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Absolute Beginners

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A must have for anyone interested in youth culture, swinging london of the 1950s and 60s, and the Mod scene... Something of a youth exploitation or confessional novel, but nonetheless an excellent picture of the generation born in post-world war II England, the first (and possibly one of the last) to be better off than their parents, the children of Britain's baby boom, obsessed with Italian fashion and American Jazz and all night clubs and coffee houses-- this is a portrait of one such youth and his life... It's the best piece of this type to come out of this period and seen by many as MacInnes' best work. Of further note by MacInnes are the other "London novels", Mr. Love and Justice and City of Spades. What a shame it is that no publisher has cared enough to keep these great books in print.

MacInnes's novel, set in 1958, London, demonstrates the status of the teenager as a new economic class is demonstrated early on when the narrator tells us: "This teenage ball had had a real splendour in the days when kids discovered that for the first time since centuries of kingdom-come, they'd money, which had always been denied to us at the best time in life to use it, namely, when you're young and strong. ... it had a real savage splendour in the days when we found that no one couldn't sit on our faces anymore because we'd loot to spend at last, and our world was to be our world..."

The narrator is a free lance photographer who takes pictures of the night life and of anything depicting the new London and its denizens, hoping for an exhibition. He loves jazz music, is integrationist, and against class. He lives in a slum named Napoli because he enjoys the low rent and how he is accepted, no matter what he does, and no one questions his background, educated or class. He wouldn't be treated that way in Belgravia, the fashionable, upscale district of London.

He has a bunch of interesting friends, such as the very friendly Fabulous Hoplife, who swings the other way, and the Wiz, a huckster who wants to make it into the bigtime, realizing there's a goldmine with the economic prosperity and renewed London. He wants to get there via illegal means, much to the narrator's chagrin. There's Big Jill, a big and friendly les to whom the narrator confides to about Suze; she's kind of like an older sister to him.

But he's really after his dreamgirl Crepe Suzette, or Suze, a pretty girl who's getting her kicks by sleeping around with every black she fancies. He's very upset when she tells him she's getting married to Henley, a fashion designer in his forties for whom she's a secretary. "I'm marrying for distinction, and that's a thing that you could never give me," she tells him. Despite her importance, she's not one of the most interesting characters here.

But when the narrator learns of the racial tensions going on and reads an anti-immigrant tirade in a news article condemning the Commonwealth Act, which allowed emigration from the former colonies to the UK, he sadly says "I don't understand my country anymore. ...the English race has spread itself all over the world...No one invites us, and we didn't ask anyone's permission... Yet when a few hundred thousand come and settle among our fifty millions, we just can't take it."

The generation gap between three groups are interesting. There are people like the narrator, growing up when the war was already over, and thus progressive, anti-Empire, and accepting blacks and Indians. People like his oafish stepbrother Verne and Ed the Ted, in their mid-twenties, lived through the war, were more patriotic, pro-Empire, and are spiteful of teenagers. And people like the narrator's father like the 1950's because they lived through the hell of the 1930's, unable to find good work, starving, and seeing the war as a godsend for the employment opportunities.

MacInnes's historical novel is a look at a post-war Britain, defanged of its empire, and having experienced a political faux-pas in the Suez Crisis. It also examines race relations in Britain ten years after the Commonwealth Act, and how British commercialism got roaring with the newfound prosperity. The tensions between whites and coloureds came to a head in the Notting Hill race riot, which takes place in this book. The movie that was adapted from this cut out most of the thoughtful parts of the book, but it's one of my favourite movies, and I see this book in a new light.

The thing to keep in mind about London in the late 1950s is that it wasn't cool. London wouldn't become one of the capitals of youth style until 1963 and later (brilliantly recounted in Shawn Levy's READY, STEADY, GO!). In this great novel, Colin MacInnes paints the portrait of an age that has received little attention, a time when England did not yet possess a full-fledged youth culture, a creature whose time was coming round at last, and was slouching towards Soho to be born. In the depiction of teens in search of self-authentication and self-realization, the novel is very much an English equivalent of Kerouac's ON THE ROAD.

