Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Novels by Colin MacInnes Absolute MacInnes. T he hero of Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes does not have a name, nor does he need one. For he is an emblem more than a character of that phenomenon of the 1950s, the teenager. An emblem of that supposedly classless class of youth as consumer and pioneer of style and 'cool', making his debut in British literature by way of MacInnes's second novel, now to be staged half a century later, in an adaptation by Roy Williams at 's Lyric Theatre. MacInnes was the decadent chronicler of 1950s Notting Hill, a restless, volatile neighbourhood which was home to one of the UK's biggest West Indian immigrant communities, and the scene of notorious race riots in August 1958. Openly gay when homosexuality was still an illegal taboo, MacInnes revelled in what he saw as the impoverished area's exuberant exoticism. Absolute Beginners was the first novel to capture the city's emerging youth culture, its lustful, teenage adventure dovetailing into MacInnes's sexualised idolisation of black life in Notting Hill and climaxing with the riots that seared the neighbourhood. Nowadays known to many only by way of 's almost universally derided film of 1986, Absolute Beginners and MacInnes's preceding book City of Spades, achieved cult status after their publication, and were the first to chronicle, for a white audience at least, the culture of the new immigrants to London. Compared by critics with JD Salinger's classic Catcher in the Rye, Absolute Beginnners is an attempt to create a sort of literary British James Dean - an antihero with no apparent demands on his time and no worry where the next ten bob is coming from as he rebounds across Notting Hill, with a keen sense of style but little sense of agency, from encounter to encounter with hustlers and pimps, fellow teenagers and a girl he takes pornographic pictures of. As he despairs of Britain after the riots, it is only the arrival of a group of 'grinning and chattering' West Indians that persuades him to stay - 'I flung my arms around the first of them, who was a stout old number with a beard' - promising them 'We're all going to. have a ball!.' MacInnes's hero does all this with a self-conscious but aimless self-assurance: 'He is MacInnes's fantasy figure, really, not a real character at all,' says the author's friend Francis Wyndham. 'I'm just not interested in the whole class crap that seems to needle you and all the tax-payers,' the teenager tells some 'pre-historic monster' of an adult, with a 'cool' snobbishness which MacInnes's companion on many of his Notting Hill sorties, the late Professor Richard Wollheim, compared to the 'Sang Froid' of Baudelaire's Dandy as he cruised through Fin-de-Siecle Paris with a similar sensibility, or lack of it. The stucco - nowadays pristine - was invariably peeling in those days when Notting Hill really was Notting Hill. The portals through which young professionals now set out for work or greet their dinner guests were then framed with rows of doorbells, each sounding in a dingy flat behind parchment-like paintwork. On those doorsteps up and down which automatous young men from Foxtons nowadays trot to show another 'stunningly appointed' apartment, children, their friends and parents used to chat and play the day away, a kaleidoscope of people - black, poor white, bohemian white or Spanish. These were the streets where I grew up, to which I have returned, though they are changed almost beyond recognition, where my father died last month and my mother still lives. My earliest memories were of 1958: 'nigger-hunters' pouring out of Ladbroke Grove station, and my young mother scolding a group of teddy boys kicking a black boy at Holland Park tube - 'What on earth do you think you're doing?' - in response to which, amazingly, they sloped off. Colin Jordan's National Socialist Movement, with its brazen swastikas, had headquarters on Princedale Road. I remember someone trying to back a lorry into it, missing, and hitting poor Mr Benton's shoe shop instead. We used to play at the bomb site where the Kensington Hilton now stands and on the walls - after the white mobs laid waste to black Notting Hill, fire-bombing and brick-throwing wherever they heard the sound of bluebeat - were painted the letters KBW: Keep Britain White. Mostly, though, Notting Hill got on well with itself; the racist rioters came from without our crazy-paving of an urban village. It was, for the most part, desperately poor. It was the domain of slum landlord Peter Rachman, into which immigrants moved during the 1950s because it was cheap, and bohemians because it was interesting. Many of the latter wanted to take the blacks' part, so much so that the Kensington News ran the headline, 'Will too many do-gooders pave the path to Notting HELL?', a phrase later deployed by Rachel Johnson to describe a rather different social stratum. All around us was this mosaic of artists and hard-working black mothers, their men in trilby hats, and prostitutes at whom to gawp while on a bike ride. Later came the hippies, the Frestonia commune and Hawkwind; camera lights to film Blow Up around Mr Wimbourne's hardware shop; while across Ladbroke Grove, on the mainly black side, the Rio cafe into which I self-consciously tiptoed occasionally became the Mangrove restaurant, and All Saints Road the shebeen and dope-dealing capital of London, under the hammer of the police. To this world, as long-term visitor, came Colin MacInnes, whose half-sister Kate Thirkell used to drive me to school with her son Robert. MacInnes came to look hard, to take part, to drink, pick up boys, locate his restless self and write books now acclaimed as masterpieces. 