Very much like beauty, social dysfunction is in the eye of the beholder.
A city that appears safe and welcoming to one resident is a terrifying hellscape to the next – a disparity of vision that is increasingly prevalent among the all-or-nothing heated debates of our post-fact era.
This very fragility of our world views is explored with mischievous glee and deliciously entertaining up-to-the-minute satire in Amanda Craig’s thoroughly moreish latest state-of-the nation novel.
The setting is the north London enclave of Prospect Park, and more specifically the microcosm of Cross Street, centring on the writers who gather daily to pound their laptop keyboards together in the Literary Café, owned by Jewish ex-barrister Sol Stern, and not far from the Turkish butcher, the Ukrainian baker and the nail salon.
The place names have been deliberately chosen. Lives from both sides of the tracks cross over in a place where it’s all too clear that prospects ain’t what they used to be.
Aspirational graduates in their twenties and thirties are increasingly fearful that the game is up. One cries out: “We’re never going to enjoy the kind of lives our parents did, are we?” in a lament for the “lost time of milk and honey”.
This is a Britain that is getting “hotter, crueller and angrier”.
The authors in the café are addicted to their poor and all too often miserably agonising profession, nurse their small successes with jealous suspicion of one another and seem almost oblivious to the fact that as professional writers of fiction they may be the last of a 20th-century dying breed.
Among them is Rose, who has had a small taste of popularity, and now is trapped in the quiet hell of life with a young baby and an irritatingly kind cyclist civil servant husband who fails to acknowledge the very existence of the plague of menacing hoodies she fears on the streets.
These are the parallel universes that you find on the outskirts of the city centre, where the social housing estate abuts the streets of Victorian houses, and – the odd mobile theft aside – ne’er the twain shall meet.
The fiction of that invisible barrier is shattered when troubled teenager Zahi finds the café as a refuge from a brutal gang that is pursuing him and will show no mercy to get their man.
The motley literary crew’s decision to protect the stranger in their midst soon provokes a riot that escalates into an armed siege. It’s not long before blood flows and even bullets fly. With rapidly gathering momentum the niceties of English middle-class snobbery give way to explosive violence that claims some surprising victims.
The set-up is openly borrowed by Craig from the 1976 John Carpenter film thriller Assault On Precinct 13 (itself an updating of the classic Western Rio Bravo), as well as being inspired by the riots that followed the death of Mark Duggan in 2011.
The panoramic interweaving plot lines enable Craig to bounce back and forth between the petty concerns of each of a chorus of characters with joyfully nimble-footed ease.
As a half-Scottish Jew whose family fled the pogroms, she is refreshingly unafraid to confront the complexities of migration in modern British society, setting up stereotypes only to puncture them when the reader least expects it.
High And Low may leave you with little comfort and considerable unease in its compressed examination of half a day in London’s life. But if half a century from now you were to be asked “What was it like to live in Britain in 2026?” this is the novel you should hand over in answer.
High And Low, by Amanda Craig, is published by Abacus
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