Race riots

Writing a state-of-the-nation novel that is also tense and funny is no mean feat, but that’s what Amanda Craig seems to have accomplished in High and Low. Ambitious and far-reaching, ittakes not a scalpel but a machine gun to the issues of modern city living, leaving no target safe. Set on a north London street over the course of a single day, it compresses time and space, which, together with its plethora of characters, gives a feeling as oppressive as the city itself. Cross Street houses a cosmopolitan mix of the privileged and the poor. Prospect Park and the Cross Estate are both metaphorical and geographical parallels, rubbing together while rarely intersecting. Alongside these highs and lows, Craig focuses on the world of the writer.

One of the great works of journalism to have come out of the Jamaican-British encounter is Journey to an Illusion by the late Donald Hinds. Published in London in 1966, the book is made up of a series of interviews with Commonwealth citizens who had settled hopefully on these shores after the war. Hinds, who was born in Jamaica in 1934 and worked in London as a bus conductor, was disappointed to find that the British were not only unmindful of the Commonwealth, but disinclined to help African-Caribbean immigrants. (Gallingly for him, Italians in the Soho confectionary business were extended a warmer welcome, even though they had fought on Hitler’s side.) Inevitably as a ‘clippie’ on double-deckers, Hinds was exposed to racism.