Long ago, a friend recommended that a sure-fire method of curing sleeplessness was to keep any novel by Angela Thirkell on the bedside table. No human alive, he said, could resist sleep after a few pages of her prose.

It sounds cruel, I know, but it has worked well for me for three decades. Although I sleep reasonably well, Mrs. Thirkell must have knocked me out on at least one sleepless night in every year since then. And I'm still working on the same book, .

Mrs. Thirkell writes according to a formula. Well-born English country gentlefolk always have a part to play, as do commoners, though only suitable ones. Her website describes one of her books, , this way: "Mrs. Palmer stages a Greek play, the actors fall in love, and general misunderstandings and family adventures occur in Worsted (just down the road from Winter Overcotes)."

A couple of years before that, she wrote , in which: "At Rushwater House, Lady Emily Leslie and her family are entertaining an assortment of houseguests, including some French monarchists." She has written books called and

Mrs. Thirkell's is a dream-like world that, if it ever really did exist, doesn't any more, by a long shot.

My purpose, though, is not to write about Angela Thirkell, who died in 1961 having written more than 30 versions of the same book. I want to write about her second son, Colin MacInnes, who was also a writer, but who wrote in a style utterly unlike his mother's ... so different that the two of them might be thought of as dote and antidote.

MacInnes died in 1976. He is now little remembered, but he wrote a trilogy of books about London that really is one of the best-kept secrets of recent English literature. For my list of the best 100 books of the last half of the 20th Century, is a solid contender.

In the introduction to the collected edition, Francis Wyndham wrote this: "These visions of London celebrate the capital during one of the most stimulating periods in its social history: the second half of the 1950s. , which was first published in 1957, deals with the coloured population of Africans, West Indians and American negroes who were creating a second, exotic London quite different from that which had hitherto been taken for granted, and yet conjoined with it at various incongruous points. (1959) is concerned with another phenomenon peculiar to the era: the teenagers who, for the first time achieving spending power, had become powerful in other ways and knew it. (1960) surveys an ancient problem, forever acute because forever misunderstood: the three Ps, unholy trinity of prostitute, ponce and policeman."

Wyndham, writer and friend of Henrietta Moraes, Francis Bacon's model, and of the author Jean Rhys, probably thought he ran with a pretty fast crowd. But like most of his countrymen, I don't think he understood just how fast a crowd could get in those days.

MacInnes was a journalist, albeit perhaps an unusual one, and I suspect Wyndham might have mistrusted him a little because of that. But while he might have dealt with his subjects with a journalist's flashy language and eye for the grotesque, he was better able to describe his subjects and their milieu because of it.

This is from : "Tamberlaine ran to the door, and reappeared wearing a bowler hat and an umbrella. 'Now I shall show you,' he announced, 'a conversation between myself and some kind English gentleman. This gentleman, he say to me' (Tamberlaine's accent became the oddest mixture of West Indian and deep Surrey) "I do envy you your wonderful teeth." To which I reply, in my mind if not with my voice (Tamberlaine removed the bowler) 'Well, sir, me don't envy you your yellow horse-fangs, and if you look clearly down my throat, you'll see most of me back ones anyway is gold?'

" 'Or else,' Tamberlaine continued, 'he come up to me and say' (bowler on) "Don't you miss the hot weather over here?"?

" 'Or else he will look very sad and sorrowful and tell me, 'You may find, sir, that there is sometimes a certain prejudice in England, but believe me, sir, that some of us are just as worried about it as you.' "

Britain was in the process of enormous change in the late 1950s and early 1960s, emerging, as if from sleep, from the shadow of the Second World War, and hating the new reality that was being created. The number of immigrants in the country was increasing by leaps and bounds. For the first time, the old Imperial Power, now weak and on the ropes, tried to protect itself against them by tightening its immigration rules. Taking no notice, immigrants forced a reluctant Britain to take the rest of the world into account in ways it had never done before, despite its Empire.

Anyone who thought MacInnes was being extravagant with his characters had only to wait two or three years until the Profumo scandal broke. At the trial of Dr. Stephen Ward, truly riveting testimony was given by the prostitute, Christine Keeler, her West Indian lovers, Lucky Gordon and Johnny Edgecombe, her friend Mandy Rice-Davies and a host of others. Their lives brought the people MacInnes was writing about into sharp focus, and made older Britons understand for the first time just what kind of people they were sharing the country with, and how much their way of life was being affected by them. That trial was a defining moment for British culture.

Before Profumo, in 1959, MacInnes explained what he had been trying to do, in , in a review of Shelagh Delaney's important play (in which she was trying to do the same thing as he was).

"As one skips through contemporary novels, or scans the acreage of fish-and-chip dailies and the very square footage of the very predictable weeklies, as one blinks unbelievingly at 'British' films and stares boss-eyed at the frantic race against time that constitutes telly, it is amazing ? it really is ? how very little one can learn about life in England here and now."

He lamented how little was known of "working class child mothers, ageing semi-professional whores, the authentic agonies of homosexual love, and the new race of English-born coloured boys ? the millions of teenagers ? the Teds ? the multitudinous Commonwealth minorities in our midst."

He wasn't alone ? the Angry Young men, a group of English writers of the 1950s ? Alan Sillitoe, John Wain, John Braine, Kingsley Amis, Arnold Wesker, John Osborne ? were also writing with rebellious and critical attitudes about the staid and hypocritical institutions of the British Establishment.

But where the Angry Young Men were expressing their unconventional ideas in relatively conventional written form, MacInnes was an experimenter, in the style of Samuel Beckett or the French writer, Alain Robbe-Grillet.

He recorded the reality of the new Britain, not by a traditional telling of the story of his characters, as much as by using the milieu in which they lived to build their stories empirically.

From "?he wasn't wearing his full Teddy uniform either: no velvet-lined frock-coat, no bootlace tie, no four-inch solid corridor-creepers ? only that insanitary hair-do, creamy curls falling all over his one-inch forehead, and his drainpipes that last saw the inside of a cleaner's in the Attlee era. To stop the chain twirling, he tried to grab it suddenly with the same hand he was spinning it with, hit his own great red knuckles, winced and looked hurt and offended, then fierce and defiant as he put the hand and the chain in his smelly old drainpipes once again.

" 'Arve moved,' he said. 'Darn ear?'

" 'And why, Ed,' I said, 'have you moved darn ear?'

" 'Cos me mar as,' he said. 'She's bin re-owsed.'"

And from : "A cracked smile appeared on the Detective-sergeant's life-battered countenance.

" 'Well son,' he said, 'number one, in public, never. The citizens don't like it. Also, they don't believe we it. Of course, if you're quite obviously attacked, it's another matter ?'

" 'If you do it,' the officer continued, 'the first thing to remember is not to mark them: not to hit them where it shows next day in daylight. Never forget: they've got to be produced in court in 24 hours ? or 48, of course, if the day of arrest happens to be a Saturday.

" 'And if you do happen to mark them, sir?'

" 'You say they went berserk and had to be restrained. Of course, you know ? sometimes they do: I could show you a scar or two to prove it.' "

All that was a reality few 1950s adult Britons comprehended, and that had the power to deliver a powerful shock.

Colin MacInnes, for whom the distance of just a single generation meant being removed by light years from the comfy world his mother wrote about, was the best chronicler of the birth of Britain's new reality.

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