Fiction
'Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers' by Grant Naylor
This book covers the first episodes of the first season of the television series 'Red Dwarf' (1988-93; 1997-99; 2009; 2012 - two new series will be broadcast in 2016-17). It is a situation comedy about a small number of characters on a spaceship. I have seen these multiple times. It was popular among my friends when first broadcast and the woman and boy who used to live in my house, loved it so much that the DVDs were regularly watched. There is a lot of toilet humour that appeals to children. The series does tackle issues that are popular in science fiction as the characters travel around space running into debris and encountering other races. They also get mixed up with wormholes and temporal anomalies and even a 'what if?' history story.
I have a friend who hates it if a movie or television adaptation diverges one iota from the source book. He forgets that a short story is more than enough to fill a 1-hour television programme, a novel could produce a series. In addition, viewers do not want a multiplicity of minor characters and it is difficult to include footnotes on screen; it was only really successfully done by 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' (TV series, 1981) and even then it had to break up the flow of the action. For myself, I actually like the divergence between the different media as it means that I do not precisely know what is coming up. This book keeps incredibly close to the series in almost every aspect and the trouble is that I know what it features far too well. There is some back story which does not feature in the series and, because the book does not lead off into the series as a whole, the final section is new.
The dialogue for most part is identical to that seen in the series. However, I found little humour in the book. It showed to me that the lead characters - Dave Lister (played by Craig Charles), a smelly slob; Arnold J. Rimmer (played by Chris Barrie) a self-centred but bitter pedant and the Cat (played by Danny John-Jules) - the ultimate narcissist, are not sympathetic characters. In the book they come across as pretty unpleasant. I realised that a lot of the humour was visual, physical stuff and came from the way the actors delivered the lines rather than the lines themselves. I have 'Better Than Life', the sequel, to read and I hope that this diverges more from the television series.
'Better Than Life' by Grant Naylor
As my current girlfriend allows me to read in bed in a way other woman have not done, the number of books I am getting through at the moment is higher than in the past. As noted above, this book is the sequel to 'Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers', in fact largely picking up where the last book left off. It again features the four characters from the television series, initially trying to get out of the game Better Than Life and then deal with the consequences of the computer on board the spaceship 'Red Dwarf' having become senile and then having its intelligence boosted but its life shortened. Scenes from the television series are mixed in with other elements that did not appear in it. There is a brief period on the version of Earth where time runs backwards but showing different events to in the series. There is the use of planets like snooker balls and there is the polymorph which feeds on emotions, shown reasonably like what happened in the television series. However, there is also Lister on Earth as Garbage Planet with vast cockroaches. Thus, even for a fan of the television series there is new material here which is interesting in a standard science fiction way. However, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is very episodic and unfortunately largely lacking in humour. This books is probably best to read if you have never seen the television series 'Red Dwarf' otherwise it is only a mildly interesting progress through various scenes with you looking out for familiar dialogue or settings from what you know.
'A Man Without Breath' by Philip Kerr
This is another of Kerr's Bernie Gunther stories, largely set in German-occupied Smolensk in March-April 1943; some scenes occur in Berlin. It is better than 'Prague Fatale' that I read last month: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/the-books-i-read-in-january.html However, Kerr seems bent on ensuring that Gunther comes into contact with many of the leading Nazis, in this book, Dr Josef Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister and central events of the regime: here two attempts on Adolf Hitler's life and the uncovering of the massacre of 4000 Polish officers by the Soviets in Katyn Forest. As before, the issue of investigating murders at a time when both sides in the conflict were committing massacres is raised. However, for much of the time Gunther is shown what he does best, down at ground level disentangling various killings and dodging the internal politics of the Nazi regime. Kerr is very good at portraying Smolensk and the surrounding areas during the period and the different types of German units there.
Kerr likes to highlight elements of the period that tend to be overlooked such as the German War Crimes Bureau which sought to document war crimes by other nations at the same time as the SS and parts of the Wehrmacht were carrying out very similar or even more vicious war crimes. He also highlights the experimentation on Communist prisoners carried out by the Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War; protest by Aryan women married to Jewish men in Berlin in 1943 that had some released and the Jewish Hospital that continued in Berlin until it was liberated in 1945 with 800 patients alive. In this book, Kerr also gives an insight into the NKVD, the Soviet secret police.
The only real drawbacks of this book is that it goes on a little too long (513 pages of narrative in the edition I read) and yet, as with 'Prague Fatale', the conclusion feels very rushed. In addition, I do not know why Kerr felt he had to have a deus ex machina to resolve everything. Given the time that has passed and the distances this seems unfeasible and undermines the grittiness of the rest of the novel. He should have removed some of the additional murders and could have built to a satisfying conclusion without the intervention he feels compelled to engineer to end the story.
The writing is good and the characters are interesting and well drawn. It moves along briskly. It just seems as is a common problem these days even with leading authors, that the absence of thorough editing means that the book is good rather than excellent in the way it could have been with some trimming and rethinking.
Non-Fiction
'Neither Here Nor There' by Bill Bryson
Bryson is a travel writer and sometime cultural commentator. He was originally from the USA but has lived for the past few decades in the UK. I read his 'Notes from a Small Island' (1996) which was one of his bestsellers - a book about living and travelling in the UK, some years back. I found it reasonably funny in a dry sometimes almost cynical way. 'Neither Here Nor There' was published in 1991 about Bryson's trip across continental Europe from northern Norway to Istanbul in Turkey in 1990 but it also regularly references a similar trip he had made in 1973.
Despite the commentary on the cover, this book is utterly lacking in humour. Bryson does not stop complaining. Every country, every town and city is either filthy and full of litter or too pristine to be interesting. Despite travelling to so many places he seems to have found very few instances when he was at all happy. He hates modern architecture, but expects the latest facilities wherever he goes. He expects everyone to understand him. He expects every town to have entertainment that will delight him without being too dated or too contemporary. All that satisfies him are a handful of museums, the occasional park and some views and these are all few and far between. He wants food that is not like that which you could get in an American city but then complains incessantly about what he is served. Anything which costs more than it would have done in backwoods USA in his youth he deems to be too expensive. He is incredibly repetitive often moaning about the prices and litter in a particular city more than once. Almost everyone he meets he finds aloof or rude; drunk or loutish and most he feels are smelly.
Bryson is a useless traveller or he certainly was in 1990 when he made this trip. Constantly he simply assumed he could go to the next town without checking the transport arrangements, schedules or costs. As a result many of his plans are frustrated. He seems incapable of speaking any languages apart from English and as a result is often totally uncomprehending of what is going on or being able to communicate what he assumes will happen. He constantly travels with no food supplies and often without the correct currency and then is upset when he arrives in a town and is hungry and cannot get food or a hotel room. Despite his declared love of the picturesque and the historic over the modern, it seems he struggles unless there is a 24/7 service everywhere.
Bryson in this book is the worst kind of traveller. He is a mixture of an arrogant Briton of the 1950s style, blended with a schizophrenic American who cannot understand why the rest of the world is different and yet also complains whenever it is too American in approach. This is a book of moaning. It is the worst travel book I have read and I cannot understand how it got published. I guess it sells well to UKIP supporters and their antecedents who want their disgust at the rest of Europe simply reinforced to make themselves feel superior. There is no humour in this book; reading it is unpleasant and it should be retitled 'The Bigot's Guide to Europe'. Another failure in terms of me selecting books to read.
'The Writing on the Wall' by Will Hutton
This is the third book by Hutton after 'The State We're In' (1994) which I read back in January: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/the-books-i-read-in-january.html and 'The World We're In' (2002). Like them it looks at the problems for the world of the collapse of civil society; in this book based on Enlightenment values and how this has allowed capitalism to create increasingly divisive countries and ironically for industry and business to become less successful. In this book first published in 2006, though I was reading an edition from the following year, Hutton looks at the rise of China from the history of the 19th and 20th centuries to its adoption and success with capitalism. Hutton highlights the challenges this poses for the world but also reassures American readers that the USA has far from lost.
Hutton's book is a very good survey of Chinese capitalism with its peculiarities that in the case of huge savings in part promoted by the collapse of the welfare state and the one-child policy, plus regional support for business that have helped the economy to grow so spectacularly. However, he also highlights how the state controls so much even now and the dangers of corruption. Like many commentators on China, Hutton insists that China cannot continue with successful capitalism and yet remain a totalitarian dictatorship. I have been reading such insistence on what must happen to China since John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman argued this line in 'China - A New History' (1992). Even nine years on from Hutton's book and 24 years on from Fairbank and Goldman's what they felt must happen, has not come about and shows no sign of doing so. In Hutton's case his insistence that capitalism must lead to pluralism does seem strange as for the last third of this book as in his previous ones, he outlines how a liberal civil society is being destroyed in the USA and Britain. Why, if he sees the pluralist elements decaying in the West does he feel that they must thrive in China? Is it not more accurate to believe as some Chinese have voiced to me, that the West is actually becoming more like China in its authoritarianism.
The book is weakened by the switch to focusing on the USA on its own and not in relation to China. Hutton has covered these topics before and this jump makes it feel as if you have gone into another book. At 436 pages in the copy I read, he could easily have dropped much of this section and made a tighter, stronger book consistently focused on China. Despite this notable flaw, the book particularly in the first two-thirds is decent. There are some oddities often when Hutton uncharacteristically allows himself to believe myths. He says that Bologna University was the first university in Europe. It is the longest enduring but was predated by the universities of Al-Andalus in southern Spain, reference to which has been chased off large sections of the internet. He later twice says the GMD (Nationalist) forces of China were so exhausted in fighting the Japanese invasions 1931-45 that they were too weak to properly combat the CCP (Communists). This is rubbish, Chiang Kai-shek [Jiang Jieshi] leader of the GMD was so negligent in opposing the Japanese he had to be kidnapped by his own officers to persuade him to resist them at all. He spent the war in Chongqing, building up reserves of weaponry but not fighting the Japanese, much to the exasperation of the Americans. As late as 1944, the Japanese were able to easily launch a large-scale offensive to take vast areas of southern China. The CCP remained pretty passive certainly from 1940 and it was down to local forces beholden to neither faction, to fight the Japanese. Hutton even says that the USA effectively won the Vietnam War through delaying the North Vietnamese takeover of South Vietnam until 1975, so apparently allowing capitalism to establish elsewhere in East Asia, though of course, in Laos and Cambodia it did not. These are surprising mistakes.
