Books: In the Republic of Other England

In a beat-up Mini Metro Nik Cohn went in search of England's outcasts. Matthew Parris enjoys a grand tour of the fringes

`We're not so much Down and Out in Paris and London, more fucked up in Liskeard and Saltash," a New Age traveller called Gilles tells Nik Cohn, in a site at Fraggle Rock just off the A38 in Cornwall. The remark could serve as mission statement for much of Mr Cohn's book. He has sought out those who might by the respectable be dismissed as worthless; he succeeds. But he has sought too, I think, to find them separable and instructive. Does he succeed? Yes and no.

John Major once mentioned a particular passage by Dickens about trapeze artists and circus folk, which for any reviewer of Nik Cohn's book, seemed worth tracking down. I have found it. It is near the beginning of Hard Times:

"They all assumed to be mighty rakish and knowing, they were not very tidy in their private dresses, they were not at all orderly in their domestic arrangements, and the combined literature of the whole company would have produced but a poor letter on any subject. Yet there was a remarkable gentleness and childishness about these people. A special inaptitude for any kind of sharp practice, and an untiring readiness to help and pity one another, deserving, often of as much respect, and always of as much generous construction, as the everyday virtues of any class of people in the world."

Beautifully expressed, with a measure of truth and a dash of sentimentality, Dickens here describes some of the types whom Nik Cohn encounters too in his roundup of the rootless, the exiled and the dispossessed. Yes We Have No - a silly title to a serious and sometimes moving book - is a grand tour of the fringes of functioning society in England. On his tour Nik and his wild companion Mary meet many it is possible to admire, many more about whom it is possible to be a touch sentimental, and some of whom he frankly despairs. Quite a few are pretty funny, though probably not to themselves or each other. Cohn is not quite sure whether he wants them to be funny to his readers, for he feels, I think, painfully ambivalent.

Commandeering a beat-up Mini Metro which he and Mary christen Teal Wheels, the pair make a summer tour of almost everything you could not call mainstream England. Following up leads, pursuing personal introductions and seeking out the living legends of the slums and subways Cohn has assembled what is really a collection of essays about outcasts, eccentrics and the underclass. "Outlaws and insurgents, rampaging natives and incomers, clubbers, visionaries, street-fighters, born-agains, fetishists, new age travellers, anarchists, graffiti artists, rastas and Ordinists, bikers, squatters, Elvis impersonators, faith healers - even the Antichrist" says the blurb: and that just about sums it up. A ragbag, but what rich and colourful rags!

The journey flashes back to, and fitfully retraces Cohn's own boyhood and personal history. This is done sparely, with style ("didn't so much drop out of school as plummet") and without self-indulgence; and it does help illuminate. At his best he has what Rian Malan has - an unpitying sympathy with the world and a nicely intimate way of expressing it. He is direct and tersely funny ("I notice that Pride is mentioned freely on the builders' placards: never a good sign").

Nor does Cohn care to be fooled: "We're introduced [to Manuela from Manchester] through a mutual friend who describes her as a diva. `She'll tell you she's Colombian and pisses Dom Perignon,' he tells me. `But I remember when she was Maxine from Bolton and she was on the gin and orange.'"

Unlike so many authors he has a good ear for the way people really speak and a sharp, almost slick eye for the telling phrase, his own and others': "Fat as butter darling. If you'd spread me on Mother's Pride you could feed a regiment," says his transvestite friend, Grace. And Cohn's own imagination arrests and amuses the reader. "The slithering and flopping of breasts," he says of a bare- bottomed bar in Manchester, "carries me back to the piers at Grimsby, when the herring catch comes in."

Some of his characters come alive. One sketch in particular, that of Peter Vincent the elderly busker ("Here lies Peter Vincent - Finally Moved On") is a masterpiece of good writing, human sympathy and fine, understated characterisation. I would include these four pages in any anthology of 20th-century profile-writing. Sometimes though, when overwrought, he overwrites, working himself into a lather of introspection and wild imaginings. Like D H Lawrence, Nik Cohn writes best low-key and at his least self-conscious; quiet observation, not overlaid with meaning, can mean the most. Of this there is much in the book.

I especially find his neutral and meticulous portrayal of the kind of black man whom we might carelessly call a coxcomb, revealingly honest. He makes one such, Laurence in Kings Cross, would-be pornographer and former pimp, lovable: "`Talent management,' he replies, silky smooth, `I am a facilitator.'" Affectionately teasing his subjects, as Dickens does, he achieves more for them than hero-worship or vilification ever could.

Taken on this level the book not only justifies but distinguishes itself. Cohn has worked hard. Professionally speaking, I admire the effort and energy he has invested in what might have been accomplished in a more sketchy way, but which would have lacked integrity. His writing has palpable integrity. I am engaged, though not consistently, by his cast of characters; often I'm moved; once in a while I'm utterly absorbed. Only one thing is missing: an enterprise of this size would have deserved (and still deserves - fast, while they are alive) a set of impressionistic pencil portraits, sketched with a light touch. Otherwise the book is complete.

But Cohn aims to do more than produce, as he has, the definitive Dropouts of Late Twentieth Century England. He wants to link his subjects in some way; to delineate something not a million miles from Ken Livingstone's rainbow coalition of the rejected; to find their common citizenship in a republic of his own devising: the Republic of Other England.

In this he has a problem cruelly expressed in a remark he quotes about Hackney: "Diversity? It's just a fancy way of saying there's more ways to fuck up." Many of Cohn's subjects hate, or would hate, each other. Some prey off each other. Some are more at threat from each other than any of them are from respectable England. Cohn is neither squeamish nor dishonest about his little tribe and accepts, I think, that they are not in fact a tribe at all. But there is one notable gap in this collection of misfits: he has hardly tackled the seriously nasty. Almost all, in their often roguish way, can be loved. No racist skinhead, no evident child molester, no mugger of old ladies, nobody who sells drugs to children: we are left with a gallery of English eccentrics, failures, alcoholics, kinks, drug-abusers and religious nuts. They are described with kindness but unsparing honesty, and almost (but never quite) mocked - Nik is afflicted with that especially Jewish contradiction of a good heart and a prosecuting intellect. The richness, the unexpected generosities of their lives will surprise you.

But their persistence and profusion amid the embarrassed, look-away Middle England which at the outset of his book Cohn sets up as the other to which his cast are Other, argue the contrary proposition from his own. England - the whole of England - is quite a cheeky, mongrely, rascally place, and a good habitat for weirdos. These people are not really Other; they are the edge, and for every edge there is a centre, and of course it's different, very different, from the edge; but in it you will find the veins which trace to the edge, and at the edge you will find the tracers pointing back to the centre. There is, in the end, no autonomous republic, only one England, this one, and we're all in it.