Absolute Beginners

by Colin MacInnes

Book Overview

London, 1958. Smoky jazz clubs, coffee bars and hip hang-outs. The young and the restless were creating a world as different as they dared from England's green and pleasant land. Follow our young photographer as he records a young teenager's life in the capital - sex, drugs and rock'n'roll; the era of the first race riots and the lead up to the swinging sixties. A twentieth-century cult classic, Absolute Beginners paints a vivid picture of a changing...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0749009985
• ISBN13: 9780749009984
• Release Date: June 2011
• Publisher: Allison & Busby
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.48 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.0" x 7.7"

Customer Reviews

The Birth of Youth Culture

This is the second of Colin MacInnes' London novels, often referred to as the "London Trilogy" even though each novel is a self-contained story with no connection with, or characters in common with, the other two. Each deals with a separate aspect of London life during the late fifties and early sixties: "City of Spades" with the city's growing immigrant communities, "Absolute Beginners" with the growth of youth culture and "Mr Love and Justice" with the city's underworld. "Absolute Beginners", set in the summer of 1958 is written from the first person perspective of a teenaged freelance photographer. We never learn his name; when the novel was made into a film by Julien Temple in 1986 he was named Colin after his creator, rather oddly given that the book was never intended to be autobiographical. MacInnes would have been forty-four in 1958, a generation older than his character. The novel is divided into four chapters, entitled "In June", "In July", "In August" and "In September", of which the first, taking up half the book, is by far the longest. Each details a particular day in the narrator's life during the month in question. The main theme of the novel is the youth culture of the period. MacInnes saw that the growing material prosperity of the late fifties, especially among younger people, had led to the growth of a new, specifically teenage, culture. The teenagers of whom he writes do not want to be dismissed as kids, but neither do they want to be classed as young adults. They see themselves as the "absolute beginners" of the title, a phrase which on the one hand indicates their youth and inexperience and on the other their desire for a fresh start, for a world as different as possible from that of the "taxpayers", as they designate the older generation. MacInnes does not actually use the word "mod", possibly because it had not been coined in 1958, but the narrator's tastes- for jazz music, for sharply-tailored clothes, for motor-scooters and for coffee bars (he does not touch alcohol, despite being, at eighteen, old enough to drink legally)- and his disdain for the rival Teddy Boy movement betray him as belonging to what was to become known as the "mod" subculture. (Admittedly his cool pretensions take a bit of a knock when he confesses to a liking for Gilbert and Sullivan, the music of choice of middle-aged, middle-class, middlebrow Middle England). Mods tended to admire all things Italian, especially fashions, and this may be reflected in the fact that the narrator refers to the West London district where he lives (actually part of Notting Hill) as Napoli, after the Italian for Naples. One aspect of mod culture not dwelt on in any depth is drugs, although mods were known for their use of amphetamines. The youth culture described in this book is very different from the one I knew as a teenager, but then I was not even born in 1958 and did not enter my teens until after the great cultural shift of the sixties. Sharp suits were

