66 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel
only receives help from those of different ethnic, national, or socio-
economic backgrounds. There is Jimmy, a beggar who takes pity
on Gabriel and helps him make a few pounds selling magazines to
passersby. Then there is Katherine, a legal-aid lawyer, who goes out
of her way to help him escape jail and persecution from angry locals.
Finally, there is Mike, an Irish lorry driver, who picks up Gabriel
hitchhiking and brings him “home” to Weston, where he provides
the latter with food, shelter, and, eventually, a car and job.
This highly unconventional “home” of Mike’s is worth exam-
ining in more detail, particularly because it seems to constitute
the only moment in the novel in which the term is used positively,
with Gabriel poignantly describing the space as his “blessed home”
(p. 292). The house itself officially belongs to Mr and Mrs Anderson,
who use it as a dynamic, open space for a broad variety of people from
different walks of life, who are “in need of temporary accommoda-
tion” (p. 287). In this sense, the notion of home is redefined as an
inclusive, egalitarian space inhabited by a cosmopolitan mixture of
people who live there by virtue of individual choice rather than the
coincidence of birthplace. This combination of free association and
nonbinding identification with place presents a clear contrast with
the fixed tribal associations that define Gabriel’s sense of belonging
in his previous “home.” “Everybody else [in the house],” he tells us,
“came and went: businessmen relocating and [those] who were in
need of temporary accommodation while looking for a home for
their families; executives at conferences; working-men between con-
tracts; or specialists who were required to operate a piece of machin-
ery” (p. 287). Such an open, inclusive notion of home strikes a chord
with the communal places of freedom that David Harvey labels
“spaces of hope.”^91 While deploying the term in a somewhat vague
capacity (in keeping with the interpretive and epistemic openness
that cosmopolitanism requires), Harvey loosely defines such spaces
as geographical locales in which the spirit of “an alternative, opposi-
tional, and [... ] egalitarian cosmopolitanism” can thrive.^92 I n d e e d ,
for Harvey it is the physical geography of place that is the crucial
element in any progressive cosmopolitan practice.
Another significant feature of the house that crystallizes its
valency as a symbol for the cosmopolitan subversion of “home” can