“Bucks without Hair” and “Bullet Points”: Social and meta-commentary in Justin Cartwright’s In Every Face I Meet

Abstract

This article aims to open academic debate about Justin Cartwright’s fiction set in England by examining the first of Cartwright’s major novels about England, namely In Every Face I Meet (1995). Although South African-born Cartwright has lived in London for more than 40 years, the majority of his novels, about England and Englishness, have received little previous academic attention. We claim that In Every Face I Meet offers social commentary in the form of a subtle, humane critique of English society and culture. Tracing the novel’s intertextual allusions, not only to the work of William Blake, but also to a text by the notoriously racist South African writer, Sarah Gertrude Millin, we examine the ways in which In Every Face I Meet explores the interface between metropole and former colony. We conclude by discussing the relevance of Cartwright’s interest in the ideas of the social philosopher Isaiah Berlin to reading the novel as meta-commentary, and the tension between reading the novel as social commentary and reading it as metafiction.

In Justin Cartwright’s novel In Every Face I Meet (1995), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award and won a Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, a black man is killed in a scuffle with two white men. Yet despite this climactic point of interracial violence and the author’s childhood in South Africa, the action of the novel takes place in England, not South Africa. Evoking William Blake’s poem “London” in its title, the story is set in London, with a South African-born author bringing to bear on this context an awareness of the fault lines within British society. Just as Blake’s poem provided a social critique of British urban life of the late eighteenth century, so Cartwright’s novel offers critical perspectives on the social conditions of early 1990s London. In this novel, Cartwright comments on the “woe” ¹ evident “in every face” (3) by scripting the seemingly hopeless lives of London’s underclass, drawing our attention to the presence of race and class conflict in the UK, not only in South Africa on which the world’s media was concentrating at the time. Focusing on the first of Cartwright’s major novels set in England, we claim that this novel offers social commentary in the form of a subtle, humane critique of English society and culture. Tracing the novel’s intertextual allusions, not only to the work of Blake, but also to a text by the notoriously racist South African writer, Sarah Gertrude Millin, we examine the ways in which In Every Face I Meet reveals a complex interface between metropole and former colony. As we argue, Cartwright’s novel may be read as a social critique in its focus on race, class, and gender issues, but it also destabilizes narrative certainty through metafictional strategies. We conclude by discussing the tension between reading the novel as social commentary and reading it as metafiction, and the relevance of Cartwright’s interest in the ideas of the social philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, to a reading of the novel as meta-commentary.

In this article, we hope to foreground a novel by an author whose fiction has been widely read and reviewed (particularly within the UK) but has not received much academic attention. An exception to this trend is the work of Mike Marais — two journal articles and one book chapter by this South African scholar concentrate on Cartwright’s White Lightning (2002), which is set in South Africa. ² Cartwright’s novels set in England, however, have received no substantial academic consideration. One might argue that the academic neglect of Cartwright’s work stems partly from his émigré status, from the fact that he is a South African-born author living in and writing about the UK. There is the “problem” of his “fit” within a field of national literature, and unlike other writers from émigré communities in Britain (who might be examined more readily under the rubric of postcolonial studies), Cartwright is white and not exactly “exotic” — a position he dramatizes and interrogates in In Every Face I Meet. Yet, as we hope to demonstrate, as a writer no longer South African and “not yet” entirely English, Cartwright is well positioned to foreground social issues — and national identity politics — in England.

Although his novels have not been the subject of much academic criticism, they have garnered a considerable amount of popular acclaim. In the many reviews of his novels in the British media, one theme is noticeably repeated, namely, Cartwright’s construction as an “outsider” in relation to English culture due to his South African background. A reviewer from The Guardian, for instance, commented on The Promise of Happiness (2004): “Perhaps it takes a South African novelist to describe an English middle-class family in such compendiously unironic detail” (Kellaway, 2004: n.p.). A review in The Telegraph of To Heaven by Water (2009a) suggested that “Cartwright, born in South Africa, has always had an outsider’s beady eye on English life” (Feay, 2009: n.p.) and in a recent interview with Cartwright, a journalist from The Independent asserted that “Cartwright comes to his England as an outsider” (Tonkin, 2011: n.p.). These comments infer that Cartwright, because of his non-English birthplace, is not only “not British” but that he occupies a position removed from English society, which allows him to write about its idiosyncrasies in such detail. The assumption that Cartwright is an “outsider” to English culture is a problematic one — he has, after all, lived and worked in England for more than four decades — yet in such reviews his identity is framed not in terms of his assimilation but of his alienation. Rather than simply perpetuating the media portrayal of Cartwright as an “unironic” “outsider” to Englishness, we wish to focus on the subtle and potentially enriching perspectives of estrangement that emerge in In Every Face I Meet, perspectives that are gently satirical of Englishness and critical in their representation of race, class, and gender prejudice.

