Early comparison with Guy Gunaratne’s This Mad and Furious City softly eroded as I made my journey into this dark and seamier side of London gang life . It’s a raw, brave, honest and disturbing book. The author/narrator tells of his life when as a young man he walked the walk and talked the talk, innit? At times some kind of lexicon would have been useful as I adjusted my reading ear, in much the same way as one adjusts one’s eyes to the darkness of an auditorium, to the language and idioms of London gangs and ‘mandem’. It’s a life of violence, vengeance, drugs and crime with a perceived immorality to those on the outside. But to those on the inside there are codes of behaviour and a stylised morality that seems contradictory to the whole culture. For it is a culture we are reading of. A culture that many of us play no part in other than as observers or ‘tutters’ when we read in the news of the latest stabbings and muggings or even shootings. It was heartening to read in the author’s note that he understands this completely acknowledging,
’It’s about a world many people can only imagine from what they see in the news and on TV.’
For otherwise if you read wondering if this is the norm it makes you feel very displaced from the world at large.
It’s a compelling read. Maybe there is a rubbernecker in all of us but I found myself with a weird fascination for what is contained in these pages. Horrified but not surprised. There’s always an underworld and as you read this it is as if there’s a whole parallel life running alongside my comfortable little one. I say that but I need to temper it for many of the locations described here are familiar to me. I realised that I could have been walking alongside some of these people on the occasions I exited Westbourne Park tube station and made my way to the Harrow Road. It affords me a kind of portal between one world and the other if you like.
This is what I believe is called ‘auto-fiction’ in the publishing biz which suggests that unlike a straightforward memoir or autobiography there are some aspects that are fictional? Again we go to the author’s note for clarification where he tells us,
‘Everything in this book, in this story, was experienced in one way or another - otherwise I wouldn’t be able to tell it.’
I believe the old term was ‘roman de clef’. And that reminded me of what Jack Kerouac did with his fiction. And if Jack were alive today maybe this is the kind of book he would be writing? For it struck me as very much a stream of consciousness, spontaneous prose kinda style. Events spilling out one after the other in a mostly chronological order. It’s as if the words themselves are high on some kind of recreational substance. I imagine Krauze is writing as he speaks. At times it is as if it is one long exhalation of confession and neither the writer nor the reader can draw breath until it’s done. The prose is lively and poetic in places. It’s substantial. It is more than a straightforward telling of a tale for there is emotion injected into the whole book.
Two aspects of the author I found fascinating were his intelligence, he was studying for a degree and his colour, a white man. Fascinating because it struck me as paradoxical. There was a feel maybe that this book was the writer’s way of making sense of the life he had led. I am assuming he doesn’t lead it now!! in fact I know he doesn’t for he eloquently refers to it as an ‘echo’. And this is an eloquent book. Not for the fainthearted but for the curious, the open minded and to quote my beloved Jack,
‘The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.’
My thanks to Matt Clacher of 4th Estate books for a proof of this extraordinary book. If you got the p's buy it....... innit.
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