"Rainbow Milk" by Paul Mendez

Shortlisted for the 2021 debut fiction prize at the British Book Awards.

At the age of nineteen, Jesse, a young black man from Dudley in the UK, is disfellowshipped from the Jehovah's Witnesses for being gay. He moves to London and becomes a drug-fuelled rent boy. This book chronicles his experiences. He is befriended by a supportive network of gay men and women, and people of colour, all struggling against a world they see as controlled by straight white males. 

I presume that this novel is largely autobiographical. This raises a problem for a critic. My comments are not meant to undervalue in any way the reality of the lived-in experiences described. The authenticity of the narrative was often overwhelming. But it seemed to be more of a memoir than a novel.

The main character is defined mostly by his opposition to his context. He is bitter and resentful about his birth mother and white stepfather; he is very angry about the Jehovah's Witnesses and their version of God. He works as a waiter at a posh London restaurant and sees almost all of the diners as spoilt and self-centred; he feels they look down on him or see him as a threat (There are several wonderful pages of hugely realistic dialogue presented as snippets overheard by an overworked waiter which are the best in the book). His customers as a rent boy divide into those who are kind and those who are exploitative. He is angry and bitter, particularly against  white men (the irony being that he is sexually attracted "to lick, suck and fuck white male ass" ). Almost the only positive side to his character is his deep love of and knowledge of music. Unfortunately, since one of my many failings is that I am more or less totally ignorant of any music post-1970, I was unable to appreciate the pages and pages of musical hagiography.

Other characters seemed stereotypical. The gay white poet, published by a gay white contemporary from Cambridge who was easily monied, descending from landed gentry, the pair of them part of the "horrible, toxic, racist, complacent, inbred, white supremacist homosexual world of high poetry" (Brixton, Ch 4) While the author's past is represented by the industrial proletariat, his present and future are worlds where there are few shop assistants or warehouse workers or lorry drivers, or even research scientists and engineers; everyone he knows now is creative or academic. 

The author is very good at capturing the speech patterns of different dialects but too many of the dialogues are dominated by speeches in which the characters represent points of view as if this novel is a sociological essay. These moments undermine the authentic feel of the rest of the novel. Perhaps in the author's world people really do speak so coherently but not in mine.

I felt too often I was being preached at, rather than being captivated by the story.

Selected quotes:

• "I don’t know this about England when I did back in Jamaica, but they have this whole spread, thick like lard pon bread, of people who can’t read, can’t talk good, scratch themselves up like dog with flea, don’t understand a thing about life outside their own head, but think they can call me nigger, darkie, coon, gorilla, tell me to go back to my own country where I belong and stop steal their sunlight – I don’t have enough back in the jungle?" (Swan Village July 20, 1959)
• ‘I don’t want to get better at suffering, Norman. I want to be happy."  (Swan Village July 20, 1959)
• "I don’t like this world. I can’t go to church when God make me humiliate so"  (Swan Village July 20, 1959)
• "Two evangelists, both mic’ed up, competed with each other over dub basslines at the station’s mouth." (Great Bridge August 2, 2002, Ch 1)
• "Johnny was scrubbing his cup as if an alien’s tongue had rimmed it" (Great Bridge September 19, 2001 Ch 4)
• "He recognised that if he was a tall, blond white boy, everything would have been different." (Great Bridge September 19, 2001 Ch 4)
• "He had thought of himself as a blond white boy all his life. He’d never thought of himself as a black boy, or compared himself to other black people." (Great Bridge September 19, 2001 Ch 4)
• "He knew he would have to spend the rest of his life convincing people that he wasn’t too black." (Great Bridge September 19, 2001 Ch 4)
• "‘So you’m part o’ the furniture, then?’ ‘The squashy old sofa. Or the vintage slot machine, take your pick,’" (Earl's Court, May 4, 2002 Ch 1)
• "Jesse realised he’d spent much of his life learning what it was to be a black man from white men. You’re like a black boy trying to be a white boy trying to be a black boy." (Earl's Court, May 4, 2002 Ch 2)
• "The bright morning, even if it wasn’t sunny, pursued him like paparazzi." (Earl's Court, May 4, 2002 Ch 3)
• "Graham wasn’t even really a football fan anyway, which put him in a minority of one among the Brothers of the congregation, who, even while they quoted scriptures warning against idolatry, were openly worshipful of the Baggies’ Number 9." (Earl's Court, May 4, 2002 Ch 3)
• "His smile had the capacity to convey every intention and emotion, and had faded slightly, transmitting concern." (Bruce Grove, December 25, 2002, Ch1)
• "He had never prayed, anyway, not really. He said words in his head but could not believe he was speaking to a real being, who was actively listening. As far as he was concerned, a conversation had to be between at least two voices; otherwise he was talking to himself, and he was not mad." (Bruce Grove, December 25, 2002, Ch1)
• "He’d found someone who could love him, whom he’d be willingly led by if he was blind." (Bruce Grove, December 25, 2002, Ch4)

A fascinating, bitter, portrayal of a segment of contemporary London life. August 2021

At one stage Mendez references, as novels portraying black life in England in the middle to later part of the twentieth century, Small Island by Andrea Levy and The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon. Both these work better as novels. He also references the unutterably superb Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin, which is about a young man whose upbringing conflicts with his homosexual desires. 