'What Colin did,' says his friend broadcaster Ray Gosling, 'is this: while Alan Sillitoe and people rediscovered the English working class, Colin alone spotted two other things: that the kids were taking over and that the future was multicoloured.' MacInnes's heritage and life have been narrated in a biography by Tony Gould, who met him when literary editor for New Society. He was great- grandson of Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones and a relative of and . He lived an itinerant early life, growing up in Australia and touring Europe. But feeling his estranged Englishness, he more or less settled in London, though rarely with fixed abode; he inhabited a demi-monde fuelled by alcohol in the French House pub and Muriel's Colony Club in Soho, occasional drugs in the East End and, above all, an obsessive, strange relationship with black Notting Hill. 'It's essential, I think,' Gould tells me, 'to understand Colin's view of race in sexual terms. But it wasn't just sex. He was one of the few people who saw what was happening, who saw the immigration and wanted to bring it to people's attention. He was writing before the days of political correctness, and could do so in a certain way. He could ask the question, "How is one to distinguish between an African and a West Indian?" and answer in language to describe black people you just couldn't use now.' When lawyer, broadcaster and writer Darcus Howe arrived from Trinidad in 1961, he 'made straight for Notting Hill', devising a scheme of flitting from digs to digs around Westbourne Park Road for free before the rent man arrived. 'Maybe once a month you'd have the money to go to Roaring Twenties in Carnaby Street,' he recalls, 'but for regular entertainment, every weekend was a shebeen - bottles in someone's flat, young men wanting to dance until the sunlight was in our eyes at nine or 10 in the morning. The girls were Australian, Swedish, whatever - it was black men and white girls - mine was Italian. That's how it was.' Howe adds: 'I remember MacInnes. He was a sexual predator; he made a pass at me when I was working at the Mangrove, and I told him to fuck off. A fiver was a lot in those days and he paid at the top end. That's how he was seen by the hustlers - give him what he wanted behind some dustbin and take the money. But I've always felt quite generously towards him. He came with a clean slate, no limitations. What did rankle me, though, was when MacInnes realised I was a Latin scholar from Trinidad - he just couldn't see that in me. It was all very imperious; I was just another hustler to him.' Not all West Indians in Notting Hill were living on a diet of sex, drugs and dancing; my memories are of Sunday best suits, children playing cricket with a wicket chalked on a wall and women in smart frocks and hats pushing prams up Ladbroke Grove or buying vegetables in Portobello market. 'Oh no,' says Howe, 'MacInnes wouldn't have been interested in any of that. He wouldn't have had a clue about the West Indian woman. It was all about men, black men.' MacInnes's relationship to black men was one of fascination and attraction, but not necessarily through a sense of common humanity. Indeed, his stereotypical view of blackness as sexually exotic seems, according to some accounts, to entail objectification. George Melly tells a story: 'Colin brought some black boy into Muriel's and told him to stay by the bar and shut up. And the boy said to the barman, "That Collins man, he sure makes me feel black."' 'Colin realised that sex with black men was a big thing,' recalls Gosling. 'He wasn't some camp ninny from , like Quentin Crisp. His attraction to blacks was partly sex and partly the adventure. He was a colonial grandee from Australia and Canada, and could see something the Arnold Weskers did not. As regards the teenagers - well, he told us who we were. But he never liked the teddy boys. He could see them for the fascists they became during the riots - from all over London, not from Notting Hill itself.' Writer Roy Kerridge's fleeting but deep-cut relationship with MacInnes demonstrated how influential, compelling and obnoxious the author could be. Kerridge was brought up by his mother and a politically active African step-father, John Longmore, surrounded by black British and African culture. But a move to Ferring in Sussex left him cut off from what he knew, until MacInnes's City of Spades arrived in 1958: 'With my love of the written word, it seemed that my world had been legitimised, because it was there on the page.' Kerridge's mother wrote MacInnes a fan letter, which he was so pleased to receive he paid her an unannounced visit. They maintained a correspondence, MacInnes informing her that his next book would be about teenagers. 'I was looking forward to it,' says Kerridge, now living in west London, 'and when Absolute Beginners came out, it told me how to be a proper teenager. It meant getting a wardrobe to fit the character in the book, on which I modelled myself entirely. then I went to see him. 'He was shocked. I thought I was a sharp teenager, but was dressed in a duffle coat, with toggles. Smart in a middle-class way, not a working- class way. I was so upset at his obvious disappointment. But I went into his room, with floorboards and a sort of camp bed and only a few books. It was all rather alarming; he started shaving and I ran out of chalk, didn't know what to say.' On a later visit, MacInnes told Kerridge how 'he would get up at 5am, write for two to three hours, have breakfast and go to Hyde Park to pick up a boy. He said he would take the boy back and afterwards dismiss him'. Melly was often in MacInnes's company. He prefers to talk about jazz and Surrealist painting, but does recall 'seeing Colin very often, at Muriel's, drinking, though drink didn't suit him'. Most frequently, though, MacInnes and Melly talked when the latter was what he calls 'an involuntary host' to MacInnes over numerous lunches at the Mellys' home. On one occasion, MacInnes wanted Melly to sign a petition concerning Israel and the Jews, which Melly declined to do. 'Colin duly stormed off to the Colony, stopping off at every pub on the way. By the time he got there, he was trying to get people to sign a petition on the other side. 'I always felt at ease with black people, but for Colin it was such a big thing. He loved them in a physical and sexual way, but he would also put up bail for them at any time of day or night. It was, though, all curiously racist.' 