Like the Kerouac novel, ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS is brilliant not for its story, but for its characters and the almost sociological and anthropological quality of its chronicle. Above all, it chronicles the social upheaval that was already taking place in London, with the central place that drugs, jazz, sex, and alcohol was more openly playing in youth culture. There is also a new and heightened consciousness of race, as well as an absence of the values that had been the mainstay of the previous generation. Although it wasn't yet the sixties, you can feel it coming throughout the book.

I don't want to mislead a prospective reading by promoting this as one of the great classics. It isn't. But like the central character, who is an aspiring photographer, the novel serves as a fictional photo essay on a neglected and under-romanticized period of English life. I can't imagine anyone not truly loving it.

The novel was in the 1980s made into a fairly decent musical (with an absolutely astonishing opening sequence) starring Patsy Kensit and with a host of musical performers in minor roles, including David Bowie, Ray Davies, and Sade. But I would definitely recommend the book over the film.

This is the second of Colin MacInnes' London novels, often referred to as the "London Trilogy" even though each novel is a self-contained story with no connection with, or characters in common with, the other two. Each deals with a separate aspect of London life during the late fifties and early sixties: "City of Spades" with the city's growing immigrant communities, "Absolute Beginners" with the growth of youth culture and "Mr Love and Justice" with the city's underworld.

"Absolute Beginners", set in the summer of 1958 is written from the first person perspective of a teenaged freelance photographer. We never learn his name; when the novel was made into a film by Julien Temple in 1986 he was named Colin after his creator, rather oddly given that the book was never intended to be autobiographical. MacInnes would have been forty-four in 1958, a generation older than his character. The novel is divided into four chapters, entitled "In June", "In July", "In August" and "In September", of which the first, taking up half the book, is by far the longest. Each details a particular day in the narrator's life during the month in question.

The main theme of the novel is the youth culture of the period. MacInnes saw that the growing material prosperity of the late fifties, especially among younger people, had led to the growth of a new, specifically teenage, culture. The teenagers of whom he writes do not want to be dismissed as kids, but neither do they want to be classed as young adults. They see themselves as the "absolute beginners" of the title, a phrase which on the one hand indicates their youth and inexperience and on the other their desire for a fresh start, for a world as different as possible from that of the "taxpayers", as they designate the older generation.

MacInnes does not actually use the word "mod", possibly because it had not been coined in 1958, but the narrator's tastes- for jazz music, for sharply-tailored clothes, for motor-scooters and for coffee bars (he does not touch alcohol, despite being, at eighteen, old enough to drink legally)- and his disdain for the rival Teddy Boy movement betray him as belonging to what was to become known as the "mod" subculture. (Admittedly his cool pretensions take a bit of a knock when he confesses to a liking for Gilbert and Sullivan, the music of choice of middle-aged, middle-class, middlebrow Middle England). Mods tended to admire all things Italian, especially fashions, and this may be reflected in the fact that the narrator refers to the West London district where he lives (actually part of Notting Hill) as Napoli, after the Italian for Naples. One aspect of mod culture not dwelt on in any depth is drugs, although mods were known for their use of amphetamines.

The youth culture described in this book is very different from the one I knew as a teenager, but then I was not even born in 1958 and did not enter my teens until after the great cultural shift of the sixties. Sharp suits were anathema to seventies teenagers who, taking their cue from the hippie movement, generally made it a point of honour to look as scruffy as possible. Those of my generation, who saw rock as the authentic music of youth and jazz as a niche speciality for middle-aged enthusiasts, might be surprised that MacInnes' hero prefers Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday to Elvis or Buddy Holly, especially as we now look back at the late fifties as the birth of the rock-and-roll era. At that time, however, before the rise of the Beatles, jazz was still very much part of the British youth scene, being associated with the mods just as rock was associated with their rivals, the "rockers".

Another difference between MacInnes' narrator and the teenagers of ten or twenty years later is that, although he is in rebellion against the adult world, his rebellion is not motivated by political concerns, apart from a hatred of racism. For him the main sin of adult society is that it is square and boring, and politics, of the left just as much as of the right, is one of the squarest and most boring aspects of that society.