Due to South Africa’s colonial past, one could say that London, the historical “centre” of the British Empire, has self-evidently occupied a significant place in the imaginations of South African-born writers with British ancestry — and even more so for a writer such as Cartwright, who lives in London. This schema of “centre” and “margin” in relation to London and Britain’s former colonies can, however, be over-simplified, as many have argued. John McLeod in Postcolonial London, for instance, proposes an understanding of London as a more “complex and conflicted location than that implied by the totalizing and abstract concept of the undifferentiated colonial ‘centre’” (McLeod, 2004: 5). Such a nuanced view of the city derives partly from acknowledging its legacy as “an important site of creativity and conflict for those from countries with a history of colonialism” (2004: 6). As we shall argue, like many of the literary texts examined in Postcolonial London, In Every Face I Meet explores “the painful and at times violent fortunes” of London in unsettling ways, “[r]ather than glibly cheerleading cultural difference” (2004: 190).

Much of the text of In Every Face I Meet is narrated in the third person and focuses on the thoughts of former rugby player and native of Swaziland, middle manager Anthony Northleach, over the course of one day that ends with his arrest for the killing of a black youth, Jason Parchment. In the sense that it focuses on the inner wonderings and flâneur-style wanderings of Northleach over one day, the text evokes James Joyce’s classic text Ulysses (1922). While Ulysses displaces the metropole from the centre of Empire to Dublin, however, in In Every Face I Meet a white middle-class member of London’s population is himself displaced in the extent to which he encounters the city’s underbelly, “a place so notorious that it had been featured in a weekend supplement as the most dangerous place in Britain, with a mortality rate only slightly better than the slums of Kingston, Jamaica” (200). Here we see a melancholic mirroring and interface between metropole and former colony that is at play in much of Cartwright’s novel as the perilous underbelly of London recalls a far-flung part of the former British Empire. In this novel Cartwright also writes from the perspectives of three other characters, using a third person viewpoint, but focalized through one character at a time. The narrative is thus structured as a series of focalizations and counterfocalizations. A story focalized through prostitute Chanelle Smith alternates with Anthony’s narrative from Chapter 2 of section “Two” onwards, evoking “the youthful harlot” in Blake’s famous poem, and in Chapters 7, 13, and 15 of “Two” we glimpse the thought-life of Anthony’s wife, Geraldine. In the very short section entitled “Three”, Anthony is in hospital recovering from a gunshot wound, and framing the entire narrative, at its beginning and end, are two sections, “One” and “Four”, set a few months later. These are devoted to the perceptions of Julian Capper, a writer who serves as a juror on Anthony’s murder trial. In these framing chapters the metafictional aspects of the novel become most apparent.

“Scaring whitey”: Racism, nationalism, and multiculture

Watching a rap group on MTV, Anthony Northleach speculates that “[r]apping was a word for chatting once. Now it seems to be about scaring whitey” (114). In Every Face I Meet is virtually prophetic about the ways in which hip-hop culture would be taken up in the UK in the next two decades. The beginnings of the hip-hop movement in Britain are reflected in the character of Chanelle’s pimp and boyfriend, Jason Parchment, who clearly identifies with black American hip-hop culture that is being translated into and indigenized within the UK. In section “Two”, Chapter 2, Chanelle thinks about Jason:

He’s bought himself a new LA Raiders jacket and cap and new sunglasses to go with the car. He looks great, in fact he looks ready to be in a video, with one of those rap groups he likes. Big clothes with plenty of pockets. The black boys don’t want to look like they have financial worries. Jason always has nice new trainers and big jackets or hoodies. When they walk down the High Road together they are telling all the little white people that they are big and loose and free. They want respect. That’s what they are saying. Chanelle wonders if they can win this one, but she never tells Jason that. Jason has started calling his mates his homies, or homeboys. He likes these American words. (80–1)

What is interesting is that since Cartwright wrote In Every Face I Meet hip-hop culture has also been adopted by an underclass of white youth in Britain, a phenomenon that has not been greeted with approval by conservatives. David Starkey, for instance, speaking about the recent riots in England and citing Enoch Powell’s infamous anti-immigration “Rivers of Blood” speech, notoriously claimed that the problem expressed in these uprisings was that “the whites have become black” (Starkey, quoted in Quinn, 2011).

In Every Face I Meet critiques and troubles such prejudices, most notably in the final section of the novel that deals with the trial of Anthony Northleach, with Capper as juror. Ironically, the defence presents Anthony as being “from the bedrock of [English] society”. The sceptical Capper, even as he reveals his own prejudices about “rootlessness”, does not entirely question that Anthony is “from” England: “[Anthony and Mike] were from that unassertive, rootless — to Julian Capper, somewhat sinister — group of people who inhabit southern England” (204). Capper at the same time reflects on how “the defence has tried to suggest […] that Jason Parchment was not quite British” by producing evidence that his father was from Sierra Leone (201). Ironically, Anthony is the one who is a direct immigrant to England, because of his birth and upbringing in Swaziland, but his immigrant status is not marked because of his whiteness and English ancestry, while Jason is constructed as coming from “a racial group inevitably sucked into drugs, prostitution and crime” (214). Capper also notes that the defence is using rather crude strategies to represent Jason as a ruthless criminal due to his race:

The defence has also insisted on passing around… pictures of Jason Parchment’s clothes placed on a dummy without a face. These are supposed to make it easier to understand the sequence of events, but they are obviously designed to make him look sinister. In the pictures he is wearing a capacious hooded jacket, voluminous trousers, dark glasses and a baseball cap with “Los Angeles raiders” written on it. Round his neck is an ANC badge. He is wearing giant black Nike trainers. (202)

Ironically again, Northleach is himself African by birth and an idealistic ANC supporter. Much of his narrative focuses on his obsession with the release of Nelson Mandela from prison, an important point to which we shall later return.

