Britain, muses trainee barrister Xan, was getting “hotter, crueller and angrier”. Amanda Craig’s 10th novel watches as it boils over. Her setting is Prospect Park, a fictional north London suburb caught between gentrification and decline, on the 12th day of Christmas. Outside a hotel housing asylum seekers, protesters and counter-protesters have gathered. In a flat nearby, a man has been stabbed, and thugs go from shop to shop, searching for the teenage boy they think did it.
Locals look on anxiously. Jade from the beauty parlour and Daisy from the health food shop brave the central street to warn others of trouble. In the kebab shop, Mehmet locks up his doner meat and sharpens his knives. Places with shutters close them.
In a book-lined cafe, the regulars – a motley crew of writers who visit to nurse hot drinks and shuffle their novels towards closure – are joined by workers from next door’s bakery. Xan stops in before viewing a flat in the nearby Cross Estate, and then the exhausted, bleeding boy the thugs are looking for arrives at the back door, leaving the group with a dilemma: hand him over, or stand up to the criminals. The stage is set for what Ivo, a newspaper editor turned thriller writer, calls “the siege of Cross Street”.
Novelist and critic Craig has written about some of these people before. Xan featured in 2017’s The Lie of the Land, while Ivo first appeared in 1996’s A Vicious Circle – Craig describes High and Low as its sequel. Veteran writers Gritts, Mary and Eva, new mother Rose and her alcoholic father Simon also reappear from other works.
Everyone takes turns to complain about the state of the nation: crumbling infrastructure, soaring rents, riots, doctors’ strikes. Some rage at refugees for draining the state, others hear racism as a “mosquito whine, almost inaudible in the past” that is now growing louder.
High and Low is part state-of-the-nation novel, part literary satire and part siege drama, but it’s mostly a book about a place and its people. There’s vivid detail on the haves of leafy Prospect Square and the have-nots of the Cross Estate, with its grime, mould and petty crime. Under the novel’s big crises are countless smaller ones: wrangles over wildflower planters and LTNs; gargantuan potholes; complaints about cars being keyed and phones being stolen.
Inconveniently for the cast but happily for the plot, mobile service is patchy and the emergency services are delayed for hours. Left confined, Craig’s cast discover shared purpose and remember half-forgotten ties. They share tips about injuries and childcare, alert each other to threats, give each other makeovers and stack books and bags of flour in makeshift barricades. Craig lives in north London, and she reminds the readers that built-up, broken down and socially divided Prospect Park, once a “gentle country lane, lined with cherry and ash, hawthorn and lime”, still has beauty, and a community willing to fight for it.
Craig’s ensemble cast is central to this neighbourhood portrait, but the need to check in with each member means High and Low moves slowly at first, and given this wide focus it’s a shame we never get much insight into the thuggish gangsters (“bad apples”, sniffs one onlooker) and furious rioters. While the tension is ratcheted up nicely from early anxiety to zombie knives, burning cars and gunshots, the book’s concluding standoff feels a little quick and neat, a papering over of the cracks Craig has spent the rest of the book chronicling.
The result is a flawed but involving portrait of local pride and pragmatism under pressure. Craig’s fascination for the stories we all carry is addictive, and returning readers will enjoy watching Craig’s characters weather the passing years, some lost, some frustrated, but all with their own hopes, fears and hidden reserves of courage.