Overall this is a useful and interesting book which would benefit from a new edition now that rather than the Chinese currency needing to be devalued, the Chinese are seeking to keep it buoyant; oil prices have slumped to a fraction of what they were in 2007 and his warnings about the US housing market have come true leading to sustained difficulties. Yet, China is no nearer to democracy and in recent months there has been a clampdown on those involved in labour protests or writing/publishing about the country's problems, hardly the growth of Enlightenment civil society that Hutton insisted was imminent.
Showing posts with label Will Hutton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Will Hutton. Show all posts
Monday, 29 February 2016
Sunday, 31 January 2016
The Books I Read In January
Fiction
'Amsterdam' by Ian McEwan
I bought this book at the same time as I bought 'The Daydreamer' (1994) which I reviewed in November 2015: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/the-books-i-read-in-november.html This one, published four years later, won the Booker Prize, though I cannot understand why. Like 'The Daydreamer' it is another short book (178 pages) set in the bubble world of McEwan's creation. Though published in the 1990s these two books set their stories in a kind of late 1960s/early 1970s world when McEwan, born in 1948, was a young man. There are the occasional references to specific items of technology and in 'Amsterdam' to the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, but these elements hardly alter the perception that the action and, certainly, the attitudes are more suited to twenty years earlier.
It is an almost exclusively white setting despite much of the story unfolding in London. Though in this book a black child and her family are mentioned, but never actually seen. Like 'The Daydreamer the culture and locations are primarily in southern England - this book does include brief visits to the Lake District and the Netherlands, but the locals are clearly 'other'. It features the English Middle Class; in this book specifically the Upper Middle Class - there is a composer, a politician, an investor and a newspaper editor. Women have bit-parts in the male-focused story; the funeral of the main woman in the book is the starting point. Most of the action takes place in London.
One criticism I had from someone who read this book in 2000 was that 'very little happens'. Much of the book is about the thoughts of the various characters, a mix of reminiscences and various meetings. It is largely whimsical in tone fitting with the magic realist tone that appeared 'The Daydreamer' only toned down. It is hard to engage with any of the characters and you feel you would despise any of them if you met them in real life. That may be the point. The only good aspect of this novel is the description of the composer's work on a symphony and how he envisages it. McEwan has written a libretto and he does well in communicating the sense of music in the mind of the composer to a non-specialist reader. I have sworn off McEwan already and this book did nothing to change my mind. I am just struck by how such slight books with such a detachment from reality can have been so successful.
As an aside, the cover of the book shows two men from the 19th century about to duel. I can now see the relevance of this because of the conflict between the two friends in the book: Vernon the newspaper editor and Clive the composer. However, it did mean I was surprised when I found it was actually set in 20th century London rather than 19th century Amsterdam and that the person who told me it featured a balloon flight over the latter city, lied.
'Prague Fatale' by Philip Kerr
I have long enjoyed Kerr's Bernie Gunther novels featuring a German police detective in the 1930s-50s since the original trilogy was published in 1989-91. With this book, Kerr has set himself a real challenge. It is one that he, through his narrator/lead character recognises in the text. For much of the book Gunther is investigating a murder as the Bohemian house of Reinhard Heydrich (1904-42) who was head of the RSHA which was an umbrella organisation for police bodies in Nazi Germany throughout the war. He became Deputy 'Protector' of Bohemia-Moravia in September 1941 though was acting 'Protector' until his assassination in June 1942. In this novel, set in October 1941, he is hosting a range of leading Nazi officials responsible for Bohemia-Moravia. All have had a part in the atrocities already being committed at that time on the Eastern Front. Thus there is a house full of murderers and as Gunther asks, is there any point in investigating the killing of one man?
The novel opens with murders in Berlin. Kerr successfully conjures up the difficulties of living in wartime Berlin with the shortages, the increasing atrocities against Jews and the air raids. This part of the novel is gritty and engaging. However, when the action moves to Heydrich's castle in Bohemia, there is an abrupt shift in tone. Again, Gunther notes this. He is correct to say that it resembles and Agatha Christie stately-home murder mystery. It could have worked on this basis. I have often been drawn to novels in which the detective can solve a case but not bring the guilty party to justice. This is a feature of crime novels by Leonardo Sciascia and Josef Škvorecký and as you might expect with such powerful Nazis involved it is a likely outcome of this novel. What is interesting to see is how Gunther resolves it and what his investigations reveal about the evolving nature of the Nazi state at this time.
Towards the end of the book, the tone shifts again. There is a torture scene, perhaps included to remind the reader not to become too accepting of Heydrich and his kind. The link between the killing and the activities of the Czech and Slovak resistance which ultimately led to Heydrich's assassination and the massacre that followed, seems rather contrived. Gunther is portrayed as both very astute but at the same time blinkered and naive, two tendencies which do not sit well together. Certainly the last part of the novel with the death of two leading members of the Luftwaffe wrapped up in pages, feels very rushed. This is not helped by the very long list of suspects that are on the table. Kerr has missed Christie's technique in keeping the suspects to a limited number. Consequently he has to engineer a speeded up conclusion of the investigation that again does not sit comfortably. I guess the alternative would have been to give us many more pages of interrogations.
Overall, this book feels as if it consists of parts of two different books welded together. Kerr can do this, even jumping between different times and continents as in 'If The Dead Rise Not' (2009) and it is something he has done again in 'The Lady From Zagreb' (2015) though I have not read that one. However, here it is far less successful. By featuring real people and having already produced novels featuring Gunther in the later 1940s and 1950s, some jeopardy is missing as we know what happened to the major characters. At times Gunther even shows that he is reminiscing from sometime much later as he outlines what happened to a couple of the suspects at the end of the war.
I think Kerr wanted to write a stately home mystery but felt guilty about doing that with such sinister, real-life people. Thus, other elements had to be included in attempt to puncture the 'cosy' nature of the investigation in the castle. This highlights the fact that such murder stories are really divorced from real murder and investigation and trying to put an example together with the far more realistic and gritty approach featuring in most Gunther novels by Kerr does not work for that reason.
It is not a bad book and it rattles along very briskly. I do always worry when the lead character begins to work for someone very senior. It may open up the opportunity for engaging with different sorts of crimes and to introduce politics. However, it detaches the detective from the realism of dealing with what is happening on the street. Most crime is sordid not effete. This has long been a challenge with Laura Joh Rowland's Sano Ichirō novels from when he went to work for the Shogun.
As I noted with 'If The Dead Rise Not' which I read in December 2012: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/the-books-i-read-in-december.html whoever does the covers for the books does not actually seem to read them. This novel is set in 1941 with some references to the death of Reinhard Heydrich in 1942. On the cover, however, it says the murder which features in the bulk of the book is committed in 1942, which is wrong. The image on the front cover is wrong as well as the man featured seems to be wearing clothes from the 1960s/70s as he walks across the Charles Bridge in Prague rather than clothing of the 1940s. These are not major issues, but may mislead some potential readers.
I have a number of other Bernie Gunther books to read this year and hope that in these Kerr has not attempted to lump together two crime genres and keeps Gunther doing what he does best.
Non-Fiction
'The State We're In' by Will Hutton
This was a hugely successful book in the mid-1990s spending months in the top-selling book charts. The edition I read this month was the 1995 revised edition with a couple of extra chapters. The book sits in a tradition of those written about the malaise of Britain that appeared during the 20th century, but notably from the 1960s onwards. Hutton puts himself clearly in that context, especially in noting the lack of long-term investment in Britain and the institutions to support that, plus the failings in technical education in Britain which were being bemoaned in the late 19th century when Britain began to slip behind the USA and especially Germany.
Hutton also writes about the so-called Establishment, an interlocked framework of the elites that have always run Britain. This topic remains a popular one for mainstream non-fiction as 'The Establishment: And how they get away with it' by Owen Jones published in March 2015 shows. Hutton, at times also takes a moral tone, which sounds as if he was a Non-Conformist from a century below and might seem out-of-step with liberal and left-wing opinion as articulated in the late 1990s. He feels that the break-up of the family and utter despair among young people is a problem that needs to be addressed though he feels the economic structures in place, notably the constant urging that labour become more 'flexible' and accept the lowest wages feasible, contributes to that situation. Some of his solutions sound 'Victorian'. He envisages different tiers of education, pensions and health care, but because he feels this is the only way to get Middle Class (by which he really means Upper Middle Class) engagement in state provision.
There is a good section on how support for the Conservatives has successfully been made to appear apolitical. I have encountered people who have said, 'I'm not into politics but I know the right party to vote for' when referring to the Conservatives. In part it is a result of the Conservative Party being so meshed with the Establishment, so supporting the Party is seen as a part with saying you are Anglican or believe Britain should have an Army. Consequently anyone holding any other views are condemned as being 'political', no matter how moderate the views are. I have encountered this in the work place. Managers are happy to bring in people from Human Resources, arguing they are neutral, when in fact they openly support the managers and see nothing wrong in that. The moment you have a union representative on your side, they ask 'why did you have to make it political?' as if them having support and you standing against them on their own, is somehow fair.
Hutton also looks at the differences between the situation in the UK and those in Germany (and its neighbouring states), Japan and the USA. It is notable that China barely gets a mention in the way it would these days. Again this is something that has been common in British decline literature even since the 1940s in the case of the USA and the 1960s for (West) Germany.and Japan. By this stage you might ask, then, what is it that Hutton added to make the book more than simply a collage of previous writings on this topic?
Hutton is very good at articulating economic theory for the general reader. He shows the lazy assumptions of New Right thinking which began to take hold in the UK in 1976 and have been dominant from 1979 until the present day. He also explains clearly how Keynesianism which was in use 1941/48 until 1976 differs. He also expounds on New Keynesianism which, despite his optimism has made no impact on the UK. Hutton shows how the very centralised UK body politic has given such power to those who wanted to implement New Right ideas, notably reducing state involvement in the economy and society to the minimum in the belief that the market will provide the best outcome for everyone. Hutton is particularly strong in how the New Right ideas fitted perfectly with the short-term high-return culture of finance in Britain focused on invisible earnings and asset-stripping rather than industrial development. This had put Britain at a disadvantage in facing challenges in industries such as precision engineering, electrical goods, optics, chemicals, etc. at the end of the 19th century and has left if floundering with its companies being taken over by foreigners in the lat 20th and early 21st centuries. He also shows how this approach has wrecked people's chances of getting a decent pension and suppresses the economy because lack of investment and the urge for quick profits breeds a strong sense of insecurity across society.
