City of Spades

My eldest son prompted me to re-read City of Spades. As is his way, he had locked himself in the bathroom where my new, half-read Iain Sinclair (dining on stones) lay on the stool by the tub. I wandered around like a separated and frustated soul and fell to fitful browsing of the bookshelves on the landing where Colin Macinnes sat unloved and unlovely. I guess I last read him when I was at college and when the dire film version of Absolute Beginners hit the screen and I'd been quite impressed by him then which made me wonder how he read after a 20+ year gap. It was an extremely curious experience - MacInnes is interesting, strange and disturbing. Read in the wrong light (with a slight look in askance) he comes across as a very dated liberal who really didn't understand colonialism. Read again with a more direct look he understood it all too well - some of his sentiments and language are mild barriers - "the negro" is not a comfortable discriptor in this day and age - and his portrait of the white Britons of the 50s is very very ugly. What I was most fascinated by was to read it with people like Andrea Levy and Zadie Smith fresh in mind and to see the close parallels between his and their views/worlds. It's also levelling to read of an era when a pregnancy outside of marriage can end a woman's career and when people talked about "miscegenation" in all seriousness, couching the ugliness of racism behind academic language. I think MacInnes's work is certainly flawed - but our society is still wearing the wounds of that era - so its flaws make for challenging reading. Anyway, by the time son no.1 had relinquished the bathroom - I was deep in MacInnes and have not yet returned to Sinclair. Moral: leave your book by the tub at your own peril - but be aware that it might open new literary avenues.