Review: All Involved - Ryan Gattis

On April 29, 1992, three police officers were cleared of charges of assault with a deadly weapon and use of excessive force during the arrest of black taxi driver Rodney King (the jury acquitted a fourth officer of the assault, but failed to come to a verdict on the charge of excessive force). Riots broke out in Los Angeles later that day, only ending on May 4 after 10,904 arrests, 2,383 people being injured, 11,113 fires and over $1 billion of property damage. Ryan Gattis’s debut novel tells the story of the Riots through the interlinking experiences of seventeen characters, looking to give a voice to those who were excluded from the official accounts of the event.

Studies of civil unrest on this scale, whether fictional or not, inevitably touch on the psychology of crowds: can a group of people act with a unified aim, does individual will become subservient to common purpose, and how do we divide violent acts of protest from looting? In Gattis’s account, in the absence of civic authority, unofficial groups step in to fill the gap. As the state’s monopoly on violence is broken, gangs and residents’ groups take up arms to protect their property, settle scores and punish offenders. One of these revenge attacks, the brutal killing of the non-affiliated chef Ernesto Vera by gangsters who held a long-term grudge against his brother, sets in motion a chain of events with consequences reaching far beyond the initial scope of the dispute.

The main action of the novel takes place away from the riots themselves, in the suburb of Lynwood. Here, two gangs, led by Trouble and Fate, engage in a blood feud, begun when a woman was shot by Fate’s brother outside a nightclub, and accelerated by the lawless atmosphere of the riots. As one of Fate’s gang notes, early on: 'there are no rules now. None. Not with people rioting. I shiver when I realise every single cop in the city is somewhere else, and that means it's officially hunting season'. The aspect of self-policing is strongly played up here: after Ernesto is killed, a gangster known as Clever acts as an unofficial CSI officer, bagging up pieces of evidence and seizing CCTV tapes to search for clues.

From here, the gangs begin to arm themselves with looted weapons, preparing for a final showdown, and the narrative broadens to take in individuals touched by the violence: a nurse who witnesses Ernesto’s murder (and later crosses paths with other minor characters who arrive at her hospital), firefighters who are attacked by crowds as they race from one arson-site to another, small-time hustlers who try to work their own angles whilst the chaos goes on around them, and Korean shopkeepers looking to use their second amendment rights to defend their property from looters.

The question of power and authority lies at the heart of the novel. We understand that prior to the riots beginning, the superior firepower of the state ensured that a lid was kept on the gang activity in the area. Clearly, violence was the key to reinforcing the status quo, rather than any notion of policing by consent. As a gang member observes, in Lynwood 'sheriffs don't knock. They ram. They come in screaming behind shotgun barrels and flashlights'. As soon as the police are moved elsewhere, the de facto authority is handed to the next most powerful entity in the area. In Hispanic areas, this is the gangs: in Korean neighbourhoods, it is the petit bourgeois shopkeepers. 

The morality of this state of affairs is rarely questioned, except by Kim Byung-Hun who muses 'we are technically vigilantes, and I don't know how I feel about that...it is just self-appointed citizens who fill the void when there is no law enforcement'. On the fifth night, it takes a spectacular (and illegal) act of extra-judicial force to reassert the authorities’ dominance.

All Involved focuses largely on the present; characters rarely waste time considering structural injustices whilst they are engaged in a struggle for survival. Only authority figures have this luxury. One, the commander of a secret government agency sent out to target gang members, describes South Central LA as 'effectively Balkanized,’ populated by ‘a particularly toxic mixture of citizens with disparate cultural backgrounds and belief systems' and 'a highly fragmented gang population numbering roughly 102,000' who are 'more skilled in urban guerrilla combat than most foreign combatants'. In this view, the various factions are so disparate that only excessive shows of force can maintain the fragile peace. Another, the firefighter Anthony Smiljanic, who is closer to the area, argues that people watching the news 'don't understand what happens to people with no money who live in a neighbourhood where crime is actually a viable career path...I'm not excusing it or condoning it or saying it can't be avoided, but I'm saying that's how it is'. He describes the inner city as the 'hidden America,' suggesting that it is a lack of constructive engagement from central Government that has led to the rising crime level.

Broadly speaking, All Involved is an effective literary thriller, fast-paced and visceral. The problem is that reading it doesn’t really feel like reading a novel. The pacing and the structure, the scenes replayed from multiple narrative viewpoints, all feel borrowed from cinema or HBO box sets. There’s a hint of Tarantino in Ernesto Vera’s opening monologue on the use of avocados in Japanese cooking, and in the graffiti artist Termite’s love of spaghetti western soundtracks, a bit of 24 in the race-against-the-clock element of the first chapter, an echo of The Wire as the narrative scope broadens from street level to state employees to federal authorities. The title itself has more than a little in common with The Wire’s motto ‘everything is connected’.

More than a little serendipity is involved in ensuring that the disparate strands of the narrative intersect, and readers may find their suspension of belief stretched to breaking point when a looter is shot straight through the cheek by Kim Byung-Hum, is rushed to hospital where they discover that, although the bullet did no real damage, he has a brain tumour, and is then cared for by the nurse who witnessed Ernesto Vera’s murder. Also, while the details of the characters’ lives feel authentic, I suspect that the dialect has been toned down to make for easier reading, a feeling heightened by the presence of a glossary at the back.

That’s not to say that you shouldn’t bother with All Involved; it’s a good page-turner, and the subject matter is extremely relevant, in light of the London riots and the abuse of black communities by police in Ferguson and beyond. I just wonder whether it would have been more at home on HBO. More worryingly, I’d expect a TV version to be a bit more daring and broader in scope than the novel is, which doesn’t say much for the current state of mainstream publishing.