in 2023 (along with Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan), it sparked an eruption of anti-trans bile on social media, including from Donald Trump and his acolyte Elon Musk in the US (who somehow sought to blame Kamala Harris), and JK Rowling here.  “A young female boxer has just had everything she’s worked and trained for snatched away because you allowed a male to get in the ring with her,” tweeted Rowling, in a rant aimed at the International Olympic Committee (IOC). The concern might be more understandable if there was any truth to the claim that Khelif was in possession of a Y chromosome. In fact, both Khelif and Lin were born female, and have competed as women their whole careers. Neither is trans, nor ever identified as such. The decision to suspend the two, on the spurious grounds of “raised testosterone levels”, was taken unilaterally by the IBA’s Russian president, Umar Kremlev, who is a close associate of Misinformer-in-Chief Vladimir Putin, and linked to the far-right biker gang, Night Wolves. Indeed, it is the IBA itself that is no longer recognised by the IOC, which suspended the body in 2019 for decades of misgovernance, match-fixing and corruption.

The second example was the outbreak of rioting on UK streets, where – I’m sure much to Kilty’s regret – Middlesborough scored silver to London’s gold in the medal table of arrests. Enough has been said about the blatantly false assertions on which the violence was supposedly based: we all know that the murderer of the three young girls in Southport was neither an asylum seeker nor a Muslim, and most of us recognise the irrelevance of such factors, even if true. To the extent these riots have fed off public discontent their root cause is social deprivation, not immigration. Successive Tory governments, abetted by the effects of Brexit and Covid, have gutted public services, and seen millions caught in the pinch between rising costs and lower real wages. And as they left their sinking ship, the Conservative Party cowardly pandered to Nigel Farage’s agenda by stoking the idea that our woes have been caused by asylum seekers. All too predictably, malevolent despotic and far-right agitators at home and abroad, many who are extremely wealthy and appear to have a surfeit of testosterone themselves, engage in sowing hatred in our communities at the expense of others’ tragedy and misfortune. If events this week have brought anything positive, it’s that at least now we can see who these Olympians of hatred are.

I wonder how the immigrant-bashing British “protestors” (some might say “rioters and looters”) feel about the anti-tourism protests in Majorca and the Canaries. It’s dangerous to make assumptions but I don’t think it’s too far-fetched to propose there may be overlap between the people hurling rocks at policemen and some tourists we export to resorts like Magaluf – where the worst-behaved make Spaniards’ lives a misery. I imagine they show the same determination to ignore their own misdemeanours and blame others, whether in the UK or the Med.

The truth is that most of us, if remotely self-aware, will find at some time in our lives we are the outsider or foreigner, arousing suspicion at best and hostility at worst. A process that should – but often doesn’t – make us more empathetic to others who find themselves in the same situation. I was musing on this while in the Cotswolds last weekend for the Wilderness Festival. An event full of well-heeled parents (who’ve ditched the children for the weekend in favour of sequin flares, moth cloaks, elaborate headgear, rave music and a dose of pixie dust), where I was conducting an author interview with cabaret-star-turned-writer Ruth Ivo (profiled here for Perspective).

I’m not much of a camper, so decided to stay at a pub near Chipping Norton, where I was painfully aware that I was a prime example of a plummy-voiced London media “incomer”. When I walked inside the inn, I found myself looked up and down by the locals like the US travellers in An American Werewolf in London, and no wonder. Locals have been besieged by journalists, politicians, pop stars, models and financiers deserting Notting Hill and Primrose Hill for the creamy-yellow-stoned houses of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire, with rambling roses climbing trellises and hollyhocks at the gate. The “Chipping Norton Set” encompasses residents like David Cameron, George Osborne, Rebekah Brooks, Kate Moss, Alex James and Jeremy Clarkson. Then there’s (Lady) Carole Bamford who founded the Daylesford Organic Farmshops and cafés, where smashed avocado on toast means taking out a second mortgage. She’s also renovated a number of local pubs where menus have distinctly London pricing and B&B will cost you around £200. 

I wondered how my landlady – a proper old-style local – felt about the moneyed invasion. She was cautious with her wording, but clearly feels it’s a very mixed blessing. She told me the pandemic had escalated the exodus from London and taken almost all family houses way beyond the million-pound mark. The only way her family could afford to live in the area was as tenant publicans, renting. And she openly admitted her envy of Carole Bamford’s ability to do up pubs luxuriously while she was forced to economise. When our conversation turned to the Olympics, she had extensive knowledge of equestrian events and archery, having once been a keen rider herself. She said Charlotte Dujardin was “a lovely woman” in her experience, “who’s had a moment of madness and will pay for it the rest of her life.”

Our conversation took me back to my own country-pub childhood in Kent, surrounded by farming folk who went fox hunting before the ban, and enjoyed point-to-points. We both agreed it was hard to defend the bloody slaughter of foxes, but we had some nostalgia for the way local hunt meets brought the community together. It was all an illustration of yet another division in British society: town and country. One that Jez Butterworth ably explored in his excellent play Jerusalem. In the end, divisions arise from the same root cause as the immigration riots: a growing divide between the UK’s wealthiest and poorest citizens. The task of healing this rift is immense and it’s crazy to expect instant miracles from the new government. Instead, we must all be open to any conversation or act that helps deflate tensions – ideally to be held in an old-fashioned British boozer.

The main “dreamers” of this book are music manager Bonnie and Swiss-Senegalese jazz singer, Mansour, the father of her unborn child. When the book opens in 1969 he has gone missing while on tour in Spain. Pregnant Bonnie abandons her mother-in-law’s disapproving hospitality in Switzerland to go in search of him. After stealing a relative’s dilapidated car, she crashes into a ditch in a rainstorm, but what happens next is held off for hundreds of pages as Sennaar takes us back to the preceding years when the couple first met at a jazz concert in Manhattan and – before that – to the lives of their mothers (each of whom had abandoned them).

Sennaar’s ambitious first novel travels back and forth across continents and generations, revealing a fascinating diaspora and a potentially confusing cast of characters, but the magnetic attraction between Bonnie and Mansour successfully holds the centre. They meet after Mansour has a premonitory dream one night about a record cover Bonnie has secretly designed for him. The duo quickly become inseparable. There’s “a rawness, an ease to them, they are quick to tug and tickle and pull one another around the house, manoeuvring limbs without words, like the body of one belonged to the other.”

From the clubs of Paris to the bars of New York in the 1960s, back to Senegal in the 1950s and forwards again to Rio, the rhythm of different voices and backstories rises and falls like jazz melodies. When Bonnie participates in the riots after Martin Luther King was murdered, she finds herself making molotov cocktails alongside a girl she recognises in school uniform at the bus stop next day. Senaar reminds us that fiction can teach us about history simply by immersing us in the magic of the story, much as black jazz musicians blew the minds and sensibilities of their white counterparts in the 1920s.

While there’s grief and loss in this story, it has a life-affirming pulse akin to that felt by Mansour when his band is playing an early gig: “Once they’re in flight, Mansour backs off the mic, laughing out loud at the sudden joy that overtakes him. A portal opens… a new suggestion of how living can feel.” And when Bonnie finally plucks up the courage to lift the dust cover off her much-missed grandmother’s record player, it’s surely no accident that the last album played by the remarkable Sylvia was Ray Charles’s Yes Indeed! The characters in this engrossing novel don’t just “dream in gold”, they’re determined to make it real.