With its Indian restaurants, market stalls, bagel shops and louche charm, London’s Brick Lane had many attractions in the late 1970s and early 80s, but was disfigured each Sunday by the menacing presence of National Front supporters selling their odious newspaper. As the son of West Indians, I despised and feared the NF, but suspected their vitriolic anti-immigrant stance was harboured quietly by many Britons, including politicians and police officers.
This ugly period of recent British history, the focus of Joe Thomas’s novel White Riot, was characterised by opposing sentiments: growing nativism coupled with free-market Thatcherism, versus race and working‑class allyship. The title is taken from the Clash’s first single, which Joe Strummer described as a call to arms for white youth to resist state-sanctioned poverty and over-policing, in the same way as their Black compatriots.
Thomas’s fiction draws on archive material, testimonies and newspaper reports from 1978-83, in particular the events surrounding the unsolved killings of two men of colour in east London. Through the stories of Altab Ali, who was stabbed to death in Whitechapel, and Colin Roach, who allegedly shot himself in Stoke Newington police station, White Riot unfolds as a propulsive crime novel. Thomas ably captures local community anger, interracial tensions and especially the foreboding atmosphere around anti-fascist marches that led to violent clashes with NF skinheads and thuggish Special Patrol Group police. In the melee, there’s the “thump of bats on slabs of meat, the crunch of deadened limb, of nose and cheek, and broken glass”.
The novel includes several sketches of real-life characters in fictionalised settings. There’s an admiring portrayal of Paul Weller, representing the socially conscious musicians who come together in the Rock Against Racism movement. Greater attention is given to Margaret Thatcher, plotting how best to exploit the white population’s racial anxiety and, in quirkily comic dialogue with her husband Denis, wondering whether to accept the makeover designed by the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi who advise that she lose weight through a diet of eggs. Denis would rather his wife was “plump and wind-free”.
Overall, the narrative is framed by the parallel and intersecting storylines of a conscientious undercover detective, Patrick, and Suzi, a campaigning photojournalist, determined to expose the cover-up of Roach’s death. Like almost all the characters’ exchanges, their conversations allow for only glancing moments of reflection. A jaunty, knockabout, cops-and-robbers street vernacular sometimes jars with the reported words of real people, which are more in keeping with a serious social history book than a crime novel.
Accounts of town hall discussions about, for instance, defunding the police, land heavily on the page. Illustration of the prejudiced mindset of police officers is confined to historical quotes such as that from Les Curtis, chairman of the Police Federation, who sees no harm in police officers’ use of racially charged epithets.
Ultimately, White Riot creaks under the challenge of integrating fact and fiction. Perhaps it’s asking too much of the form, but for a crime novel that is also cast as a critique of the silencing of the lived experiences of those at the blunt and brutal end of police and racist violence, the characters of south Asian and Caribbean descent are thinly drawn.
I willed it to be otherwise. For this ambitious work on a big canvas is an admirable attempt at portraying a fraught and fracturing nation. But it’s painted with broad brushstrokes, and it’s a little patchy; it could have done with another coat.
• White Riot is published by Arcadia (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
