Books: Jive Among the Jumbles

CITY OF SPADES (255 pp.)—Colin MacInnes—Macmillan ($3.75).

“You’re a Jumble, man.”

This phrase keynotes the bright dialogue of this bright new novel. What is a Jumble? The term is a kind of Joycean jive for Johnbull, blurred by soft voices and subtle minds to a new sound. The word is used by London’s fast-growing population of West Indian and African Negroes. In their eyes, the whites whose town they have invaded are confused and confusing, square as tea chests, Jumbled in their thoughts about Spades. And Spades, of course, are the Negroes as they describe themselves—hip in their bright night world, realistically calling a spade a spade.

Out of this sociological theme, British Novelist Colin MacInnes has fashioned a book that for most of its length is as jaunty and bitterly Jumble-joking as the Spades themselves. Johnny MacDonald Fortune, 18, is the lad in from Lagos, Nigeria, wearing a white and crimson sweater, a nylon shirt with gold safety pins on each collar point, and a sky-blue gabardine jacket. The first thing he does in London, for the sky-blue hell of it, is to clamber up a down escalator. And in a sense that is what he does in rundown London for the rest of his stay.

He befriends Montgomery Pew, a feckless but amiable young Jumble who holds a job with a government welfare bureau. Montgomery pries Johnny loose from the hardhanded white law, while Johnny returns the favor by showing his pal safe trails through the Spade jungle. The pair meet such notable Spades as Peter Pay Paul, who pushes an asthma cure as marijuana; Billy Whispers, a pimp of stature; and Ronson Lighter, whose kleptomania focuses on only one Jumble artifact.

Author MacInnes (a Jumble himself) appears to know and like his Spades, manages to write of them without condescension—and without condescension’s obverse, the kind of Negro-worship shown by U.S. Beatnik Jack Kerouac. The book’s slight plot sags a little, but the gaiety and moroseness of wild, roiled lives are well told, and the reader gets a Spadeful of irony as the dark minstrel Lord Alexander sings:

This English gentleman he say to me

He do not appreciate calypso melody.

But I answer that calypso has supremacy

To the Light Programme music of the B.B.C.