'I didn't like him at all,' says Diana Melly, who was a showgirl at the Cabaret Club in Soho along with Christine Keeler. 'His idea of me was just the wife with young children who cooked lunch all the time. I don't know what gave him the idea that he could get so drunk and be so rude after having his lunch made.' Observer film critic Philip French, who often worked alongside MacInnes on BBC radio, similarly recalls the writer as being a 'good broadcaster, but one of the rudest people I've ever met, always needling away to try and expose some bourgeois trait he might, as a good bourgeois, disapprove of'. In search of the best of Colin MacInnes, one seems to need either to stick with the books or find those with whom he had his most cerebral and, thereby, probably closest friendships, including that with Wyndham, who now lives in a flat full of good books and paintings above a launderette on Harrow Road. Wyndham and MacInnes met at a Billie Holiday concert at the Albert Hall in the early 1950s: 'Just by being there, one could do no wrong.' Moreover, MacInnes was a man 'very aware of dynasties and heredity,' says Wyndham, and 'was interested in the fact that I came from a dynasty: the Wyndhams who bought Pre-Raphaelite paintings and all that, and on my mother's side, being grandson of Ada Leverson, Jewish friend of Oscar Wilde - all this fascinated him, even though it was nothing whatsoever to do with who I really am, and we talked a lot about our families, and being part Burne-Jones, part Kipling'. Although they would meet in the French House or Colony Room, 'I never really liked all that drinking,' says Wyndham. So the friends went for long walks, 'through the adventure of London'. 'Our best conversations,' says Wyndham, 'were just about ideas, ideas for an article, or about what we were writing. He would tell me what he was writing and so would I. Ours was, to use that silly term, an intellectual friendship. I once told him how difficult he was, to which he replied. "Wouldn't it be awful if I was easy?"' The other way to recall MacInnes at his best is to talk to his family. Kate Thirkell, who married MacInnes's half-brother Lance, recalls MacInnes as 'a very intelligent, very interesting and very unhappy man. But he was always supportive to me, and the magical things about Colin really were magical'. 'We have to remember that homosexuality was illegal, and Colin was always on the run, from the police and from gangs - black gangs, whom he always wanted around, but couldn't stop being rude to. I went to see Colin for my son's fifth birthday, and the bell rang. Everyone froze, Colin went to the window and obviously did not like what he saw. He lived in fear, his world in a suitcase, and when he moved, he simply took that world with him in a taxi.' Kate Thirkell still lives in the same road, but how strange it has been for me to come back and live here again. The council walk-ups in which 'our Sue' lived - who cut my hair, whose brother 'our Geoff' I went to QPR with - now have a smart security gate and have been sold off for fortunes. Eric the newsagent is now a Russian icon gallery; Howell the butcher is a boutique selling I'm not sure what. My rough-house local, the Portland Arms, is some weird pedicure place called the Cowshed and the pub in which MacInnes lived out his last sad days is the First Floor Restaurant (private dining available). Kerridge continued to meet MacInnes when he moved to Notting Hill, by which time the author of Absolute Beginners would frequent the Colville, 'an entirely black pub, that is to say for black men - their girlfriends were all white. Colin would sit there, usually alone; people would call him "queer Colin", and be kind to him, but they wouldn't talk to him'. The fact of Absolute Beginners being staged in 2007 is itself testimony to the impact of MacInnes's writing. But what is his legacy in the experience of Black Britain? One of the main custodians of that experience, now curating a photographic history of it, is Paul Gilroy, a writer and professor at the London School of Economics. Gilroy recalls how seeing copies of City of Spades and Absolute Beginners on the shelves of every household he visited was 'an essential part' of a black childhood in London. 'But,' says Gilroy, 'negrophilia and negrophobia can be intertwined. MacInnes seems to have imprisoned black people in his exotic conceptions of their blackness. He encounters them as objects through the lenses of his sexual desire. It's hard to see how that colonial conception can speak to an age where blackness has become an ordinary, emphatically post-exotic thing in a city like this one.' MacInnes for beginners. Born 20 August 1914 in London. Died 22 April 1976. Education Moved to Australia with his mother, novelist , but left school at 16 to work in . Later attended art school in London. Early career Served in the Second World War, then wrote scripts for BBC Radio before going freelance in the mid-1950s. 1957 City of Spades - MacInnes's landmark debut, set in Notting Hill's immigrant community, was one of the first novels to vividly explore racial issues in modern Britain. 1959 Absolute Beginners, MacInnes's most famous book, looks at the rise of the teenager as a cultural force. 