something to tell you

ROCOCO & SPARKLING

This is my 8th consecutive month of reading for Books on the Broad. Three of the books have ‘murder’ on the first page. I wonder why?

I follow my usual rules. Go straight to the author’s text. Avoid introductions, ignore reviews, bypass publishers’ puffs. Go straight to the author’s text! and carry with you the whole of your previous experience. And in this case I admit to prior knowledge of Hanif Kureishi. I have twice seen the film My Beautiful Laundrette when it was shown on the television. And I have a distant memory of picking up a copy of The Buddha of Suburbia, reading a line or two here and there, and returning it unpurchased to the bookshelf. (Not to my taste at the time or Not satisfying a transitory need. It doesn’t matter now but I can’t completely subdue the impression.)

Something to tell you is an easy-going conversational autobiography. ‘The Life and Times of Jamal Kahn’ as set down by a complaisant amanuensis.

Words are magic. I am drawn into the nub of the story. I am the invisible reticent bystander in the taxi ; in the half-light of the Kama Sutra Club ; alongside the naked sunbathers in their secret hidden corner of the garden ; chuntering away on an old golfball typewriter.

Then there’s the external world. Of dreams, of thoughts, of wisdom shared. Of Wittgenstein, André Breton, and great slabs of Freud. Of Schopenhauer. “Sexual passion is the most perfect manifestation of the will to live.” Even Mick Jagger has a walk-on part.

I’ve heard it all before. I’m back with Charlotte Bingham. Swinging London in the 60s. Basement cafés in Soho. Bubbling Gaggia machines. Night on a Bare Mountain as number one of the jukebox. But it’s different. Now it’s Shepherds Bush market, not the Kings Road. Not the Mods and Rockers. And certainly no Vespas or Lambrettas. This is a new generation showing indulgent delight in their cultured hippy freedom. They are all larger than life. Their ancestors may have grown up among far flung shreds of Empire. Now they revel in their own street theatre. Some of the script remains the same but the characters and the settings belong to their own richly hued panorama.

It’s flamboyant. It’s exhilarating. It’s hilarious.

It’s fun.


© francis cameron
oxford, 28 january 2009