Fiction Book Review: Absolute Beginners. Colin MacInnes

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"We'd loot to spend at last, and our world was to be our world, the one we wanted and not standing on the doorstep of somebody else's waiting for honey, perhaps."

[First published 1959, eBook published 2011]

It’s London, 1958. War time restrictions are a thing of the past. The city is now full of the wonders of frothy coffee, marijuana-hazed jazz clubs, a burgeoning pop music scene, and a new entity making the most of it all - the teenager: Blitz babies with money in their pockets for the first time, and a taste for freedom. The book follows the unnamed 18 year old narrator through four separate days over four months of a hot summer of warfare between trad and mod jazz fans, old and young lovers, and the city's first race riots.

The appeal for me in this book is not only the vivid picture presented of a city at a turning point, but the characters of the protagonist and his friends. He is a photographer by inclination, and his inner comments on what he sees and photographs as he moves around the incredibly diverse West London area he calls Napoli are deeply thoughtful, and rich in tone. His friendships encompass all manner of people who are caught in that moment of time before the Notting Hill race riots created a different kind of city: the teenage mods, rockers, teddy boys, rent boys and Caribbean immigrants; and the property developers, political extremists, sociopaths and gossip columnists, all in their way wanting to exploit the teenagers and their money, if they have it, and their talent, if they have that.

"This teenage ball had had a real splendour in the days when the kids discovered that, for the first time since centuries of kingdom-come, they'd money, which hitherto had always been denied to us at the best time in life to use it, namely, when you're young and strong, and also before the newspapers and telly got hold of this teenage fable and prostituted it as conscripts seem to do to everything they touch."

Absolute Beginners is the second book of a trilogy. It was produced as a film in 1986 with Patsy Kensit, Ray Davies, David Bowie, Steven Berkoff and James Fox. Music from Sade Adu, Style Council, Slim Gaillard, Bowie and Davies, among others, ensured the cool of the book translated to the screen.

The Library has a growing collection of thousands of eBooks. As the eBook world expands, so does the range of content. We are now able to select from titles published yesterday, those to be published months in the future, and those first published many years ago. We welcome your suggestions for new titles to add to our collections. Colin MacInnes was brought up in Australia. He was the son of novelist Angela Thirkell, and cousin of Stanley Baldwin and Rudyard Kipling.