East End Review

Category: BOOKS

  • Lee Jackson: ‘The crux of modern life is Victorian’

    A meeting of 'smoke makers' in Dirty Old London
    A meeting of ‘smoke makers’ in Dirty Old London

    According to Stoke Newington writer and historian Lee Jackson, the funny thing about the smoke, fog and grime in Victorian London was how people seemed to love it.

    “There are so many quotes about ‘dear, dirty old London’,” Jackson says. “They’ve got that sort of indulgence for the filth and the grubbiness of it, because it’s so distinctive – distinctively urban.”

    Jackson has just spent two years researching such delights as cesspools in the 1860s, and has sifted through the account-books of rag-and-bone men to write the book which takes its title from such affectionate sentiments.

    Dirty Old London: the Victorian Fight Against Filth is the story of a forgotten world, a world in which it was normal for the streets to be two-foot-deep in mud, for hats to turn black simply from being worn outside and for tap-water to be deemed drinkable as long as the half-glass of brown sediment it contained had sunk to the bottom.

    One of the book’s achievements is to enable the imaginative leap required to understand that these conditions were once accepted as the status quo. His prose forms a well-sprung surface from which the reader can make this jump into the past, recording the development of everyday amenities like paved roads and the collection of rubbish which it is easy to forget are ideas someone once had to think up.

    It’s a gripping tale which pits diligent reformers and wacky idealists against the literally parochial governing authorities and the stubborn refusal of the middle classes ever to pay for any kind of civic improvement.

    “It’s that very sort of Victorian, 19th century, laissez-faire sort of thing; small government,” says Jackson. “And the whole book in a way is about that sort of thing: what does it mean to have local government?”

    Dirty Old London answers the question in such an intriguing way that you start to wonder why people don’t ask it more often. Household waste, for instance. At the start of the century, the collection of ‘dust’ – predominantly made up of ash from fireplaces – was a jealously guarded privilege awarded to private contractors, who paid local councils high fees to be allowed to collect it.

    Ash had value as it was used in the manufacture of bricks. There was a colossal demand for bricks at the time and, in consequence, for ash. Several ‘dust men’ became extraordinarily wealthy from the trade, including Henry Dodd, an Islington rubbish merchant who left an estate of £111,000 when he died in 1881 (a fortune that in today’s money would be comparable to that of J.K. Rowling).

    But the dust trade was a victim of its own success. London grew too big, and the ‘brickfields’ in which the East End was baked were moved further away from the centre of the city. It became less and less economical to cart dust out that far, and bricks imported from Birmingham offered too much competition.

    London was also ‘the Smoke’ – “a city named after its own pollutant”, as Jackson puts it. Fog was only part of the problem, but an all-enveloping part. It had a certain allure, and featured prominently in the erotic anecdotes assembled into the anonymous pornographic memoir My Secret Life, as well as in popular magazine stories about low-vis romantic encounters of the sort that – in Jackson’s words – “end with people turning round and saying ‘didn’t you know that was the Countess Von Such and Such you were speaking to!’”

    Mud was also pervasive. Most of it was horse-dung, mixed with general filth and sewage to form an omnipresent ooze. As with the brickfields, farmland became so far away as London developed that it was no longer worth anyone’s while to crape the mud off the streets and sell it for fertiliser – the system the city had relied on to keep its streets navigable.

    Crossing-sweepers – familiar to readers of Dickens as the ragged objects of benevolence, cruelty and non-standard orthography (such as Jo in Bleak House, whose every ‘v’ is written as a ‘w’) – didn’t simply keep junctions looking tidy as their name might suggest, but were actually in charge of ploughing a thoroughfare or ‘crossing’ through the mire and keeping it clean so that people could get from one side to the other, relying on optional tips as payment for the service.

    Jackson’s enthusiasm for this stuff stems from his days as a Victorian crime novelist. His research ran away with him and now he predominantly writes history. He is the man behind the online archive of historical documents Victorian London, a website so popular that it’s listed first on a Google search for its name, beating Wikipedia and the several museums and tour operators also competing for the term. “More people have read that website than have read my books, I’m sure of that,” he reflects.

