September 2026 is ENGLAND AS IT WAS Month at the PorPor Books Blog
Book Review: 'Yes We Have No', by Nick Cohn
'Yes We Have No: Adventures in Other England' first was published in the U.K. in 1999. This U.S. edition (357 pp.) was issued by Vintage Books in 2000.
After posting about 'Rock Dreams', I was curious about Cohn's other works, and selected this book for investigating. It's a collection of essays, some of which Cohn published in the Sunday Times, the Guardian, and other UK media, in the late 1990s. The essays are dedicated to what Cohn refers to as the 'other England', or the 'Republic', and it basically means the land of the Lumpen Proletariat, the lost, and the dispossessed.
Mindful that Cohn is a documented bullshitter, I read each essay with a skeptical frame of mind. Cohn coyly avoids assigning any identifiers to his writings: no dates (I infer the book's chronology starts in June, 1998, as Cohn references a mass drunk / riot in London following England's tie with Argentina in the World Cup) and no indication that the names given in the book are pseudonyms or not.
American readers will need to make allowances for impenetrable references to U.K. pop culture:
Dettol. Mr. Kipling cakes display. The 'Bleak House' in the Dingle (someplace in Liverpool ?). 'The Road to Wigan Pier' (a novel). Marzine. Bumpf. Blagging. Top Shop tracksuits. Chares. Morris Cerullo. The 1985 Peace Convoy at Shipton Billinger (there was a riot, evidently). Hooray Henrys, with their beepers and beamers.
While the book starts in King's Cross in London, Cohn soon makes the acquaintance of a rather scattered young woman named Mary Carson, and the two of them go on a lengthy road trip to examine the places and people residing in Albion's less glamorous landscapes. Much of the travelogue is devoted to the North Country, and its vistas of industrial decay lying side-by-side with desperate attempts at modernization and economic revival. It's a sort of living testament to Sting's album The Soul Cages:
The longer we stay in Newcastle, the worse we're flummoxed by its contradictions. We stroll the city centre, handsome as ever. The smooth facades of Granger and Grey Streets, sand-blasted, are the color of clotted cream on sunlit mornings, a faint rosy pink at dusk. Their glassed arcades are full of high-priced boutiques and designer kitsch. Then we cruise the Scotswood Road, a mile away. The sidestreets are rubbish dumps, piled with scrap metal and rotting floorboards. Those terraced houses that aren't bricked up have parts of their roofs missing, collapsing walls, and steel cages round the letter boxes, to guard against explosives.
In North Shields, I take a walk round Meadowell Estate with a sixteen-year-old called Lee. There were riots here, a few years back. I ask Lee what caused them. 'Shite life,' he says.
In seeking out those bound to the louche life, Cohn interviews street thugs, alienated Pakis, addled pensioners, sex workers, drug addicts and alcoholics, and honest workmen befuddled by the disintegration of the society they grew up in. Some of the these individuals have what Cohn politely describes as 'somewhat tangled' histories.........
The final part of 'Yes We Have No' appropriately deals with the coming Millennium, which in the U.K. (as elsewhere in Western civilization) sparked a fervid revival in all manner of things religious. An encounter with a middle-aged man named Terry Hutcher, who clings desperately to the hope offered by evangelical Christianity, is one of the book's more poignant chapters:
His home is in Shepherd's Bush, on an estate near White City. These names, in the context, take on a missionary ring, but the council flats where he and his wife Deanna live prove less than blessed. Used condoms litter the walkways; 'Smack My Bitch Up' snarls from an unseen ghetto-blaster. 'Welcome to the wilderness,' Ted says wryly, and ushers me indoors. A series of bolts and chains are shot home behind me. 'Deanna has baked a sponge,' I'm told.
'It's all God's power, not mine,' says Ted modestly......He works at the same Oxford Street boutique as when they first got married, at virtually the same wage level, with no real hope of promotion. 'I'm totally dead-ended,' he says......Only Christ's love buoys him up.
'Yes We Have No' is a very readable book; Cohn uses a crisp, clean diction, keeps his interior monologues to the point, and has an eye for the incongruous and the transgressive.
I finished the book thinking that the Thirdworldization of the U.K. that Cohn (somewhat diffidently) portrays in the book was, as of the late 1990s, something peculiar to Western Europe. But now I realize that, while at the time an American like me could read Cohn's musing and sigh with relief: it can't happen here, that no longer is true.
In 2026, large tracts of America, such as New York City, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Seattle, etc. are no different from what was taking place in Bradford, Kentish Town, Rochdale, Liverpool in 1998. If there is a message from 'Yes We Have No', it is a sobering one: what seemed dire in 1998, actually was better than what we see in 2026.......
1 comment:
You might actually like The Road to Wigan Pier, which is journalism, not a novel--Orwell is a very good writer with a fun, clever style. The first part of The Road to Wigan Pier is about Orwell's three months spent among working class people in Northern England, and the second half of the book is Orwell musing on why socialism has not yet won over a majority of people (this is a 1937 book). Orwell's theories on why so many people find socialism repulsive are amusing. Whether or not you believe Orwell's reportage in the first half, and whether or not you think socialism a good idea, the book is a brisk enjoyable read, and quite memorable.
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