There is no sharply defined plot, unlike some of MacInnes novels. "Mr. Love and Justice", for instance, is much more traditional in terms of its narrative structure. Much of the first chapter, in particular, simply describes the narrator meeting friends and acquaintances and discussing his outlook on life. What plot there is concerns the narrator's hopes of getting back together with his ex-girlfriend, Crępe Suzette, who is about to enter a marriage of convenience with her boss, a gay middle-aged fashion designer. There is little in the way of physical action until the final chapter which takes place against the background of the Notting Hill race riots.

This is not, in fact, a novel one reads for its plot. There are, however, three good reasons to read it. The first is MacInnes' wonderfully vivid prose style which, as one might expect in a novel narrated by a teenager, makes great use of slang and colloquialisms. The second is his equally vivid gallery of characters who often go by eccentric nicknames. (Besides Crępe Suzette there is the narrator's friend The Wizard, the gossip columnist Dido Lament and - best of all- a gay rentboy known as The Fabulous Hoplite).

The third reason to read the book is for the author's skill in depicting a particular place and time. In the 1950s Notting Hill, today a fashionable part of London, was a depressed and rundown area. Many of the inhabitants were immigrants, especially Afro-Caribbeans, and people on the margins of society, such as prostitutes, homosexuals, lesbians and junkies, all of whom feature in the novel. Together with low rents, it is the area's diversity which, from the narrator's point of view, makes it such a desirable place to live. (He is originally from Pimlico, a more traditional white working-class area a few miles away). Black characters play an important part in the novel, if not quite as important as they do in "City Of Spades".

"Absolute Beginners" is my favourite one of the London Trilogy. Reading it I was struck by the brilliance of the picture that MacInnes is able to conjure up. Reading it I realised that there was another side to the fifties besides the complacent, conformist, never-had-it-so-good period depicted in so many films and television programmes and that there was a vibrant, nonconformist side to London life a decade before the "swinging sixties" with which we are today more familiar.

Like many young Americans, I read this book because David Bowie was involved with making it into a movie and because the British band The Jam had a record called "Absolute Beginners". I thought it would be an interesting peep into British mod culture. As others have pointed out, the culture in the book is a little bit "pre-Mod" in that it appears to be set a few years prior to "Quadrophenia." Yet, the youthful narrator of the book, who is the "mod" type, is still definitely distinct in his style and political views from Teddy boys as personified by "Ed the Ted." He is portrayed as just young enough to have missed most of the WWII hardships, unlike his father and some others in the book who have been worn down and scarred by that baggage.

Unlike the majority of British movies and books that are set in the 50s, this book is remarkably optimistic. The nameless narrator has money to spend, colorful friends (including a stylish gay party boy and an ex-debutante) to have fun with, and an open mind towards new developments such as the influx of immigrants and people of color into his geographic space. In contrast to his hidebound elders he's pretty ebullient, and the only blot on his horizon has to do with his teenage girlfriend Suze, who cheats on him with blacks (which interestingly, doesn't turn the narrator's attitude negative towards them - he's truly primed for the upcoming free love generation) and then informs him she's marrying someone else. The book isn't much of a story, more a stream-of-consciousness narration of our hero hopping from a wild party, to a conversation with his father, to an attempt to patch things up with Suze, and so forth and so on. The story thus zips from place to place much like the narrator does on a scooter.

Incidentally, the book isn't much like the movie, which cut out most of the racial and political elements. This doesn't surprise me since if you're an American reader who hasn't majored in modern British history, you're probably going to need to resort to Wikipedia every chapter or so, to have a clue what the heck the author is talking about. This is the main reason why I didn't give it five stars - it really needs a glossary since the narrator clearly is a busy guy who doesn't have time for lengthy 'splainin'. Also, the ending of the book was kind of weird and left me feeling like the narrator really needs to get a prescription for his ADD sometime soon. It's still a breezy fun read, full of colorful slang. I just don't recommend it for "absolute beginners" who have zero knowledge of 50s Britain - they may lose patience fast.

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