Hugh Barnes

At the height of Punk I was still at school, which always seemed to me a rather melancholy fact – not least because one’s authority as a rebel was brought into question by having to attend lessons and the like. Out of hours, we worked hard to make good our sense of disadvantage, and a competition, which was incidental to following our favourite groups around London, started up among my circle of friends. At the end of each night out, we used to run amok, hoping to catch a glimpse of our idols. Fashions in idolatry change, whenever a purge takes place or the latest style is jettisoned, but even so I doubt whether the way we brushed with greatness will ever ‘come back’: we were surly and obnoxious, and we practised curling the lip. (The curled lip, rather like a masonic handshake, doubled as a greeting between initiates and a message in code.) We also vied with each other to incur our heroes’ displeasure, which was measured in rebukes. The practice of behaving discourteously towards people one actually looked up to derived, I suppose, from a misconceived notion of the egalitarian spirit of Punk, its élan vital. The best I ever managed was a warning not to be such a nuisance from someone who, for a brief period, played drums with The Clash: however hard I tried to be outlandish, I was generally ignored. But there was one lad who stood outside a recording studio for an afternoon in the rain because the Sex Pistols were known to be inside. At last Sid Vicious emerged, and our friend launched into his adoring volley of abuse. Sid took one look, snarled and told him to fuck off. Back at school the boy became an instant celebrity.’

The first novels of Lewis Nkosi and Catharine Arnold raise issues that have been in the news of late: racist oppression in South Africa and the ugly behaviour of the smart set at England’s oldest universities. Neither phenomenon is new, but that is not all they have in common: both can be regarded as symptoms of madness, which is always making news – this, at any rate, is the diagnosis favoured by Nkosi and Arnold. They discount the talk of journalists and are at pains to show how states of emergency or of madness come about, and how adversity in the world modifies concern for the self. Much emphasis is laid on the unconscious activity of the mind, which for Sibiya in Mating Birds as well as for Francesca in Lost Time means horrid imaginings, displacement and a fear of poltergeists. Capitulation is charted: Sibiya awaits execution in a Durban jail, although the Government is about to fall and from his cell he can hear street-singers announcing ‘the near-dawn of freedom’. Francesca, a famous concert cellist, suffers private madness – as opposed to the collective variety accountable for apartheid – in the form of a nervous breakdown. At the same time taboos are flouted by the characters and invoked by the authors as if they were the unconscious of society. Sibiya’s crime was to sleep with a white woman, while a revelation of incest, for which a neglectful father is held to be responsible, contributes to Lost Time. In each case the novelist has recourse to psychoanalytic theory, and a meaningful relationship would seem to be implied between free societies and the free association of ideas.’