In this startling debut novel, longlisted for the Women’s prize, a young woman is lured into an underworld of violent gangsters, and communes with her Jamaican ancestors through DJ toasting over dub music. Jacqueline Crooks has crafted a richly textured world, artfully drawing on her youthful experience of raves and gangs in 1970s west London, as well as supernatural beliefs in Obeah (an African diasporic tradition of healing and spell-casting).
The second-generation Caribbean migrants in Fire Rush are habituated to life under surveillance, at risk from the kind of assault that can lead to a police morgue. It’s safer underground, at a London club called The Crypt, home to dancehall dub nights with wardrobe-sized speakers. There Yamaye, a committed reveller, breathes in the ganja clouds and hangs out with her sistren, Rumer and Asase. They groove to lovers rock, resisting the “dry-mouthed suggestions” of hungry men entranced by their bodies “rippling like seagrass”. The Crypt offers Yamaye and her gyals relief from factory work and their tower block homes on the Tombstone Estate, “where grey-white curtains billow like spirits at dark windows and metal coffin lifts shuttle between heaven and hell”.
Fire Rush is a taut insider’s tale of the search for raw pleasure in tough neighbourhoods patrolled by police with “patented power smiles”, and a subterranean ghost story of intergenerational trauma that progresses in three locations, London, Bristol and Jamaica’s interior.
Tombstone’s oppressed youth find their oppositional voice, inflected with Jamaican English, spinning tunes and flinging down lyrics in the male-dominated Crypt. The men have competition in Yamaye, whose musical talent underlines an unspoken truth: “Man preach revolution but woman carry its sound.” Yamaye is also grieving for her mother, who took off for Guyana when she was a child, and is now presumed dead. She’s been raised by Irving, her caustic father, who mostly spared her the rod but whose “belt used to be his tongue”.
Her prospects improve dramatically when she falls for Moose, a dreamy sculptor and cabinet-maker who left the eerie Cockpit Country, Jamaica’s most inhospitable region, for a better life in England. Crooks sensitively portrays the couple’s evolving tenderness; however, it ends abruptly when Moose has a terrifying altercation with the police.
The novel ably conveys Yamaye’s dismay and churning fury as, in the aftermath of tragedy, she flees to Bristol. Here Fire Rush shifts into a darker and more sinister register. Taking refuge with a man called Monassa, she doesn’t initially heed the warning signs: a small ruby in the centre of his front tooth; the out-of-bounds locked rooms; his associates’ hushed conversations. Only gradually does it become clear that Monassa is a controlling sadist rather than a saviour, and possibly the embodiment of a duppy or malevolent spirit. His violent crew of burglars inhabit a world where sexual coercion of women is the norm, and Monassa’s “safe house” is a cage from which Yamaye will struggle to escape.
Only on a trip to Jamaica will she find, with the help of Moose’s Obeah/herbalist grandmother, an alternative to the seemingly predetermined tragic projection of her life. In the mystical Cockpit Country, with drumming, incantation, song, and an Obeah remedy, there’s the possibility of rebirth through accepting her complicity in her own degradation. There Yamaye divines her own strength and agency, with a revelatory “fire rush”, a burning truth coursing through her body, that has been on the verge of being expressed from the story’s beginning, and can no longer be denied.
For her debut, Crooks has set herself a complex task, especially in conjuring a spirit world just beyond Yamaye and the reader’s grasp. She succeeds with great aplomb, mapping lives “caught in the contractions of the past, trying to find their futures”.
• Fire Rush by Jacqueline Crooks is published by Jonathan Cape (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
