WHO THEY WAS

A young man describes his several years in London’s gang culture in this challenging debut.

The narrator, Snoopz, who’s occasionally called Gabriel or Krauze, describes the violence, substance abuse, and crime that permeate the battered housing towers of South Kilburn—“eighteen floors of rusty concrete silence and windows repeating themselves and all of it holding the sky back.” Gang rivalries make every day a gantlet, every slight becomes grounds for vengeance. Knife assaults are common and graphically described. And yet, any form of action might seem nearly miraculous given the prodigious quantities of drugs and booze consumed. Days (and pages) pass with a numbing sameness, punctuated by dealing or using drugs or mugging wealthy citizens in brazen street assaults. Jail time is inevitable, with all its soul-crushing routines and perils not much different from life outside. Snoopz looks to be one of the rare escapees from the nightmarish milieu as he pursues a university degree in literature. To the growing genre of drug-riddled fiction—Irvine Welsh, Denis Johnson, Joel Mowdy, Nico Walker—Krauze adds a flourish, a kind of harsh music, with his use of gang argot. Imagine Riddley Walker combined with A Clockwork Orange: “top shotters who make p’s but move too d-low for the eaters to rob them” (translation: top drug dealers who earn a lot of money but are too careful for thieves to hit them). Snoopz is intelligent, but he also extols the gangster life’s bling and transient glories, its tests of manhood (women in the hood are there mainly for sex). Krauze doesn’t offer fresh wisdom on the causes of or cures for the hard life he grew up in, but maybe an insider’s artfully gruesome view can turn the right minds to seeking better solutions.

A gritty read for its gore, drugs, and profanity, but possessed of a raw and honest eloquence.