City of Spades is a perfectly straight, unaffected story about a cheerful, bounding Nigerian boy and his life and downfall in London. The lodging-houses, the clubs, the pubs, the whole perimeter-life of a coloured community, are presented by a truthful expert to the innocent eye…. This novel has no trace of artfulness, but much art in the presentation of the various types. Johnny Fortune may seem a little too bright and shiny, Mr Karl Marx Bo and Mr Ronson Lighter a little too comic to be true; yet the attitude of the other characters towards them gives them validity.
This is a good, clear piece of story-telling with a neat and acid ending. Would the cards have been stacked quite so hard against Johnny? Probably yes. Do we believe in Miss Pace and Mr Pew of the BBC? Well—in a Miss Pace and a Mr Pew. Are we refreshed by optimism in the thought that we have only to be kind and understanding and full of brotherhood for the problem of an increasing coloured population to sort itself out? No, we are not: and that is the strength of the book. Mr MacInnes sets out to show that understanding, in any deep and valuable sense, is pretty hard to come by, and that there are no cosy answers. He is not directing his book at Virginian Colonels, Dr Malan, or bridling landladies afraid of the contamination of the lavatory: he is directing it at those people who, having accepted the proposition that all men are created equal, have now to find out what all men are like.
Pamela Hansford Johnson, "New Novels: 'City of Spades'," in New Statesman (© 1957 The Statesman & Nation Publishing Co. Ltd.), Vol. LIV, No. 1384, September 21, 1957, p. 362.
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