1960 Mr Love and Justice - the story of a young pimp completes celebrated 'London trilogy'. · Absolute Beginners previews from 26 April at the Lyric Hammersmith, London W6. Colin MacInnes. The most interesting commentary on the emerging youth culture of the late 1950s can be found in the essays and novels of Colin MacInnes. MacInnes was no teenager himself at the time: born in 1914, he would have been 45 years old in 1959. Although he was born in London, MacInnes spent most of his childhood in Australia, where his mother Angela Thirkell gradually established a reputation as a prolific writer of popular fiction. MacInnes himself returned to Europe in 1930, and eventually settled in London to study painting; he later served in the British Intelligence Corps during the Second World War. During the late 1940s, he began to establish a career as a writer, producing journalistic essays and novels, and working in radio broadcasting. MacInnes was fascinated by the Soho netherworld of crime, prostitution and drugs described in Barry Miles’s London Calling. He led a fairly chaotic, restless existence, moving from one address to another, and was often short of money. He was a prodigious drinker, and probably an alcoholic. He was bisexual, with a well-documented preference for African men, and was quite open about his use of male prostitutes. Those who knew him frequently described him as unpredictable, quarrelsome and difficult. Ray Gosling, whose mentor he became, depicts him in his autobiography as moody, irascible and opinionated, but also as a fiercely independent thinker and a ‘fighter for liberation’. Gosling even makes a comparison – at first sight quite improbable – between MacInnes and the upright military figure of Lord Baden-Powell, the founder of the scout movement: If any one was, though, he was the Baden-Powell to the 1960s – he fought for, led and chronicled, cajoled and disciplined the formation of our compassionate, permissive society (abortive though it may now be in part). (p. 72) The most obvious manifestation of MacInnes’s political radicalism was not so much related to young people, however, as to the cause of anti- racism. As we’ll see, this was a recurring theme in his writing, especially in his response to the ‘Notting Hill Riots’ of 1958, which are documented in Absolute Beginners (they actually took place in Notting Dale , some distance north of Notting Hill itself). In the aftermath of the riots, he played a key role in a short-lived group called the Stars’ Campaign for Inter-Racial Friendship, and was involved with several black liberation campaigns: as late as 1971 he appeared as a character witness in the trial of the self-professed Black Power activist, Michael X. Nevertheless, MacInnes was also somewhat of an outsider – or at least an ‘insider-outsider’, as he described himself: he felt at home in the multicultural, cosmopolitan buzz of London, and he was praised by some of the key New Left writers (such as Stuart Hall), but he was never a team player. During the 1960s, he never regained the comparative success of his three ‘London novels’, to be discussed below: he died in 1976. Some of MacInnes’s best journalistic writing on these issues is contained in a collection called England, Half English , published in 1961. The book contains both shorter and more substantial pieces about a wide range of issues, from London’s drinking clubs and sex workers, through Ella Fitzgerald to the Elgin Marbles and Pevsner’s Buildings of England. There are critical essays on contemporary drama and the artist Sidney Nolan, as well as relatively obscure figures such as the novelist Ada Leverson. There are also interesting pieces on what we would now call ‘post- colonialism’, including an extended essay based on a trip to Nigeria, and a piece about immigration entitled ‘A Short Guide for Jumbles (to the Life of their Coloured Brethren in England)’, originally published in 1956: here MacInnes warns his white readers (‘Jumbles’ are ‘John Bulls’) against a whole range of patronizing assumptions – although (like his novel City of Spades , which tackles the same issues) the piece is not without problematic generalizations of its own. While there is a shared set of concerns cutting across these essays, I want to focus here on three that are specifically concerned with youth culture. ‘Young England, Half English’, first published in 1957, was written for the decidedly upmarket literary journal Encounter . Here, MacInnes sets out to explain for his educated older readers the appeal of a new generation of teen pop stars – and specifically that of ‘the Pied Piper from Bermondsey’, the working class Tommy Steele. Steele’s rise to ‘the status of national idol’, he suggests, is partly about his talent: he is both ‘animally sensual’ and yet ‘innocent’, possessing a ‘joie de vivre’ that MacInnes claims to find ‘irresistibly engaging’. However, he also seeks to explain this phenomenon sociologically, as a consequence of the increasing affluence of young people, which the market researcher Mark Abrams would go on to document a couple of years later. In response to fears about ‘Americanisation’ (as evidenced for instance in Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy , published in the same year), MacInnes paints a more complex picture: Steele, he argues, is not just a copy of America, a kind of English Elvis. He may sing in a ‘shrill international American-style drone’, but he speaks in an English Cockney accent. MacInnes looks forward to the possibility of a more English singing style, and to songs that would deal with English topics, but he thinks this is an unlikely development (although in fact, he would not have long to wait). ‘Pop Songs and Teenagers’ was published the following year in The Twentieth Century , another literary magazine. Here, MacInnes goes rather more on the offensive against what he describes as the ‘abysmal ignorance of educated persons about the popular music of millions’. He challenges such people’s ‘morbid dislike of these symbols of popular culture which they feel are undermining not so much culture itself, as their hitherto exclusive possession of it’, and he condemns them for having ‘a lamentable lack of curiosity about the culture of our country in 1959’. Here again, MacInnes notes the rise of young British performers such as Steele and Lonnie Donegan, who have come to equal the popularity of Elvis and Paul Anka – although he laments the fact that they are still singing ‘in American’. He also provides a more detailed sociological account of the rise of the teenager, noting how their increased spending power is fuelling not just the music industry but also a distinctive new market in technology, transportation (scooters) and food and drink. These young people, he claims, are ‘a new classless class’. They are ‘blithely indifferent’ towards politics and ‘the Establishment’. They are internationally-minded, a ‘post-Hiroshima generation’, but they are not merely ‘Americanised’: rather, they have transformed American influences into something of their own. They are independent of adults – ‘in their private lives, they don’t like to be told ’ – and they are joyful and ‘gay’ in what he describes as ‘the dullest society in Western Europe’. However, MacInnes’s account here is not entirely sanguine: he also suggests that it is ‘possible to see, in the teenage neutralism and indifference to politics, and self-sufficiency, and instinct for enjoyment – in short, in their kind of happy mindlessness – the raw material for crypto-fascisms of the worst kind’. These fears were also dramatized in the character of Wizard in Absolute Beginners , who joins the racist attackers in the Notting Hill riots – although as MacInnes remarks in a footnote to this essay, he felt that the ‘worst offenders’ in these events were not the young people but the ‘countless respectable adults who just stood and watched ’. The final essay I want to consider in this collection was also published in The Twentieth Century in 1959, and is entitled ‘Sharp Schmutter’. It details the ‘dos and don’ts’ of contemporary English menswear. MacInnes contrasts his preferred style both with mainstream adult fashions, but also with the clothing of the Teddy Boys and that of the followers of Trad Jazz, who (he suggests) ‘simply haven’t got the money for sharp clothing’. His favoured style is described in considerable detail: it is smart and tailored, an early version of the ‘mod’ style that was to become much more widespread a few years later. It belongs largely to the newly affluent working class, although it has a certain ‘classless’ appeal; and its influences are primarily drawn from Continental Europe (especially Italy) rather the USA (and here again, MacInnes detects a ‘growing indifference to America’). Once again, we can see this style in evidence in the descriptions of the characters in Absolute Beginners ; and MacInnes’s detailed attention to such issues is especially evident in his comparison between two of his minor characters, the Misery Kid with his ‘trad drag’ and Dean Swift, a hip ‘modernist’. Once again, MacInnes feels compelled to persuade his readers that attention to such matters is not merely ‘frivolity’, or a matter of young men becoming ‘effete’. He argues that, like pop music, this isn’t the only preoccupation of the young. On the contrary, he asks: Isn’t it rather a minor (and pleasant) part of an international upheaval which is changing, behind the lock-jawed deadlocks of the politically mighty, all forms of social intercourse, the world’s boundaries, thought, art – everything, almost? (p. 157) On reading these essays, it’s hard to resist the conclusion that MacInnes was well ahead of his time, in a great many respects. He is not blindly celebrating youth culture, but he is making the case for taking it seriously, and treating it with respect. He is alert to the political dimensions of what some might dismiss as mere trivia – to subtle changes in class identities and especially to the rise of what we now call multiculturalism and globalization. And, like Stuart Hall and Ray Gosling, he is also looking ahead to social and cultural changes that are only just emerging over the horizon. The London novels. The essays in England, Half English are to some extent journalistic rehearsals of themes that MacInnes was also developing in his fiction. His three London novels in particular have often been praised for their journalistic accuracy. Nevertheless, in one of the brief introductions to these essays, MacInnes refutes the idea that these novels are some kind of ‘documentary’, or the work of a ‘researcher’. They may come from his own ‘direct experience’, he says, but they are also ‘poetic evocations of a human situation’: the language of the characters – including the youthful lingo of the narrator of Absolute Beginners – is ‘invented’ rather than ‘naturalistic’. My main focus here will be on Absolute Beginners , but this novel should be briefly set in the context of MacInnes’s other London novels, City of Spades (1957) and Mr. Love and Justice (1960). Although it’s doubtful whether MacInnes ever intended these books to be a trilogy, they share a concern with contemporary social issues: the first is primarily about race, the second about youth, and the third is about crime and the sex trade, although these themes feature to a greater or lesser extent in all of them. The first two in particular also have a powerful graphic feel for London locations, which extends well beyond the affluent West End, and indeed the Soho and Fitzrovia districts where MacInnes spent much of his time, to areas like Shepherd’s Bush, North Kensington (‘Napoli’ in Absolute Beginners ), Stepney and Kilburn. This is not at all the ‘official’ version of London, or indeed the glamorous image that was later to appear in accounts of ‘Swinging London’: in many respects it shows the seamy underside of the ‘straight’ world, which MacInnes himself liked to frequent. The characters move quickly from one location and social milieu to another, perhaps (as Paula Derdinger suggests) reflecting the more general modernist concern with mobility. As in his journalistic essays, MacInnes shows himself to be a keen observer of contemporary fashions and social rituals across a wide range of London’s diverse communities; but his overarching concern is with the tensions between the past and the present, the blurring of social boundaries, and the sense of impending social change. Nevertheless, there are some striking differences between these three books, not just in their substantive focus but also in their approach. MacInnes’s interest in questions of race – and his fascination with the worlds of black (and especially African) immigrants – is most fully explored in City of Spades . Like Mr. Love and Justice , this book has a dual perspective, alternating between the accounts of a Nigerian student, the charismatic Johnny Fortune, and a liberal white government employee, Montgomery