Given that this book was 20 years old, I approached it more as a history book of the mid-1990s than of present day. Some things have changed since 1995, notably the disappearance of high interest rates and the decline in unemployment. The Bank of England has become independent which Hutton warned against. Many of his warnings have come true in all respects, notably the collapse of more financial institutions, obscene pay for executives, the ability of companies to continue with short-term risk behaviour, asset-stripping that destroyed established companies, utility companies providing a worsening service yet with increased pay-outs for their owners, the further weakening of local authorities and greater restriction on their spending, further suppression of union rights, further decay of towns and cities, more cash-for-questions scandals in parliament and so on. Many things he has warned about have come true, notably the financial crash of 2008 resulting from the dangerous banking behaviour and risky lending in the over-heated housing market he condemns throughout the book, though the USA was to prove to be in as bad a situation as the UK.
There have been sporadic, isolated attempts to introduce some of the ideas that Hutton mentions. There has been a growth in apprenticeships to lower the percentage of people without any training, though recently it has been revealed that many of these are as sub-standard as 1980s training schemes. There is now a minimum wage and it has not brought down the economy as so many insisted that it would. Some cities now have elected mayors and London actually has an elected body, something absent in the 1990s. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland do have more autonomy, but English regions are unchanged. There have been tiers of education created, but in a way which has often benefited friends of the government and has certainly contributed to even greater centralisation.
After a slight shift in higher education to allow more people in, in the 1990s and 2000s they are now being priced out of taking up such opportunities and once again there is a drive for more private providers with an assumption that they will do everything better. Despite David Cameron's brief flirtation with 'Big Society' there has been no development in our civil society and Britain is divided more than ever. Attempts at constitutional reform have been dropped. Blair did nothing significant to the House of Lords and ironically only Cameron has considered it again because the Lords will not bend to his will not because in terms of equity or democracy it needs reform. The Conservatives love the absolute sovereignty of Crown-in-Parliament and many seek even greater power through leaving the EU. Clinging to the New Right religion that only the state and its regulations are what are hampering a boom in Britain, the drive goes on to break down any 'restraint' on capitalism, without even recognising that further steps are providing minimal benefit to British business people, but increasingly to foreigners. This is the irony of the New Right in Britain, despite being patriotic on the surface they are yielding sovereignty to other countries, notably China.
Hutton was foolish to be optimistic. He was right to expect a Labour victory in 1997. Labour under Blair, at times, packaged itself in Huttonite rhetoric. However, in fact it further entrenched the establishment systems Hutton railed against. Blair made friends with the Conservative media even more assiduously than even Thatcher had done. He wooed business people and gave them the greater freedoms they desire. The Blair regime continued the New Right agenda without a break. This means that there has been no interlude from when Major stepped down until when Cameron came in. Brown had too little time and was too shackled to the deals Blair had made to disrupt this. Hutton could have written this book in 2015 and with the exception of minor things such as interest rates, he could say exactly the same thing as back in 1995. The socio-politico-economic framework in which the reckless British economy operates remains untouched. Short term, high return approaches are only tempered because so many British companies are owned by people from different systems that have to make consideration of different attitudes. Thus, while the book is now over 20 years old, in large part it could be written today and that is a tragedy for the UK.
'Write' ed. by Claire Armitstead
This is a book about fiction rather than being fiction, so I have put it in the Non-Fiction category. Following severe criticism of my writing, I thought it might be a good idea to read a book on how to write better. This book consists of numerous short chapters with tips from established authors. Unlike some authors I do not have the difficulty of starting. I believed that I had found my voice, indeed a number of voices for different genres. I am alert to words I over-use. I like rich description but know that is not in favour in current writing. I do not feel I learned a great deal from this book. There was a good tip from DBC Pierre about including speaking quirks to identify characters in extended dialogue. I have been conscious of too much 'he said, she said' when having more than two characters in a conversation, but have also sought clarity for the reader. The outcome for me is that then my writing is deemed 'clumsy'. The most irritating chapter is from Mark Billingham. His chapter is supposed to be about building suspense, something I am eager to sharpen up on for my crime novels. However, in fact he gives no tips except to say that you need characters that readers engage with so that they then feel suspense in witnessing what they are going through. This is rather a cop-out and just bounces you back to Andrew Miller's chapter on characters.
I did like Kate Mosse's chapter on the importance of plot. Often critics dismiss plot as unnecessary whereas for much of the general reading public, this is the top priority. With my short stories, I have been attacked for not having enough plot. I think some people misunderstand how a short story works and that it is not simply a miniature novel. I enjoyed Mosse's 'Labyrinth' (2005), she is good in getting the reader into a particular time and space as she does with Carcassonne in southern France during the period of the Cathars in that book.
The middle section of the book is simply lists of 'do's' and 'don'ts' from a range of authors. Many of these begin to overlap. There is a lot about editing. There is a reference to the use of friends as critics. However, I know from other authors that in the real world this does not work. These days people have minimal interest in reading a book which is not on sale. If they are friends they seem inhibited in pointing out anything wrong or go to the other extreme and say you should abandon writing entirely as you are not a 'proper' author.
I do not know why anyone quotes any guidance from Martin Amis. His work is terrible. He cannot even peer beyond his own ego to connect with the rest of the population. My opinion of Will Self, also featured in this section, has been in severe decline since I met him in 2012. Some of the tips from leading authors show how far they are from the average person who would read 'Write', notably Hilary Mantel who starts her list advising you to get an accountant. This is like Brenna Aubrey on the Amazon Kindle January 2016 newsletter who said: 'assemble your team of pros to help you publish (cover artists, editors, proofreaders, etc.)'. This makes it clear that unless you are already wealthy and can afford to pay all these people, really you stand no chance as an author. I did find out Mantel lives in Woking (or did so when this book, published in 2012, was written). She does advise reading 'Becoming A Writer' by Dorothea Brande (1934). One problem of this book is the age of the authors. There is some reference to people writing laptops, but far too much on using pencils and paper. Writing with a computer does impact.
Geoff Dyer's tip number 7 about always having more than one project on the go at once, is one I would support. I wish Esther Freud, who I have commented on before, could get readers to accept that they do not need every last thing explained. Readers of 2016 will not accept that view and get upset very quickly if every last issue is not resolved and every minor character given an ending, all within a single novel, I like Michael Moorcock's point number 9 about carrot and stick for characters.
There is a section in which successful authors outline how one of their most famous books came about. This is reasonably interesting but simply highlighted that it is a very random process and success in writing has no connection to ability or effort. The final section has some oddities. However, the one by Blake Morrison was a salutary warning. Listening to ballards by The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and David Bowie, things like 'Daytripper', 'Drive My Car', 'Norwegian Wood', 'Under My Thumb', 'Sympathy For the Devil' and 'The Man Who Sold the World' there seemed to be a good basis for some short stories about what is narrated in these songs. Morrison points out the cost of even quoting a handful of song lyrics in your books. He had to pay £500 to use one line of 'Jumpin' Jack Flash' by The Rolling Stones, £735 for one line of 'When I'm Sixty-Four' by The Beatles and £1000 for two lines of 'I Shot the Sheriff' by Bob Marley. He spent more than the average advance clearing lyrics. My book would have been very expensive to write and this chapter re-emphasised that being an author these days is really only feasible for the very wealthy, I suppose like any opportunity in sport, art or even most professions.
Maybe I did expect a 'self-help' book when this was nothing of the kind. It offers little of support for a writer and much it does offer is contradicted some pages later, such as being satisfied/dissatisfied with what you write and paying attention to the views of others. This book is really just a coffee table book for you to dip into to pass some small chunks of time. It is really a collection of anecdotes from various successful authors, some of which simply emphasise how disconnected those people are from other people, including amateur authors. If you are a writer, I suggest not reading this book as it will simply encourage to abandon all hope and go off and at best take up some random hobby; at worst simply slump in front of the television, but certainly not to continue trying to be an author. Very depressing all round and a purchase I now gravely regret making even second hand.
'Amsterdam' by Ian McEwan
I bought this book at the same time as I bought 'The Daydreamer' (1994) which I reviewed in November 2015: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/the-books-i-read-in-november.html This one, published four years later, won the Booker Prize, though I cannot understand why. Like 'The Daydreamer' it is another short book (178 pages) set in the bubble world of McEwan's creation. Though published in the 1990s these two books set their stories in a kind of late 1960s/early 1970s world when McEwan, born in 1948, was a young man. There are the occasional references to specific items of technology and in 'Amsterdam' to the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, but these elements hardly alter the perception that the action and, certainly, the attitudes are more suited to twenty years earlier.
It is an almost exclusively white setting despite much of the story unfolding in London. Though in this book a black child and her family are mentioned, but never actually seen. Like 'The Daydreamer the culture and locations are primarily in southern England - this book does include brief visits to the Lake District and the Netherlands, but the locals are clearly 'other'. It features the English Middle Class; in this book specifically the Upper Middle Class - there is a composer, a politician, an investor and a newspaper editor. Women have bit-parts in the male-focused story; the funeral of the main woman in the book is the starting point. Most of the action takes place in London.
One criticism I had from someone who read this book in 2000 was that 'very little happens'. Much of the book is about the thoughts of the various characters, a mix of reminiscences and various meetings. It is largely whimsical in tone fitting with the magic realist tone that appeared 'The Daydreamer' only toned down. It is hard to engage with any of the characters and you feel you would despise any of them if you met them in real life. That may be the point. The only good aspect of this novel is the description of the composer's work on a symphony and how he envisages it. McEwan has written a libretto and he does well in communicating the sense of music in the mind of the composer to a non-specialist reader. I have sworn off McEwan already and this book did nothing to change my mind. I am just struck by how such slight books with such a detachment from reality can have been so successful.
