By Koushik Banerjea.
John King, London Country (London Books, 2023)
Ray’s got a lot on his mind these days. Bereavement, Brexit, a sense of betrayal. But mostly Brexit and how it has wormed its way into his everyday thinking. The doublespeak of politicians, distant elites and, more troublingly, of the occasional customer taking umbrage at the skinhead cabbie’s uncompromising view. The circuit Ray makes ferrying customers around his particular stretch of what author John King euphemistically terms ‘herbert manor’ establishes a key nodal point in his latest novel, London Country. The outer city, ‘edge’ city, sprawling wild west of Southall, Uxbridge, Slough and beyond. Look carefully, and the map of the satellite imaginary is there on the front cover, its grid of connections reaching back into time, and place, bent out of shape. Writ large in the epigraph too, a paean to the dispossessed from Oi legends, Infa-Riot. Actually those concerns have been there all along, in the earlier Satellite Cycle books by King – Human Punk, White Trash and Skinheads – which first introduced the reader to Joe Martin, Ruby James and Terry English, who all resurface here in a familiar London hinterland. Familial too, since Terry is Ray’s uncle, concerned at his nephew’s recent loss of control and narrow avoidance of a custodial. The whisper of Lydon in the background – ‘anger is an energy’ – though unlike his friend Joe who ‘believed in circles and loops and fuck knows what else, Ray was a skinhead and dealt in straight lines.’ Yet those nodal points, their boundary markers, dissolve again into what Joe recognises as ‘satellite sounds soaked in fog.’
Linear time and a purely physical topography don’t strictly apply in the mythopoesis proposed here by King. And just as the veteran punk, Joe Martin, now spends his days building shelves, helping in a church restoration project, and collecting sounds, so the author himself delves into the ‘streaks of sadness in this beautiful mind-bending fog… black smudges in the haze, a warning that something terrible is coming.’ The world he conjures is of course a tangible one of ‘terraces, cul-de-sacs and commons and industrial parks the woods and orchards and caravan sites and park homes’, but its true resonance is in the free-thinking eclecticism of the soundtrack Joe is assembling in his head. He’s no longer the callow youth of Human Punk, can see the fundamentalist punk ‘year zero nonsense’ for what it is. In an equally radical departure, jazz-funk may not be the hated enemy anymore and perhaps even has a role to play in the ‘bastard-pop picture of what he hoped to get across’. Armed with a sampler, Joe views the contraption as a divining rod of sorts. He ‘had to get to grips with the machine, make sense of the storm inside his head.’ Driving around the city limits and the London Orbital picking up various people’s vinyl castoffs, he soon realises that there is a lot more than collectibles at stake. Etched into the runout grooves the joys and pains of lives all too often sneered at, lives lived at the margins of that ‘satellite fog’. People selling up and moving on, in need of some quick cash, or needing to be prised from their analogue memories. ‘The memories buried in here were personal, secondhand and third person.’ And if this makes Joe feel that he is a ‘vinyl-loving scrap-metal rag-and-bone man’, then that is a designation he is happy enough to adopt. For what he is assembling, in his own head, is a kind of living London archive made from the remnants of both the living and the dead. Inspired of late by the methodology of DJ Shadow, Joe has begun to develop his own Buddhist/punk sound collage, ‘seeing it as a montage that kept building on itself, mutating and reinventing as it created the new from the old, a mirror of the wider society. Nothing was new, everything recycled.’ And what a collage that turns out to be! Film soundtracks, spoken word albums, Bowie, Dilla, Oi, punk, ska, trip-hop, reggae, classical Indian devotional cassettes, Miles and Mingus. In the manner of all DIY DJ cut-ups, the dubplate acetate forming in Joe’s own head turns out to be a blend of desire and thievery. A wilful corruption of linearity, its temporal arrangements refashioned in the manner of all good dissidents. In Bowie and Dilla especially, the old punk finds succour in sounds forged at the edge of death. The new/old synthesis at its most stark, terrestrial life ebbing away, a cosmology of questions hoving into view. The sounds left behind, of legacy, the ludic, despair, miming the wider contradictions of a society hardly at ease with itself. Sound and fury, though in a heartbeat Joe senses that can just as easily become joy or dissolve altogether into dread. ‘Moods shaped events, altered outcomes.’
