Who They Was

From jounwin.co.uk

"Gabriel Krauze grew up in London in a Polish family and was drawn to a life of crime and gangs from an early age. Now in his thirties he has left that world behind and is recapturing his life through writing. He has published short stories in Vice. Who They Was is his first novel."

Then from Vice as a preface to one of those short stories:

"Gabriel Krauze is a writer from South Kilburn, London, who has pioneered his own 'estate noir' genre – literary non-fiction, real events told in his own inimitable style."

Then from the Author’s Note at the end of the book:

"Who They Was is based on a specific period in my life. It’s about a world many people can only imagine from what they see in the news and on TV. It’s a world full of untold stories. This one has never been told because it is my story."

Told almost entirely in London slang and set in a very real London (you can follow the characters around on Google maps, if you want), this is a book that exposes a culture and lifestyle of which I know next to nothing. Or, in fact, nothing. I have lived my life in the English countryside, only occasionally visiting a city and just sometimes that city is London. Here, Krauze relates a period in his life lived in North London. As he says later in the author’s note, "everything in this book, in this story, was experienced in one way or another - otherwise I wouldn’t be able to tell it"

It’s hard to write about this book because there is a constant awareness that you are not discussing a fictional character: anything you say is making reference to a real person who experienced the events described in the book. It is a book that lives on the edge and often strays across a boundary into violence. There’s a sense of tension in the narrator’s life: he is very intelligent, working towards a university degree and highly regarded by his tutors, but it takes very little to provoke him and cause him to lose control. Through a lot of the story there is a sense of two different destinies pulling at Krauze, one calling him “up” to education and all that offers, and one calling him “down” to crime and drugs.

"It’s mad how I know this world of wickedness and doing mad tings that earn respect, and that same time I know a world of going to uni and trying to write a 3000-word essay on The Birth of Tragedy, and I also know the world that’s all about get up, go to work, go on holiday, buy this, buy that, tick this box, tick that box, box, tick, box tick, box tick. But the people in that uni world and in the box-ticking world, don’t know this one I’m in right now."

The further you get into the book, the more you begin to somehow relate to Krauze: you simultaneously understand what makes him react how he does and hope that he can fulfil his potential and somehow "save" himself. And that surprised me, because the life he describes is so completely different from the life I have lived.

The language in the book takes some getting used to. I learned a lot of new words as I read. The good news is that you can work out what most of the London slang words mean from their context. There are also lots of webpages you can turn to that will help you if you get stuck, although most of these tend to skip over the words that describe drugs, violence and sex and so are not a lot of help. But Krauze is also a poet at heart and there are beautiful sentences that suddenly leap out of page, especially when taken in the context of the gang culture that is being described.

So, you might read:

"Taz was one of them brers that when you walk through the ends with him he’d constantly be stopping to say wagwan to someone, olders hailing him up, next man on the block calling out yo Taz wa’um, and he’d raise a fist as he passed by and shout yes g mi deya."

And then suddenly

"Grey clouds like heavy sponges tug on the sky’s skin"

Or

"Black like a bee’s tongue with eyes like some far corner of space where even stars get lost."

Or

"… for the first time that night I can see stars stinging the petrol black sky"

All this makes for a very powerful reading experience that shows a whole new world that very few readers, I imagine, will have experienced for themselves. As the narrator says:

"It’s mad how you can live in a city and never see any of this. Or you just see faint smudges of it every now and again around the edges of your existence but even then you don’t fully believe in it, because even though we live in the same city, where I’m from and where you’re from could be two totally separate worlds."

Perhaps best described as a work of autofiction, Gabriel Krauze recounts his own story and takes you into a world that is much discussed and feared, but is little understood.

A pulsating, breathtaking read from start to finish, this book acts like a portal into a parallel universe.

Now in his thirties, Krauze looks back at his life of violent crime and tries increasingly as time goes on, to make sense of it.

Here, he makes the back streets and estates of North West London come alive. It is a wonderful piece of descriptive writing where taking a wrong turn into an adjacent street may well put your life in danger.

The linguistic energy is constant.

The book abounds with violence, drungs and misogyny, but the story is in some respects more complicated than it would at first appear.
Firstly Krauze is white, secondly he avoids becoming involved in gangs with their internecine turf disputes, for example South Kilburn against Kensal Rise and thirdly, he is privately educated and subsequently balances his life of crime with his university studies.

For a general reader like myself, the slang initially was a bit confusing, but like reading a 17th century text you quickly get used to it, and by the end you do not notice.

Apart from its classification as "Estate Noir" I would say it is also at heart a phychogeographical work.
I would recommend that you read this along with an A to Z map for there is much geographical detail with constant movement around the streets that can be followed.

Hopefully this work will be followed by others and is strongly recommended.

An autobiographical novel highlights the hidden war zones of London written almost entirely London-slang. From the beginning we are thrown into a world of robbery, drugs, violence and the struggle to survive in a North London.
30 year-old Krauze looks back on his life and tries to make sense of it.
The writing is a brilliant piece of energetic descriptive writing.