As an aside, the cover of the book shows two men from the 19th century about to duel. I can now see the relevance of this because of the conflict between the two friends in the book: Vernon the newspaper editor and Clive the composer. However, it did mean I was surprised when I found it was actually set in 20th century London rather than 19th century Amsterdam and that the person who told me it featured a balloon flight over the latter city, lied.
'Prague Fatale' by Philip Kerr
I have long enjoyed Kerr's Bernie Gunther novels featuring a German police detective in the 1930s-50s since the original trilogy was published in 1989-91. With this book, Kerr has set himself a real challenge. It is one that he, through his narrator/lead character recognises in the text. For much of the book Gunther is investigating a murder as the Bohemian house of Reinhard Heydrich (1904-42) who was head of the RSHA which was an umbrella organisation for police bodies in Nazi Germany throughout the war. He became Deputy 'Protector' of Bohemia-Moravia in September 1941 though was acting 'Protector' until his assassination in June 1942. In this novel, set in October 1941, he is hosting a range of leading Nazi officials responsible for Bohemia-Moravia. All have had a part in the atrocities already being committed at that time on the Eastern Front. Thus there is a house full of murderers and as Gunther asks, is there any point in investigating the killing of one man?
The novel opens with murders in Berlin. Kerr successfully conjures up the difficulties of living in wartime Berlin with the shortages, the increasing atrocities against Jews and the air raids. This part of the novel is gritty and engaging. However, when the action moves to Heydrich's castle in Bohemia, there is an abrupt shift in tone. Again, Gunther notes this. He is correct to say that it resembles and Agatha Christie stately-home murder mystery. It could have worked on this basis. I have often been drawn to novels in which the detective can solve a case but not bring the guilty party to justice. This is a feature of crime novels by Leonardo Sciascia and Josef Škvorecký and as you might expect with such powerful Nazis involved it is a likely outcome of this novel. What is interesting to see is how Gunther resolves it and what his investigations reveal about the evolving nature of the Nazi state at this time.
Towards the end of the book, the tone shifts again. There is a torture scene, perhaps included to remind the reader not to become too accepting of Heydrich and his kind. The link between the killing and the activities of the Czech and Slovak resistance which ultimately led to Heydrich's assassination and the massacre that followed, seems rather contrived. Gunther is portrayed as both very astute but at the same time blinkered and naive, two tendencies which do not sit well together. Certainly the last part of the novel with the death of two leading members of the Luftwaffe wrapped up in pages, feels very rushed. This is not helped by the very long list of suspects that are on the table. Kerr has missed Christie's technique in keeping the suspects to a limited number. Consequently he has to engineer a speeded up conclusion of the investigation that again does not sit comfortably. I guess the alternative would have been to give us many more pages of interrogations.
Overall, this book feels as if it consists of parts of two different books welded together. Kerr can do this, even jumping between different times and continents as in 'If The Dead Rise Not' (2009) and it is something he has done again in 'The Lady From Zagreb' (2015) though I have not read that one. However, here it is far less successful. By featuring real people and having already produced novels featuring Gunther in the later 1940s and 1950s, some jeopardy is missing as we know what happened to the major characters. At times Gunther even shows that he is reminiscing from sometime much later as he outlines what happened to a couple of the suspects at the end of the war.
I think Kerr wanted to write a stately home mystery but felt guilty about doing that with such sinister, real-life people. Thus, other elements had to be included in attempt to puncture the 'cosy' nature of the investigation in the castle. This highlights the fact that such murder stories are really divorced from real murder and investigation and trying to put an example together with the far more realistic and gritty approach featuring in most Gunther novels by Kerr does not work for that reason.
It is not a bad book and it rattles along very briskly. I do always worry when the lead character begins to work for someone very senior. It may open up the opportunity for engaging with different sorts of crimes and to introduce politics. However, it detaches the detective from the realism of dealing with what is happening on the street. Most crime is sordid not effete. This has long been a challenge with Laura Joh Rowland's Sano Ichirō novels from when he went to work for the Shogun.
As I noted with 'If The Dead Rise Not' which I read in December 2012: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/the-books-i-read-in-december.html whoever does the covers for the books does not actually seem to read them. This novel is set in 1941 with some references to the death of Reinhard Heydrich in 1942. On the cover, however, it says the murder which features in the bulk of the book is committed in 1942, which is wrong. The image on the front cover is wrong as well as the man featured seems to be wearing clothes from the 1960s/70s as he walks across the Charles Bridge in Prague rather than clothing of the 1940s. These are not major issues, but may mislead some potential readers.
I have a number of other Bernie Gunther books to read this year and hope that in these Kerr has not attempted to lump together two crime genres and keeps Gunther doing what he does best.
Non-Fiction
'The State We're In' by Will Hutton
This was a hugely successful book in the mid-1990s spending months in the top-selling book charts. The edition I read this month was the 1995 revised edition with a couple of extra chapters. The book sits in a tradition of those written about the malaise of Britain that appeared during the 20th century, but notably from the 1960s onwards. Hutton puts himself clearly in that context, especially in noting the lack of long-term investment in Britain and the institutions to support that, plus the failings in technical education in Britain which were being bemoaned in the late 19th century when Britain began to slip behind the USA and especially Germany.
Hutton also writes about the so-called Establishment, an interlocked framework of the elites that have always run Britain. This topic remains a popular one for mainstream non-fiction as 'The Establishment: And how they get away with it' by Owen Jones published in March 2015 shows. Hutton, at times also takes a moral tone, which sounds as if he was a Non-Conformist from a century below and might seem out-of-step with liberal and left-wing opinion as articulated in the late 1990s. He feels that the break-up of the family and utter despair among young people is a problem that needs to be addressed though he feels the economic structures in place, notably the constant urging that labour become more 'flexible' and accept the lowest wages feasible, contributes to that situation. Some of his solutions sound 'Victorian'. He envisages different tiers of education, pensions and health care, but because he feels this is the only way to get Middle Class (by which he really means Upper Middle Class) engagement in state provision.
There is a good section on how support for the Conservatives has successfully been made to appear apolitical. I have encountered people who have said, 'I'm not into politics but I know the right party to vote for' when referring to the Conservatives. In part it is a result of the Conservative Party being so meshed with the Establishment, so supporting the Party is seen as a part with saying you are Anglican or believe Britain should have an Army. Consequently anyone holding any other views are condemned as being 'political', no matter how moderate the views are. I have encountered this in the work place. Managers are happy to bring in people from Human Resources, arguing they are neutral, when in fact they openly support the managers and see nothing wrong in that. The moment you have a union representative on your side, they ask 'why did you have to make it political?' as if them having support and you standing against them on their own, is somehow fair.
Hutton also looks at the differences between the situation in the UK and those in Germany (and its neighbouring states), Japan and the USA. It is notable that China barely gets a mention in the way it would these days. Again this is something that has been common in British decline literature even since the 1940s in the case of the USA and the 1960s for (West) Germany.and Japan. By this stage you might ask, then, what is it that Hutton added to make the book more than simply a collage of previous writings on this topic?
Hutton is very good at articulating economic theory for the general reader. He shows the lazy assumptions of New Right thinking which began to take hold in the UK in 1976 and have been dominant from 1979 until the present day. He also explains clearly how Keynesianism which was in use 1941/48 until 1976 differs. He also expounds on New Keynesianism which, despite his optimism has made no impact on the UK. Hutton shows how the very centralised UK body politic has given such power to those who wanted to implement New Right ideas, notably reducing state involvement in the economy and society to the minimum in the belief that the market will provide the best outcome for everyone. Hutton is particularly strong in how the New Right ideas fitted perfectly with the short-term high-return culture of finance in Britain focused on invisible earnings and asset-stripping rather than industrial development. This had put Britain at a disadvantage in facing challenges in industries such as precision engineering, electrical goods, optics, chemicals, etc. at the end of the 19th century and has left if floundering with its companies being taken over by foreigners in the lat 20th and early 21st centuries. He also shows how this approach has wrecked people's chances of getting a decent pension and suppresses the economy because lack of investment and the urge for quick profits breeds a strong sense of insecurity across society.
Given that this book was 20 years old, I approached it more as a history book of the mid-1990s than of present day. Some things have changed since 1995, notably the disappearance of high interest rates and the decline in unemployment. The Bank of England has become independent which Hutton warned against. Many of his warnings have come true in all respects, notably the collapse of more financial institutions, obscene pay for executives, the ability of companies to continue with short-term risk behaviour, asset-stripping that destroyed established companies, utility companies providing a worsening service yet with increased pay-outs for their owners, the further weakening of local authorities and greater restriction on their spending, further suppression of union rights, further decay of towns and cities, more cash-for-questions scandals in parliament and so on. Many things he has warned about have come true, notably the financial crash of 2008 resulting from the dangerous banking behaviour and risky lending in the over-heated housing market he condemns throughout the book, though the USA was to prove to be in as bad a situation as the UK.
There have been sporadic, isolated attempts to introduce some of the ideas that Hutton mentions. There has been a growth in apprenticeships to lower the percentage of people without any training, though recently it has been revealed that many of these are as sub-standard as 1980s training schemes. There is now a minimum wage and it has not brought down the economy as so many insisted that it would. Some cities now have elected mayors and London actually has an elected body, something absent in the 1990s. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland do have more autonomy, but English regions are unchanged. There have been tiers of education created, but in a way which has often benefited friends of the government and has certainly contributed to even greater centralisation.
After a slight shift in higher education to allow more people in, in the 1990s and 2000s they are now being priced out of taking up such opportunities and once again there is a drive for more private providers with an assumption that they will do everything better. Despite David Cameron's brief flirtation with 'Big Society' there has been no development in our civil society and Britain is divided more than ever. Attempts at constitutional reform have been dropped. Blair did nothing significant to the House of Lords and ironically only Cameron has considered it again because the Lords will not bend to his will not because in terms of equity or democracy it needs reform. The Conservatives love the absolute sovereignty of Crown-in-Parliament and many seek even greater power through leaving the EU. Clinging to the New Right religion that only the state and its regulations are what are hampering a boom in Britain, the drive goes on to break down any 'restraint' on capitalism, without even recognising that further steps are providing minimal benefit to British business people, but increasingly to foreigners. This is the irony of the New Right in Britain, despite being patriotic on the surface they are yielding sovereignty to other countries, notably China.
