Author | Colin MacInnes |
---|---|
Country | United Kingdom |
Publisher | MacGibbon & Kee |
Publication date | 1959 |
Media type | Print (hardback and paperback) |
Pages | 223 pages (1st edition), & 208 pages (paperback) |
ISBN | 978-0-7490-0540-5 (paperback) |
OCLC | 45648228 |
Preceded by | City of Spades |
Followed by | Mr. Love and Justice |
Absolute Beginners is a novel by Colin MacInnes, written and set in 1958 London, England. It was published in 1959. The novel is the second of MacInnes' London Trilogy, coming after City of Spades (1958) and before Mr. Love and Justice (1960). These novels are each self-contained, with no shared characters.
The novel is written from the first-person perspective of a teenage freelance photographer, who lives in a rundown yet vibrant part of West London he calls Napoli. The area is home to a large number of Caribbean immigrants, as well as English people on the margins of society, such as homosexuals and drug addicts.
The themes of the novel are the narrator's opinions on the newly formed youth culture and its fixation on clothes and jazz music, his love for his ex-girlfriend Crêpe Suzette, the illness of his father, and simmering racial tensions in the summer of the Notting Hill race riots.
The novel is divided into four sections. Each details a particular day in the four months that spanned the summer of 1958.
In June takes up half of the book and shows the narrator meeting up with various teenaged friends and some adults in various parts of London and discussing his outlook on life and the new concept of being a teenager. He also learns that his ex-girlfriend, Suzette, is to enter a marriage of convenience with her boss, a middle-aged gay fashion designer called Henley.
In July has the narrator taking photographs by the river Thames, seeing the musical operetta H.M.S. Pinafore with his father, has a violent encounter with Ed the Ted and watches Hoplite's appearance on Call-Me-Cobber's TV show.
In August has the narrator and his father take a cruise along the Thames towards Windsor Castle. His father is taken ill on the trip and has to be taken to a doctor. The narrator also finds Suzette at her husband's cottage in Cookham.
In September is set on the narrator's 19th birthday. He sees this, symbolically, as the beginning of his last year as a teenager. He witnesses several incidents of racial violence, which disgust him. His father also dies, leaving him four envelopes stuffed with money. Suzette has separated from Henley, but still seems uncertain as to whether she should resume her relationship with the narrator. The narrator decides to leave the country and find a place where racism doesn't exist. At the airport, he sees Africans arriving and gives them a warm welcome.
The narrator also encounters a left-wing trade unionist called 'Ron Todd' in a jazz club. [1] In 1985 a real-life trade unionist called Ron Todd became general secretary of the TGWU.
Although MacInnes turned 44 in the summer of 1958, the book is written through the eyes of an 18-year-old, who is part of the new vibrant and affluent London youth culture of coffee bars, modern jazz and rock 'n' roll music, and Italian scooters and clothes. As such, it chronicles the first years of what would become the mod subculture in the 1960s. MacInnes has the narrator use a very stylised form of speech. For example, when the narrator and Zesty-Boy talk about why Vendice no longer uses Dido's newspaper for advertising, MacInnes writes it as:
"And why has Partner's pimpery taken their custom away from Dido's toilet-paper daily?" I asked Zesty-Boy.
"It may be that Dido's slipping, or the paper's slipping, or just that everything these days is falling in the fat laps of the jingle kings."
"I wonder why Dido doesn't do a quick change and crash land in the telly casbah?"
The narrator is never given a name. When asked it by a girl at a party, he avoids the question. When pressed, he says, sarcastically, David Copperfield. He is variously addressed in the book as "blitz baby", "kid", "teenager", "child", "infant prodigy" and "son": all terms that emphasise his youth. The majority of the other characters are given nicknames or referred to by their job titles, rather than by their real names.
The novel was adapted into a musical film directed by Julien Temple and released in 1986.[ citation needed ] The narrator was given the name Colin, after Colin MacInnes, and was played by Eddie O'Connell. Patsy Kensit played Crêpe Suzette and David Bowie appeared as advertising man Vendice Partners. Bowie also wrote and performed the title song, which reached number 2 in the UK singles chart in March 1986.
The film used many of the characters of the book, but changed a lot of their motivations and the story's ending. It also made more use of the idea of older characters exploiting the young, which was merely hinted at in the novel.
The novel was republished by Penguin Books to tie in with the film's release. The cover showed O'Connell and Kensit in front of a stylised silhouette of the London skyline.
The singer-songwriter Paul Weller, who was born in 1958, has described the novel as "a book of inspiration". This quote was used on the cover of the 1986 paperback edition. Weller also chose the book when he appeared on the BBC Radio 4 programme Desert Island Discs . [2]
His group The Jam released a single called "Absolute Beginners" in 1981. It reached number 4 in the UK charts. His second band, The Style Council, recorded the song "Have You Ever Had It Blue?" for the 1986 film.
