The Review and Downfall of Amanda Craig – Will Britain End? | | Fiction

Britain, Xan’s teacher of the muses, was “hot, cruel and angry”. Amanda Craig’s 10th book watches as it explodes. The setting is Prospect Park, a fictional area in north London caught between gentrification and decline, on the 12th day of Christmas. Outside a hotel housing asylum seekers, protesters and protesters have gathered. In a nearby room, a man has been stabbed, and the thugs go from store to store, looking for the guy they think did it.

The locals are watching with concern. Jade from the beauty salon and Daisy from the health food store brave the streets to warn others about trouble. In the kebab shop, Mehmet closes his meat offering and sharpens his knives. A place with shutters closes.

In a cafe with books, the regulars – a group of mostly writers who go to drink hot drinks and mix their notes to close – are joined by the workers of a nearby bakery. Xan stops before he sees the house next to the Cross Estate, and then a tired, bloody young man wanted by the gang arrives at the back door, leaving the group with a dilemma: betray him, or stand up to the gang. The episode is based on what Ivo, a newspaper editor turned thriller writer, calls “the siege of Cross Street”.

Author and critic Craig has written about some of these people. Xan appeared in 2017 The Lie of the Worldwhen Ivo first appeared in 1996’s A Vicious Circle – Craig describes High and Low as his sequel. The Gritts’ ex-writers, Mary and Eva, Rose’s new mother and her alcoholic father Simon also appear from other works.

Everyone takes turns complaining about the state of the world: infrastructure damage, rising rents, riots, doctors’ strikes. Some are angry with the refugees for draining the government, others feel racism as a “mosquito cry, unheard in the past” that is getting louder.

Up and Down is part world classic, part fiction and part drama, but mostly it’s a book about a place and its people. There is much to be said for the pages of Prospect Square and those of the Cross Estate, with its grim, moldy and petty crime. Beneath the book’s main problems are countless smaller ones: the debate over wildflower growers and LTNs; gargantuan pits; complaints about cars being keyed and phones being stolen.

Unpleasantly for gamers but happily for the plot, mobile services are limited and emergency services are delayed for hours. On the left, Craig’s cast found shared goals and remembered half-forgotten friendships. They share tips about injury and child care, warn each other of threats, make changes and keep books and powder bags in a safe place. Craig lives in north London, and reminds the reader that Prospect Park is built, broken and divided between people, which was “a soft country road, with cherry and ash, hawthorn and lime”, still has beauty, and people who want to fight.

Craig’s team is very important in the close-up scenes, but the need to look at each member means Up and Down moves slowly at first, and when we think about it it’s a shame that we don’t know more about the gangsters (“bad apples”, sniffs the viewer) and angry riots. Even as the tension escalates from initial anxiety to zombie knives, burning cars and gunfire, the book’s finale feels quick and clean, a nod to the cracks Craig has used throughout the book.

The result is wrong but related to local pride and pragmatism under pressure. Craig’s interest in the stories we all carry is intense, and returning readers will enjoy watching Craig’s characters through the years, some lost, some despondent, but all with their own hopes, fears and hidden courage.