    Jackson works on the period because of its continuing relevance. “It’s the cusp of modernity,” he says. “Transport. The Victorians thought you could annihilate time and space with the railway – you can suddenly move from one city to another in a couple of hours, the real modern transition.

    “The Victorians invented rollerskates, you have these wonderful photos of women in their bustles rollerskating around on rinks made of marble.”

    The washing machine, of the handle- operated kind, was also a 19th century invention, marketed using what Jackson calls “these amazing 1950s-style adverts. One was like ‘my servants wash more in three days than they used to in three weeks’, or ‘the boys in the reformatory now do their laundry much better than they could before!’

    “By the end of the era you have the cinema, the radio – it’s all there. There’s very little in modern life whose origins aren’t Victorian. The crux of modern life is Victorian, for me.”

    Jackson was born in Manchester and has lived in Stoke Newington for the last twenty years, an area which he says “started off as a very pretty village, and its first boom was as a rural retreat for bankers from the city.

    “Then people realised they could make a lot more money by buying the fields, digging up the clay and building houses.”

    He sees the social changes in Stoke Newington over the time he has lived there as “an exact parallel with Islington in the 1980s”, with gentrification and rising house prices. “I find it a bit depressing in a way how you just see wealth knocking people out of the way – and I’m part of it.

    “But no one owns any district for a long time in London – with the possible exception of Mayfair, which is literally owned by the Grosvenor estate. The beauty of things like Hackney and Islington is there aren’t these overweening vast estates. This has changed over time, and if there is an economic collapse it’ll all change again.”

    At a time when the idea of collective projects for the common good has once again become unpopular, it’s good to be reminded that it was only recently we managed to climb out of our own filth.

    Dirty Old London:The Victorian Fight Against Filth is published by Yale University Press. RRP: £20. ISBN 9780300192056

  • Xiaolu Guo’s journey from the Far East to East End

    Xiaolu Guo 620
    Author: Xiaolu Guo

    Successful authors who write in a second language are a rare breed.

    Beckett, Conrad and Nabokov most famously did it, but to name someone writing in English whose first language is Chinese is no easy proposition.

    Xiaolu Guo, however, belongs to this select group. Furthermore, the 40-year-old, who in 2013 was named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists (former nominees include Salman Rushdie, Jeanette Winterson and Zadie Smith) lives and works in East London.

    Brought up in a south Chinese fishing village, Guo showed artistic promise from a young age. She studied film in Beijing before moving to London in 2002 to take up a fellowship at the National Film School. She is a prolific filmmaker and novelist with ten books to her name – five of them written after arriving in the UK.

    Her first novel in English, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, was published in 2007. It is the story of a young Chinese woman sent by her parents to study English in London, structured in dictionary form and written in a broken English that improves alongside the narrator’s own grasp of the language.

    It won her plaudits, including an Orange Prize-nomination, and Guo has continued experimenting with narrative in her latest novel I am China, a tale of love, exile, art and politics, set over three continents and written in epistolary form.

    “I think literature should be an intellectual exercise for readers, not only for the writers, and this habit has been lost in this country and in the Anglo-Saxon world really,” she tells me bluntly over coffee.

    I am China is told through the perspective of a young translator, Iona Fitzpatrick, living in London, who is given a bunch of letters and diary entries by a publisher and few clues as to what they’re about. What follows is a detective narrative in epistolary form – not dissimilar to AS Byatt’s Possession in this respect – in which she pieces together a 20-year love story between exiled Chinese punk and Tiananmen protester Kublai Jian, and his lover Deng Mu.

    If the idea of Chinese punk seems far-fetched, that’s because it is – China has never had its own punk culture. But Guo listened to The Sex Pistols and found the genuine anger in their music, reminiscent of the students’ pro-democracy protests in 1989.

    She created Jian, her own Chinese punk (based on a real person) and wrote a short story in which he confronted Johnny Rotten and asked him whether punk is a positive or distractive force.