Kenneth Macrae MacLeod is a Scottish science fiction writer. His novels The Sky Road and The Night Sessions won the BSFA Award. MacLeod's novels have been nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke, Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Campbell Memorial awards for best novel on multiple occasions. A techno-utopianist, MacLeod's work makes frequent use of libertarian socialist themes; he is a three-time winner of the libertarian Prometheus Award. Prior to becoming a novelist, MacLeod studied biology and worked as a computer programmer. He sits on the advisory board of the Edinburgh Science Festival. MacLeod has been chosen as a Guest of Honor at the 82nd World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow.
The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time is a posthumous collection of previously published and unpublished material by Douglas Adams. It consists largely of essays, interviews, and newspaper/magazine columns about technology and life experiences, but its major selling point is the inclusion of the incomplete novel on which Adams was working at the time of his death, The Salmon of Doubt. English editions of the book were published in the United States and UK on 11 May 2002, exactly one year after the author's death.
Hawkmistress! is a science fantasy novel by American writer Marion Zimmer Bradley, part of the Darkover series at the end of Ages of Chaos, in the period of Darkover's history known as the Hundred Kingdoms. Chapters 35 and 46–50 of Zandru's Forge overlap with the story in Hawkmistress!.
Akhenaten: Son of the Sun is a novel written by Moyra Caldecott in 1986. It was first published in 1986 as The Son of the Sun in hardback by Allison & Busby, UK.
The Discworld Companion is an encyclopaedia of the Discworld fictional universe, created by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Briggs. Four editions have been published, under varying titles.
Taken at the Flood is a work of detective fiction by British writer Agatha Christie, first published in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company in March 1948 under the title of There is a Tide. .. and in the UK by the Collins Crime Club in the November of the same year under Christie's original title. The US edition retailed at $2.50 and the UK edition at eight shillings and sixpence (8/6). It features her famous Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, and is set in 1946.
Daniel Blythe is a British author, who studied Modern Languages at St John's College, Oxford. After several years writing stories for the small press, Blythe began his professional career writing for the Virgin New Adventures series of Doctor Who novels, for which he wrote the novels The Dimension Riders (1993) and Infinite Requiem (1995) and very soon moved on to have his own original work published.
Absolute Beginners is a 1986 British musical film adapted from Colin MacInnes' book about life in late 1950s London, directed by Julien Temple. The film stars Eddie O' Connell, Patsy Kensit, James Fox, Edward Tudor-Pole, Anita Morris, and David Bowie, with featured appearances by Sade Adu, Ray Davies, and Steven Berkoff. It was screened out of competition at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival. It received coverage in the British media but was panned by critics and became a box office failure, although modern reviews have been more favourable. Bowie's theme song was very popular in the UK, spending nine weeks on the charts and peaking at number two.
Behold the Man is a existentialist science fiction novel by British writer Michael Moorcock. It originally appeared as a novella in a 1966 issue of New Worlds magazine; later, Moorcock produced an expanded version that was first published in 1969 by Allison & Busby. The title derives from John 19, Verse 5, in the New Testament: "Then Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. And Pilate said to them Behold the Man".
"Absolute Beginners" is a song written and performed by English singer-songwriter David Bowie. Released on 3 March 1986, it was the theme song to the 1986 film of the same name. Although the film was not a commercial success, the song was a big hit, reaching No. 2 on the UK Singles Chart. It also reached the top 10 on the main singles charts in ten other countries. In the US, it peaked at No. 53 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Colin MacInnes was an English novelist and journalist.
Julian Jay Savarin is a British musician, songwriter, poet and science fiction author.
"Absolute Beginners" was a single released by the Jam on 16 October 1981. The song did not appear on any of the band's studio albums; it reached number 4 in the UK Singles Chart. The song was named after the Colin MacInnes novel of the same name. The book was one of songwriter Paul Weller's favourites, being chosen by him when he appeared on Desert Island Discs.
Andrew Salkey was a Jamaican novelist, poet, children's books writer and journalist of Jamaican and Panamanian origin.
Anthony Barnett is a modern English writer and campaigner. He was a co-founder of openDemocracy in 2001.
Donald David Zec was a British newspaper journalist and biographer who worked for the Daily Mirror in various departments for 40 years.
Mineke Schipper is a Dutch author of non-fiction and fiction. As a scholar she is best known for her work on comparative literature mythologies and intercultural studies.
The True History of the Elephant Man is a biography of Joseph Merrick written by Michael Howell and Peter Ford. It was published in 1980 in London, by Allison & Busby. It was distributed in the United States by Schocken Books. A second edition was published in 1983. Following Michael Howell's death in 1986, Peter Ford published a third edition of the book in 1992.
Carola Hansson-Boëthius is a Swedish novelist, dramatist and translator.
The Murderer is a 1978 novel by Guyanese writer Roy A. K. Heath. The author's second novel, it was first published in London by Allison and Busby, with Margaret Busby as editor, and was the winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize.