From childhood summers to teenage debauchery, early 20’s bedsit miserabilism and travelling abroad by yourself for the first time, moments like those will remain part of you forever and you’ll eternally reference them for a variety of reasons.
However, when they go wrong, they leave a scar just as influential.
John L. Williams understands that all too well.
Speaking in 1997, Williams declared that:
Writing Faithless started a couple of years ago when I was sitting in the Burger King in Camden High Street. I was struck by how much it had changed. When I first worked there it was hardcore London Irish, full of grisly, doomy pubs with just a couple of trendy places. Now it is London’s top tourist attraction, the marketplace of teenage cool. Personally I do not enjoy it much, because it seems like every time you think such and such a pub is still bearable to drink in, all of a sudden it is discovered by zillions of fashionable young people who are no doubt in bands I have never heard of. But there was a time when everyone I knew was in bands playing around Camden Town, and I am sure we must have pissed people off when we went into pubs.
Faithless is about people scuffling around in the early eighties. But I object to the we-all-had-skinny-ties-once nostalgia for a rock ‘n’ roll past that never was. I am interested in the loss of faith and the loss of politics in my generation. In 1981-2 all the bands I knew were deconstructing the record business, making records on DIY labels. And then almost overnight, some of us had given up because we were crap, and others were making records in New York that cost $2m. I fixed on 1983, when Thatcher was re-elected, as the point at which it all changed. My protagonist is trying to investigate what the hell happened.
This protagonist, named Jeff, has quite the story.Formerly in a post-punk band that mutated
into a pop group, Jeff witnesses a cottage burning down, his former frontman
becoming a Green Gartside style pop star and a woman by the name of Frank
(because it’s the early 80’s) seems to be the connection. When Jeff’s work
colleague is stabbed to death in an apparent robbery gone wrong, things take a
deeply sinister turn and soon the high life and low life of old London town are
one and the same.
Ostensibly a crime novel, it’s the
post-punk/new pop elements that lift Faithless out of the realm of crime
fiction and into terrain somewhere between Iain Sinclair and Nick Hornby. The
idea that playing pop music could be subversive, even whenever the high-end
parts of the city embrace this music in a way that they never would have with
Crawling Chaos runs throughout the novel and is a neat reminder of how
yesterday’s subversives become today’s establishment figures.
Although the crime plot is flimsy by
today’s standards, it works because of the period setting: the
behind-the-scenes shenanigans that would see London transformed from decaying
metropolis to the centre of the world again. A bit more development on this
front would have strengthened the text further.
Because of this, I would describe Faithless
as an average book with moments that hint at what could have been. Of course
it’s a big subject to grapple with so it’s understandable that it doesn't
completely work but, as the old slogan says: Be realistic. Demand the
impossible.
Faithless. John L.Williams, 1998. Serpent’s Tale, ISBN: 9781852425166.
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