Autobiographes of rent boys reviewed in this blog include:

• Making Beds in Brothels by Adam Brock
• Street Kid: A Rent Boy's Tale by Ned Williams

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Blank Slate" by Steven Pinker

I don't re read many books but The Blank Slate is so important that I had to read it again after several years.

Steven Pinker, who wrote the phenomenal The Better Angels of Our Nature previously wrote this even better book. In it, he seeks to demolish three sacred cows:
The Blank Slate which holds that our genes have no part in our personalities and it is our environment that makes us who we are. It is the received wisdom of the self-help guru: you can be whoever you want to be, and the mantra of the left. Unfortunately the scientific evidence suggests it is not true.
The Ghost in the Machine which suggests that we have a soul, or a personality, or a consciousness that is somehow separate from our biological physicality. "'John's body' ... presupposes an owner, John, that is somehow separate." (p 10)
The Noble Savage which suggests that we were perfect and innocent before we were expelled from the Garden and that we need to get back to the perfect state of nature.

He doesn't spend a lot of time on the latter two but he uses twin studies and logic to demolish the Blank Slate.  "The mind cannot be a blank slate, because blank slates don't do anything. ... Something has to see a world of objects rather than a kaleidoscope of shimmering pixels." (p 34). It is clear that genes affect how animals behave, why on earth should we believe that the sole influence on human behaviour is 'culture' (which in any case has many remarkable similarities across the world)? "The evidence is overwhelming that every aspect of our mental lives depends entirely on physiological events in the tissues of our brain." (p 41) eg (p 42):

• Electrical stimulation of brain tissue causes lifelike experiences
• Brain damage causes loss of some function
• Brain death = death

There are clearly things about us that are hard-wired; despite many attempts there is no evidence that any gay man has ever been 'cured' of his homosexuality. (p 94)

This leaves a problem. "If the slate of a newborn is not blank, different babies could have different things inscribed on their slates. Individual sexes, classes, or races might differ innately in their talents, abilities, interests, and inclinations ... if groups of people are biologically different, it could be rational to discriminate against the members of some of the groups ... the differences cannot be blamed on discrimination, and that makes it easier to blame the victim and tolerate inequality." Furthermore, eugenics becomes defensible (p 141)

Pinker describes this as the "the 'naturalistic fallacy': the belief that what happens in nature is good." (p 150). He thinks it is dangerous to base a moral code on a scientific fact which may turn out to be incorrect (as Pinker has, with overwhelming evidence, shown that it is). "We should not concede ... that if people do turn out to be different then discrimination, oppression, or genocide would be OK after all" (p 141) he suggests. "The case against bigotry ... is a moral stance that condemns judging an individual according to the average traits of certain groups." (p 145) "All humans can be assumed to have certain traits in common. No one likes being enslaved. No one likes being humiliated. No one likes being treated unfairly." (p 145) "Social Darwinism: the belief that the rich and the poor deserve their status" (p 149) is wrong.

Does this mean that we have no free will, no personal responsibility? Don't blame me, blame my genes (p 176) Again, he thinks it need not. He points out that Daniel Dennett (who wrote the brilliant Consciousness Explained) says that a truly free will would not be deterred by punishment, shame, guilt etc (p 177); in any case the environmentalists might have it that we can evade personal responsibility by blaming our mothers (or our cultures; is the prevalence of female genital mutilation in some cultures morally defensible?). Pinker believes that morality has the practical effect of helping selfish individuals get along in society: from reasons of reciprocity "it pays to insist on a moral code, even if the price is adhering to it oneself." (p 187) In any case, he believes that some aspect of morality, such as fairness, are part of our genetic inheritance. "If we are so constituted that we cannot help but think in moral terms ... then morality is real for us as if it were decreed by the Almighty or written into the cosmos. And so it is with other human values like love, truth, and beauty." (p 193)

This is a truly important book, liberating moral philosophy from a number of blind alleys and allowing a twenty-first century ethical code to emerge.

Not only that, but it is also very well-written and extremely readable. 

May 2016; 434 pages