    “The Chinese punk asks why Western punk music always creates diarrhoea. If you’re so angry why not construct a better society? And Johnny Rotten says ‘No, punk is about diarrhoea so you can let out all the capitalistic bullshit out your arse’.”

    The unpublished story grew into I am China, and became part of the novel’s wider discourse on the role of the artist.

    Guo calls I am China an autobiographical novel, with Jian and Muo representing two contrasting ideas about the world. Jian is an “ideological being”, prepared to go into exile after handing out copies of his ‘manifesto’ at a gig, while Mu lives beyond ideological struggle.

    “Jian is very much like how I was, a very angry rock ‘n’ roll youth who believed all art is political and there’s no art that can really live beyond the political sphere and that even being apolitical is a political gesture. I was very much like that, and that’s what drove me all the way from China to here.”

    ‘Freedom’ in the West is something both Guo and Jian in the book hoped to find. But for Jian, leaving China brings him to detention centres in Dover and Switzerland. Similarly, Guo says she is now less naïve than when she first left China.

    “Western democracy actually has a certain totalitarian character, because if you’re not inside this system you can never participate in democracy, you have no voice anyway,” she says.

    Living with her partner and young child in Hackney, Guo has forged a life for herself and no longer feels like the ‘angry teenager’, aligning herself more with her lover character, Miu.

    “This lover is saying that life is so much bigger, and this universe is so much bigger,” Guo says. “Because if you read Zen Buddhism you will laugh at Communism and if you know George Orwell’s 1984 you’ll know what a little awful crazy nasty political game man has created. I mean, we’re just advanced monkeys.”

    Guo claims not to care as much now about politics or even the arts. But despite this, there’s something of the punk about her that refuses to mellow.

    “I come across as this woman who comes from this far away China and lives in the West. That’s not me,” she snaps, when I ask her about her life in China. “Who is me is a novelist and filmmaker who communicates my story and my vision through a narrative. So ‘me’ doesn’t exist in a way. My little trivial reality is not interesting, it’s not like I’m Andy Warhol.”

    When her character Kublai Jian comes to Britain and is detained, he becomes “stateless”. I wonder if, as an artist on foreign soil, she feels stateless too; neither fully British but long past the point of no return.

    “I’m not really attracted to Hackney at all,” Guo admits. “If I could I’d live on a tropical island in the southern hemisphere.

    “My journey’s really more like an intellectual journey, I’m not really into making a life in the West. I don’t care if I make a living in China or New York or Hackney or Hamburg. Basically I want to create art and write novels.”

    I am China is published by Chatto & Windus. RRP: £14.99. ISBN: 9780701188191

  • Book review: Boxer Handsome – ‘somewhere between soap opera and classical tragedy’

    Anna Whitwham by Nick Tucker
    Punchy prose: author Anna Whitwham. Photograph: Nick Tucker

    Anna Whitwham’s debut is vivid and – in a literal sense – punchy. It opens on a canal-side brawl over a girl. From there, we follow Clapton fighter Bobby as he tries to find his way to boxing triumph and love in the macho, clannish East End.

    His nemesis both in the ring and on the towpath is Connor, the brutish scion of a gang of Irish travellers – “their lot”. Bobby, styled early as “the Jew” to Connor’s “Gypo”, is the handsome son of a wilted local boxing hero. Theresa – sex, nails and hair extensions – is the girl behind the opening skirmish. She wants Bobby but is intended for Connor. The estate they live on is a “goldfish bowl” of petty politicking and gossip. Enter demure, graceful Chloe: more than a love interest, she is a glimpse of an alternative future for Bobby. Meantime, the big fight – Bobby v. Connor – approaches.

    The book is vivid; it isn’t subtle. The violence is graphic, the sex is bare and anatomical. The men are visceral, hot-headed, heavy-fisted – or, like Bobby’s dad, Joe, the spent obverse: decrepit, ridiculous. The women are measured in units of prettiness, tinyness, comfort and passivity. In fact, all the characters are more or less familiar by type, set into a familiar, antagonistic tribal map structured on blood ties and hand-me-down feuds.