Hutton was foolish to be optimistic. He was right to expect a Labour victory in 1997. Labour under Blair, at times, packaged itself in Huttonite rhetoric. However, in fact it further entrenched the establishment systems Hutton railed against. Blair made friends with the Conservative media even more assiduously than even Thatcher had done. He wooed business people and gave them the greater freedoms they desire. The Blair regime continued the New Right agenda without a break. This means that there has been no interlude from when Major stepped down until when Cameron came in. Brown had too little time and was too shackled to the deals Blair had made to disrupt this. Hutton could have written this book in 2015 and with the exception of minor things such as interest rates, he could say exactly the same thing as back in 1995. The socio-politico-economic framework in which the reckless British economy operates remains untouched. Short term, high return approaches are only tempered because so many British companies are owned by people from different systems that have to make consideration of different attitudes. Thus, while the book is now over 20 years old, in large part it could be written today and that is a tragedy for the UK.
'Write' ed. by Claire Armitstead
This is a book about fiction rather than being fiction, so I have put it in the Non-Fiction category. Following severe criticism of my writing, I thought it might be a good idea to read a book on how to write better. This book consists of numerous short chapters with tips from established authors. Unlike some authors I do not have the difficulty of starting. I believed that I had found my voice, indeed a number of voices for different genres. I am alert to words I over-use. I like rich description but know that is not in favour in current writing. I do not feel I learned a great deal from this book. There was a good tip from DBC Pierre about including speaking quirks to identify characters in extended dialogue. I have been conscious of too much 'he said, she said' when having more than two characters in a conversation, but have also sought clarity for the reader. The outcome for me is that then my writing is deemed 'clumsy'. The most irritating chapter is from Mark Billingham. His chapter is supposed to be about building suspense, something I am eager to sharpen up on for my crime novels. However, in fact he gives no tips except to say that you need characters that readers engage with so that they then feel suspense in witnessing what they are going through. This is rather a cop-out and just bounces you back to Andrew Miller's chapter on characters.
I did like Kate Mosse's chapter on the importance of plot. Often critics dismiss plot as unnecessary whereas for much of the general reading public, this is the top priority. With my short stories, I have been attacked for not having enough plot. I think some people misunderstand how a short story works and that it is not simply a miniature novel. I enjoyed Mosse's 'Labyrinth' (2005), she is good in getting the reader into a particular time and space as she does with Carcassonne in southern France during the period of the Cathars in that book.
The middle section of the book is simply lists of 'do's' and 'don'ts' from a range of authors. Many of these begin to overlap. There is a lot about editing. There is a reference to the use of friends as critics. However, I know from other authors that in the real world this does not work. These days people have minimal interest in reading a book which is not on sale. If they are friends they seem inhibited in pointing out anything wrong or go to the other extreme and say you should abandon writing entirely as you are not a 'proper' author.
I do not know why anyone quotes any guidance from Martin Amis. His work is terrible. He cannot even peer beyond his own ego to connect with the rest of the population. My opinion of Will Self, also featured in this section, has been in severe decline since I met him in 2012. Some of the tips from leading authors show how far they are from the average person who would read 'Write', notably Hilary Mantel who starts her list advising you to get an accountant. This is like Brenna Aubrey on the Amazon Kindle January 2016 newsletter who said: 'assemble your team of pros to help you publish (cover artists, editors, proofreaders, etc.)'. This makes it clear that unless you are already wealthy and can afford to pay all these people, really you stand no chance as an author. I did find out Mantel lives in Woking (or did so when this book, published in 2012, was written). She does advise reading 'Becoming A Writer' by Dorothea Brande (1934). One problem of this book is the age of the authors. There is some reference to people writing laptops, but far too much on using pencils and paper. Writing with a computer does impact.
Geoff Dyer's tip number 7 about always having more than one project on the go at once, is one I would support. I wish Esther Freud, who I have commented on before, could get readers to accept that they do not need every last thing explained. Readers of 2016 will not accept that view and get upset very quickly if every last issue is not resolved and every minor character given an ending, all within a single novel, I like Michael Moorcock's point number 9 about carrot and stick for characters.
There is a section in which successful authors outline how one of their most famous books came about. This is reasonably interesting but simply highlighted that it is a very random process and success in writing has no connection to ability or effort. The final section has some oddities. However, the one by Blake Morrison was a salutary warning. Listening to ballards by The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and David Bowie, things like 'Daytripper', 'Drive My Car', 'Norwegian Wood', 'Under My Thumb', 'Sympathy For the Devil' and 'The Man Who Sold the World' there seemed to be a good basis for some short stories about what is narrated in these songs. Morrison points out the cost of even quoting a handful of song lyrics in your books. He had to pay £500 to use one line of 'Jumpin' Jack Flash' by The Rolling Stones, £735 for one line of 'When I'm Sixty-Four' by The Beatles and £1000 for two lines of 'I Shot the Sheriff' by Bob Marley. He spent more than the average advance clearing lyrics. My book would have been very expensive to write and this chapter re-emphasised that being an author these days is really only feasible for the very wealthy, I suppose like any opportunity in sport, art or even most professions.
Maybe I did expect a 'self-help' book when this was nothing of the kind. It offers little of support for a writer and much it does offer is contradicted some pages later, such as being satisfied/dissatisfied with what you write and paying attention to the views of others. This book is really just a coffee table book for you to dip into to pass some small chunks of time. It is really a collection of anecdotes from various successful authors, some of which simply emphasise how disconnected those people are from other people, including amateur authors. If you are a writer, I suggest not reading this book as it will simply encourage to abandon all hope and go off and at best take up some random hobby; at worst simply slump in front of the television, but certainly not to continue trying to be an author. Very depressing all round and a purchase I now gravely regret making even second hand.
Monday, 5 March 2012
When Knowing A Foreign Language Is Something To Be Ashamed Of
I think I have been rather beaten to this posting by Will Hutton writing in ‘The Guardian’: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/05/will-hutton-learn-foreign-languages However, I guess there is no harm in me adding my perspective too. As with Hutton, my thoughts were triggered by the fact that the two leading men aiming to be nominated to be the Republican candidate for the coming US Presidential elections, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich were attacking each other on the simple basis of whether they spoke French or not. As the BBC noted last month, they probably both do: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16583813 Romney spent 30 months in Bordeaux and Paris as a Mormon missionary in the 1960s whilst Gingrich wrote a PhD on Belgian educational policy in the Congo 1945-60 and cites a number of French-language texts in the bibliography; he might not be able to speak French but we have to assume that he reads it. I guess Gingrich is also ‘Dr. Newt Gingrich’ something else he is keeping quiet. Gingrich has produced an advertisement which refers to Romney’s ability to speak French. The reason for such an attack comes from what Republican politicians associate with Europe – the euro and all its difficulties; a strong welfare budget and an unwillingness to engage in futile military conflicts. Like most Britons they do not seem to associate Britain with Europe.
It seems incredible that there is more to gain politically from disguising that you have intellectual skills and that the grasp of a foreign language is something to use as an insult to your opponent or at least something which you feel the electorate should be dubious about. However, it is probably worth noting that both former President George Bush Jr. (2001-9) and his father’s Vice-President Dan Quayle (1989-93) both demonstrated difficulties with English and yet seemed sufficiently popular. In Britain, Nick Clegg when he became deputy prime minister was viewed suspiciously by Conservatives less for his political views and more for the fact that his wife is Spanish, his mother Dutch, his father half-Russian and he speaks Dutch, French, German and Spanish; his children are English-Spanish bilingual. In a continental politician such abilities would be commended or at worst seen as normal. However, in the UK, as in the USA, learning can be seen as an electoral liability which is why I never saw reference to Dr. Gordon Brown or Dr. Mo Mowlem even though that was in fact the case.
This is in sharp contrast to countries like Germany or many states in the Arab World.
This is in sharp contrast to countries like Germany or many states in the Arab World.
Ironically Clegg is very much like the nobility and royal families of Europe of the 19th century. Queen Victoria (actual first name Alexandrina), born to a German family, married to a German prince, had children who married into the different royal families of Europe including those of Germany and Russia. Victoria spoke German with her children and presumably her husband too. At the time upper class people across Europe spoke French to the extent that you often cannot find copies of treaties Britain was party to actually in English (I have looked) as French was spoken so widely among the civil service and I imagine the entire diplomatic corps. Of course, there has always been one rule for the rich and another for the rest. Whilst the wealthy of the UK including many members of the Conservative Party may look in disdain at our European neighbours let alone nationalities further afield and voice this attitude, this does not actually stop them from taking expensive holidays in exotic countries and mixing with the 'right sort' of foreigner; wealth is a language all of its own.
I do not know when the attitude shifted, but to me it seems it came during the First World War as Britain looked on both its opponents and its allies with disdain and focused on things that looked 'unBritish'; even the royal family was compelled to drop the surname Saxe-Coburg-Gotha in favour of Windsor. Throughout the 20th century foreigners seem to have lost the sense of being worthy rivals to being people who should at best be patronised and at worst attacked. Perhaps it was the fact that Sir Anthony Eden, foreign secretary (1935-8; 1940-5; 1951-5) and prime minister (1955-7) did not reveal that he had a degree in Farsi (spoken in Iran) and Arabic and could speak reasonably good French in the documentary film, 'Le Chagrin et la Pitié' (1969) though he switches to English towards the end. I always note that Eden could have understood the broadcasts in Arabic by his great antagonist Egyptian leader Colonel Nasser without a translator. The fact that Eden had this knowledge yet it was effectively concealed probably shows the stage that knowing a foreign language in Britain was no longer seen as beneficial but suspicious.
I do not know when the attitude shifted, but to me it seems it came during the First World War as Britain looked on both its opponents and its allies with disdain and focused on things that looked 'unBritish'; even the royal family was compelled to drop the surname Saxe-Coburg-Gotha in favour of Windsor. Throughout the 20th century foreigners seem to have lost the sense of being worthy rivals to being people who should at best be patronised and at worst attacked. Perhaps it was the fact that Sir Anthony Eden, foreign secretary (1935-8; 1940-5; 1951-5) and prime minister (1955-7) did not reveal that he had a degree in Farsi (spoken in Iran) and Arabic and could speak reasonably good French in the documentary film, 'Le Chagrin et la Pitié' (1969) though he switches to English towards the end. I always note that Eden could have understood the broadcasts in Arabic by his great antagonist Egyptian leader Colonel Nasser without a translator. The fact that Eden had this knowledge yet it was effectively concealed probably shows the stage that knowing a foreign language in Britain was no longer seen as beneficial but suspicious.
