Dancing in the dark

The hedonistic 1970s rave scene meets race riots, grief and gangsters in a thrilling debut novel that took 16 years to write

FIRE RUSH By Jacqueline Crooks 352pp, Jonathan Cape, T £14.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP£16.99, ebook £7.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ

It’s 1am on a Friday night in 1978 in a church crypt in Norwood, south London, and a “mass of closed eye skankers… [are] dancing in darkness… skinning up with the dead. I feel them twisting around me, broken-beat bodies of sound… The Dub Master spinning versions of delayed time.”

Novelists have long harnessed the extemporised rhythms and cinematic ambience of jazz in prose, but I doubt any author has channelled so beautifully the skittering beats and otherworldly transcendence of dub as Jacqueline Crooks does in this remarkable, semi-autobiographical debut. Written partly in patois, it’s narrated by Yamaye, who lives with her taciturn father on the Tombstone estate and who every weekend heads out with her “gyals” – Asase, with her “high priestess glow” and Irish-born Rumer – to “skank” at a dance hall night held 10 feet below the ground.

Here, in this place of ecstatic sonic communion, where the air itself seems to vibrate with the souls of her ancestors, Yamaye feels uniquely alive and at home. It’s here too that she meets Moose, a soulful furniture-maker with dreams of returning to Jamaica, which the quietly unhappy Yamaye (who has never gotten over the loss of her own Jamaican-born mother when she was young) starts to believe she might share.

Yet soon Moose is dead, killed in police custody after falling victim to the era’s suspect laws, while, in an unrelated event, Asase winds up in prison. Increasingly lost, Yamaye becomes involved in a protest organisation investigating black deaths in custody, yet when she suspects a police informer is after her, she flees to Bristol, winding up in a “safe house” run by a coercive gangster, Monassa. Music is not just a salve, it’s the soundtrack to her very being: when Monassa first rapes Yamaye, all she can hear in her head is a “jumping needle record on repeat”.

It’s tempting to compare Fire Rush to Colin MacInnes’s 1958-set novel

Absolute Beginners, which remains a landmark portrait of London’s post-Windrush youth culture. In several key respects it’s nothing like it (Crooks is writing from a black perspective, for one thing), but Fire Rush provides an interesting coda to it by suggesting that the multiracial music scene of the 1950s had been pushed underground and segregated by the late 1970s; the vitality MacInnes captured so well replaced by an introspective hedonism and a prevailing mood of drift and despair.

It’s not just the spectral imagery with which Crooks imbues her descriptions of dub and of London itself that reflect her characters’ othered emotional states, but their societal dislocation at a moment charged by race riots and the rhetoric of a prime minister who resembles “the National Front in a pussy cat bow”. “We have no history,” says Asase, of a rootless nocturnal community sequestered away in tiny flats, where parents are either missing or withering away, where jobs are part-time and hopeless, and where men are directionless and dangerous. “I wonder why I attract these kinda men,” thinks Yamaye after one abusive encounter with a dancer known as Crab Man. “[Men] who are just like my father.”

It’s taken Crooks, who is 59, 16 years to write this novel, and in terms of sheer lyrical force it stands head and shoulders above most debuts. The writing jerks and twists with an articulacy that often defies semantic logic, while startling images abound on almost every page: a woman’s behind is “shaped like a heart with all the life flattened out”; a man has “perforated skin that looks like woodworm”. Characterisation is understated and deft, while the novel refracts its politics less through declamatory observation than through Yamaye’s exquisitely rendered state of mind, simultaneously deeply felt and disassociated.

Towards the end, Yamaye is about to board a plane to Jamaica, hoping to find a peace she has never known, and one wonders if Crooks should have left the story there, unfinished on the tarmac. Instead the final section features a plot denouement that defies credibility, and, for the first time, an idealised quality infects the writing. But perhaps this abrupt contrast is deliberate. After all, only the stoniest of readers would deny Yamaye her hardfought journey out of the darkness into the light.

‘I feel them twisting around me, brokenbeat bodies of sound’

j Sheer lyrical force: novelist Jacqueline Crooks