As Paul Gilroy and Robert J.C. Young aptly argue, tension between multiculture and racism inheres in the idea of Englishness. Gilroy and Young draw attention to the ways in which “Britain’s long experience of convivial post-colonial interaction and civic life has, largely undetected by government, provided resources for a functioning, even vibrant multiculture” (Gilroy, 2004a) and of the ways in which England — and London specifically — emerged historically as a cosmopolitan metropole “bristling with the people and goods of empire” (Young, 2008: 7). Yet in There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation, Gilroy also argued that Benedict Anderson’s separation of racism and nationalism “simply does not apply in the English/British case”, as “the politics of ‘race’ in this country is fired by conceptions of national belonging and homogeneity which not only blur the distinction between ‘race’ and nation, but rely on that very ambiguity for their effect” (Gilroy, 1987: 44). What Gilroy means in his book, which appeared in the decade before In Every Face I Meet was published, is that English national identity has been welded to the idea of racial identity. Gilroy went on to outline the characteristics of “new racism”, a term referring to the discourse around immigrants in the 1980s, and argued that “[t]he new racism is primarily concerned with mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion” and that it “specifies who may legitimately belong to the national community and simultaneously advances reasons for the segregation or banishment of those whose ‘origin, sentiment or citizenship’ assigns them elsewhere” (1987: 45). In his later book, After Empire, Gilroy outlines “convivial” culture and melancholia as two possible directions for British politics and culture, positions that he proposes exist in a dialectic. Beginning on a rather pessimistic note as he was writing in the period of the Bush–Blair-led “war on terror”, Gilroy states that “[m]ulticultural society seems to have been abandoned at birth” (Gilroy, 2004b: 1). He nonetheless posits the hope that “the workings of conviviality”, namely “the processes of cohabitation and interaction that have made multiculture an ordinary feature of social life”, “will take off from the point where ‘multiculturalism’ broke down” (2004b: xv).

Robert Young has a different focus in his exploration of Englishness, and is more positive about the inclusiveness of Englishness, claiming that it has historically been a concept fashioned by “a long-distance nationalism”, by a “far-off diasporic community” of those “who were precisely not English, but rather of English descent: the peoples of the English diaspora moving around the world: Americans, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, and even, at a pinch the English working class” (Young, 2008: 1). While not denying the racism that Gilroy analyses, Young sees ideas about English identity as having the potential for inclusiveness:

Though it is anachronistic to use the term “ethnicity” […] the English definition of themselves in terms of an English race was so elastic as to have only a tangential relation to biological racial science. This is not to say that English ethnic or racial identity did not involve forms of racism, racist assumptions of superiority, both of which increased in the late nineteenth century. To affirm the liberal tradition does not require the denial of its residual racism. It does help explain, however, why, in the second half of the twentieth century, it was comparatively easy to transform it in a positive way. (2008: xii)

Englishness may have been an “elastic” category as Young suggests, but from the 1950s onwards it did not extend to black and Asian immigrants, even while such immigrants were allowed to be British citizens. Yet, English identity has in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries certainly been a field of contestation in a constant struggle against, and pushing back of, boundaries. For instance, since Cartwright published In Every Face I Meet, there has been a movement of black British citizens to claim Englishness — one example of this would be the hip-hop rapper Dizzee Rascal, who claims publicly to be black and English, and who performed at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in London in 2012. Orchestrated by Danny Boyle, the ceremony could in fact be regarded as a celebration of convivial culture and the potentially inclusive aspects of Englishness as described in Gilroy’s After Empire and Young’s The Idea of English Ethnicity.

As we shall demonstrate, In Every Face I Meet delves into the dilemmas of multiculture, racism, and class oppression (which are enmeshed with gender issues) in interesting ways that may be put into conversation with some of the points made by Gilroy and Young above. Yet, as we shall argue, the narrative strategies of focalization and counterfocalization in In Every Face I Meet allow for and even invite critical distance from the perspectives offered in Cartwright’s text, as do the intertextual references set up in the novel. Moreover, aspects of metafiction or meta-commentary in In Every Face I Meet caution against reading a literary text in ways that reduce it to theoretical points.