I would argue that the criticism of people for having language skills is part of a broader anti-intellectualism that has been common in the UK since the 1970s and probably quite a bit longer. It is interesting that the website of the ‘Daily Mail’ has now just overtaken the ‘New York Times’ as the most often accessed English-language news site. The ‘Daily Mail’ is clearly nationalistic, anti-European Integration and generally right-wing. It tends to focus on glamour rather than intellectual issues and presents solutions to most of the world’s problems as based on getting foreigners to listen to British common sense. Hutton takes a more specific focus in his seeking for an answer.
Hutton notes that there has been a fall of 21% in students applying for university degree courses in non-European languages, exceeding the general fall of around 9% in all university applications, despite the fact that having such skills makes graduates highly employable. Part of the difficulty is the fall in the feed-through of students who speak any foreign languages, as only 43% of even GSCE level students study any language. At ‘A’ level in 2011 only just over 13,000 students took French down 5% from 2010; 7,600 took Spanish; 5,100 took German a fall of 7%; Chinese was taken by 3,100; Polish by 458 and Irish by 339. A key reason for not studying a language at university is that language degrees last 4 rather than 3 years so accruing more fees, though as with sandwich courses with industrial placements the fees may be reduced when the student is away from their home campus.
Hutton quotes translator Michael Hofmann who argues that only speaking one language traps you in a ‘cultural cage’ only able to perceive one position on issues. Consequently he sees an advantage in terms of getting employment not simply through being able to talk to people from a different country but because you develop a flexibility of mind which allows you to adapt to different circumstances even if that is shifting from one company to another simply within the UK. Hutton thinks that the lack of affinity for language learning stems from seeing foreigners as ‘invaders’, indeed some kind of benefit pillagers. Whilst we like the fact that English is so widely spoken in the world (but still by fewer people that Mandarin Chinese) we do not like the fact that it makes it easier for them to come to the UK to work or claim benefits. In addition, most British are not interested in going out to countries to assist in strengthening their economies to make even recession hit UK look less attractive. While we may not have shaken off the sense of imperial superiority we certainly have lost any sense of a patrician approach which once was an element of British colonialism.
Hutton feels the sense that foreigners are a threat is why those studying languages are so often ridiculed in the UK as if daring to learn the alien’s language makes you a source of suspicion, much as we see it doing in the USA. Putting in effort to learn a foreign language, apparently shows that you are focusing on the wrong priorities because you are putting at least some emphasis on a different culture from your own and somehow that wanting to know more about another culture suggests you lack pride in your own. As Hutton notes this cultural censuring of language learning runs counter to the best interests of those people choosing what subjects to study. I had a friend who learnt Korean. He seems to have been the first person ever to complete a Linguaphone course in that language as he noticed that tapes 3 and 4 in the set (this predated CDs let alone downloads) that he had bought were identical. The company had recorded tape 4 but had been dispatching the wrong one in its place. Anyway, he was so in demand that when travelling on public transport anyone in the UK or South Korea found he spoke Korean they would offer him a job. Anyone who speaks fluent English and can get a decent grasp of Mandarin or Arabic or Russian or even Portuguese is liable to be in high demand and yet young people cannot see that.
Weirdly the basic Chinese course from the Open University available on ITunesU is one of the top 3 downloaded courses but no-one seems to go beyond lesson one. Perhaps as I have argued before the British have no language ability: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2007/05/british-and-foreign-languages.html so the fall in students taking them suggests that they have stopped trying to learn the languages and humiliating themselves. I have forgotten all the foreign languages I ever learnt and as it was only got 10% in my Chinese test after 18 months study. However, I am not going to ridicule anyone who learns a foreign language or see them suspiciously. It seems ironic that those who are so much more nationalistic than me are so hostile to language learning not realising that if you are ignorant of someone else's language and yet they know yours, it is you who is at a disadvantage.
Wednesday, 24 September 2008
'The State We're Not': Essay on British Identity
I came across this essay on my work computer. It was my entry for the 2006 Pimlott essay writing prize. You can see by looking at the winning entries which I am sure are available somewhere online, why I stood no chance. Foolishly I went for a jovial, populist tone rather than the serious academic one of the winning entries. However, that tone probably makes this essay more suited to this blog environment. The title set was: 'Who Do You Think You Are? Can History Help Us to Define British Identity Today, or is it Part of the Problem?'. What I titled my essay is 'The State We're Not' a reference to Will Hutton's book, 'The State We're In' (1996) which was about the running of the British state. My essay is more about British culture and identity. Speaking to a woman from the Galicia region (which has its own language and culture and now a degree of autonomy) of Spain recently she was struck by the fact that Welsh people in Britain call themselves Welsh (there was a man present who had just done that) but English people called themselves British. As I have noted before, that is partly due to the difficulties around English identity. Anyway, I did not get to hear much about Galician vs. Spanish identity, but it did encourage me to dig out this essay, which I hope you find interesting.
'The State We’re Not'
Looking around UK society today, it is difficult to find positive examples of an appropriate British identity that you can adopt. How do you show you are British? Do you choose to be emblazoned with the Cross of St. George? Are you a Sunday-morning kilt wearer? Do you robe yourself in the garb that Victorians thought Druids wore? In most cases Britons will answer no. It is no easier when you go beneath such surface details. So how do you define yourself as someone who is British? Is it by the town you live in, even though you dislike your neighbours, let alone the people from ‘the estate’ or those from ‘the posh houses’? Is it by the team which you support, though that too is likely to divide you from more people than it is to link you with them? Is it by your language – one which is evolving quicker in Tokyo, Delhi, Beijing and Los Angeles than it is in Britain? Is it in the sense of what is ‘right’, the moral lead that Britain gives the world, though the more is known of our human rights record the more embarrassing it proves? Is it the ability to complain but not to act; the ability to seek to blame rather than to help? Maybe, but if not, how then do we define ourselves?
I would argue that in an era when many traditional views ‘Britishness’ are dismissed, it is only by defining what we are not that we get a sense of what it is to be British. The highly edited view of history in popular usage provides the tools to determine what so many of us brindle against. A fuller view of British history would provide a different picture, but one which most of us are not interested in hearing. Every country has dark and light sides in its story, and it is often hard for peoples to address the less palatable ones. The British feel we hold a trump card which means that when countries are challenged to tackle their history, we can claim, ‘well, we were the winners’, we decide what goes into the story and how it is told. Yet, I believe this let-out cheats the British of their true identity, something richer and more complex, and thus fascinating. Above all, something that would allow us to think and operate fully in the twenty-first century rather than with one foot still mired in the 1940s.
What, then, do we feel we are not? Stop someone in the street and these days most would say we feel we are not European. Many Britons welcome the proper teaching of History because it shows our young how we beat the ‘Europeans’. Even though Britain’s fighting men and women are lionized and national service would be returned at the drop of a referendum, we contrast Britain’s freedoms with the supposedly or once militaristic states abroad, notably Germany, Russia and Argentina. Somehow the British can love the military without there being anything wrong with it, whereas for others it is an ingredient of dictatorship. Having fought with every neighbouring country, and many others, in the preceding centuries and won, we believe this still equips us to tell them how to behave, whilst making their suggestions to us irrelevant.
‘Europe’ currently provides us with the scapegoat for all that is bad, from the comic regulation of our fruit and veg, to the level of taxes and the influx of foreigners. We expect special exemptions because we were the winners whereas the others were the aggressors or losers; we are the model that they should adopt. Our dismissing of anything European leaves us oblivious to facts like the French retirement age of 60 and that Belgian employees get 14 months’ pay each year to give them summer holiday and Christmas money. We are happy that the Europeans supply us, as they have for decades, with cheap shopping and cheap holidays, without ever asking, why these things are so expensive at home. Even if we do challenge such discrepancies there is always a simple answer: that must be something to do with the ‘EEC’. History can show that the British have had much exchange with the rest of Europe. As we find from among our surnames, despite our aspirations for isolation, there has long been traffic in both directions and connections with France, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Greece and Russia to name a few.
We are less certain about this aspect, but generally we agree we not American. As with the Europeans, we feel that the Americans are somewhat naïve and in need of guidance from us, their elders. British history shows that our forces turn up first and stick it out, whilst cajoling the Americans into action. We admire their tough business practices, but would be bewildered if turned away from a hospital for having no health insurance or finding nowhere to ‘sign on’ after a few weeks unemployed.
In other ways we feel the Americans are soft. The ‘we-can-take-it’ attitude through centuries of fighting has meant that, unlike the squeamish Americans, generations of Britons raised on weekly casualty reports from overseas, if even from just across the Irish Sea, means we do not whimper as the death toll mounts. What goes for abroad applies to the home front too. September 11th – what is all the fuss? Who marks the days to remember Brighton, Docklands, Enniskillen, Guildford, Harrods, Manchester, Omagh and more? Is there a day in the British calendar on which some civilian has not been blown apart? The British have been through it and ‘keep on keeping on’. So, however much we would have liked to have our representatives in the Senate and have long preferred a bomb with a US flag on top, anything closer is only going to come once the Americans have matured to our level. Of course if we just viewed our Victorian history, we would know that, first, very many Americans have British roots, though these have been far more quickly lost than those with Irish, Italian, German or Polish connections. Second, that the current actions of the USA would look right and proper to those who had lived under any of Palmerston’s governments. Whilst this may not make them excusable it allows them to be understood and anticipated.
We are determinedly not political. ‘I don’t do politics’ has even been legitimised as a kind of catchphrase. We certainly do not see that the changes we desire, whether great or small, will be engineered or prevented by politics. There is a clear division between the outcomes we want and any method of achieving them that we will accept. Never educated about how our state works, we feel inadequate in any discussion of politics and this unease means, as a topic for discussion, politics is banned from dinner tables and sofas the length of the country. Such aversion, plus television, draws away those who once would have filled the ranks of the Chartists, the Suffragists, the Mosleyites and their opponents, and the anti-poll tax rioters. Nowadays we have a single, ineffectual, political weapon, the moan, used as we stand in the queue, as we shout at the television or at the drivers in the cars around us. Being British means being able to complain better than the rest; if it was an Olympic sport Britain would head the table for medals. Of course, Britain has never moved forward relying on simple complaints. Without something more dynamic in the past we would lack votes for many men and for all women; reasonable working conditions would be rare. Not knowing how such things were brought about, breeds both complacency and fatalism.