    In this, the book sits somewhere between soap opera and classical tragedy: two households, both alike in repetitive indignity. This mood is reinforced by a slightly overwrought, pervasive prophetic sense. The book opens, “Bobby knew that he would win,” and builds thickly on foresight and fate. “I don’t want to speed it up…what’s going to happen to me,” says Theresa.

    Indeed, crucial to the story is Bobby’s struggle against the power of blood and history to animate him like a puppet. In this “goldfish bowl” characters are largely resigned to swim round in circles, generation after generation. For Bobby, boxing victory and Chloe seem like twin glimmers of an escape route from this often extremely vicious cycle.

    Unfortunately, I found that the plodding sense of destiny and the familiar landscape of characters and feuding families combined to glaze the story in a gently anaesthetic predictability. This rather attenuated my curiosity as the story rose to crisis.

    Still, if the characters draw on standard stock, they are mostly drawn with an appealingly bold hand. Bobby’s emotional awkwardness and frustration, Theresa’s front of toughness, are well observed. Joe is pathetic, but lucidly realised and sympathetic, too.

    Whitwham’s writing is expressive: she works in a spartan, specific lexicon and short sentences which set the narrative to the tense rhythm of a prizefight. Sometimes, a more generous descriptive tone emerges, for instance, to paint the canal – “the black ribbon that tied everyone together” – beautifully, as “black and secret. Hushed, peculiar.”

    Whitwham’s affectionate depiction of the boxing scene as manly in a tough, fair, paternal way – a shot at redemption for the bullied and the brawlers – is authentic and convincing. And, despite the shadow of austerity Britain’s indolent youth, this setting – boxing club, tethered tinker ponies, men with greased hair and market gold weighing down their wrists – is often mistakable for the East End of Whitwham’s grandfather, the Hoxton boxer who inspired the novel.

    Whitwham has been criticised for this, but I enjoyed it. A slippery sort of modernity make this East End world feel a little more eternal, which fits the mythic-tragic mood and the building sense of the goldfish bowl as a difficult thing to climb out of.

    Boxer Handsome by Anna Whitwham is published by Chatto & Windus. RRP: £12.99, ISBN: 9780701188306.

  • Book review: Thirst by Kerry Hudson

    Kerry Hudson by Eleonore de Bonneval
    Kerry Hudson by Eleonore de Bonneval

    The idea of a novel exploring the relationship between a trafficked Russian sex-worker and a gentle young security guard who catches her shoplifting sounds risky. It’s the kind of glittery rescue narrative that if poorly handled could make for a fairly unpalatable read.

    But from the deft fingertips of Kerry Hudson, author of the award-winning Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-cream Float Before He Stole My Ma, comes a second novel so sweetly pitched and dexterously structured that any such concerns seem, in retrospect, completely absurd.

    Hudson knits together the disparate lives of Alena and Dave, a troubled couple who find commonality in their gut-wrenching loneliness. Both dealing with dark and twisted pasts, they enjoy comfort in one another’s tentative company – almost as if working the other out provides a moment’s relief from their respective realities. It’s a relationship hanging on tenterhooks.

    Lured to England by her mother’s oldest friend, Alena is fast submerged in a thickly veiled London underworld, where she’s forced into a brutal pattern of rape, threats and violence. Hudson writes her backstory with unflinching detail, layering her sparky central character in folds of horrifying experience. The scenarios are unnervingly believable and thus all the more difficult to stomach.

    Dave’s story, on the other hand, seems a nip less devastating. Having moved above a Hackney Kebab shop after life on a Roehampton estate comes to a difficult end, his is an existence of dull routine and pipe dreams of escape. He’s kind, handsome and would do anything for the lost, vulnerable girl he’s come to share his bed with. Though, always assuring himself of his own good nature, there are surprises in store.

