Book Review--Absolute Beginners

Absolute Beginners, published in 1958, is a tale told by a protagonist who is deeply immersed in the pop culture of his time, the fast-evolving fashion and pop culture of jazz clubs and coffee bars of late 1950s London, a city on the cusp of profound and irreversible cultural and social change. This is the exact point in popular culture when, as Ed Vuillamy of the Guardian says, in reference to teenagers, “the kids were taking over”, a decade in which the “mod” sensibility with its love of sharp, well-tailored clothes and modern jazz is defining the essence of what is “cool”. 

The protagonist, who remains nameless throughout the story like the lead in Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow Up, is a dandy photographer tripping through the chic London streets in his “Roman suit”, an allusion to the tailored jackets favored by the new “mod” youth sub-culture, wielding his Rolleflex, and snapping at arresting scenes, ever hungry for style. The narrative style certainly has plenty of propulsive energy, and the tale, although simple, is riveting as it captures the lives of the teenagers, “absolute beginners”, who frequent those coffee bars, “smoky jazz clubs”, consume style, and live sybaritic lives. 

Ironically, however, MacInnes, when he wrote this novel, was actually 45 and working for the BBC. Although London-born, he was Australian, feeling a certain “estranged Englishness” due to his peripatetic up-bringing, so as such, was a keen observer of the young mods and jazz cats and the whole bohemian scene. All the characters are known by their nicknames only, - The Fabulous Hoplite, Misery Kid, Ex. Deb. Of Last Year – while the lead, at a party, shoots back a flippant reply, “David Copperfield”, when asked his name.

 

The first-person narrative style is dense with colloquialisms and encoded street talk of late 1950s London, while the frequent dialogue is rapid-fire, busy, and lyrical, so readers who would most enjoy this story are ones with prior knowledge and curiosity of this moment in British pop culture. Despite his tender years, he also knows well the seamier sides of the capital, being on the fringes of the pornographic industry, but wanting to cut loose from that and have an exhibition of his own. In that sense, he is aspirational and, although associating with the underbelly of the city, it becomes obvious that he is acutely aware of the morality of a vast range of issues; he is indignant about the indifference to the racial violence brewing in London which belies Britain being a civilized nation, takes his friends’ loyalty seriously and, while striking out against banal conventionality, blinkered rule-following, and even his own mother, possesses instincts towards peace and social harmony.  

The story elapses over four months in the summer of 1958, during which time the young protagonist suffers the anguish of love, betrayal, the death of his father, and genuine friendship, with events, and non-events, building up to a climax which involves the Notting Hill race riots of the summer that year. At various points in the story, it is clear that he is appalled by the casual racism towards the West Indian inhabitants, and he often indicates his avowedly multiculturalist sympathies, none more significantly than in the final chapter of the book when, in the airport, he reverses his decision to leave Britain while waiting to board a plane when he sees a group of “grinning and chattering” West Indians, saying, “ I flung my arms around the first of them”, proclaiming, “We’re all going to …have a ball!.” He believed that the future of Britain should involve a diversity of races, the issues being another prescient foretelling of our current turbulent times. 

However, although his distaste for racism is clear, MacInnes doesn’t portray West Indian characters in any meaningful and well-rounded sense, although the locals are fascinating character sketches, while equally, MacInnes doesn’t delve deep enough into the background of the riots. Admittedly, the narrative is seen through the eyes of teenager, who, for all his big-city savvy, may well be naïve and confused as to why the racial tensions boiling around him have suddenly come to a head. Nonetheless, the drama of that suddenness of violence, the unbalancing of the natural order is powerfully evoked in the book’s dramatic turning point scene. The book is masterful for several other reasons. MacInnes’s description of the difference between and trad jazz and modern jazz aficionado is crisply executed; the former wearing a “tie of all one colour, short jacket..somebody’s riding tweed..”, and the latter marked out by his “collage boy smooth-cropped hair,.. neat, white, Italian, rounded collar shirt”. 

 

Besides its stylistic strengths, there are many themes covered in the story which are relevant as we enter the third decade of the 21st century: the rise of the all-pervasive media in the guise of game shows, the public’s clamor for celebrity culture, the crass commercialization of that culture, raw consumerism and racial intolerance are some of the issues which are critiqued, showing the reader that these are not blights unique to our present era. This novel, more than a highly intimate reportage, is of particular interest to those who want to know what the foundations of the Swinging Sixties were like, as it depicts the nascent youth culture with great precision and verve.

The quotes in this piece are from The Guardian column by Ed Vuillamy, published on 14 April, 2007, entitled “Absolute MacInnes.”