who they was (gabriel krauze)

Krauze’s roman a clef is a plaintive celebration of masculinity and the fearsome dreams of youth. It’s an account of a white, second generation Polish man’s integration into a West London criminal scene. Gabriel, the protagonist, spends his days either smoking weed, plotting robberies, or carrying out robberies. Sometimes he gets involved in stabbings, sometimes he witnesses shootings. Some days he’s in prison and on other days he goes to uni and talks about Nietzsche. The book’s take on crime, as one might expect from the Nietzsche reference, is anti-judgemental. Crime is a phenomenon that exists, with society’s moral boundaries being something imposed by an elite seeking to protect its status and wealth against the ferocious power of youth. One of the longest non-criminal sections in the book involves a uni discussion about the victim’s rights to murder and even torture a pedophile, an argument Gabriel puts forward to the nodding approval of some of his fellow students. The law exists as a means to control base tensions and the collateral damage of lawlessness is a price worth paying to exist in a society that feels more alive. 

The moral questions the book poses are perhaps the least interesting element of a fascinating book. I am slowly working my way through Quixote, a book riddled with a cartoonish violence, and Krause’s use of violence or crime seems almost as much a literary device as a declaration of (Im)moral purpose. Violence has always been a cornerstone of the literary experience and Who They Was just adopts this to give the novel fuel. In a similar way, the use of street slang, in which the book is written, feels like a carefully crafted wallpaper which lends the text authenticity and acts as a distancing device. Gabriel inhabits a world with its own codes and languages, one which the reader can access but will always feel estranged from, because on the whole readers won’t talk like this. (Good luck to the translators.) The spine of the book is not the violence or the language, it’s the elliptical journey of the protagonist, who will in the end exile himself from this Threepenny Opera world, using the writing of the novel as a way of exorcising his earlier life. Much of the novel’s dramatic tension lies in this: when will the narrator switch, when will he leave this world behind? Krause holds on until the very end, when we come to realise that the novel is essentially a lament. A lament for the lost world of (his) youth, where you don’t yet have to play by the rules, where your guile and strength should protect you, where you will bounce back from a beating or a stabbing, ready for more. It’s the world of Mercutio and Tybalt, and it retains a dark lawless beauty, fuelled by adrenaline, which Krause’s prose captures with surgical efficiency. 

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Aside. I lived for a decade in a block of flats on an estate which gets a passing mention as one of the less troubled West London estates. Gabriel’s family lived on the other side of the railway tracks. At one point he scoots across the footbridge and the narrow passageway which connects my former block to Westbourne Grove. Hyde Park is just a ten minute walk away. London is a city where worlds rub up against one another. My flat was sandwiched between Notting Hill and Maida Vale, two of the wealthiest barrios in the city. I too lived there in part because I wanted to cross over from the middle class divide, find out what it meant to live on an estate. If I had read Who They Was beforehand I might have been scared off, but the truth its that Polesworth House was never a threatening place to live. It always felt safe. The underworld  that Krause describes kept itself to itself. At the same time, there are other prisms through which the culture Krause celebrates can be seen. The Curry and I investigated this with Nicholas La Barrie in Tempest. I also thought of the elusive and enigmatic figure, The Text God (T.T.G.), whose pithy graffiti on the footbridge over the railway lines Gabriel would have seen just as I did. The graffiti contained both an anger and an energy, but suggested other methods of channeling that energy, methods which are just as anarchic, but perhaps less destructive, both to the subject and the object of the subject’s ire.