Absolute Beginners

Colin MacInnes's 1959 novel, Absolute Beginners, is a coming-of-age masterpiece. Highly nuanced and perceptive, it follows the 18-year-old narrator, who is a photographer and jazz aficionado, through the chaotic summer on the cusp of entering his last year as a teen, on the final approach to adulthood. Though MacInnes was 44 when it was published, he was remarkably attuned to the budding but shadowy world of late 1950's London teenage culture, its vibrancy still resonating within the book nearly sixty years later. It all rings true: the dialogue, the characters, the angst, the confusion, love and loss, disillusion and hope.

Against the backdrop of London's class distinctions and racial unrest, which MacInnes confronts unflinchingly with show more pointed social commentary, the novel places the reader right in the center of these tensions, and then zeroes in on the emotional strains at the personal level involving the narrator's relationships with family, girlfriend, friends and acquaintances. The descriptions of London are truly evocative, from the loving take on the Thames embankment to the frightful dissection of the dismal and dangerous Napoli/Notting Hill neighborhood. This is an essential work in the Bildungsroman genre: passionate, smart, honest, and insightful. show less

Part of the cultural conversation takes place, of course, in creative work: arts and crafts. Broader social discussions are encountered within personal conversations, and through public activities, yes, but also by participating in art, as creator and as audience. And art always crosses genre borders, with painters and painting borrowing ideas from poetry, literature from music, theater and film from one another. At the same time, each of us has our special touchpoints. Some of us get inspiration more from dance, not so much attuned to television; others from sculpture, or quilting circles, or gardening. There is both a broad cultural profile, and countless idiosyncratic views within it.

This is obvious, but on occasion the truth of it show more strikes me with particular force. Finishing MacInnes's novel, Absolute Beginners, I reflected on first becoming aware of it without realizing it was a novel, through hearing the Jam's 1981 single of the same name, along with the post-punk world ushering that band to my ears, only later reading about or seeing the book itself and thinking: ah-hah! That's what Weller was on about! -- and then for years not so much hearing more about the book as slotting it amidst my growing exposure to 20th Century British youth culture. I don't think that was grossly unfair to the book, but admittedly this was a subjective and atmospheric imprint more than anything.

The profit-and-loss one now began to look a bit uneasy---I mean, not at my ideas, but me---which always happens if you let loose an idea. [101]

Finally reading the book itself, some forty years later, I am wholly struck by the distinct and fully realised narrative voice, which wasn't translated to me at all by the song or any later impressions of the novel, but also in no way conflicted with it or failed to meet any expectations. This was perhaps my best possible reading scenario. As much as the song and the post-punk Mod scene bring a strong personality to mind, this impression didn't direct my thinking of the novel in any specific way. The story came across very British, sure, yet allowed MacInnes to unspool his story and his storytelling as he wanted, and I felt no resistance to where it took me or what it left out. At several points I found myself thinking of The Catcher In The Rye, both in terms of the cultural preoccupations of each novel's protagonist, and novel's mark upon culture. (Are English students assigned MacInnes at all parallel to how Americans are assigned Salinger?)

While the novel stands alone perfectly fine, based on this reading of MacInnes I would pick up another of his London Novels. show less

A subtle, wry contemporary take on late 1950s London. The unnamed narrator casually observes life around him for most of the book, until the political, social and personal reality of the time and place hit him - and the reader - in the last chapters. MacInnes has an unnerving knack of covering light and dark in the same mocking, objective voice, so that the emotions behind events are all the more powerful when unravelled from the narrator's point of view; I was nearly brought to tears at one point, and the racial tension is staggering. A smart, thoughtful snapshot of twentieth century England, that still applies today, and I particularly have to agree with the psychology of drivers ...

2014: I re-read this book after many years as a result of reading The Year of Reading Dangerously and was delighted to find it was still great. It's so immediate and exciting and seedy, but also captures teenage naivety and idealism in a really lovely way. It also covers race issues and the 50s riots, and has a few fantastic passages on tolerance, racism and colonialism which probably really helped shape my views as a teenager. Sure sometimes it feels dated both in terms of language and ways of thinking, but it has it's heart in the right place and is well worth reading.

2016: And another re-read of this in the wake of the Brexit vote, still relevant, and I was also reminded of how evocative some of the descriptions of London in the 50s are.

Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes is a book that has gained cult status with it’s precise, yet slangy language, and it’s sharp look at the youth culture in London in the late 1950’s. The novel unfolds through the words and thoughts of a teenage freelance photographer who rubs shoulders with a varied amount of people from debutantes to drug addicts. He is obsessed by fashion and jazz music but over all is driven by his love for his ex-girlfriend Crepe Suzette.

The story is told in four parts, each part covers one day in the four months of the summer of 1958. This was a summer of simmering racial tensions that the narrator observes, he also learns of his father’s illness and his promiscuous ex-girlfriend’s decision to enter a show more sexless marriage with her much older, gay fashion designer boss. With it’s coffee bars, modern jazz, rock n’roll, trendy clothes and life style this is obviously a chronicle of the emergence of upcoming mod culture.

I found Absolute Beginners to be a small window on a London that was soon to evolve into the epicentre of the “Swingin’ 60s” On the one hand it was a joyful celebration of being young but ingeniously contrasted by dark descriptions of junkies, prostitutes, race wars, and selling out in life. With it’s stylized language, colourful characters and pop culture atmosphere, this was an engaging read. show less

Absolute Beginners, the first-person narrator's moniker for teenagers, is the second of the three books known as The London Novels. It continues an examination of race relations in 1950s London through the eyes of an unnamed eighteen-year-old living on his own in a dodgy flat in the mixed neighborhood of Napoli. Making his living off the pornographic pictures he takes, he rambles through a strange cast of characters and even stranger vocabulary in a story that spends its first half getting seemingly nowhere. But with the change from June to July, the temperature of the book picks up. MacInnes' narrator skillfully weaves together the narrator's unconsummated love for Suze (and hers for him) and his troubled relationship with his deadbeat show more dad and unloving (and unlovable) mum into an amusing amalgam of naive but admirable commentary on the stupidity of the interracial violence he witnesses. When he is victimized by this same violence, he complains that not one of the many respectable onlookers (or police) does anything to stop it.

Mirroring the many unlikely chance meetings with his friends and acquaintances just when he needs an ally or two to avoid being beaten or arrested, Absolute Beginners's plot is a crazy tapestry of random events culminating in the narrator thrusting himself into the role of racial ambassador. While I wouldn't have included this on my list of 1,001 must-read books had I been in charge, it is an entertaining read that provides a glimpse of the curious world of post-war England in the chaotic vein of The Crying of Lot 49 or Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me. show less

I came to this book from admiration of the film made of it, the seventh greatest movie of all time, by my reckoning, but the book doesn't have much to do with the movie, except for the final chapter. The narrator is a jazz fan and club fanatic who makes the rounds of London nightlife circa 1958. His droll narration delivered in hipster lingo of the day is amusing and, in its way, informative. The usual subject of his narration, the denizens of the club scene, are interesting mostly because of the author's somehow coherent transcription of their Cockney-cum-hipster patois; I didn't find the characters themselves terribly interesting. Not a terrible book by any means, but don't expect very much of the film to be here.