By Stephen Hayward.
Koushik Banerjea, Category Unknown, London Books, 2022
Man goes into work, gets the sack, fails to tell his wife. And then keeps failing to tell her each time he subsequently heads back out in the morning to a phantom job, hanging out on park benches with the tramps instead. The job, the real one he used to have, turns out to have been something in middle management, involving financial analysis. So far, so Updike. But this recently canned employee is no Harry Angstrom, and this novel is no ‘Rabbit’. Actually, the warning signs about what to expect are there from the get-go, in the unusual opening epigraph, juxtaposing an elliptical cutaway from Clarice Lispector with a torrent of abuse from the lips of Don Logan, he of the cult Brit crime flick, Sexy Beast. And in a dedication, part borrowed from The Specials, to those kids ‘whose faces never fit’.
It can be hard to know where to start with Category Unknown, given that the book itself is already playing havoc with time frames in the prologue, which turns out to be anything but. But the central timeline is 1978 – 2008, accompanying the rise of Margaret Thatcher (and Debbie Harry) and the fall of Lehman Brothers. Its startling opening salvo, and interpretation of ‘prologue’ to mean a potted London pop cultural history, feel broadly suggestive of some desire to subvert expectations, be they literary, readerly or purely linear. Is this a bildungsroman, campus farce, or a big city drama? At times it seems as though it might be all three, reblended with wanton disregard for the conventions of genre. What is clear though is the referencing of a real-life backdrop – the 1981 New Cross Fire and its horrific fallout, as well as the wider racial antagonisms of the time – to remind readers that many of the issues around social justice today have in fact got far older roots. And indeed Category Unknown does not shy away from the less edifying aspects of this earlier historical period, be that the racial profiling of the hated SUS laws, intra-ethnic tensions, sexual violence or class-bound prejudice. It is one of its strengths though, that it manages to do so without any descent into diatribe, leaving the reader instead with the slightly queasy feeling that these are just everyday banalities, albeit mired, as Hannah Arendt would have it, in their own discrete forms of evil: bureaucratic, societal, individual.
Banerjea is meticulous in his detailing of particular time periods, signposted by the changing styles and tastes of his key protagonists. The music they listen to, the trainers they wear, their modes of social engagement, all are laid out with an unstinting eye. The overall effect is that of a whirligig of sportswear labels – Fila, Ellesse, Lacoste, Diadora, Adidas, Nike – and of the music du jour – soul, funk, reggae, pop, 2 Tone, electro – ‘framing smartmouth Charlie Nicholas clones’. But above all, of worlds in motion. We are transported to a time of rapid social change whose full implications are still being absorbed by the story’s young protagonists. It is not just the pop-cultural firmament which is forming before their very eyes, but crucially too their own personal, political, even sexual ambitions. It also becomes clear that whatever notion of politics is being proposed here, it is largely an adjunct, owing little to established party affiliations and plenty to the nervy, jittery palate of young people when confronted by the radically altered social and economic conditions of their actual existence. The ground beneath their feet is shifting, or eroding entirely, under the fiscal onslaught of Thatcherism, and Banerjea offers us ringside seats here to the crumbling ruins of the old social contract: ‘Spooned in like cod-liver oil by smart-suited boys and girls…The old men in high-backed trousers, held up over string vests with button braces, tea and fig rolls on a side plate, watching the world they’d built dismantled brick by accursed brick.’
The London Banerjea describes bears many similarities to the speculative city depicted in a film like The Long Good Friday, and in fact, that film’s ultimately doomed Harold Shand is even namechecked at one point, though this occurs much later in the story, after a frank admission by its occasional narrator, D: ‘I’m not the man I used to be, a half-cut, pastiche, cardboard-cut-out cockney.’ If narrative judgement is deferred, then the point is still made that, as with all speculative drama, there are winners and losers. D as a Mick Travis everyman perhaps, losing his footing in workaday society, or once that has gone altogether, in the throes of madness, producing occasional flashes of illumination, like another character also referenced from a cult film, Laura Mars. In several dreamlike passages, the aftershocks of collapse – personal, financial, mental health – unravel as powerful elegy to what has been lost under Thatcherism, but also hint, in an unexpected way, at what still endures in the ‘ludic’, ‘mongrel’ city of D’s birth. Like Selvon’s ‘sufferers’ or Dostoevsky’s epileptics, D remains intact (just) and offers himself up as our guide to a clandestine city which has been hiding in plain sight all along.
