Reading Savage Messiah, Roz Kaveney finds moments of “inchoate skinhead anarchism,” sitting alongside moments of mixed-media art that, “approach the condition of poetry.”

Kaveney admires Savage Messiah for its ability to, “see in the scruffy and semi-derelict a sort of beauty, a prophetic apocalyptic sublime,” but worries that Laura Oldfield Ford’s London is,

 a city of white working-class resistance; it is an able-bodied, exclusively heterosexual world in which the only ideology is a sort of inchoate skinhead anarchism devoid of theory.

Kaveney, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, describes the content of Savage Messiah as a series of, “collages, fragments of text, dingy-looking photographs, sketches of buildings, deliberately stylized portraits. She interprets Oldfield Ford’s low-tech approach as, “in part a deliberate rejection of the sort of psychogeography she associates with Iain Sinclair and Stewart Home, and sees as a deliberate packaging of the bizarre for middle-class consumers.” She highlights the ways in which the apparently derelict and run-down areas of London that are depicted in Savage Messiah become symbols of struggle against urban and political hegemony, writing that

[Oldfield Ford] sees temporarily occupied drinking dens, factories where alienated workers sabotage the machines that fill cheap chocolates with nasty fondant, high streets full of kebab and pound shops, as sites of resistance to the squeaky clean consumerism of contemporary Britain.

In particular Kavaney draws attention to Oldfield Ford’s particular interest in the coming Olympics and the social, political and geographical transformation being wrought on the London landscape. In Savage Messiah the Olympics, she writes, and the public works associated with them, become, “a destruction of space that was once fascinating and wild, as an extension of surveillance into what was once free turf.”

Instead, she argues, Oldfield Ford's loyalties lie with the “lost generations,” and those who live, “hard-edged, often brutal lives.” However, it is precisely the presentation of these celebrated figures from the margin that worry Kaveney. She analyses the main male figures in the book and finds them lacking in depth and outlook, suggesting that,

 Most of her angry young men evince little inner life beyond a sense of wounded pride and a habit of requiting perceived slights and failures of attention; one the few exception is a Nigerian engineering student who reads Borges where no one can see him doing it.

 Her London is…a city of white working-class resistance; it is an able-bodied, exclusively heterosexual world in which the only ideology is a sort of inchoate skinhead anarchism devoid of theory. It is a thug London sanitized of racism, oddly tolerant of domestic violence and men who sponge off women, even in the punk era to which she looks back, there was Rock against Racism and the first inklings of Riot Grrrl politics.

Despite Kaveney’s thoughtful critique, she cannot help but find uplifting moments in the journeys and landscapes of Savage Messiah; moments that offer the promise of something extraordinary, 

But when [Oldfield Ford] elegizes clean, polite old men who offer cups of tea, or celebrates moments of Bakhtinian riot among the chocolate machines – when she photographs half-ruined house and the hole in the ground where their neighbours stood, or when she talks of an inchoate sense of doom – at such moments she produces something which is both a total work of mixed-media art and an impressive vision.

 At these moments, she writes, the  “ideological collages” that make up Savage Messiah,  “approach the condition of poetry.”

You can read the full  article in the print version of Times Literary Supplement, which comes out on Friday 10 February.

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