In the sections dealing with Anthony we are privy to the thoughts of a character who feels slightly estranged from Englishness and from his context, but simultaneously the text invites us to critique Anthony’s perspective. The section of the novel focalized through Anthony begins in a train station in London, a setting that evokes Young’s designation of London as a kind of “terminus” as well as a place of departure in ideas about Englishness, a location that possesses “a strange economy of alienation and estrangement” (Young, 2008: 5). Anthony notes mentally that “English people are growing taller”, but we are then told that he is even taller than average (11). Although he could pass for English on account of being white, his height seems to suggest that he does not quite fit. Following his reflections on height at the station, Anthony admits to feeling “plumped up”, with the reasons for this being firstly, that “England have beaten France 26–7 in Paris”, and secondly, that “the government in South Africa has announced that Nelson Mandela will be released soon” (11). Despite being drawn into sympathy with his perspective through focalization, and despite the fact that he is, like Cartwright himself, an African-born colonial living in London, Anthony’s priorities are clearly to be questioned at this early point in his narrative. Pleasure in his life is generated through identification with the English national rugby team, and behind the ordering of his thoughts — that rugby comes first as a source of pleasure and the release of Nelson Mandela second — one detects a subtly ironic or satirical critique on the part of Cartwright.

Anthony’s awareness of ethnicity also becomes apparent as he marks the black Britons on the train, noticing that “[t]he blacks dress with verve. He admires it, although the young men in their hoodies and track suits, who seem to be more numerous by evening, frighten him […] He doesn’t think of them as English, although of course they are” (12). Anthony’s parents, white colonials of English descent, also channel ideas of Englishness, but in a less self-reflexively racist manner, playing out the negative side of Young’s observation that Englishness has been formed by those “who were precisely not English, but rather of English descent” (Young, 2008: 1). Indeed, Anthony’s mother could be read as expressing starkly noticeable aspects of what Gilroy calls the “new racism”, although ironically she is not actually “English” by birth, but rather a colonial born in Lucknow, India. Her idea of Englishness is marked by nostalgia for Empire, where certain people apparently knew their place. Struggling to deal with a rapidly changing multiculture in which divisions of class are also less immoveable, she is particularly concerned about the presence of “black people and Oriental people” in the news:

Nobody told her that black people and Oriental people and people with funny accents were going to come shouldering their way on to her news. Even newsreaders are black. She has nothing against them […] but she feels uneasy that people who don’t have good accents are allowed to read the news, never mind the importance given to them on the news. You can’t have a country where everybody is valued equally. (20)

One thinks here, of course, of Benedict Anderson’s idea that national identity is fostered through news media. Anthony’s mother sees the media as having so important a bearing on her life and identity that she thinks of it as “her news”, wishing it to confirm her sense of English identity as ethnic purity. Although the media is both representing a changing English society and actually playing a role in the creation of a multicultural nation, Anthony’s mother does not accept the move towards a new society in which “everybody is valued equally” (20). In Every Face I Meet thus explores the tension between multiculture and racism within England, but also shows the ways in which white colonials, far from constructing Englishness as inclusive, have been complicit in upholding conservative and melancholically nostalgic ideas of English national identity.

“Bucks without Hair”: Colonial and metropolitan violence

Racism as a legacy of colonial domination also comes across in the passages that refer to Anthony’s deceased father, and some of the most important insights we are given into colonial racialism are provided through a significant intertext. In chapter 1 of section “two” Anthony remembers how his mother sent him a poem, written by his father, which she says was enclosed in a book: “Your father left this in a book he was reading. It was in a book called Three Bucks without Hair. Funny title. Gives me the creeps, I thought you would like the poem” (34). The short story collection referenced here, by the notoriously racist South African author Sarah Gertrude Millin, was published in 1957 and is in fact entitled Two Bucks without Hair and Other Stories. The title story from the collection is set in Swaziland and the phrase “two bucks without hair” refers to the supposed Swazi euphemism for a person, a “buck without hair”, who becomes a human sacrifice. Two such sacrifices, a woman and a man, are made in the narrative to help a chief retain his position of power, and a third character, an old counsellor, is also killed, in order to conceal the original crime. The murders are then investigated by the police and the witchdoctor who incited the crimes is imprisoned, evoking the homicide trial in In Every Face I Meet. Millin’s story is undeniably racist in its focus on grisly, superstitious customs of the Swazi people. Yet not only was this text published in London by Faber & Faber, but Millin’s work was generally lauded in the UK and the US. By providing this short story as an intertextual reference, In Every Face I Meet points to the dialogue between metropole and colony in disseminating racist ideologies.

The subject matter of the poem written by Anthony’s father interacts in interesting ways with the novel in which it is enclosed. In the poem, Anthony’s father addresses an adolescent Anthony, wistfully musing on the end of his son’s childhood:

A Poem for Anthony

A blemish

On your porcelain nose

Your childhood’s gone

After my youth.

You are me.

I am you.

Without you

I do not exist.

Your flight has begun.

Stay awhile.

I am you.