Anyone can bear witness that we are not merciful. News reports on the arrest of a murderer elicit scores of volunteers to be the executioner. In a country where guns are all but illegal, we would rather have every officer armed and a large portion of the ‘right’ people properly equipped too. Whereas we will not march, or certainly not more than once, to oppose a war or poverty or banning fox hunting, we relish the chance to pick someone else’s fight, even better if it is simply based on rumour and assumption. Rather than the activist we prefer to be the on-the-spot vigilante, to make the streets safe for us ‘decent’ people through our rage. Arbitrary justice is our favoured form with no time for lenient judges and the complexities of proof. We are British because we know what and who is wrong, and what ‘they’ should suffer as a consequence.
Feeling as powerless as we do in this society, the only tool of ordinary Briton is anger. From airport check-in desks to traffic jams we swear and jibe, hoot and jab with righteous indignation and a ‘how dare you!’ It stretches from those whose tack is ‘don’t you know who I am?’ to those who fall back on ‘do yourself a favour mate’. We are united and divided against each other in our ferocity. Our personal anger expelled temporarily, we slump back in our chairs to watch master classes in temper on our television. Reality TV shows us the reality of both our inability to cope with anything that confounds our plans and the force we use to challenge such ‘injustice’.
We are not tolerant. Whilst we may be sympathetic and occasionally reach a short way into our pockets to help, we would rather foreigners’ problems were dealt with in their own countries. For us, the words ‘asylum seeker’, no longer have any connection to persecution and torture, simply designating people who are not us, people who get greater benefits and an easier life than we will ever have, and yet who are at the heart of every local crime. Maybe this should not be surprising, as many corners of British history show where such tensions lead, from the forgotten anti-Semitic rioting of the First World War, through the Notting Hill riots of 1958 to the recent Bradford riots. Many of us define ourselves as not being ‘them’ - those invaders or in turn, not being ‘them’ – our attackers. Forgotten too is the fact that the British Isles are a landscape of settlement from pre-history to today; that the first Arabs arrived as Roman troops and racial legislation appeared in the 13th and 16th centuries. Through the centuries Britain has been a place of refuge. From Huguenots refugees of the 17th century through Jewish ones of the 19th and 20th centuries to the East African Asians of the 1970s, those fleeing persecution elsewhere have injected culture and prosperity, and contributed to the Britain as it is today. Forming opinions from perspectives that lack a sense of history may be a defining characteristic of the British, but it is liable to choke off such input in the future, leaving a society of stagnant attitudes and a stagnating economy.
Despite regular claims to the contrary, it is clear the British are not classless. E.P. Thompson argued that class was not about our place in an economic structure, but about our perceived standing in relation to the others around us in society, especially as consumption is now the basis of how we define our status. We define ourselves against everyone else we encounter; there are not three classes, but millions. I look down on him because his car has 0.2 litres less capacity than mine; I look up to her because her shoes came from that store; I look down on him because he has got last year’s toy; I look up to her because she got the chair by the window in the Television Room. Every aspect of our persona from where we live and work, and especially what possessions we have, separates us. You may argue that other countries are equally as divided, but the British add extra layers based on the less tangible aspects – our accents, our names and our attitudes. Ironically our consumer society means we are united in debt. So many of us teeter on the edge of bankruptcy; we are as vulnerable of a fall as any Victorian character of a Dickens or a Charles Palliser novel. For all our fine distinctions, so many of us are just a few purchases away from penury.
We are not intellectual. We relish the ability to dismiss learning; we are the only nation who can say someone is ‘too clever by half’ as if there is a quota we should not exceed. It is common to laud the self-made man, but such references now neglect that such people were also self-taught men and women as two examples from among the praised show: Brunel went to college, in France of all places, and Stephenson attended evening classes. These men did not despise learning in a way those attempting to be their equivalents do today who somehow assume great business people are born not painstakingly crafted.
Another role model swept under the historical carpet in more recent decades is that of the self-teaching trade unionist, probably best embodied by Peter Sellars in ‘I’m Alright Jack’. Whilst the movie ridiculed, it did note a common type of the 1950s: a man working to advance himself through study. Ironically, now, in a time when more people than ever can access education whether face-to-face or online, you cannot even satirise such people, because they have been wiped from history and a person’s knowledge of a football team’s record or the latest ‘Big Brother’ happenings win him or her higher status than any ability in history or engineering.
We are not lazy. Britons are united in how long they work. How would the Victorian reformers view our work practices now? A century and a half of legislation has not eliminated the long hours and the workplace injuries. Whilst we may have fewer bank holidays and work longer hours than colleagues in neighbouring countries, every employee is made to feel greedy for taking off time that is legitimately theirs. No comment on workplace sickness is unaccompanied by allegations of malingering; no reference to statutory leave is not countered by talk of how many millions each bank holiday costs employers. The history written in the future is more likely detail how many who were made unemployed by the minimum wage than to outline how many chip shop workers, as a result of its introduction, for the first time could afford a portion of fish and chips from an hour’s work.
We are not celebrities. The magical aura that so many Britons grasp for shows how many of us will not attain it. Our voices will never be spurned by a panel of experts, our dressing gowns will never be viewed through Channel 4 cameras, we will never be asked to escape from a jungle, and we will never attend Elton’s or the Beckhams’ bash. Yet, because the day-to-day work of most is so devalued, we aspire for our fifteen minutes of fame or notoriety, as if something not done in front of millions of viewers lacks value. Those of us who fail to become the latest manufactured pop idol, are thus left with nothing but shrieking in public places and condemning anything that we feel is alien, to give us some sense of being worthwhile.
So what is the role of history? The first question has to be – which history? Two decades of schools focusing on the history of wars and ‘great’ people has left so many of us without a history that relates to our present. Just as much as the ‘losers’ like France and Germany, China and Japan are having to address their histories, with all their difficulties, so must Britain. There are too many dark corners that to many have become myths to be denied. Who remembers that whilst Churchill never ordered a miner shot. he favoured sterilising habitual criminals? Who now believes that in 1910 King George V thought the country was on the verge of civil war? Who is familiar with Britain’s ‘punitive’ aerial bombings over Iraq in the 1920s? Who talks about keeping Jews out of air-raid shelters in the early days of the Blitz? Who describes that the Catholics welcomed the British Army into Northern Ireland for their protection in 1969? Who teaches what issues caused the Three-Day Weeks? Who can explain why the Community Charge was dubbed the ‘poll tax’? An incomplete, or even worse, a selected history, makes for an incomplete national identity. An identity for the future cannot be one that has its feet mired in a distorted view of the past. It has to be based on the good and bad of every country, not viewed rosily nor seeking to demonise those of other times and places.
How can history play its part in identity? With so much negativity, who can offer a solution? Where is the focus of pride? Maybe television offers some answers, look to Tony Robinson and to the late Fred Dibnah. These ‘amateur’ enthusiasts were in a position to interpret history to be both interesting and relevant in a form accessible to viewers. The stories they have told are of a Britain in all its complexity, involving all kinds of people. They successfully highlight that the great moments of history have been underwritten by hard slog. The great cathedrals, the burgeoning cities, the glorious victories, the NHS are all built on sweat and ache of millions of hands motivated by an infinity of thoughts and ambitions. There is a place for the rulers and the governors in such stories, but they are not us, they are not the people who actually did the things which have created the Britain and thus the Britons which we know.
'The State We’re Not'
Looking around UK society today, it is difficult to find positive examples of an appropriate British identity that you can adopt. How do you show you are British? Do you choose to be emblazoned with the Cross of St. George? Are you a Sunday-morning kilt wearer? Do you robe yourself in the garb that Victorians thought Druids wore? In most cases Britons will answer no. It is no easier when you go beneath such surface details. So how do you define yourself as someone who is British? Is it by the town you live in, even though you dislike your neighbours, let alone the people from ‘the estate’ or those from ‘the posh houses’? Is it by the team which you support, though that too is likely to divide you from more people than it is to link you with them? Is it by your language – one which is evolving quicker in Tokyo, Delhi, Beijing and Los Angeles than it is in Britain? Is it in the sense of what is ‘right’, the moral lead that Britain gives the world, though the more is known of our human rights record the more embarrassing it proves? Is it the ability to complain but not to act; the ability to seek to blame rather than to help? Maybe, but if not, how then do we define ourselves?
I would argue that in an era when many traditional views ‘Britishness’ are dismissed, it is only by defining what we are not that we get a sense of what it is to be British. The highly edited view of history in popular usage provides the tools to determine what so many of us brindle against. A fuller view of British history would provide a different picture, but one which most of us are not interested in hearing. Every country has dark and light sides in its story, and it is often hard for peoples to address the less palatable ones. The British feel we hold a trump card which means that when countries are challenged to tackle their history, we can claim, ‘well, we were the winners’, we decide what goes into the story and how it is told. Yet, I believe this let-out cheats the British of their true identity, something richer and more complex, and thus fascinating. Above all, something that would allow us to think and operate fully in the twenty-first century rather than with one foot still mired in the 1940s.
What, then, do we feel we are not? Stop someone in the street and these days most would say we feel we are not European. Many Britons welcome the proper teaching of History because it shows our young how we beat the ‘Europeans’. Even though Britain’s fighting men and women are lionized and national service would be returned at the drop of a referendum, we contrast Britain’s freedoms with the supposedly or once militaristic states abroad, notably Germany, Russia and Argentina. Somehow the British can love the military without there being anything wrong with it, whereas for others it is an ingredient of dictatorship. Having fought with every neighbouring country, and many others, in the preceding centuries and won, we believe this still equips us to tell them how to behave, whilst making their suggestions to us irrelevant.
