Fast By The Horns (2024)

Why this one?

This was an ARC from Headline/Wildfire via Netgalley (many thanks!) - I chose this one because I’ve had McKenzie’s much-lauded debut sat on my TBR pile for ages and somehow inexplicably not got around to reading it. Possibly a weird reason?

Moses McKenzie (1998- ; active 2019-) is of Caribbean descent and grew up in Bristol. His first novel, An Olive Grove in Ends, was completed when he was just 21. It was listed as a Guardian novel of the year in 2022 and shortlisted for the Writers' Guild Best First Novel Award. He won the Soho House Breakthrough Writer Award in the same year, and in 2023 the prestigious Hawthornden Prize (awarded since 1919 for "imaginative literature" and won by everyone from Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene to Hilary Mantel and Ali Smith). Fire By The Horns is his second novel, and he is already working on his third, alongside a television adaptation of his debut.

Thoughts, etc.

Fast By The Horns is set in the Bristol neighbourhood of St. Pauls in 1980. It focuses on Jabari, the 14-year-old only son of the Rasafarian community leader Ras Levi. He exists in a clearly very close-knit community, but one that is constantly beaten down by corrupt policing and lack of council investment. Ras Levi and his fellow Rastafarians in the community, including of course Jabari, dream of repatriation to the Ethiopian motherland, though others in the community mock their ambitions and urge them to engage with the political realities of life in the UK. Amidst the violence and daily struggles with police brutality, Jabari's encounter with a young girl formerly from St. Pauls, who we find has been placed in the care of a white family in a neighbouring affluent area, provides a tender and emotional thread at the centre of the novel.

It's a book with a lot to recommend it. Foremost is its vividly evoked sense of place and time. We're thrown headlong into a world with its own codes and language, with the vast majority of the novel written in Rastafarian patois. It takes a bit of time to adjust to, but ultimately makes for an incredibly immersive reading experience. Within the community there's a richly rendered web of complex relationships, typically blending both a strong sense of community support with an exploration of the conflicts that exist despite this, both within families and between the different elements of the community.

Alongside Jabari and his father's Rastafarian community, we encounter a group of feminist activists who run a local community centre and contain within their ranks those seeking to affect change by potentially violent protest; and elsewhere within the community we find youths engaging with familiar 'melting pot' ska/two-tone subcultures of the era (very familiar to this white British reader, but viewed with a special kind of disdain by Jabari).

There are some shocking, if sadly unsurprising, moments dotted through the book, the recurring theme being the inevitability of victimisation, targeting and straight-up abuse at the hands of the police, who are depicted without exception as cackling and heartless grotesques. The shock here is less the reality of their racist actions, and more the sadness of the way the St Pauls residents have to submit to this relentless humiliation (as well as the anger, of course, in the knowledge that this sort of thing continues relatively undiminished some forty years later). The treatment of Ras Levi at the police's hands is, however, on another level and a hugely powerful depiction of a brazen act of brutal humiliation that stands out even in a novel filled with similar tragedies.

There's also a lot of love and tenderness on display in here too, in the community bonds, in the relationship between Jabari and his friend Makeda, and in their determination to help the young girl. It's a novel in which hope plays a big role, albeit a hope that is often frustrated and occasionally brutally crushed. As a result it's also a novel full of righteous anger, which carries you along, reading in a kind of rage and despair. It's a complex book with no obvious solutions or conclusions to its ongoing issues, but with a huge amount to chew on.

Score

8.5

This is a compelling, exciting work by a young author who is already making serious waves and likely to play a serious role in British literature in the years to come. He's already expressed determination to be seen alongside 'the greats' (for him, that's the likes of James Baldwin and Maya Angelou) and at the moment anything seems possible for McKenzie.

Now, I really need to finally get around to reading An Olive Grove in Ends…

Next up

A few more upcoming releases, I think.