Pew. The book contains a great many debates between the characters about racial issues, ranging from drugs and criminality, to the appeal of black men for white women, the ‘colour bar’ and racism, and the prospects for post-imperial Africa. Like his stand-in Pew, MacInnes is an outsider to the ‘Spade’ community, and he knows it. He indulges in generalizations (for instance about black people’s musicality and their physical and sexual prowess), while simultaneously warning against them; he romanticizes the exotic ‘other’, while also being aware of the superficiality of doing so. City of Spades makes an interesting comparison with the film Sapphire , a more conventional ‘social problem’ film produced by Michael Relph and directed by Basil Dearden, which was released (needless to say) in 1959. The film has similarly didactic intentions – it portrays racism as a kind of pathological ‘sickness’ – but it also fails to avoid some of the assumptions that it is supposedly questioning. In one notable scene, we are introduced to the ‘lily skins’ – the young black women who (like Sapphire herself) are able to pass for white, yet are betrayed by their inability to resist the ‘beat of the bongo’ and are compelled to engage in frenzied dancing. (The music, once again by Johnny Dankworth, offers a rather sanitized version of contemporary ‘hard bop’.) In Sapphire , the point of view is that of the white British police officers who are investigating Sapphire’s murder, although they also meet Sapphire’s impeccably well-spoken (and much darker-skinned) brother, who is a doctor. The film’s primary focus is not on the black experience, but on white racism. By contrast, City of Spades offers much more direct access to the perspectives and experiences of the black characters, who are by no means all worthy and well-behaved. Mr. Love and Justice takes a similarly didactic, sociological approach, in this instance to the sex industry: it depicts the relationships between ponces, prostitutes and the police, attempting to explain how the business works and how the different participants benefit from it. As in both the other novels, there are ongoing debates among the characters that are intended to address the reader’s questions, to challenge familiar assumptions, and to expose some of the hypocrisies and contradictions that are at stake. MacInnes’s third London novel is more tightly focused and structured than its predecessors, and there is less journalistic description for its own sake: arguably, it works somewhat more effectively as a novel, although the parallels and contrasts between the two sets of characters are almost schematic. The London Novels by Colin Macinnes. Soft Cover. Condition: Fair. Binding cracked in middle and in front, but n o pages loose yet. Covers have shelfwear and old sticker. Pages free of markings. ***Ships today or next business day. Our books are carefully described and packaged in boxes (not envelopes). A gift card and personalized message can be included upon request.***. The London Novels (The Colin MacInnes Omnibus) MacInnes, Colin. Published by Allison & Busby, 2005. Used - Softcover Condition: Very Good. Trade Paperback. Condition: Very Good. 2nd printing. text clean and unmarked. binding tight. covers have very light wear. fore-edge, small bump to top edge of last few pages. head and foot of book have very light wear. The London Novels. MacInnes, Colin. Published by Allison & Busby, 2005. Used - Softcover Condition: Good. Paperback. Condition: Good. Connecting readers with great books since 1972. Used books may not include companion materials, some shelf wear, may contain highlighting/notes, may not include cdrom or access codes. Customer service is our top priority!. The London Novels. MacInnes, Colin. Published by Allison & Busby, 2005. Used - Softcover Condition: Very Good. Condition: Very Good. Item in very good condition! Textbooks may not include supplemental items i.e. CDs, access codes etc. THE LONDON NOVELS: City of Spades. Absolute Beginners. Mr. Love and Justice. MacInnes, Colin. Published by Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1969. Used - Hardcover Condition: Good. Condition: Good. Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. THE LONDON NOVELS: City of Spades. Absolute Beginners. Mr. Love and Justice. Colin MacInnes. Published by Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1969. Used - Hardcover Condition: Good. Condition: Good. A+ Customer service! Satisfaction Guaranteed! Book is in Used-Good condition. Pages and cover are clean and intact. Used items may not include supplementary materials such as CDs or access codes. May show signs of minor shelf wear and contain limited notes and highlighting. The London Novels. MacInnes, Colin. Published by Allison & Busby, 2005. Used - Softcover Condition: Good. Condition: Good. A+ Customer service! Satisfaction Guaranteed! Book is in Used-Good condition. Pages and cover are clean and intact. Used items may not include supplementary materials such as CDs or access codes. May show signs of minor shelf wear and contain limited notes and highlighting. Colin MacInnes Omnibus : His Three London Novels: City of Spades: Absolute Beginners: Mr Love and Justice. MacInnes, Colin. Published by Allison & Busby, Limited, 2005. Used - Softcover Condition: Good. Condition: Good. Ships from the UK. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. The London Novels. MacInnes, Colin. Published by Allison & Busby, 2005. Used - Softcover Condition: UsedAcceptable. Condition: UsedAcceptable. book. The Colin MacInnes Omnibus: His Three London Novels: City of Spades, Absolute Beginners, Mr Love and Justice. MacInnes, Colin. Published by Allison & Busby, London UK, 1986. Used - Softcover Condition: Very Good. Paperback. Condition: Very Good. The page edges are lightly tanned. Several copies are available. 627 pages. Books listed here are not stored at the shop. Please contact us if you want to pick up a book from Newtown. Size: Size D: 7"-8" Tall (177-203mm). THE LONDON NOVELS: City of Spades. Absolute Beginners. Mr. Love and Justice. Colin Macinnes. