Yes We Have No

From Barnes & Noble

In the two decades before he embarked on the journey that was to become Yes We Have No, writer Nik Cohn lived quietly in an isolated village an hour or so outside of London, where the biggest news of the year was a neighbor's dead horse or barrel of sour ale. Then modern life began to creep into Hertfordshire, the place Cohn calls "the land that time forgot." When yuppies bought the house next door and the local pub began catering to tourists, he figured it was high time to catch up on the England he'd been missing for the past 20 years. He decided to retrace the steps of his earlier journeys, and then set out into uncharted territory after he'd covered the familiar ground.

Bizarre characters cross Cohn's path in rapid succession. As soon as he arrives in London, he meets up with a West Indian pimp named Laurence, who sneers, "Welcome to the republic!" He is referring to today's England, a place separate from the old Anglo ways and populated by Africans, Arabs, Asians, and Eastern Europeans, among others. This "global kaleidoscope" of cultures has its own history apart from the queen's lineage -- stories dictated by "people who live in England, but not by Englishness."

Yes We Have No is a cheery deconstruction of gray English stereotypes -- forget the royal family or the "quiet desperation" that Brit rockers Pink Floyd decried. This is a collection of the wild and the absurd, of the underbelly of society and over-the-top characters. Cohn searches out the stories of rabid soccer fans, earnest karaoke enthusiasts, prostitutes, hippies, faith healers, transvestites, Rastafarians, a Chinese Elvis impersonator, and a gent who claims to be the Antichrist. By eliciting their tragedies, emotions, and master plans, Cohn takes away the stiff upper lip of English society and replaces it with something raunchier, yet more humane.

Cohn's partner-in-crime in his search for "the republic" is a gamine, Irish-born researcher named Mary. Stomping through Robin Hood's Sherwood Forest in purple Doc Martens and screeching down country roads in a rented jalopy nicknamed "Teal Wheels," Mary is the colorful muse for Cohn's precise observations. Without her connections to the club and street scenes, Cohn might have been just another middle-aged author looking for a scoop, but Mary's presence allows him through the doors of wary political activists and shy techno disc jockeys. It's also Mary's presence that turns the key on many a tight-lipped interviewee, and the reader can appreciate her determined enthusiasm. Together, Cohn and Mary speed from cities to squatters' towns, hippie gatherings to raves, giving nearly everyone they meet the opportunity to talk.

Not all of the stories in Yes We Have No draw a chuckle, as do Jess the Dominatrix's bad luck in love or Paul "Elvis" Chan's rhinestone jumpsuit. Cohn tackles the poverty of economically busted cities like Liverpool, Newcastle, and smaller mining towns -- places that once bustled with commerce and culture and now lay as wasted as "bomb sites," with no money for needed repairs. Cohn refuses to gloss over the roughness of it, or his own shock over how quickly things seemed to change. He remembers Liverpool as "an imperial city" when he first arrived in 1965; now it seems "just a shell." The site of riots in 1981 and constant skirmishes between drug lords and gangs, Liverpool is a place whose humanity is captured through the violent frustration of the people who live there.

When Cohn first set out from his little village, his personal prognosis was that England seemed a violent mosh pit teetering on the edge of anarchy. Instead he found a complex web of wanderers and poets, some violent, most not, many of whom have rejected convention and opted for a peculiar kind of freedom. Yes, they have no bananas, and many of them are quite happy about it.

Through the breakneck travels of Cohn and Mary, a fascinating impression of modern England emerges, one the reader surely has never encountered in such depth. This reviewer recommends keeping a map of England handy while reading Yes We Have No, just to be able to keep up the pace.

—Jessica Leigh Lebos

Jessica Leigh Lebos is a freelance writer and armchair Anglophile living in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Stephanie Zacharek

I once had a teacher who'd written a book called See Europe Next Time You Go There. I never got a chance to read it, but I always thought its title spoke beautifully for itself. It's so easy to visit a place (a continent, a country, a city, a village), to seek out every discernible high point it has to offer, and yet to completely miss it. Maybe that's what accounts for the vaguely melancholy feelings many of us have after even a wonderful vacation -- that somehow none of it seemed real, as if aside from a few good meals and the occasional moment of hyper-clarity, we were really just engaged in a kind of half-aware sleepwalking.

