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Jamaica-born British writer Jacqueline Crooks’s impressive debut novel Fire Rush (2023) was two books in one. It was an energising account of the London dub music scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s — of the “arrhythmic electricity” of the body infused by music — but also a teasing thriller with more hairpin bends than a Formula 1 track.
Her new novel is, for the most part, a more sombre and knotty affair. It’s set largely in early 1990s north London, where a young mixed-race woman, Jaycee, lives alone in a sparsely furnished apartment in a block above a shopping centre, with just a DJ on the radio for company. She is isolated — her best friend Ella-G moved to New York — and she never takes time off from her job as a legal secretary because she “crave[s] the order of the workplace”.
Music is still crucial, as it was in Fire Rush — “Walls hummed with overdriven bass lines. Doors bounced in their frames” — but the escape it offers Jaycee is not ecstatic but protective. “Some part of her knew she must re-enter the past. But mostly, she wanted to keep running in the other direction.”
About that past: Jaycee has “a white-bleached space where a family should be”. She is so estranged from her parents that she cannot think about them directly. Instead, she corrupts them in her memory into non-human creatures, as “Cyborgs . . . who sparked and cussed in pulsing code, who locked her into that operating system of theirs because she was too young to have a password to get out”. Her mother is “Lie-Vex” and her mother’s boyfriend “Cy-Rank”, an ex-army man.
Cy-Rank is the real problem, but Jaycee’s memories are so deeply buried that they distort, and progress through the story is measured by revelation — what happened? Why? What effect did it have? — as much as action. Jaycee even considers herself to be more “Alien” than “Human”.
This whole Cyborg aspect, and the tech language used to show Jaycee’s trauma — “Expectations placed on her memory have exceeded her limits. Jaycee is no longer available for contact” — risk sounding ridiculous when described cold, but Crooks delivers both with such intensity and commitment that we are fully immersed.
For much of its length, Sky City is animated and static at the same time: Jaycee’s constrained world is richly described, but trauma keeps it stuck. With no future in sight, the story achieves some movement by taking Jaycee into the better parts of her past: her camaraderie with Ella-G in a women’s hostel with its “whirling glitterball chaos”; her friend Sol from school, who was “in the lowest class for every subject but music”.
Then, slowly, Jaycee’s frozen life begins to creak back into motion, when Sol turns up, and makes a move on her. He gets short shrift — “there wasn’t much left of the person I knew”, he tells her later — but something has been unlocked.
Suddenly, life is on again for Jaycee. The plot builds, bringing in Ella-G and her own parent issues, as Jaycee thinks she has found Ella’s father, and accompanies her on a revelatory journey. Others join the story, Jaycee’s world finally expands, and the plot that strained on the starting blocks for so long finally races off. This gives the book a somewhat unbalanced feel, but it’s one that the reader is happy to accept, given the dramatic rewards that follow.
Sky City is an account of how a life can go around and around, with the same things on repeat. But, it says, this needn’t be the end, even when “the record finishes, the needle in a loop of silent waves, the sea circling”.
Sky City by Jacqueline Crooks Jonathan Cape £18.99, 384 pages
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