‘Europe’ currently provides us with the scapegoat for all that is bad, from the comic regulation of our fruit and veg, to the level of taxes and the influx of foreigners. We expect special exemptions because we were the winners whereas the others were the aggressors or losers; we are the model that they should adopt. Our dismissing of anything European leaves us oblivious to facts like the French retirement age of 60 and that Belgian employees get 14 months’ pay each year to give them summer holiday and Christmas money. We are happy that the Europeans supply us, as they have for decades, with cheap shopping and cheap holidays, without ever asking, why these things are so expensive at home. Even if we do challenge such discrepancies there is always a simple answer: that must be something to do with the ‘EEC’. History can show that the British have had much exchange with the rest of Europe. As we find from among our surnames, despite our aspirations for isolation, there has long been traffic in both directions and connections with France, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Greece and Russia to name a few.
We are less certain about this aspect, but generally we agree we not American. As with the Europeans, we feel that the Americans are somewhat naïve and in need of guidance from us, their elders. British history shows that our forces turn up first and stick it out, whilst cajoling the Americans into action. We admire their tough business practices, but would be bewildered if turned away from a hospital for having no health insurance or finding nowhere to ‘sign on’ after a few weeks unemployed.
In other ways we feel the Americans are soft. The ‘we-can-take-it’ attitude through centuries of fighting has meant that, unlike the squeamish Americans, generations of Britons raised on weekly casualty reports from overseas, if even from just across the Irish Sea, means we do not whimper as the death toll mounts. What goes for abroad applies to the home front too. September 11th – what is all the fuss? Who marks the days to remember Brighton, Docklands, Enniskillen, Guildford, Harrods, Manchester, Omagh and more? Is there a day in the British calendar on which some civilian has not been blown apart? The British have been through it and ‘keep on keeping on’. So, however much we would have liked to have our representatives in the Senate and have long preferred a bomb with a US flag on top, anything closer is only going to come once the Americans have matured to our level. Of course if we just viewed our Victorian history, we would know that, first, very many Americans have British roots, though these have been far more quickly lost than those with Irish, Italian, German or Polish connections. Second, that the current actions of the USA would look right and proper to those who had lived under any of Palmerston’s governments. Whilst this may not make them excusable it allows them to be understood and anticipated.
We are determinedly not political. ‘I don’t do politics’ has even been legitimised as a kind of catchphrase. We certainly do not see that the changes we desire, whether great or small, will be engineered or prevented by politics. There is a clear division between the outcomes we want and any method of achieving them that we will accept. Never educated about how our state works, we feel inadequate in any discussion of politics and this unease means, as a topic for discussion, politics is banned from dinner tables and sofas the length of the country. Such aversion, plus television, draws away those who once would have filled the ranks of the Chartists, the Suffragists, the Mosleyites and their opponents, and the anti-poll tax rioters. Nowadays we have a single, ineffectual, political weapon, the moan, used as we stand in the queue, as we shout at the television or at the drivers in the cars around us. Being British means being able to complain better than the rest; if it was an Olympic sport Britain would head the table for medals. Of course, Britain has never moved forward relying on simple complaints. Without something more dynamic in the past we would lack votes for many men and for all women; reasonable working conditions would be rare. Not knowing how such things were brought about, breeds both complacency and fatalism.
Anyone can bear witness that we are not merciful. News reports on the arrest of a murderer elicit scores of volunteers to be the executioner. In a country where guns are all but illegal, we would rather have every officer armed and a large portion of the ‘right’ people properly equipped too. Whereas we will not march, or certainly not more than once, to oppose a war or poverty or banning fox hunting, we relish the chance to pick someone else’s fight, even better if it is simply based on rumour and assumption. Rather than the activist we prefer to be the on-the-spot vigilante, to make the streets safe for us ‘decent’ people through our rage. Arbitrary justice is our favoured form with no time for lenient judges and the complexities of proof. We are British because we know what and who is wrong, and what ‘they’ should suffer as a consequence.
Feeling as powerless as we do in this society, the only tool of ordinary Briton is anger. From airport check-in desks to traffic jams we swear and jibe, hoot and jab with righteous indignation and a ‘how dare you!’ It stretches from those whose tack is ‘don’t you know who I am?’ to those who fall back on ‘do yourself a favour mate’. We are united and divided against each other in our ferocity. Our personal anger expelled temporarily, we slump back in our chairs to watch master classes in temper on our television. Reality TV shows us the reality of both our inability to cope with anything that confounds our plans and the force we use to challenge such ‘injustice’.
We are not tolerant. Whilst we may be sympathetic and occasionally reach a short way into our pockets to help, we would rather foreigners’ problems were dealt with in their own countries. For us, the words ‘asylum seeker’, no longer have any connection to persecution and torture, simply designating people who are not us, people who get greater benefits and an easier life than we will ever have, and yet who are at the heart of every local crime. Maybe this should not be surprising, as many corners of British history show where such tensions lead, from the forgotten anti-Semitic rioting of the First World War, through the Notting Hill riots of 1958 to the recent Bradford riots. Many of us define ourselves as not being ‘them’ - those invaders or in turn, not being ‘them’ – our attackers. Forgotten too is the fact that the British Isles are a landscape of settlement from pre-history to today; that the first Arabs arrived as Roman troops and racial legislation appeared in the 13th and 16th centuries. Through the centuries Britain has been a place of refuge. From Huguenots refugees of the 17th century through Jewish ones of the 19th and 20th centuries to the East African Asians of the 1970s, those fleeing persecution elsewhere have injected culture and prosperity, and contributed to the Britain as it is today. Forming opinions from perspectives that lack a sense of history may be a defining characteristic of the British, but it is liable to choke off such input in the future, leaving a society of stagnant attitudes and a stagnating economy.
Despite regular claims to the contrary, it is clear the British are not classless. E.P. Thompson argued that class was not about our place in an economic structure, but about our perceived standing in relation to the others around us in society, especially as consumption is now the basis of how we define our status. We define ourselves against everyone else we encounter; there are not three classes, but millions. I look down on him because his car has 0.2 litres less capacity than mine; I look up to her because her shoes came from that store; I look down on him because he has got last year’s toy; I look up to her because she got the chair by the window in the Television Room. Every aspect of our persona from where we live and work, and especially what possessions we have, separates us. You may argue that other countries are equally as divided, but the British add extra layers based on the less tangible aspects – our accents, our names and our attitudes. Ironically our consumer society means we are united in debt. So many of us teeter on the edge of bankruptcy; we are as vulnerable of a fall as any Victorian character of a Dickens or a Charles Palliser novel. For all our fine distinctions, so many of us are just a few purchases away from penury.
We are not intellectual. We relish the ability to dismiss learning; we are the only nation who can say someone is ‘too clever by half’ as if there is a quota we should not exceed. It is common to laud the self-made man, but such references now neglect that such people were also self-taught men and women as two examples from among the praised show: Brunel went to college, in France of all places, and Stephenson attended evening classes. These men did not despise learning in a way those attempting to be their equivalents do today who somehow assume great business people are born not painstakingly crafted.
Another role model swept under the historical carpet in more recent decades is that of the self-teaching trade unionist, probably best embodied by Peter Sellars in ‘I’m Alright Jack’. Whilst the movie ridiculed, it did note a common type of the 1950s: a man working to advance himself through study. Ironically, now, in a time when more people than ever can access education whether face-to-face or online, you cannot even satirise such people, because they have been wiped from history and a person’s knowledge of a football team’s record or the latest ‘Big Brother’ happenings win him or her higher status than any ability in history or engineering.
We are not lazy. Britons are united in how long they work. How would the Victorian reformers view our work practices now? A century and a half of legislation has not eliminated the long hours and the workplace injuries. Whilst we may have fewer bank holidays and work longer hours than colleagues in neighbouring countries, every employee is made to feel greedy for taking off time that is legitimately theirs. No comment on workplace sickness is unaccompanied by allegations of malingering; no reference to statutory leave is not countered by talk of how many millions each bank holiday costs employers. The history written in the future is more likely detail how many who were made unemployed by the minimum wage than to outline how many chip shop workers, as a result of its introduction, for the first time could afford a portion of fish and chips from an hour’s work.
We are not celebrities. The magical aura that so many Britons grasp for shows how many of us will not attain it. Our voices will never be spurned by a panel of experts, our dressing gowns will never be viewed through Channel 4 cameras, we will never be asked to escape from a jungle, and we will never attend Elton’s or the Beckhams’ bash. Yet, because the day-to-day work of most is so devalued, we aspire for our fifteen minutes of fame or notoriety, as if something not done in front of millions of viewers lacks value. Those of us who fail to become the latest manufactured pop idol, are thus left with nothing but shrieking in public places and condemning anything that we feel is alien, to give us some sense of being worthwhile.
So what is the role of history? The first question has to be – which history? Two decades of schools focusing on the history of wars and ‘great’ people has left so many of us without a history that relates to our present. Just as much as the ‘losers’ like France and Germany, China and Japan are having to address their histories, with all their difficulties, so must Britain. There are too many dark corners that to many have become myths to be denied. Who remembers that whilst Churchill never ordered a miner shot. he favoured sterilising habitual criminals? Who now believes that in 1910 King George V thought the country was on the verge of civil war? Who is familiar with Britain’s ‘punitive’ aerial bombings over Iraq in the 1920s? Who talks about keeping Jews out of air-raid shelters in the early days of the Blitz? Who describes that the Catholics welcomed the British Army into Northern Ireland for their protection in 1969? Who teaches what issues caused the Three-Day Weeks? Who can explain why the Community Charge was dubbed the ‘poll tax’? An incomplete, or even worse, a selected history, makes for an incomplete national identity. An identity for the future cannot be one that has its feet mired in a distorted view of the past. It has to be based on the good and bad of every country, not viewed rosily nor seeking to demonise those of other times and places.
How can history play its part in identity? With so much negativity, who can offer a solution? Where is the focus of pride? Maybe television offers some answers, look to Tony Robinson and to the late Fred Dibnah. These ‘amateur’ enthusiasts were in a position to interpret history to be both interesting and relevant in a form accessible to viewers. The stories they have told are of a Britain in all its complexity, involving all kinds of people. They successfully highlight that the great moments of history have been underwritten by hard slog. The great cathedrals, the burgeoning cities, the glorious victories, the NHS are all built on sweat and ache of millions of hands motivated by an infinity of thoughts and ambitions. There is a place for the rulers and the governors in such stories, but they are not us, they are not the people who actually did the things which have created the Britain and thus the Britons which we know.
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