John King : Human Pink

By JOHN McCRYSTAL*

There's a town to the west of London with the wonderfully Bunyanesque name of Slough. It's named after an old word for a swamp - appropriately enough, as it's one of those all-too English eyesores comprising a clutch of crumbling, graffiti-daubed housing estates, decayed industry and burned-out shops. It's what poet and social commentator Sir John Betjeman had in mind when he penned the lines "Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough. It's not fit for humans now."

Trouble is, human beings did live there, and still do, and improbable as it seems, some of them even entertain a degree of affection for the place and hope for its prospects. It was to places like Slough, the neglected slums of England, that George Orwell directed attention in the search for a new England, for a culture that would arise out of the ashes of the old.

That new culture, according to John King, is punk and the various youth movements which it has subsequently spawned. His novel Human Punk follows punk rocker Joe through three phases in his life - his spotty adolescence in Slough in the 70s, his young adulthood travelling in China just before the Tienanmen Square massacre and in Eastern Europe just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and his early middle age back in Slough.

It is, obviously enough, a story of growing up. Joe and his mates start out naively attached to the look and the music of punk - wearing tattered denim and 10-eye Doc Martens, running through the lyrics of Anarchy in the UK, trying to work out what "anarchy" means. They're basically good kids: petty crime and minor-league violence aside, they're harmless enough.

The decisive event in Joe's life is when he and a mate are beaten up and thrown in the festering canal; Joe escapes more or less unscathed, but Smiles, his mate, nearly drowns, and while he seems to make a full recovery, he becomes increasingly mentally disturbed and eventually commits suicide.

It is news of his death that brings Joe back to Slough from his travels, tormented by guilt and anger. He's a settled individual now, and his observations of the repressive regimes of China and Eastern Europe have given him a better understanding of what it was that the anti-authoritarianism of the punk music was all about.

He manages to carve out a comfortable niche for himself as a purveyor of retro music, but the injustice of Smiles' death and his own survival gnaws away at him and threatens to derail his apparently bright prospects.

Human Punk is cleverly told. Each of its three parts is narrated in the present tense, frequently covering the same ground and illustrating the revisionism that goes on as an individual grows up and reflects upon his past.

I found Human Punk to be quite a tough read: the long passages of stream of consciousness frequently make for pages at a time without so much as the relief of paragraph breaks. But it is rewarding: Joe is an appealing character, and there's plenty of humour.

King's The Football Factory established him as England's answer to Scotland's Irvine Welsh, and readers of Welsh will be struck by the uncanny similarities Human Punk bears, thematically at least, to his latest, Glue. King has appointed himself the spokesman of the down-at-heel humanity with which the housing estates of England are stuffed, just as Welsh defends Scotland's "schemies." Perhaps the coincidence of their simultaneously raising their voices is evidence of the emergence of Orwell's New Britain.

* John McCrystal is an Auckland freelance writer.

Vintage

$26.95