The colourful world of British teenagers in 50's London

MacInnes's novel, set in 1958, London, demonstrates the status of the teenager as a new economic class is demonstrated early on when the narrator tells us: "This teenage ball had had a real splendour in the days when kids discovered that for the first time since centuries of kingdom-come, they'd money, which had always been denied to us at the best time in life to use it, namely, when you're young and strong. ... it had a real savage splendour in the days when we found that no one couldn't sit on our faces anymore because we'd loot to spend at last, and our world was to be our world..."The narrator is a free lance photographer who takes pictures of the night life and of anything depicting the new London and its denizens, hoping for an exhibition. He loves jazz music, is integrationist, and against class. He lives in a slum named Napoli because he enjoys the low rent and how he is accepted, no matter what he does, and no one questions his background, educated or class. He wouldn't be treated that way in Belgravia, the fashionable, upscale district of London.He has a bunch of interesting friends, such as the very friendly Fabulous Hoplife, who swings the other way, and the Wiz, a huckster who wants to make it into the bigtime, realizing there's a goldmine with the economic prosperity and renewed London. He wants to get there via illegal means, much to the narrator's chagrin. There's Big Jill, a big and friendly les to whom the narrator confides to about Suze; she's kind of like an older sister to him.But he's really after his dreamgirl Crepe Suzette, or Suze, a pretty girl who's getting her kicks by sleeping around with every black she fancies. He's very upset when she tells him she's getting married to Henley, a fashion designer in his forties for whom she's a secretary. "I'm marrying for distinction, and that's a thing that you could never give me," she tells him. Despite her importance, she's not one of the most interesting characters here.But when the narrator learns of the racial tensions going on and reads an anti-immigrant tirade in a news article condemning the Commonwealth Act, which allowed emigration from the former colonies to the UK, he sadly says "I don't understand my country anymore. ...the English race has spread itself all over the world...No one invites us, and we didn't ask anyone's permission... Yet when a few hundred thousand come and settle among our fifty millions, we just can't take it."The generation gap between three groups are interesting. There are people like the narrator, growing up when the war was already over, and thus progressive, anti-Empire, and accepting blacks and Indians. People like his oafish stepbrother Verne and Ed the Ted, in their mid-twenties, lived through the war, were more patriotic, pro-Empire, and are spiteful of teenagers. And people like the narrator's father like the 1950's because they lived through the hell of the 1930's, unable to find good work, starving, and seeing the war as

A brilliant novel of late 1950s London hip culture

The thing to keep in mind about London in the late 1950s is that it wasn't cool. London wouldn't become one of the capitals of youth style until 1963 and later (brilliantly recounted in Shawn Levy's READY, STEADY, GO!). In this great novel, Colin MacInnes paints the portrait of an age that has received little attention, a time when England did not yet possess a full-fledged youth culture, a creature whose time was coming round at last, and was slouching towards Soho to be born. In the depiction of teens in search of self-authentication and self-realization, the novel is very much an English equivalent of Kerouac's ON THE ROAD.Like the Kerouac novel, ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS is brilliant not for its story, but for its characters and the almost sociological and anthropological quality of its chronicle. Above all, it chronicles the social upheaval that was already taking place in London, with the central place that drugs, jazz, sex, and alcohol was more openly playing in youth culture. There is also a new and heightened consciousness of race, as well as an absence of the values that had been the mainstay of the previous generation. Although it wasn't yet the sixties, you can feel it coming throughout the book.I don't want to mislead a prospective reading by promoting this as one of the great classics. It isn't. But like the central character, who is an aspiring photographer, the novel serves as a fictional photo essay on a neglected and under-romanticized period of English life. I can't imagine anyone not truly loving it.The novel was in the 1980s made into a fairly decent musical (with an absolutely astonishing opening sequence) starring Patsy Kensit and with a host of musical performers in minor roles, including David Bowie, Ray Davies, and Sade. But I would definitely recommend the book over the film.

Soul Brothers and Sistas...This is where it all began!!!

Our Primordial Soup...steamy, smoke filled speakeazies. Jazz, Pims, crazy Italian suits...expresso e un biscotti, gratzi! Gauloise? Non, Gitanes, merci!!! The Conductor Of The Groovy Juice Symphony.

Colin MacInnes-- Absolute Beginners

A must have for anyone interested in youth culture, swinging london of the 1950s and 60s, and the Mod scene... Something of a youth exploitation or confessional novel, but nonetheless an excellent picture of the generation born in post-world war II England, the first (and possibly one of the last) to be better off than their parents, the children of Britain's baby boom, obsessed with Italian fashion and American Jazz and all night clubs and coffee houses-- this is a portrait of one such youth and his life... It's the best piece of this type to come out of this period and seen by many as MacInnes' best work. Of further note by MacInnes are the other "London novels", Mr. Love and Justice and City of Spades. What a shame it is that no publisher has cared enough to keep these great books in print.