All the emotions are on display on a nearby nurses’ night out as Ruby James looks to drown recent sorrows and make good on her promise to reunite treasured mementos with the grieving loved ones left behind by the evil serial killer NHS consultant, Jonathan Jeffreys, a ghoulish ‘collector of souls, trophies, stolen treasures.’ His monstrous deeds, killing patients in their beds and then trying to kill Ruby as well, are firmly located with ‘the ghosts in the fog… that landgrabbing class rooted in invasion… it’s them we should fear… deceivers manipulating the system… betraying our trust…’ But Ruby never allows the anger to cloud her restorative mission and even now, after everything that has happened, she would rather see the good in people. She heard ‘the sweetest part of nature booming from the speakers… her skull full of echo and reverb.’ Her presence, and survival, not only fighting off but killing the murderous Jeffreys, laying down another placeholder in King’s imagined geography. A fundamental decency as counterpoint not just to untrammeled evil, but also perhaps to the workaday rage of Ray, who by this point with his constant ranting is even starting to annoy those who agree with his strident views.
Yet if the roar in Ray’s head will not abate, he nonetheless recognises the dead end that wearing the ‘nutter’ label has brought him to. He regrets some of his own aggressive outbursts over the years and becomes increasingly mindful of his late mother’s sage advice that ‘he had to learn to listen.’ And this seems to draw him back from the brink at a moment of deep, personal crisis. Channeling (that other) Ray (Winstone’s Gal Dove) as he sunbathes in his back garden, angry Ray seems to have some sort of epiphany. ‘How we can’t always blame being a cunt on the cunts at the top… He thought about the wider planet. Human systems built on class, caste, tribe, race, sex. There were bullies, bigots, liars everywhere… The best liars enjoyed the easiest lives.’ And if elsewhere the introduction of a giant blue rabbit (lamp) and mention of Don Logan mainline two of the more nightmarish elements of the classic film Sexy Beast, then the circuit Ray follows also treads a fine balance between pride, rage and the possibility of love.
King invests his cultural imaginary with a rich lineage. Sonic, of course, but subtly intertextual in other ways too. Filmic – Metropolis, Clockwork Orange, Sexy Beast – and literary to boot. In their different ways, JG Ballard, Alan Sillitoe, even Richard Allen are all present and correct in this firmament. A brief mention of the skinhead cabbie, ‘Hawkins’, a seemingly sly allusion to the key protagonist of Richard Allen’s early 1970s skinhead novels. Yet contra the implied hermeticism of those Allen novels, something far more intriguing is taking place here. As with the sampler, streams of consciousness, of dread and delusion, subject themselves to a mysterious alchemy on the page, the Uxbridge Road special reappointing itself as divining rod. Blips, beeps, burps and a whole lotta beats. Soundscape as Buddhist meditation, as shadowplay, as scream. A nascent outpouring of grief, joy, pride, despair and all points in between. ‘Joe considered the ten-minute track he’d been building before leaving England, a series of sentences used whole, chopped into phrases, words and sounds, the speed of the latter adjusted and the results warped and reshaped… The voices no longer human, key words dismantled and turned into the smallest of breaks… the past and the future this never-ending present they were all living.’ And perhaps it’s apt that Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are also both fed into the equation, the latter ‘title next to a man fighting for his life.’ To which one might add, in the finest traditions of Dilla, and as a playful riposte to any year zero fundamentalists, another (jazz/soul) tune of that era, the early 70s Leon Thomas classic, ‘It’s my life I’m fighting for’. Joe, you feel, wouldn’t mind too much. Type of thing his mate Ricky probably wouldn’t want to sell him though.
In its desire to play with form, its carousel of dreamlike, intertextual fragments and temporal jump cuts, there is something Benjaminian about what King has achieved here. Both spiky and serene, perhaps London Country has started to do for the London Orbital/Satellite belt what Walter Benjamin did for 1920s Paris in his ‘Arcades Project’. In its ‘circles, loops and fuck knows what else’ it reveals an always evolving cartography of desire. What’s possible as well as what’s already passed. And in so doing it has breathed urgent new life into an old question: an ongoing argument with self about presence, place and form. A qawwal from the punk undercommons.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Koushik Banerjea is the author of two novels – Another Kind Of Concrete and Category Unknown – and numerous short stories. He lives in South London.