And you are me. (34)

The poem is banal, even silly (“Your flight has begun/ Stay awhile”), and certainly lacking in literary merit. Yet it is significant that Anthony’s father comments on his son’s child-like “porcelain” skin, on Anthony’s movement into adolescence through the appearance of blemishes (which could be freckles or adolescent pimples). The image of a blemished whiteness here seems to be a symbol of nostalgia for childhood and innocence, which contrasts with the morally dubious behaviours and motives attributed to the “natives” in Millin’s short story. Once again, one senses Cartwright’s ironic perspective, and we are encouraged to occupy a position that is critical of Anthony’s father. Anthony himself finds the narcissistic recognition claimed between father and son in the poem problematic, even claustrophobic. He experiences it as something from which he must escape: “Anthony feels leaden. His father’s presumption drags him down: I am you. You are me. Did he really feel this?” (34–5). His interest in Swedenborgianism, in the liberation of Mandela and the “abolition” of apartheid may be read as an attempt to escape his parents’ conditioning.

In In Every Face I Meet, Anthony Northleach’s mother mistakes the number of “bucks” in Millin’s story’s title, changing it from “two” to “three”. One could read the change in title as part of the social commentary in Cartwright’s novel. Anthony’s mother makes a mistake, but in Millin’s story there are three deaths. Moreover, the “three bucks” could be read as referring to the three deaths in Cartwright’s novel. Here Jason and Mike shoot each other, and Chanelle’s son, in an accident strikingly similar to those occurring frequently in South African “township” or shack life, dies in a fire in Chanelle’s mother’s home in London. In Every Face I Meet thus seems to suggest that so-called civilized society still retains “human sacrifice”, which is clear in the suffering that Chanelle and Jason experience, and which results in the three deaths in the novel. In other words, in British society, the underclass is “sacrificed” in order for the middle and upper classes to prosper. Through the intertextual allusion to Millin explored above, In Every Face I Meet turns a critical eye on Englishness, challenging the ways in which London may see itself as a civilized metropolitan centre.

England and Africa: Blake, Swedenborg, and Nelson Mandela

Anthony’s upbringing in Swaziland has affected his attitudes towards race and ethnicity, though his attitude differs from that of his parents. Anthony idolizes Nelson Mandela, whom he sees as offering a kind of Messianic hope, not just to southern Africa but also to the rest of the world, and he compares Mandela to the Swazi king, Sobhuza, whom he met as a child. He believes that both Mandela and Sobhuza epitomize unspoiled nobility and wisdom, and that Mandela will therefore be able to provide a solution to the world’s problems. Significantly, Anthony is also obsessed with the work of the Swedish scientist and philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), whose influence on Blake is well known. As Robert Rix points out, Blake reacted to Swedenborg’s thought in many key respects, and one of these related to Swedenborg’s view of Africa and Africans. With reference to Blake’s poem, “The Little Black Boy”, Rix argues, “[the] fact that Blake’s little black boy will teach the white boy about heavenly joy concurs with Swedenborg crediting the African with spiritual superiority” (Rix, 2007: 98).

In In Every Face I Meet, Anthony’s belief in Mandela as a Messianic solution is gently satirized in the conversation between Mike and Anthony:

Nelson is our man, he says to Mike.

What position does he play?

Utility player. (69)

Using sports jargon, Anthony jokes that Mandela can take on whatever role is required of him in the “game”. What does Anthony believe Nelson Mandela will provide? The answer is formulated very vaguely as some kind of knowledge and wisdom. Anthony idealistically compares, for instance, the somewhat dubious “judgements” of politicians, with the more meaningful knowledge that Mandela will confer: “Nelson, he believes, will have picked up some more basic wisdom while he was breaking stones in the lonely beauty of Robben Island. We need it. Mike needs it” (69). Evoking here the image of the holy man who enters a state of isolation in order to attain enlightenment/commandments from God, Anthony decides that Mandela’s isolation from society on Robben Island will have nurtured his “wisdom”:

Maybe he was freer out there…. Islands are introspective. They are defiant. They have self-esteem.… [H]e is sure that Nelson will be bringing back from there, like Moses from the mountain, essential knowledge…. Nelson has been set free of all the humiliation and reverses that ordinary people suffer. (87)

Considering that it was never Mandela’s choice to be imprisoned, there is a certain deluded Romanticism in Anthony’s suggestion that Mandela was possibly “freer out there” and also that on the island Mandela has “been set free of all the humiliation and reverses that ordinary people suffer”. It is a mark of Anthony’s relative privilege that he cannot imagine that as a political prisoner kept in a small cell for 27 years Mandela was certainly not “freer” nor exempt from “humiliation”.

