Straight white guy tries crime in London
An attention grab for the reader who likes toxic masculinity and cultural/socio-economic tourism in their Bildungsromans
Gabriel Krause the author writes about Gabriel Krause the character in the debut novel Who They Was, a coming of age story written like a diary about a white teen in a black gang in South Kilburn. The novel was long-listed for the 2020 Booker Prize. Gabriel has moved out of his middle class parents' house, leaving his twin brother Danny about whom little is recounted except that he is an expert violin player and student, to live with his uncle in South Kilburn's government subsidized blocks while he attends university to study English. He enters rap battles using the name Snoopz and makes friends with the immigrant black men who make up the South Killy gang. The thrill of robbing, particularly diamond designer watches, and selling pot, heroin, and cocaine quickly occupies more of his time than rap battles. Gabriel is drawn to crime, we learn at the end of the book, because he was robbed in a rich neighborhood while visiting a school friend when he was thirteen. Revenge threads throughout the novel as he is betrayed and abandoned by his best friend, Gotti, who later serves a six-year prison term for murder. What motivates Gabriel to pursue a university degree remains unexamined. He gets accolades from professors and pretty girls are interested in him, but his desire for pursuing literature is written as innate as his desire for violence. His desire to create and destroy are parallel forces at work, a given as the natural order of things.
At school, Gabriel reads Nietzsche's The Genealogy of Morality (a favorite of mine when I was 19, too so I connect a tiny bit with this guy) and gains access to a language about his twin drives. The world is an inherently violent place without morals because people who live in danger, that is people who live among criminals and fight over limited resources, can't afford to ascribe to moral codes the way that people living in peace, those who can purchase diamond watches, can. He is rewarded for his violence in diamond watches, though when he is finally arrested and does time in jail it is for assaulting a man in the subway. The price he pays is a three-week sentence; he can attend his last year of college in the fall.
Gabriel does not express conflict with his competing and opposite drives. He has worked out a balance where he can have his degree, nearly graduating at the top of his class while wearing a gold grill on his teeth and take breaks from selling drugs because his gang leader respects his choice to study English. He can shift between convention and transgression in a way that seems to glamorize lawlessness as well as normalize it. Life on the fringes makes it easy for him to acquire things because they are easier to take. He does not, in the course of more than seven years of the novel, gain any moral perspective or maturity. His place of privilege as a white, middle class, straight man, no matter that he is an immigrant, is secure whether he is at university or in South Kilburn. He can and does return at will to his safe white space, either his parent's neighborhood or to college and its future opportunities and leave the life of immigrants, mostly black men, who have been pushed to the edges by a class system that requires poverty and structural racism in South Kilburn. Neither Gabriel nor Snoopz reflects on this disparity of experience. There is also the question, glanced over in the remembering of his entry into South Kilburn to do rap battles, of whether joining gangs and integrating into black working class life for the sake of one's artistic career is a valid life choice or is self-serving to the point of exploitation.
The novel's lack of any voiced female character is troubling. Gabriel's mother is the only figure who stands up to him, and he treats her the same as the few other women in the book whom he uses for company and sex and discards. He rails against his mother's treatment of him early in the book when, furious that Gabriel drew a knife on a cop in their apartment, she breaks his CDs and deflates a small basketball. She starts, "Now you see what happens when you disobey your mother," and goes on to make a face "of fake pity at me, going yes, cry cry you poor victim, you should be ashamed of yourself." The incident leads him to reflect on his father's sacrifices to get them into their current middle class apartment while his mother completely disappears. She exists only to give him a hard time by trying to enforce her rules, in this scene and throughout the novel. She receives the blame for why he can't fit in at home and none of the credit for raising him. Gabriel resists and rejects her morality, becomes resentful of her attempts to impose it on him. His needs to destroy and create are satisfied not by a life of assimilation but by enacting violence and philosophizing.
Thick with UK slang and adopted Caribbean patois from his gang mates, the book's language is both interesting and challenging. Other reviewers have compared it to A Clockwork Orange and given that both novels are structured as linked anecdotes and delivered in slang and dialects it has a literary parallel. In South Killy, a nine millimeter gun is a Nina, eating is robbing, a jake is a cop, duppy is to haunt. The most lyrical of the slang is the word madness, meaning crime. Snoopz often describes doing a madness. This word holds all the chaos that living outside morality can bring, but also the suffering that is inherent in being alive whether you believe you live in a moral universe or not.