    In contrast with the heavy subject matter, the prose is clean and delicate – elevated by the author’s acute observations of the nuances in everyday city-life. Of an afternoon in the Dalston flat that Dave and Alena inhabit, she writes: “The windows were all open, letting in a soup of early-evening Hackney air: dirty pavement, exhaust fumes, kebab meat.” It’s real and romantically grim.

    Thirst is an accomplished, if grey, portrait of two characters who might be anyone walking past on the street, sharing a quiet drink in the pub, or hiding in the corner of a gallery cafe. With uncompromising concern for literature’s underexplored people, Hudson’s work is an education. It’s quaint, multi-dimensional and damn tough to swallow. Don’t miss a word she writes.

    Thirst is published by Chatto & Windus. RRP: £12.99. ISBN: 9780701188689

  • The Planner- review

    Tom Campbell. Photograph © Nick Cunard
    Tom Campbell. Photograph © Nick Cunard

    Even if you don’t remember Tom Campbell’s first book, you might remember him as that dark horse of City Hall who boasted about shoplifting.

    In 2011 Campbell promptly resigned from his post at the London Mayor’s Office after explaining to the Evening Standard that he had a personal code of conduct for using chain stores: never buy, only steal.

    The boast may have been a sloppily-made political statement (why not just actively buy from independents?), but nonetheless a refreshing bit of risky honesty.

    Not surprising then, that Campbell counts among his influences the American novelist Jonathan Franzen, who won headlines by allegedly being rude on Oprah.

    In The Corrections, Franzen’s white, angsty middle-class protagonist goes into a posh grocery store and stuffs some salmon fillets into his pocket, only for their juices to drip down his leg while he queues at the checkout. It’s a bizarre act of entitlement combining expensive tastes with wealth resentment. Annoying, but intriguing.

    In Campbell’s new novel, The Planner, everyone is similarly annoying. And that makes The Planner a little bit addictive, because it’s fun to resent characters in books.

    The title character James is, by all conventional definitions, boring. He works a thankless job as a town planner in Southwark Council. He spends his days poring over the finer details of a city he can barely afford to live in, surrounded by friends he finds insufferable as their vacuous success (bankers, lawyers) has come to define their personalities. They lack complexity, thoughtless amoebas blobbing their way through life.

    Surely then James, martyr to his city, is more than meets the eye? Not so.

    Unable to conjure any more noble motivations, James allows himself to become the mentee of high-flying ad man Felix, who introduces him to a glamorous, decadent lifestyle as a method of revving up his bland, night bus-using existence.

    It’s the book’s central irony that this planner can’t plan his own life, which may be a bit overplayed – the professional/personal divide is nothing special. Fashion designers often dress badly. There are dentists with bad teeth. Lawyers who commit crimes.

    Elevated to the role of protagonist, James’ task is to surprise and intrigue.

    But he never does, forcing an altogether more cynical take away – there’s no enlightenment in having very little. Just more striving.

    The Planner is published by Bloomsbury Circus. RRP: £12.99. ISBN: 9781408818268

  • Wave Caps: Former hack turns poet

    wavecaps_620

    Wave Caps is the debut collection of poetry and short stories written by former Hackney Gazette journalist Miguel Cullen and designed by artist Alix Janta-Polczynski.

    Here the avant-garde poet talks to Hackney Citizen about his Argentine roots and the breadth of his references – from the dust of Agrippa to black Nike golfing gloves – as well as the performance instinct of poetry

    Spanish sounds and words fill Wave Caps. Could you tell me a bit about your background, and the influence of language on your work?

    My father comes from Argentina, he moved over in the 1970s to work as a live-in Freudian psycho-analyst in a commune in Gospel Oak. My family out there are from the Provincia de Buenos Aires, and much of my writing is taken from my life out there, working when I was younger, during a difficult personal period for me. I was born and grown here in the UK, but studied Spanish at university and have been bilingual since birth. I read a lot in Spanish and talk a lot with my dad in Spanish, who loves reading.
    I’m not native Spanish, but I think and write in Spanish, and in poetry, the natural voice speaks lines or fragments of lines to me very lucidly.

    You used to write for the Hackney Gazette. How is it different writing poetry?

    Yes I had a brief time at the Hackney Gazette, after longer work at other local London papers. I find that news writing is very much a discipline, but with poetry you have to be just as true to the facts of your reality as much as a news writer is true to the facts of the story.

    What is your day job now?

    I am arts editor for the Catholic Herald, in Moorgate. It’s very different from the rest of the free-lancing I do, which is for culture publications like Vice and Wonderland, and elsewhere, as well as being a full-time poet.

    In ‘Gravediggaz – Niggamortis’ you write: “We are all sepulchred on cypress hills, tombed/ Like fingers in black Nike golfing gloves.” Could you try and describe juxtapostion between modern idiom and ancient civilisation in your work?

    There’s a performance attitude to my writing, so when I mention people wearing one Nike black golfing glove, which was a trend at drum & bass raves, it’s part of my references, just as Agrippa returning to Rome in ashes, which I do later in the poem is, which I took from a Turner painting at the Tate Britain.

    Equally the performance instinct in poetry, which may provoke harsher juxtapositions, is just as real an instinct as the description of ‘everyday truths’ that are prevalent in contemporary poetry. I’d definitely say I’m in the ‘avant-garde’ bracket of contemporary poetry, and this leads to images that are utterly opposite, to the point of being incomprehensible – I think I’m being led vaguely in that direction now.

    The narrators of your poems often have a wistfulness for Argentina, but also a love of London. Does this reflect in some way your own displacement between the two?

    Yes – indeed some of the love I have for reggae, drum & bass and hip hop comes from a love of minority cultures that I have through my lack of connection on a basic level with one of my mother countries.

    My brother and I have always gravitated towards music that is exciting, vibrant, more kinetic, like hip hop, reggae, dancehall, reggaeton, all that, perhaps because we’re drawn to it through that. My last poem ‘Citoyen Des Deux Mondes’ talks of the “Talkers that step out of the hand” of the King, the talkers who were created by the way the British Empire took us. We’re Spanish, but the African and Asian diaspora still talk to me. As the sample in the book, the audio element, which is taken from Hackney then-pirate radio station Kool FM, goes to show.
    The book, designed, bound and with collages by Alix Janta-Polczynski, is published by Odilo Press, a poetry platform founded by the two. odilo-press.com/shop/wave-caps

     

    ‘Graduation’

    The dad’s eyes were withered like fingerprints spurting out of control
    His nose was like a hard-on through a stocking hat
    His round frames were dodecahedrons clicking into place
    Like the Terminator or the missing suspension of a psychotic

    He looked like an Iranian living in High Street Ken

    And his daughter, with skin like leaves
    And lipstick like the small type of nipple-colour

    We were graduating in the class of BA Hons 2014

    We were my brother.

    So now I understand, the place where the daughters of the rich
    Middle-class people go. They go where we go.

    It’s boring but it’s what I thought.

    Being classless is being out of control of being out of control
    About being like you,
    Like you, and everything that is outside you that isn’t me and isn’t you
    Doesn’t kill me yet, because today I’m with you.

     

  • Swimming with Diana Dors – book review

    Author Jeremy Worman
    Author Jeremy Worman

    This somewhat enigmatically entitled collection of short stories by Jeremy Worman follows the Hackney-based author’s debut collection Fragmented in 2011. 

    The stories are divided into two sections, ‘Places’ and ‘London’, with some set in far flung destinations such as Russia, as well as in Surrey and East London. ‘Christmas Games’, an insight into a mother and son relationship, demonstrates the clarity of Worman’s prose style. But the story is punctuated by disturbing moments, such as when the son plays with Scalextric and dreams of crashing his mother’s new ‘friend’ on “the worst corner at Silverstone”. Then, after he feels his thigh being squeezed, he reveals: “I got an erection.” 

    These characters return in ‘After Father’s Funeral’. The mother and son are now at the father’s funeral.These are characters that “need love”. Worman’s descriptions often seem superfluous in other stories – “gloomy” rooms, voices “like grenades” – but here he writes with a sobriety that illuminates the character’s state of mind. 

    The image of the father’s coffin, as it “moved easily into the flames” is followed by the downing of a pint. The movement of the coffin and the act of drinking show a flushing out of memory, a sort of anaesthetised look at life. 

    ‘Old and New’ takes place on the 38 bus route, along Balls Pond Road. As vivid a picture as Worman paints of the area, the story struggles to delve deeper than surface description, and some of the dialogue falls flat, such as the old woman’s cry of “young-uns!” and a nurse’s exclamation that there is “no racism in me”. It feels too obvious and lacking in anything particularly new. 

    The collection works better in stories such as ‘Stairs at 29 Mehetabel Road’ or ‘Harry Slocombe’s East End Return’ with the former a touching exploration of place and history as layers of paint are stripped off an 1863 Hackney terraced house with hidden histories revealing themselves from underneath the paint. 

    Despite the variable quality of the stories, it is excellent writing overall. One only wishes Worman had narrowed his focus on London as when he does the collection really comes alive. 

    Swimming with Diana Dors & Other Stories is published by Cinnamon Press. RRP: £9.99. ISBN: 9781909077225

  • Futures – book review: things are never ‘stupid A to B’

    Futures' author John Barker
    Author John Barker

    Is there any deeper link between finance and cocaine than the role credit-cards and twenty-pound notes play in its ingestion? In 2009, the UN illegal drugs ‘tsar’ Antonio Maria Costa claimed an estimated $315 billion of drugs profit was “the only liquid investment capital” available to some banks in the aftermath of the 2008 credit crunch, the only thing keeping them from seizing up.

    Costa’s accusation was one of the reasons former Angry Brigade member John Barker resurrected a manuscript from the late 1980s and reworked it into his new novel, Futures. The year is 1987, and inspired by ‘Big Bang’ deregulation, City analysts and inveterate snorters Jack and Phil plot to score a huge cargo of cocaine, in anticipation of a massive price rise.

    Trouble comes their way as it becomes apparent that even the not-altogether rectitudinous business practices they know from high-finance are, morally, a cut above those of the criminal underworld their new commodity throws them into trading with. Cue fast cars, pornography, pub-brawls, beatings and killings, and the endless search for a working phone-box.

    It is this messiness of doing deals, rather than any critique of what City folk choose to do with their noses, that the presence of cocaine in the novel serves to highlight. It zooms in behind neatly abstract contracts and indices to show the lives and difficulties of the people buying and selling, with the drug world a particularly pungent example of this on-the-ground intractability.

    Hence the novel’s structure: chapters alternate between separate narratives, each following different characters. As Futures proceeds, stories connect and overlap. Carol – “a survivor”, in Barker’s phrase – is a single mum who makes ends meet selling small amounts of coke every few weeks. It turns out she’s Jack’s dealer, through whom he’s conducting the research into market conditions which underpins his and Phil’s cocaine ‘futures’ enterprise.

    Shadowing everyone is gangland big-cheese Gordon Murray, for most of the novel the only character who gets to speak in the first person. Barker wanted Murray’s voice in the book because he finds him “boring” for the way he “mimics neo-liberal language”. (Barker is working on a new book, Terms and Conditions, a dictionary of buzz-words and the ideology they can serve or conceal).

    Big-business talk – “leverage”, “deliverables”, “offer”, “strategy” – is a bête noir of contemporary discourse. But commercial and economic literacy has always been seen as useful on the Left. Barker has been writing about economics for decades, with articles in the magazines Mute and Variant. An essay at the end of the book explores the connections between US agricultural and foreign policy and the rise in cocaine cultivation in South America.

    Barker is a slightly better essayist than he is a novelist, the same emphasis on complexity and flux making for a compelling modesty in what he writes. His arguments, he says, are valid, and his facts are true, but are not the whole story – there are other truths and other facts. As his analyst characters are fond of saying, things are never “stupid A to B”.

