The Freezies by Farrukh Dhondy is a novel that uses urgency and comedy. It presents the miniature misadventures of a child who is afraid of a world that struggles with migration, borders, and belonging. The novel revolves around three misfits—Suleikha (Sully), Leo, and Kai: outcasts among their peers—taking comfort in each other’s friendship to blunt their pain. They call themselves the ‘Freezies’, a title that betrays both their common experience of feeling disconnected and their survival. But beneath that episodically comedic tone, the novel follows the blistering truth of exile, displacement, and the human heart’s need to be a sanctuary.
The story begins with a dented van and trailer pulling into their village green, ‘The Mead’. Its occupant is Mr Christaki, a Syrian violinist who washed up on the shores of England with his adopted child. To the young people, he is both strange and drawable: a man whose music and gentleness embody another world. When he is taken by the deportation machinery, the Freezies decide to act. Their solution to attract national attention to his case is both ambitious and admirable, a reversal to children yielding power against an adult world.
Dhondy’s mode of narration (using the three children’s voices) breathes a sense of freshness into the writing. Each voice is individualized, fraught with cultural and familial experience—Indian, Caribbean, and mixed race—that reflects the diaspora of Britain today. The boys’ conversations are rich with humour and candour, yet they always allow us a glimpse of the prejudices and fault lines of their world.
Thematically, the novel revolves around solidarity and exclusion. The Freezies comprehend in Christaki a mirror of their dislocation. Friendship with him is a granting of symbolic asylum. Dhondy employs that friendship to offer us a reflection on asylum and sympathy. The argument that the youngest, ordinarily the most ignored voices of a society, might be capable of possessing values which the elders often forget.
Symbolism runs secretly through the pages. The car which Christaki lives in is an image of shortness, of tenuous belonging, even while it proves a temporary refuge for the children’s minds. His violin is not just a token of his earlier existence but a thread of connection between cultures; of music without frontiers. ‘The Mead’, or the open village green, by comparison, is both a communal hub and contested ground—a comment on the doubleness of welcome and rejection.
Even bare style delivers poise through omission. The novel resists falling into sermonizing. Rather, through the courage of its teenage protagonists and heroine, the reader witnesses ethical repercussions of the questions posed. That is the purpose of this story: to pose questions of sanctuary, racism, and the dignity of man. Finally, The Freezies is a novel about children only. It is a fable of belonging, with wit and concision. Dhondy reminds us that even the softest of voices, raised together, can challenge the hard machinery of insensitivity.