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969, 1969. Used - Hardcover Condition: Very Good. Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good. 1st Edition. Very Good with slight spine slant in a Very Good jacket. 1st Printing. The London Novels of Colin MacInnes. MacInnes, Colin and Hentoff, Nat (Introduction) Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1969. Used - Hardcover Condition: Very Good. Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. Dust Jacket Condition: Fair. First Edition. First Edition (1969.) Hardcover with dust jacket. 8vo with 626 pages. Known as the "London Trilogy:" City of Spades (1957), Absolute Beginners (1959) and Mr. Love & Justice (1960) are collected in this volume. "Absolute Beginners" was filmed in 1986 by director Julien Temple starring . White spine/red and blue text. #030766 Size: 8vo. Hardcover. The London Novels. MacInnes, Colin. Published by Allison & Busby, 2005. Used - Softcover Condition: Very Good. Paperback. Condition: Very Good. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged. The London Novels. MacInnes, Colin. Published by Allison & Busby, 2005. Used - Softcover Condition: Good. Paperback. Condition: Good. The book has been read but remains in clean condition. All pages are intact and the cover is intact. Some minor wear to the spine. The Colin MacInnes Omnibus. The Three London Novels: Absolute Beginners, City of Spades, Mr Love and Justice. Colin MacInnes. Published by Allison & Busby, London, 1985. Seller: SAVERY BOOKS, BRIGHTON, EAST SUSSEX, United Kingdom Contact seller. Used - Softcover Condition: Very Good. Soft cover. Condition: Very Good. PAPERBACK 1985. 20x13cm. SPINE IS LIGHTLY CREASED. Clean & tight. TANNED PAGES. No inscriptions. Dispatched ROYAL MAIL FIRST CLASS with TRACKING next working day or sooner securely boxed in cardboard, ref 409/26. The London Novels Macinnes, Colin. MacInnes, Colin. Published by Allison & Busby (September 30, 2005), 2005. New - Softcover Condition: new. The London Novels Macinnes, Colin. MacInnes, Colin. Published by Allison & Busby, 2005. New - Softcover Condition: New. Condition: New. New. The London Novels. MacInnes, Colin. Published by Allison & Busby, 2005. New - Softcover Condition: New. Paperback. Condition: New. Brand New!. The London Novels - Absolute Beginners/City of Spades and Mr Love and Justice. Colin MacInnes. Published by London Macgibbon and Kee 1957-1960, 1957. A set of first edition, first printings published MacGibbon and Kee between 1957-1960. Comprising Absolute Beginners, Mr Love and Justice and City of Spades. All in the original dust wrappers and all unclipped. Absolute Beginners and Mr Love and Justice are both near fine and City of Spades is very good+ in like wrapper with some edge wear to the dust wrapper and some light spotting to the prelims and endpapers of the book. A rare set of first printings. Bringing together three of Colin MacInnes' finest works, this trilogy explores a very different side of London life in the 1950s than is usually portrayed. Tell us what you're looking for and once a match is found, we'll inform you by e-mail. Can't remember the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. The Modern Novel. The world-wide literary novel from early 20th Century onwards. MacInnes: The London Novels (Visions of London) Home » England » Colin MacInnes » The London Novels (Visions of London): City of Spades; Absolute Beginners; Mr. Love and Justice. Colin MacInnes: The London Novels (Visions of London): City of Spades; Absolute Beginners; Mr. Love and Justice. The first novel in the trilogy is about race relations in England in the 1950s. West Indians are arriving en masse in England and the government realises there is a problem. A small branch of the Colonial department is given the task of dealing with the problem and Montgomery Pew is the officer entrusted with the task. His first client is Johnny Fortune, newly arrived from Nigeria, allegedly to study. Fortune’s friend, Hamilton, is already in London and introduces him to the black life of London. Pew soon gets involved in the London West Indian culture and also involves Theodora, who lives in the same building as he does and who works for the BBC. Most of the novel is MacInnes’ tribute to the black culture of London, with all its foibles (petty theft, drugs, etc.), and the unfair treatment it gets at the hands of the dominant white culture. While all this is now obvious, at the time it was revolutionary for a white writer to say such a thing. MacInnes brings in all aspects of black culture – African, West Indian and even USA, and shows the differences and rivalries between the different cultures. Johnny takes up with Muriel who is the daughter of the (white) woman his father had an affair with many years ago but then gets set up by the police. Pew loses his job but doesn’t seem to care and he and Theodora work to get Johnny legal help to set him free. Of course, it all more or less works out in the end but the pleasure of this book is not the plot, it is the affectionate portrait of London’s black culture. Absolute Beginners. This book is perhaps best known for the film made of the novel, starring David Bowie (who wrote and sang the title song), , Sade, (of the Kinks) and Mandy Rice-Davies. It was an excellent film and focused attention on MacInnes’ novel. Colin is a photographer and the first generation of independent teenagers in post-war England. One of the reasons why he is a photographer is because he values his independence so highly. However, he is in love with Suzette, his now ex-girlfriend who has taken up with and subsequently marries the rich old poof , Henley. Just as City of Spades is a tribute to black London, this novel is a tribute to pre-Beatle swinging London – from cockneys to teddy boys, from Soho and its coffee bars, clubs and soft-core porn to the Thames and its boats. And, of course, the race theme spills over from City of Spades , culminating in the 1958 Notting Hill race riots, which Colin witnesses. Does he get Suzette back? Who cares? This is a