Ostensibly the story of four young people (three Londoners, one from Spain) whose lives intersect at key moments over three decades as they move through adolescence and then into adulthood, Category Unknown could just as easily be read as a style guide and a cultural primer. Indeed, it is rife with pop cultural references, from pirate radio to Prince Charles and the City Beat Band, by way of Professor Anthony Giddens. Yes, that Anthony Giddens, high priest of the Blairite ‘third way’! Though by the time his ideas and the crucible for their dissemination – the London School of Economics – finally enter the narrative fray, it’s already the last chance saloon for D, now a tramp and effectively outcast from the same neoliberalism which has also supplanted Giddens’ grand theory.
In keeping with the entrepreneurial ethos of his main protagonists, Banerjea seems to be suggesting that everything, from style, to politics, to carnal desire, can actually be repurposed for personal gain. And that this, in fact, is the true nature of the Thatcherite ideology reshaping society in her own, self-mythologising image. It is a dispiriting idea, but harder to refute once the narrative pivots to the (then) unfolding catastrophe at Lehman Brothers and the financial meltdown which will follow. The subplot of failed city trader D, in particular, seems indicative of how the neoliberal roots of that global disaster were clearly sown during an earlier Thatcherite era of laissez-faire, which also heralded the decline in more established notions of race, class and community. By extension, its (neoliberalism’s) apotheosis, for instance in a tragedy like Grenfell, should really surprise no one, given the established timeline of rampant neglect and profiteering which have long characterised the speculative city. A cost/benefit ratio where ‘safety’ or ‘dignity’ nearly always come a distant second to profit. And in the ‘New Cross Fire’, the narrative finds its own precursor to Grenfell, but again is content to leave the social facts, and the epochal tensions, simmering away in the background while its protagonists, somewhat surreally, carry on bickering over sportswear, or girls.
That the novelistic centre just about manages to hold in spite of being pulled in multiple directions – social history, style primer, campus absurdism – is testament to some beautiful prose and an unerring instinct for the key detail in each conflicting scene: a look, or a strategic silence, or sometimes even just a pair of boxfresh trainers, which remind you that this is both proximate myth and performative drama. The girls, then young women in Banerjea’s telling are shown to be less neurotically defined by their peer group structures than the boys/men. And again, with the benefit of hindsight, one wonders whether a subtle point is being made about the perils of brittle, at times toxic, masculinity, when either left unchecked or actively encouraged by its formative environment. Peers, teachers, adults are all shown to be culpable in this as the novel’s focus shifts from South London to a Spain still deeply scarred by the brutal legacy of General Franco’s dictatorship. Yet ultimately it is the female characters who take the most decisive actions to alter the course of their lives here. And perhaps it is their steadfastness, in these grim days of Supreme Court rollbacks and institutionalised misogyny, which offers a more hopeful catharsis than any monetary makeover. Roxy and Laura do not accept whatever preordained destiny society, or family, seems to have in mind for them. The fate of Conrad and D remains less certain though.
And just as the book welcomes you with the not-so-sonorous trilling of ‘potty mouthed’ Don Logan, it bids you adieu in the exalted company of Mohammed Rafi, Elvis and Gil Scott Heron. A superbly eclectic playlist the final offering from one of the book’s main protagonists, though in truth if there’s a party going on it’s still quite hard to tell who’s supposed to be having all the fun. Perhaps that’s finally the point. When all distinctions are blurred, what are you actually left with? A category unknown.
It is also worth pointing out that by delivering on that titular promise, this novel sits somewhat uncomfortably next to what might be loosely termed ‘diaspora’ fiction, and this effectively recasts its concerns as free-floating picaresque rather than unimpeachable cultural authenticity. In fact, fraud and dissimulation appear to be its principal métier – the gleefully ‘inauthentic’ rogues’ gallery of a ‘cardboard-cut-out cockney’, a ‘two bob Brit Rasta’, and more troublingly of sexual predators operating under the cloak of institutional respectability. By turns exquisitely drawn and disturbing, Category Unknown is a novel with something important to say about where we’ve ended up now. If ‘it’s for all the kids whose faces never fit’, when you think about it some more, that’s most of us, really. At any rate, those amongst us who are troubled by whatever else is going on out there nowadays under the guise of ‘culture wars’. From its abrasive opening, this book somehow manages to make a distilled epic of its pop-cultural subject and is both nerveless and unnerving in how it goes about this. It is funny, smart, sad and unresolved. The ghost of Samuel Selvon would surely approve.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stephen Hayward is a lecturer at Central St Martins, University of London. And a Londoner.
