Top Boy, the gritty London gang saga from Belfast man Ronan Bennett, ran for two seasons on Channel 4 from 2011 to 2013 and was granted a second life thanks to the joys of streaming. The perhaps unlikely figure of Canadian hip hop star Drake got involved and Netflix commissioned a further three seasons, with the final episode providing a definitive ending.
Or so we thought. Bennett, a writer with fingers in several pies (he co-wrote Public Enemies, Michael Mann’s John Dillinger biopic and has authored several award-sniffing novels including 2004′s marvellous Havoc, In Its Third Year), returns here to Hackney’s Summerhouse estate for what’s more or less a novelisation of that closing season.
Rather than concentrating on either of the show’s central characters – Dushane and Sully who took over the estate’s drug trade early in season one – the novel moves their subordinate Jaq into the spotlight.
She’s been on the road, her term for the gang life, since she was 14 when Jimmy The Indian, an acquaintance of her father and a good friend of her mother, gave her a bag of weed and she elected to split it up and sell it on. “I ain’t never done nothing else. It’s all I know.” She’s in love with her partner Becks in the nice house the life has bought her, properly invoiced and receipted in case the “feds” come calling, but it all starts to unravel.
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A bent detective, because the police are just another gang, proposes a job that could change her life. At the same time, Sully’s position as Top Boy is threatened, not least by a hijacked delivery and a phone call from some Irish rivals. There’s also the pregnant presence of her sister Lauryn, and mounting protests against authority on the estate.
Bennett’s use of street slang – straps, P, bando, mandem – and the power of his writing, especially when dealing with grief at a death in the family and the realisation that it engenders, brings a borough decimated by “Poverty and discrimination. Harassment and neglect” alive.
The events herein will be mostly familiar to fans, although as Jaq points out, they “think they know the whole story. They don’t”, so readers might be better off coming to this book fresh but either way the fast-paced narrative grabs you right from the off and refuses to let go, much like the show itself.