With Yes We Have No, novelist and cultural critic Nik Cohn isn't chronicling a vacation to England; he lives both there and in the United States. Born in London but raised in Ireland, Cohn returned to England in his mid-teens, only to find that the country, long established and secure in its refinement, wanted little to do with him. And then, suddenly, in the early '60s, when "rebels and misfits became fashionable," Cohn rode the wave and published his first novel. He had little to do with mainstream England, he admits, until he started to notice, sometime in the '90s, how much life had changed in Hertfordshire, where he'd owned a house for years. He'd heard the reports that the old England was dead or dying, that people were struggling for survival, that the certainty and comfort of "the English way of life" could no longer be relied upon. And so, feeling suddenly restless, he set out to find out what this other England was really like.

He did find a land full of troubles, but he also found a vital population of "outsiders," many more than he had encountered on his earlier travels through the country. Assembled, he writes, they constitute

...a mighty power to me. A whole country within a country, many millions strong. The jobless, the homeless...Miners and dockers and steelworkers who would never work again, and school-leavers who would never work at all... Born-agains, bikers, fetishists, faith healers, visionaries, squatters, druggies, lunatics, and street heroes. Many of them were lost, and many would never be found. But they were full of sap, even so; wild and bursting with the stuff. This other England, unlike the older model, was permanently on heat.

Starting in London and fanning out through Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle and countless pockets in between, Cohn navigates a country that's by and large veiled to the rest of us, and one that even plenty of native Britons are unable, or unwilling, to see. With his pal Mary Carson -- an Irishwoman who's done research on cultural fringe groups, and who also never passes up an opportunity to go clubbing -- he meets an assortment of low-rent gangsters, techno DJs, spiritual wanderers, lost women, buskers, football hooligans and karaoke specialists. Cohn comes around to the obvious conclusion -- that it's people who make places what they are -- in wholly un-obvious, entertaining and deeply moving ways.

Yes We Have No is a bundle of raggedy adventure stories, frayed around the edges. But by its end it ties itself up into a gracious and humane chronicle. It's an underground social history made altogether more rare and precious by the fact that it's written by a red-blooded hipster: Usually only the poseur squares have the audacity to take on projects like these.

Part of what makes Cohn's book work is that he approaches his home country as both an Englishman and an eternal outsider, never forgetting that his circumstances set him far apart from most of the people he meets. (He is a fairly well-known writer, financially comfortable enough to reside in two countries.) When he visits the Yorkshire Mining Museum and gets lowered down a 450-foot shaft into a spanking-clean coal mine, he's filled with momentary self-congratulation: Working the mines might not have been all that bad. Then he shakes himself back to reality by rereading a portion of George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier, which describes the mines as a nightmare of dust, heat and noise -- 400 yards down, not 450 feet. He sums up his own admittedly lame experience baldly: "In other words, I've not been down a mine at all."

Cohn travels to towns where tourism is both the most visible means of support and also a kind of death grip. He chats with a bunch of young stoners in Stratford-upon-Avon:

The bong circulates, and I enquire what life is like here, and one boy tries to tell me. "Shakespeare's from here, you know," he explains earnestly. The town's a museum, all tourists, and nothing left over for people. "What can I tell you?" The boy draws deep, and passes the bong. "It's just a small, shit town."

But Cohn's compassion rests light as gossamer: What always comes through is how much he likes these people, how readily they make him laugh. He's not interested in plucking at their misfortunes as if they were violin strings. And he can never pass up a good joke. He comes upon this scene in Walberswick, an old Suffolk fishing village: "Some kids are playing wanna-be Oasis in the sludge, air-guitaring to 'Wonderwall.' 'I'll be Noel, and you can be the wanker,' one says."

Yes We Have No covers so much territory that it leaves you with the feeling that you'll never be able to see England next time you go there, at least not in the way Cohn does. I hesitate to call Yes We Have No a travel book -- it seems to strain such a concrete category to its breaking point -- but like the best travel books, it does have the power to transport you. Better yet, it's a brilliant, beautiful agitator, vibrant and loud enough to wake the dead -- or even just the sleepwalking. Cohn opens our eyes to this other England, reminding us that it's good to be alive, but it's even better to be awake.
— Salon