Anthony’s belief that both Mandela and Sobhuza have access to some sort of arcane wisdom seems to touch on ideas of the noble savage, of romanticized primitivism. Amongst his nostalgic remembrances of Swaziland, some of the most vivid are Anthony’s memories of Sobhuza’s Ncwala (king-renewal) ceremony. These passages convey an uncomfortable exoticism in their focus on the dances, the slaughtering of the bull, and the suggestions of the hidden rites “they won’t show to Europeans” (112). Anthony, in fact, asserts that Mandela, as a “Thembu prince” will have been “thinking about the meaning of this sort of ritual on the island” and will be “in a position to update King Sobhuza’s beliefs” (175). Apart from his idea that Mandela will have gained some “previously undiscovered truth about humanness” through his isolated position on Robben Island, Anthony is also hinting that Mandela has obtained a form of illuminating knowledge because of his association with a more “primitive” culture. The connection with Swedenborg is made clear in the novel when Anthony, who appears to be going through some sort of mid-life crisis and is looking for “cryptic clues to the meaning of infinity”, has been trying to read a pamphlet on Swedenborg (from the Swedenborg Society) which he finds quite dense, and muses that he “wants Nelson to answer Swedenborg’s questions in plain English” (98). That he wants Mandela to speak “plain English” is clearly ironic, revealing how Anthony thinks Mandela will speak to him, personally, in his own language.

Blake apparently became interested in the adoption of Swedenborg’s ideas about Africa and Africans into a discourse of abolition, and Swedenborg’s ideas about Africa were taken up by radical Masonic members of the New Church who published a pamphlet, with which Blake would have been familiar, entitled “Plan for a Free Community upon the Coast of Africa under the Protection of Great Britain; but Intirely Independent of All European Laws and Governments”. The pamphlet described a plan for establishing a colony on the coast of Sierra Leone founded and run on Swedenborgian principles, according to which, slavery would be abolished and “the European” and “the Negro” should coexist harmoniously — perhaps a Utopian ideal of multiculture, though not in England. Notably, Chanelle’s black pimp and boyfriend Jason Parchment (named on his birth certificate Jason Ndongo) in In Every Face I Meet has family origins in Sierra Leone, and like Northleach, has certain lofty hopes about what Mandela will provide for the world at large, claiming Mandela as “[o]ur man… coming out to lead us home” and calling Mandela “the Lion of Judah”, “Emperor of Africa”, and “my Haile Selassie” (81). This evocation of Rastafari culture actually ties up with radical Swedenborgianism as a “Back to Africa” movement. For Blake and the radical Swedenborgians, Africans are noble savages who are in touch with the divine, and Europe, rather than Africa, is a place of darkness that enslaves its subjects. The path that Cartwright’s novel treads is complex, however. Even as In Every Face I Meet satirizes the idea of “the noble savage”, a Blakeian and Swedenborgian subversion of traditional ideas about London as an enlightened metropolitan centre may be seen in this novel.

The “Youthful Harlot” and the “Marriage Hearse”: Women’s perspectives

Blake’s poem “London” appears as an epigraph to In Every Face I Meet, and apparent in the novel’s social commentary is an enmeshment between race, class, and gender issues. Alongside the perspectives of Anthony Northleach and Julian Capper, feminine perspectives are foregrounded in Cartwright’s text. Jason Parchment is fashioned and self-fashioned through his identification with black masculine youth culture, but the narrative of his girlfriend, white 19-year-old prostitute Chanelle/“Carole” Smith, also plays a crucial role in Cartwright’s social commentary. Notoriously, a relationship between a lower-class white woman and a black man sparked the Notting Hill riots in London, and Chanelle is very aware of how others see her. She knows, for instance, that the “old ducks” who live in her block of flats blame “her kind” for its dilapidated state. Even more significantly, she notices their fear of Jason, whom they see as a “black devil” (118). The fact that it is old, white women who are expressing their fear of Jason is pertinent. As Gilroy points out, the image of an elderly white woman, beleaguered by intimidating immigrants, is a particularly charged trope in racist discourse (Gilroy, 1987: 49).

In the first chapter that is focalized through Chanelle’s perspective, we learn that Chanelle is a crack addict with a sickly son, Bradley, who is being looked after by her mother. The reader is drawn into sympathy with her perspective, and with her awareness of herself as forming the detritus of society. The pathos of Chanelle’s life and the inescapability of her fate become apparent as she knows “[s]he can’t go on much longer. Most of the girls end up dead before they’re thirty. Upside down in a dustbin” (76). Moreover, Chanelle’s first chapter appears immediately after the first chapter focalized by Anthony, and her dysfunctional family, which initially seems to be at odds with the lives of Anthony’s wife and son, brings into relief the dysfunctionality of Anthony himself within his marriage. Sexism and dysfunctionality are mirrored in family life between classes.