    Futures by John Barker is published by PM Press. RRP: £9.99 ISBN: 9781604869613

  • East London Swimmers – for the love of London Fields Lido

    Bracing: a swimmer poses for the camera at London Fields Lido
    Bracing: a swimmer poses for the camera at London Fields Lido. Photograph: Madeleine Walker

    There is something pure and empowering about swimming. It’s no coincidence that most religions have purification rituals involving immersion in water. Is it taking things too far to suggest the redemptive feeling of moving about freely in liquid stems from some deeply lodged memory of being ensconced in the amniotic sac, or the genes we have inherited from our coelacanth-like ancestors? Yes, to be honest, and why intellectualise something that is inherently visceral?

    This book of ‘before and after’ shots of clothed and swimsuited-up devotees of London Fields Lido is pleasingly devoid of psychobabble, or indeed babble of any kind. What it is full of is photographer Madeleine Waller’s excellent portraits, some of which are on show at this much loved outdoor pool. These images, particularly the ones that show steam rising off the water as it does on cold mornings, possess a raw power.

    In his introduction to this book – a typically lovingly produced hardback offering from small publishers Hoxton Mini Press – Robert Crampton highlights the “sheer beauty of the environment that open-air swimming can provide”.

    “Like cyclists,” he writes, “swimmers are, whatever their competence (slow, medium or fast lane), essentially united by the vulnerability of their shared near-nakedness.”

    Sure, lack of clothes equals vulnerability, but I’ve come across pensioners who swim in the lido every day and who look like they have discovered the fount of eternal youth. This book contains photos of swimmers fresh out of the pool and standing in the freezing snow, glaring defiantly in the face of the bitterly cold weather.

    I’m far from a regular at the lido, but I have occasionally swum there in the deep midwinter, and I can confidently proclaim that the combination of swimming and bracingly cold weather leaves one feeling virtually invincible. As you haul yourself out of the water, you hardly feel vulnerable. Rather, you feel capable of conquering the world.

    East London Swimmers is published by Hoxton Mini Press. RRP: £12.95. ISBN: 9780957699823.

  • Swimming London: The 50 Best Pools, Lidos, Lakes and Rivers from around the Capital – book review

    Swimming London 620

    “London is a city built on water” states the publicity bumf for writer and blogger Jenny Landreth’s exhaustive guide to the best places to swim in the capital. Our city gets its fair share of watery weather too, so there is a certain logic to the fact it boasts such a wealth of places to do the breaststroke.

    Landreth is an entertaining and witty writer who does not merely dive into her subject but takes a running jump along the diving board and deftly somersaults as she plunges into it. It might seem like there is little to be said on the subject of swimming pools, but many have incredible histories, and the newer ones often have a controversial past (Hackney’s Clissold Leisure Centre is a case in point).

    This book also allows readers to discover sumptuous and unusual pools within easy reach of the East End such as Virgin Active Repton Park – a swimming pool in a church (yes, really) and King’s Oak Lido on the cusp of Epping Forest. Closer to home, the pool at Shoreditch House and Walthamstow Forest College Pool are also included.

    Then there is open water swimming and so-called wild swimming, both increasingly popular activities. At the risk of rhapsodising on the subject, the experience of propelling oneself through the water in a lake or reservoir surrounded by fish and diving water birds is an amazing way to connect with nature, and thank goodness this experience is available at places like the Hampstead Heath swimming ponds and the Stoke Newington West Reservoir, albeit that you have to pay and wear a wetsuit to swim in the latter.

    No true wild swimming opportunities exist in London, unless of course you count the Thames, which Landreth does. Though swimming is banned in the busiest stretch through central London, this book details how and where to plunge into London’s mother-river.

    Which begs the question: what about the River Lea? Sure, this notoriously polluted waterway is no doubt dangerous to swim in, and there may well be bylaws banning swimming here. Still, some foolhardy adventurer should try it anyway, if only for the sake of novelty.

    Swimming London: The 50 Best Pools, Lidos, Lakes and Rivers from Around the Capital is published by Aurum Press. RRP: £12.99. ISBN: 9781781310960