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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A picture of another time - still with the power to distrub,
By Booksthatmatter "Booksthatmatter" (Brighton, UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: City of Spades (Mass Market Paperback)
My eldest son prompted me to re-read City of Spades. As is his way, he had locked himself in the bathroom where my new, half-read Iain Sinclair (dining on stones) lay on the stool by the tub. I wandered around like a separated and frustated soul and fell to fitful browsing of the bookshelves on the landing where Colin Macinnes sat unloved and unlovely. I guess I last read him when I was at college and when the dire film version of Absolute Beginners hit the screen and I'd been quite impressed by him then which made me wonder how he read after a 20+ year gap. It was an extremely curious experience - MacInnes is interesting, strange and disturbing. Read in the wrong light (with a slight look in askance) he comes across as a very dated liberal who really didn't understand colonialism. Read again with a more direct look he understood it all too well - some of his sentiments and language are mild barriers - "the negro" is not a comfortable discriptor in this day and age - and his portrait of the white Britons of the 50s is very very ugly. What I was most fascinated by was to read it with people like Andrea Levy and Zadie Smith fresh in mind and to see the close parallels between his and their views/worlds. It's also levelling to read of an era when a pregnancy outside of marriage can end a woman's career and when people talked about "miscegenation" in all seriousness, couching the ugliness of racism behind academic language. I think MacInnes's work is certainly flawed - but our society is still wearing the wounds of that era - so its flaws make for challenging reading.
Anyway, by the time son no.1 had relinquished the bathroom - I was deep in MacInnes and have not yet returned to Sinclair. Moral: leave your book by the tub at your own peril - but be aware that it might open new literary avenues.
3.0 out of 5 stars
The Dangerous Edge of Things,
By
This review is from: City of Spades (Twentieth Century Classics) (Paperback)
This is the first 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.
The word "spade" in this context is a slang term for a black person, derived from the phrase "black as the ace of spades". Today it would be considered highly derogatory, but in the fifties it seems to have been more acceptable and was even used by black people about themselves. Language changes in this respect; one reviewer takes MacInnes to task for using the word "negro", which is today regarded as politically incorrect, but in 1957 both "negro" and "coloured" would have been normal, polite usage. Indeed, in those days it would have been considered impolite in some circles to refer to a person as "black". The slang phrase then used by black people about whites was "jumble" (a corruption of "John Bull"), which today appears to have died out. Like "Mr Love and Justice", but unlike "Absolute Beginners", "City of Spades" does not have a single protagonist but rather two, with alternate chapters being narrated from the viewpoint of one and then the other. Most of the time MacInnes uses first-person narration, although there are two chapters (entitled "interludes") in which he reverts to third-person mode. The two main characters are Johnny Fortune, a young Nigerian, and Montgomery Pew, an official in the British Colonial Office whose job involves welcoming to Britain newcomers from overseas. Johnny is ostensibly in Britain to study meteorology, although he quickly abandons his studies in favour of a louche lifestyle of smoking cannabis and hanging round in nightclubs. The plot involves Johnny's romances with two white English girls, Muriel Macpherson and Theodora Pace, and his arrest and trial on a trumped-up charge of living off the immoral earnings of Muriel's prostitute sister Dorothy. We learn that Johnny's father was also a student in London when he had an affair with the woman who later became Muriel and Dorothy's mother; this affair produced a son, Arthur, which means that Johnny and Muriel share a half-brother. Although "City of Spades" does not share any characters with the other two works in the London Trilogy, it does share certain themes and stylistic techniques with them, especially with "Mr Love and Justice". As with Robert Browning's, MacInnes' interest lay on the dangerous edge of things, and in "City of Spades" he largely ignores the law-abiding majority within the black community in favour of that community's more dangerous edge, the world of pimps, hustlers, petty criminals, drug dealers and drug users. As in "City of Spades" he gives us a jaundiced view of London's police force, at this date almost exclusively white. One character is named Detective Inspector Purity- ironically so, as he is quite prepared to commit perjury, beat up suspects or plant incriminating evidence on them. (The trial scene suggests that MacInnes had an almost equally negative view of the English legal system; Johnny's legal team only secure his acquittal by being more devious than their police adversaries). As in "Mr Love and Justice" and "Absolute Beginners" MacInnes succeeds in giving us a vivid picture of London low-life in the late fifties and draws some sharp portraits of his characters. Nevertheless, "City of Spades" has always been my least favourite of the trilogy. Although the author was strongly anti-racist in that he despised the ignorant bigotry of many of his fellow-countrymen, the black characters depicted in this novel are often conceived in terms of the very racial stereotypes that the more irresponsible British newspapers of the period were spreading about the immigrant communities. Just about every black character we meet is involved in some form of illegal or immoral