Although black hip-hop culture is usually associated with misogyny and Chanelle acknowledges that Jason “once kicked her in the face” (79), sexism is also woven into Anthony’s white middle-class narrative, revealed most poignantly in his visit with Mike to a strip club, and in his attitude towards Mike’s physical abuse of his wife, Babette: “It pains him — not, he’s ashamed to admit to himself, on Babette’s account, but on Mike’s. There’s a certain honour in being hit, a vindication, but there’s nothing but shame for a man who hits a woman” (145). Soon after this, Anthony actually laughs along with Mike about the fact that Babette was “asking for it” (159), as they feel that she challenged Mike to hit her in order to prove his masculinity. Anthony realizes the inappropriateness of reacting to this situation with laughter: “He could never defend it, but then, he thinks, why should I have to?” (159). Ironically, he does end up having to defend his position, where he is not only interrogated in court on the subject of the shooting incident, but also by a feminist lawyer on his behaviour before the incident:

And so, just let me get this straight, while Mrs Babette Frame was trying to summon an ambulance at number 7 Jellicoe Terrace, and your wife was waiting for you at number 4 High Woods, South Godstone, Surrey, you were in the pub watching women strip naked?

Believe me it wasn’t quite like that.

Just answer yes or no.

Yes. (211)

Apart from Chanelle Smith and Julian Capper, the other character whose point of view contrasts with Anthony’s is his wife, Geraldine, through whom three chapters are focalized. The first chapter from her perspective occurs after the description of the domestic violence incident at Babette’s house, and in this chapter we see Geraldine preparing dinner. The structured domestic order of Geraldine’s activities is set against Anthony’s unproductive and increasingly chaotic day, the violence that befalls Babette, and the unpredictability of Chanelle’s life. While Anthony is following an obtuse mental trajectory in order to counter his feelings of alienation, Geraldine is concerned with details of the here-and-now and admits that she is “living a full life” (126). Geraldine’s second chapter comes after the section detailing Anthony and Mike’s experience in the strip club. Most of this chapter deals with her thoughts about their son, Fergus, whom she watches while he sleeps. The innocence of the sleeping boy and the idyllic domestic setting are set against Anthony’s rather debauched day. Fergus’s peaceful slumber also brings to mind the contrasting circumstances of Chanelle’s son Bradley. Significantly, Geraldine comments critically on Anthony’s friendship with Mike, suggesting that his motives for maintaining the friendship are not entirely pure: “There’s a certain conspiracy there: it helps to have a completely clueless friend because it paints you in a good light” (167). These thoughts cast doubt upon the way in which Mike and Anthony’s friendship is presented by Anthony, and cause the reader to see Anthony’s final misguided attempt to defend the honour of his dead friend by sacrificing himself in a dubious light, undercutting ideals of male bonding.

Meta-commentary and value pluralism: The influence of Isaiah Berlin

The theorist who has most influenced Justin Cartwright is without a doubt the social philosopher Isaiah Berlin, whose lectures Cartwright attended at Oxford University and whose ideological imprint is evident in Cartwright’s novels, including the one discussed here. Berlin vehemently opposed the notion of a rationalist “single true solution” (Berlin, 1958: 37) and argued that:

One belief, more than any other is responsible for the slaughter of individuals on the altars of the great historical ideals […] This is the belief that somewhere […] there is a final solution. This ancient faith rests on the conviction that all the positive values in which men have believed must, in the end, be compatible, and perhaps even entail one another. (1958: 52)

He suggested that “the belief that some single formula can in principle be found whereby all the diverse ends of men can be harmoniously realized is demonstrably false” (1958: 54). Rather, he proposed the idea of value pluralism, in which contradictory positive values can co-exist. For Berlin, absolute values or monisms are delusions, as well as dangerous and limiting. This is an idea that is debated to have contributed to theories of multiculturalism and postmodern perspectives (though Berlin struggled to avoid the relativism of which postmodernism has been accused). ³

It is worth noting that Isaiah Berlin, like Cartwright, was a transnational who had a complex relationship with Englishness, as he was Jewish and born in Latvia. Robert J.C. Young significantly places Berlin in his list of “Anglophile characters masquerading as Englishmen” (2008: 3), ⁴ along with T.S. Eliot and Joseph Conrad, in order to demonstrate how Englishness has historically been an inclusive ethnicity. Cartwright also points out Berlin’s strong identification with Englishness. In Oxford Revisited he quotes William Waldegrave as saying:

If you had asked me to show you what I meant by the ideal of Englishness, I would have taken you to see a Latvian, Jewish, German, Italian mixture of all the cultures of Europe. I would have taken you to see Isaiah Berlin. (Cartwright, 2009b: ch. 2)

Cartwright has professed his affinity with Berlin’s ideas widely, and paraphrases the main thrust of Berlin’s philosophy thus: “Berlin understood with penetrating clarity that people who seek an all-embracing theory in religion and philosophy are deluded” (Cartwright, 2009b: ch. 2). This is perhaps a simplification of Berlin’s value pluralism, but it summarizes what Cartwright frequently critiques in his novels, including In Every Face I Meet: the pervasiveness and simultaneously deluded nature of ideals and absolute values, including nationalism.

Cartwright’s use of focalization and counterfocalization — for instance, in contrasting ideas about male friendship focalized through Anthony and Geraldine — may be read as part of this critique of absolute values. As we shall demonstrate, Berlin’s influence on Cartwright may also be traced in the ways in which metafictional strategies in In Every Face I Meet operate as a meta-commentary that undercuts reductionist readings.