fun novel about being a teenager in 1950s London and should be enjoyed for its portrait of London. Mr. Love and Justice. This is the least successful of the trilogy but moderately interesting nonetheless. Mr. Love is Frankie Love, ex-sailor and now pimp. Justice is Police Constable Edward Justice, newly promoted to the vice squad whose aim is to get pimps like Frankie. MacInnes pokes fun at the police for their rigid rules and staunch conservatism. We follow Frankie as he becomes a pimp (like PC Justice he has to learn his trade) and we follow PC Justice, a naïve young man, in love but unable to marry as his girlfriend is the daughter of a felon. This novel is the most didactic of the three, pointing out the hypocrisy of British laws on pimping (as it is so difficult to prove, the police frequently resort to framing suspects as they do here). While he does not overly glamourise prostitution and pimping, he seems to imply that it is a more noble calling than the vice squad. Will Justice catch Love? Will Justice see the light? Once again, plot is not MacInnes’ strong point and, as the vibrant background of the first two novels is missing here, you are likely to lose interest before the inevitable climax. Publishing history. First published by MacGibbon & Kee (1958 City of Spades; 1959 Absolute Beginners; 1960 Mr. Love and Justice); first published as a collection 1969 (as Visions of London in the UK, as The London Novels in the USA) The London Novels by Colin MacInnes. Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes. Absolute Beginners was published in 1959 and set in the summer of 1958. At face value it is a vivid sketch of a particular place at a particular time (the unfashionable post-war sprawl of west London that MacInnes calls ‘London Napoli’ roughly centred on Notting Hill, and within a diamond bordered by Kensington High Street, Bayswater, Ladbroke Grove, and Holland Park). Fifty-odd years later, and 35 years after the death of its author, the book is still in print which suggests it has some enduring qualities – but what might you consider them to be? Does it just have a curiosity value because of its milieu? This book describes events in the lives of young people in London, and uses the expression “teenager” to describe them at a time before the word came into common use; written when the author was 45 years old (he was born a couple of weeks after the start of WW1), the story has the potential to present a disastrous misrepresentation of this new generation. Certainly, the characters he describes might be unrepresentative of typically average teenagers of that era, but they weren’t entirely fictitious creations and they self-evidently became a template for a whole generation. Absolute Beginners describes London on the very cusp of its transformation from the drab austerity of post-war Britain to the swinging London of the mid-1960s. MacInnes gives his unnamed narrator a distinctive voice through an invented subcultural language that draws on American jazz and beatnik vocabulary. Although some of the jargon now invokes toe-curling embarrassment, on the whole it succeeds and the device was adopted a few years later (in 1962) by Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange with his Droogs’ ‘Nadsat’ language; we also encountered it being used (badly?) in Tony White’s Foxy-T (2003). I think the jargon works in Absolute Beginners because MacInnes uses the technique as Damon Runyon did in his stories of gangsters in New York; the dialogue has occasional turns of baroque formality, and his characters become part of the strange milieu with names that serve as character references – the Wiz, the Fabulous Hoplite, Mr Cool, ex-Deb of Last Year and Call-me-Cobber. However, are these characters , or just character sketches ? Retrospectively we can see they are archetypes, but this wouldn’t have been evident in 1959. Almost every character became the template for celebrities who emerged in the 1960s and have continued in every cultural generation since from comments about very young pop stars, to gay style icons, Australian media pundits, and down-at-heel socialites. The characters in the story are self-aware and define their beliefs and behaviour in terms that explicitly reject the values, expectations and obligations of previous generations. There is a preoccupation with consumerism, brands, fashion and style, pop music, hedonism and money as the means to make all this possible; however, there is a rejection of paid employment as the source of income, and the characters freelance and hustle their way around London. There is an acceptance of commercial sexuality (prostitution, pornography, and promiscuity) and homosexuality, of drug taking, and of West Indian and Asian immigrants. There is also a disdain for the politics of both the Right and the Left, for, and mainstream culture. The book is an eerie premonition of what was to happen in the 1960s with working class photographers (David Bailey, Terence Donovan), mod culture and ‘swinging London’; we already see the sharp Italian suits and Vespa scooters, the Derry & Toms roof-garden restaurant which became an essential part of the iconic Biba fashion chain, the lethal combination of dodgy diplomats, teenage hookers and gay male models which turned into the Profumo affair (1963), and the scurrilous photos that incriminated the Duchess of Argyll (1963). Our current experience of Justin Bieber, Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, reality TV ‘stars’ and the culture of celebrity, the underlying racism and homophobia of the commercial mainstream, are all part of the London we experience today and first foreseen by Absolute Beginners . The book ends in the chaos of and fall-out from the Notting Hill race riots in the summer of 1958. The narrator experiences emotional turmoil as his father dies, he gets it together with Suze, he makes amends with Vern and sees Wiz in his true colours. Although he makes a token attempt to escape by leaving the country, we are left with the distinct impression that he can’t bring himself to get on the plane.