behaviour, normally involving either prostitution or illicit drugs. (An exception is Johnny's sister Peach, but she is only introduced at the very end). Even Johnny Fortune is, at best, an amiable rogue. The pimping charge may have been trumped up, but there are plenty of other black marks against him. Perhaps the worst aspect of his character is the heartless way in which he treats the two women in his life, Muriel and Theodora, especially the latter who has fallen deeply in love with him. At the end of the story the disillusioned Theodora says she thinks that black people do not feel love in the same way as whites, and there is not all that much in the novel to suggest that MacInnes disagrees with her on this point. Although there are dishonest or disagreeable whites in the story, notably Dorothy and Purity, the two main white characters, Montgomery and Theodora, are portrayed as basically honest and decent, if naïve and occasionally foolish. Even today, "Absolute Beginners" gives us a vivid and credible picture of what it was like to be a teenager at the time it was written, even though MacInnes was then in his mid-forties. "City of Spades" does not succeed in the same way; for all the author's good intentions it never gives us much idea of what it was like to be an immigrant in fifties Britain.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Still makes its point,
By Philip Spires "Author of Mission, an African ... (La Nucia, Spain) - See all my reviews
This review is from: City of Spades (Hardcover)
Colin MacInnes wrote City Of Spades over fifty years ago. At the time its depiction of London from an African immigrant's point of view both shocked and revealed. I wondered whether a contemporary reader might now find its perspective hackneyed, its impact diminished by changes in attitudes towards race that we assume have happened in the intervening years.
Half a century ago, the bones of Johnny Fortune's story might have shocked. Somehow, at least for those anywhere near the issues, I doubt it. He arrives in London from Nigeria to study meteorology, an activity that, for a whole host of reasons, he manages singularly to avoid. A newly-appointed welfare officer is charged with the task of easing the exigencies of life for youngsters from the warmer parts of the Commonwealth who come to be weaned by the mother of the Empire. He is appointed to care for Johnny's file. But before long, while Johnny designs his own curriculum, it is our young civil servant who is receiving the education, an education about the nature of his own society, or at least a side of it that he might previously have been totally and blissfully unaware. Perhaps paradoxically, Johnny meets people who regularly do things that are less than legal. He encounters substances with their associated informal retail trade, dubious service-sector occupations with their associated facilitators, activities behind closed doors that would be unseemly at the street corner. In short, opportunities in several shapes and sizes appear at almost every step. And then, of course, the police turn up and try to call a halt to the party. Suffice it to say that Johnny Fortune's fortunes lead to various encounters, some of which are within the law, and some with the law. Invariably, they involve little prosperity and even less formal learning. If the plot's content might have shocked residents of areas outside inner London in the late 1950s, then today it would not. Times certainly have changed. But then shock was not the book's intent, even fifty years ago. Shock would have encouraged exaggeration which Colin MacInnes only ever suggests to create comedy. What City of Spades tries to do, in my opinion, is question those assumptions we all make about the nature of our society, our identity, our ideas of culture, nationality and history. And the book still manages to achieve this, because those themes, if not their settings, are eternal. I was reminded, on this reading, of The Rake's Progress. When we follow the exploits of Tom Rakewell, we make allowances that accommodate differences between eighteenth century life and its contemporary manifestation in order to see through to the principles and ideas. We do not, for instance, need to believe that Nick Shadow is actually the embodiment of The Devil, as advertised, to understand the folly of Tom's decision to seek personal aggrandisement in London rather than a slower-paced but perhaps more sincere provincial predictability. We do, however, have to understand a certain moral landscape in order to interpret the schemes that Tom pursues, despite the fact that they now seem strange and a tad unlikely. It's in this spirit, I believe, that we should approach City Of Spades in order to identify, experience and understand much in the work that clearly transcends merely historical significance. Also like The Rake's Progress, City Of Spades is a highly witty and humorous look at some aspects of its contemporary society. In the latter's case, it reveals double standards relating to race, class difference and a host of societal characteristics whose existence received middle class sentiment might seek to deny. Nowadays, we might see many of these revelations as highly unremarkable, despite the fact that, for many, they remain not quite mundane. Colin MacInnes's City Of Spades still retains the ability to make its point in its original, apparently durable terms. In the 1950s, a stereotypical view of Britishness might have included claims to trust, honesty, integrity in public life, a police force that was the toast of the earth and a society that both cared for the vulnerable and had time to love animals. In City Of Spades, Johnny Fortune had drugs planted on him, was beaten up in custody and lived ordinarily in layer of society whose existence the polite either denied or ignored. But then he has African. Times don't change. But the title might have.
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