In the incident that results in his trial in In Every Face I Meet, Anthony is driving home from the strip club, with Mike drunk in the back of his car. He comes across Chanelle, who claims that she has been raped, and asks Anthony to drive her home, where Jason is waiting to abduct him and force him to draw money from an ATM. When they reach the ATM, Mike suddenly comes back to consciousness and tackles Jason. In the epilogue we learn that Anthony is on trial for Jason’s murder, and Capper, who is rather pleased with his insightful interpretation of events, believes Anthony to be guilty. It finally emerges, however, through the revised statement of Chanelle/“Miss Carole Smith”, that Mike and Jason shot each other, and that a bullet passing through Mike hit Anthony.

The framing chapters of the novel focalized through Julian Capper, particularly the epilogue, bring into play most clearly the metafictional elements of the novel. Capper’s position as a writer and his initials (J.C.) suggest that Capper may be an alter ego for Cartwright himself, yet Capper is something of a failure as a writer. He may have started out with ambition but now writes for The Grocer, a house magazine for small shopkeepers. This publication, as well as the novel’s historical setting, bring to mind Margaret Thatcher, who fell from power in the same year in which the novel is set. She is mentioned on a number of occasions within Anthony’s narrative, and was famously known as the grocer’s daughter who still knew the price of milk while Prime Minister, but was also known as “the milk-snatcher” for her savagely neoliberal economic policies. Resonating with this image of milk, when we first meet Capper in the opening pages of the novel, he is writing a column on whether the “boom in mozzarella” is trade-led or consumer-led. Despite the staging of his position as a writer and the initials he shares with Cartwright, Capper’s perspectives are revealed to be limited and partial, and his opinion of himself shown to be over-inflated:

Julian Capper is sure that his own summing up will be both concise and decisive. He is, after all, the only one among [the jurors] who has to marshal his thoughts systematically, almost daily, even if these thoughts […] are not in the same category as arguments about society and its instruments of control. (216)

Capper’s name also suggests some of the functions of the framing sections of the novel: not only do these sections “cap” the novel, but “Capper” is also close to “caper”, which has a set of meanings denoting playfulness, thereby echoing the metafictional games in the novel. Because Capper is so sure of himself but ends up being so wrong, in the Capper narratives Cartwright raises questions about limited perspectives and the partiality of truth or final solutions, such that Capper’s epilogue prevents us from forming a simple viewpoint about the narrative we have just read.

Apart from Capper, some of the other characters’ names point to a focus on writing, fiction, and textuality. Jason has taken on the surname Parchment, probably as a way of trying to fit into a racist society, but through his surname the text also alludes to the pages of Cartwright’s novel itself, and compares Jason to a text on which the “marks of weakness” projected by a racist society will be etched.

Just before the novel’s conclusion, in a mise-en-abyme scene of reading that echoes the role of the literary critic, Capper “reads” the case as “symbolic”. Significantly, however, his listing of the themes raised by the incident in which Anthony is shot and Mike and Jason killed seems to destabilize any simple reading of the novel as merely social commentary by inviting meta-commentary:

[H]e sees that this is a case which has important resonances. But there is a sense — he wipes his fingers to write down some bullet points — in which the case is symbolic.

The shucking off of responsibility for the weak and defenceless.

The contempt for the unsuccessful and under-privileged.

The promotion of business and market values above individualism.

The attempt to preserve the status quo.

The nostalgic belief in an earlier golden age.

Racial innuendo. (214)

Here the themes of the novel are made into “bullet points” that critique Thatcherism (and Capper’s role as a writer for The Grocer). Yet the phrase “bullet points” is also a clear pun on the gun violence at the centre of the novel, implying that an oversimplifying, reductive analysis of a literary text may be violent, or at least harmful in a sense.

Conclusion

Cartwright’s In Every Face I Meet is a text that had its finger on the pulse of social conditions of England in the early 1990s, and was also in many ways ahead of its time in the themes it addresses. Confronting issues of race and class conflict in England, the novel portrays a complex interface between metropole and former colony, subverting the idea of London as a civilized metropolitan “centre”. The denouement of this novel, with the seeming deus ex machina of Chanelle’s confession and the final twist of Capper’s realization that Anthony was protecting Mike’s memory by standing trial, provides a false sense of closure. The reader cannot really be happy about Anthony’s release when we learn of the horrific death of Chanelle’s son, and given Capper’s and Geraldine’s opinion of Mike and Anthony’s friendship, the novel’s last line “That’s how it is with friends: you don’t dishonour their memory” (218) is certainly not unironic. In Chanelle’s confession Cartwright consciously uses a well-worn literary technique, namely, the sudden plot twist that resolves the novel’s problems, but the novel prevents closure through irony and meta-commentary. Thus, while In Every Face I Meet provides the social commentary that its Blakeian title promises, it does so in an open-ended and metafictional manner that exposes any single truth as partial, and that also questions reducing the meaning of a literary text to a political or social manifesto.