Publishers Weekly

England's contemporary bohemians, tramps and even thieves get an exciting, sympathetic set of quick portraits in Cohn's vivid book-length essay. Long known for his writings on early rock and roll, novelist Cohn (Need) travels to urban centers from Brighton to Newcastle and around the countryside in search of "[t]ravellers and techno freaks...bikers, fetishists, faith healers, visionaries, squatters, druggies, lunatics and street heroes." He wrote of a similar excursion to New York City's demimonde in Heart of the World. Cohn discovers an ideal, indefatigable road-trip companion in Mary Carson, for whom "every act is a life-or-death drama." Together they observe and interview London football hooligans; an elegant West Indian modern Falstaff; a penniless woman who roams Bristol obsessively seeking her ex-lover; Cedric Reeve, who sailed to Shanghai in a junk he built himself while suffering from MS; the wonderful transgendered Grace, "the Marlene Dietrich of Cowley"; young runaway Megan, an aspiring "world champion kick boxer"; a priestess of Odin; Surgeon, the hardworking king of Birmingham techno-music; and a few dozen other decidedly individual individuals. Deejay Bobby Friction, the coolest kid in London's all-Asian Hounslow, asks Cohn, "Am I to be eclipsed? Or do I shine?" With appealing descriptions of often appalling conditions, Cohn invokes a left-wing agenda reminiscent of Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier; closer parallels lie in more recent writing about the U.K.'s pre- and post-punk undergrounds. Fans of Iain Sinclair and Neil Gaiman, or even Trainspotting, will find the Derry native's tour of England equally captivating. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Cohn, whose works include novels (Need), assorted nonfiction, and the story that inspired the movie Saturday Night Fever, now turns his attention to modern England. This is not, however, the England of country pubs, quaint villages, and stately mansions but of Karaoke bars, squalid city pubs, urban decay, and unemployment. He travels around the country (and through his past) to introduce us to a packed cast of characters: a Chinese Elvis impersonator, the truck-driving drag queen Grace, boxers, prostitutes, drug dealers and addicts, soccer hooligans, and racists. None of these characters seems uniquely British or original, but Cohn's writing is brisk and vivid, and he has a talent for making even these mostly sad, disappointed, sometimes repellent people come alive. His many references to things English are likely to puzzle all but the most Anglophilic American readers. The book contains strong language. A marginal purchase for large travel collections of public libraries.--Linda M. Kaufmann, Massachusetts Coll. of Liberal Arts Lib., North Adams Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Booknews

Cohn's England is populated by techno-freaks and soccer-obsessives, faith healers, Rastas, Odinists, and even the Antichrist. Cohn and his friend Mary Carson, an unstoppable Irish firebrand, whirl from the changing countryside of Cornwall and East Anglia to the ravaged postindustrial North, and from seaside towns to London netherworlds. Lacks a subject index. 4.5x9<">. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Vanessa V. Friedman

From Fraggle Rock to Brighton, Liverpool to South London, Cohn seeks out the abandoned, the destitute, the men and women who haven't just fallen off the grid, but jumped with eyes and arms wide open. The result is a jazzy non-judgemental song of a book, full of riffs that catch your ear and mind like a piano rag.

Entertainment Weekly

Kirkus Reviews

An exhilaratingly picaresque expedition—encountering innumerable misfits, mutants, and militants—into England's gray, unpleasant land. Veteran rock 'n' roll journalist and lowlife anthropologist Cohn emerges from retirement in an impossibly bucolic, Betjeman-esque village in Hertfordshire to explore the barely United Kingdom's underbelly with the same gusto that he did for Times Square in The Heart of the World (1992). Easy as it is to tear down Tony Blair's "Cool Britannia" or sift the post-Thatcherite wreckage, Cohn's instinct for oddballs and his enthusiasm for the rave generation's youthful energies power this road trip from Cornwall and London to Liverpool and Yorkshire, with detours for anything out of England's ordinary: social workers turned fortune tellers and dominatrices, Hell's Angels in Hackney, karaoke fanatics, graffiti artists, a Church of England exorcist, and more at each stopover. With Cohn accompanied by a fellow Derry-born minute female dynamo of a "researcher" whose motto is "Leap before you look," Yes We Have No travels over the much-changed ground covered by Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier, J.B. Priestley's English Journey, and its sequel by Beryl Bainbridge (with their paperbacks in Cohn's pockets). Cohn has the good listener's ability to get a memorable quote out of everyone, e.g. "You need to jive to thrive," says Laurence, a Jamaican spiv with three A-levels who divides the country into an anarchically multiracial "republic" and the status quo of the "Anglo Club." Detouring from youth-driven culture, Cohn also tracks down last year's rebels, such as a quietly retired Johnny Edgecombe, the Antiguan scam artist whotouched off the Profumo Affair, and miners' union leader Arthur Scargill, still shilling unreconstructed socialism after his union's decimation by Thatcher. Underneath Cohn's attraction to outsiders, however, lurks his Derry childhood's nostalgic, unreturned affection for old England, which gives an elegiac undercurrent. The rave-generation answer to Defoe's Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain.