Category: Other people’s books

James Salter’s first novel, and the only book of his that I’ve read, was originally published in 1956.  It’s about American fighter pilots in the Korean War, a transition point in aerial warfare, when the planes were jets with swept-back wings, but still fought each other with guns, as the fighters of WW2 had done.

I bought the book after reading an article on Salter in the LRB by James Meek, which observed that twentieth-century American novelists tend to depict the military as victims, but that The Hunters had more in common with the Iliad or Beowulf than with Catch-22.  In this book, aerial warfare is not depicted as a cruel waste of young men, but as a kind of princely sport.   Salter himself was an USAF officer for some time, and was a fighter pilot in the Korean War – he himself shot down a MIG fighter above the Yalu River – and his attitude to this experience is evident in his preface to the 1997 edition:

It was said of Lord Byron that he was more proud of his Norman ancestors who had accompanied William the Conqueror in the invasion of England than of having written famed works…  Looking back, I feel a pride akin to that in having flown and fought along the Yalu.

All this is very remote from my own experience, my own stance on life, my own temperament, and my own sense of what I’m capable of, physically, emotionally, morally.   I dislike war and the readiness to resort to war as a means of solving problems.  I seldom win at competitive games.  I’ve worked most of my adult life in a profession in which women outnumber men by eight or nine to one.  But I nevertheless found myself interested in this book about an exclusively male world in which hunting down MIGs is

… a child’s dream and a man’s heaven, living a medieval life under sanitary conditions, flying the last shreds of something irreplaceable, I don’t know what, in a sport too kingly even for kings.   

The only strand of connection I have with this world is that I was fascinated by fighter planes as a child.   I owned many books about them.   I loved to see them in the sky, and, when I had the chance, to go and look at them close up, their silvery riveted wings, their cramped cockpits filled with mysterious dials, their sleek forms made unspeakably glamorous by their association with speed and power and death. 

Another thing I remember from my childhood was a form of comic book that we used to refer to as ‘war mags’.  They were a kind of graphic novel, I suppose, or graphic novella anyway.   I don’t remember ever actually buying one, but they were passed about at school and I must have read dozens of them, each one containing a single story about British soldiers or airmen in World War II, fighting against the Germans (who said things like ‘Britisher schweinhund!’) or the Japanese (who said ‘Banzai!’).  There were a lot of blazing machine guns and grim-faced men, but fighting the enemy was always the backdrop to a more personal story about male relationships.   As I recall a typical plot involved rivalry or even bitter hatred between two men, or perhaps two groups of men, who were supposed to be fighting on the same side.   A happy ending might be the resolution of this conflict, and a new friendship, or at least a new respect, ‘forged in the white heat of battle’, or alternatively the death of a real bad egg, paying the price of his own lack of courage, or integrity, or loyalty to his mates.

The Hunters, it seems to me, is essentially a literary war mag.   The plot centres on the rivalry between Cleve, the main viewpoint character, who desperately longs for ‘kills’ but somehow keeps failing to be in the sky at the right moment, and Pell, a shallow and selfish man who is quite prepared to place his comrades’ lives in jeopardy in his pursuit of the five MIGs that will make him officially an ‘ace’.   

At one point, Cleve is on the tail of a MIG and about to make a kill when Pell radios for help:  he’s being pursued by MIGs and is unable to extricate himself because, when he tried to jettison his disposable fuel tanks, one of them got stuck and is now hanging half off, impairing his manoeuvrability.  Cleve, honourably, abandons the chase to rescue him, even though he’s desperate to add a second kill to his solitary success.   Pell subsequently shakes off his drop tank and goes on to claim the destruction of another MIG as his crucial fifth kill.  Basking in glory back at base, he crowns his ingratitude and dishonesty by insinuating that Cleve, the man who gave up a kill to save him, is a coward who avoids a fight. 

All this is pure war mag, it really is, but I guess that the world evoked by war mags wasn’t entirely a fantasy, and that Homer wasn’t making it all up when he wrote about those fierce and competitive warrior-princes.  A particular kind of grouping, held together by a code of honour, and driven by a very clear and very narrow definition of success for which its members are willing to risk everything, really does exist, and really is one of the many ways in which human beings manage to imbue their lives with meaning.  There are odder things, after all.  There are people whose entire life is organised around the need to get a bicycle round a circular track a fraction of second faster than anyone else.

Salter’s sparse, Hemingway-like prose works well, writing about men who are not in the habit of discussing their emotions and would regard it as sissy to wax lyrical about beauty.  Occasional, carefully rationed outbursts of lyricism are all the more effective for emerging from out of this Spartan restraint, particularly the evocations of those mysterious landscapes of cloud and air, far enough above the ground to be separate worlds, which are the medium through which the pilots fly and seek their enemies.   Salter’s sudden, temporary viewpoint shifts, too, going against all the usual rules, are daring and interesting and worth studying as a technique.  The war mag plot is sometimes rather predictable – when a pilot’s longing to get home to his wife and sons is described in more detail than any other pilot’s homesickness, or when a gun camera is jammed at the beginning of a mission so that there will be no photographic evidence of any kill, or when a legendary MIG pilot known as Casey Jones puts in an appearance on the enemy side, you just know what’s going to happen next – but it drives the book forward and keeps you turning the pages, just as it did in the war mags themselves.

War mags never had women in them.  Here, the few women characters, described almost entirely in terms of their physical attractiveness to the men, are entirely marginal figures – they include barmaids, waitresses , prostitutes, and one young Japanese woman who very briefly becomes an object of romantic yearning – but I guess this is may be realistic, in a novel written from the perspective of the male pilots.   When you focus exclusively on a single narrow objective, presumably editing out as far as possible the horror of the deaths you cause or may suffer yourself, your grasp of the rest of the world must indeed become attenuated, utilitarian and shallow.  Cleve half-grasps this himself, though much of the time he seems to accept that this narrowness of vision, and the risk of a horrible death, are prices worth paying for those solitary existential moments among the clouds, hunting and being hunted.      

As a writer of made-up stories, I’m increasingly in awe of writers who tell stories about real people, reconstructed from historical evidence, and increasingly drawn to reading them.

This book is about the way in which, after the formal abolition of slavery, white Southern society was able to reintroduce black slavery in a new, but equally brutal, form which continued to exist until 1945: well into living memory.  Douglas Blackmon brings this story alive by repeatedly drawing out individual lives from the historical backdrop: real tragedies, real attrocities, and occasional real acts of courage.  It’s a history book, and a very harrowing one, but its also a real page-turner.

The way the new form of slavery worked was by sentencing people to hard labour and then selling them on to local employers.  This happened at the state level, but it happened in an extraordinarily off-hand and corrupt way also at county level, where local officials would arrest black people as a source of saleable slave labour, often on trivial or made-up charges, such as playing with dice, talking loudly in the presence of white women, ‘vagrancy’ or riding in empty freight cars.  Leaving their employment without permission of their employer was also a criminal offence.  They’d be found guilty in a flimsy quasi-legal process in which they’d have no legal representation and then required to pay fines and court expenses which they could not afford.  At this point, a white farmer, logging camp operator or mining company would come forward and agree to pay the fine in exchange for so many months of labour.   At times of need (harvesting time for instance), large numbers of black men might be rounded up in this way, and sometimes specific black men, known to be good workers, would be arrested in this way at the request of would be purchasers.

These convicts (even if only convicts for using bad language or dropping litter) were then bought and sold by one employer to another, whipped, tortured, forced to work very long hours and live in appalling conditions and not infrequently killed  (unlike antebellum slave owners these new masters had no long-term interest in keeping ‘their’ slaves healthy and alive).  They were also routinely kept on far beyond their original notional ‘sentence’ by being charged with additional offences or required to pay off additional debts in a system where there was close collusion between white public officials and white purchasters, and no sort of checks or balances whatever for black people, who’d been excluded from juries, excluded from participation in government, and were kept in a permanent state of fear, not only by this quasi-judicial form of oppression, but by lynchings, and by the most amazingly coarse, open, brutal and contemptuous kind of racism.  A governor of Georgia, pardoning a white man charged with rape, comments that he seriously doubts that it possible to commit the crime of rape against a black woman, so voracious and uncontrollable are black women’s sexual appetites (a view which of course gives white men carte blanche to indulge their own sexual appetites with any black woman they like).  A white US senator from the South, hearing news of a lynching in Illinois, comments that at last the Northerners are learning how to kill and burn niggers.

The double standards are breath-taking.  Black people are controlled by a mendacious, sadistically brutal and sexual predatory system because they are supposedly untrustworthy, violent and unable to control themselves sexually.  White men who’ve beaten and murdered black slaves escape prosecution or (occasionally) receive the most desultory fines, while black men are sentenced to work for months in darkness under the whip for riding an empty freight car.

Blackman’s concluding message is to remind us that the historical burden from under which black people in the US are trying to emerge is much much more recent than most people would like to admit.   (And of course disenfranchisement and segregation went on much longer even than this particularly form of slavery.   The year that Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white man was the year in which I was born.)   What this book vividly and painfully shows is that those who are denied power and political participation are also denied justice and truth, but I guess it also shows that those who have power also, in a way, deny themselves the truth, for their power gives them the ability to replace reality with their own self-serving projections.  Having power over others which we haven’t earned turns us into babies.

Wondering how things had moved on since those days, I found myself looking up the websites of Southern state legislatures.  I was somewhat relieved to find that in George and Alabama, the proportion of legislators who are black seems to roughly correspond with the proportion of black people in the population in general, which is surely progress of some sort.  It’s a curious quirk of US history that all the black legislators seemed to be members of the Democratic party, the party of segregation, and the ruling party under which the attrocities described by Blackmon took place, while the representatives of the Republican Party, the party of emancipation, seemed to be entirely white.

I recommend this book, which came out in 2009 and won the Pulitzer Prize.  It has several excellent reviews on Amazon UK.  Oddly, and I wondered why this was, there were no reviews of it all on amazon.com.

I wrote here previously about my distaste for a new Oxfam ad, which seemed to me to perpetuate the nauseating stereotype of Africa as a pathetic and helpless victim dependent for its salvation on the outside world.  (I wonder how much investment has been lost to Africa as a result of this stereotype, perpetuated, ironically, by aid agencies trying to use pity to get money from us to help Africa?)

My daughter Nancy recently spent a year in Malawi, one of Africa’s poorest countries, and my wife and I spent two weeks there with her.   As we drove across the country, the delivery end of the aid business was everywhere in evidence.  One after another along the wayside were clinics, schools and orphanages funded by European and American aid agencies.  The Malawian government itself has something like half of its budget provided by foreign aid.

Malawi is a delightful country – its people are friendly, interested, and courteous in a charming old-fashioned kind of way, and certainly not pathetic or helpless – but I felt uncomfortable about what I was seeing.  Where was all this going?  Is it useful, healthy, or even sustainable in the long run, for a country to have its basic services largely provided by external donors, and often administered by them as well?  Was this really ever going to help the country reach a point where it could fund its own institutions?  Where were the industries, where were even the beginnings of the industries, that would make this possible?

So I found myself asking the question: does aid really help?

Certainly the evidence thus far is not encouraging.  As the Rwandan President, Paul Kagame, observed: “In the last 50 years, you’ve [the rest of the world] spent US$400 billion in aid to Africa.  But what is there to show for it?”  Dambisa Moyo – she is a Zambian economist – observes that just 30 years ago Malawi (among other countries) had a per capita income that was higher than that of China. Why has one country shot ahead, and the other remained stuck in a state of dependency?

Well of course there are a number of possible reasons for this, and I couldn’t help feeling that Moyo skated rather lightly over some of them. (China, after all, has been a state and an urban civilization for thousands of years, long before any country in Europe, while Malawi, like most African countries, is a recent invention, and its modest cities have only existed for a century or so).   However I remained struck by Moyo’s thesis, which is that, far from being a solution to Africa’s problem with development, aid is in very large part its cause.

Aid supports rent-seeking – that is, the use of governmental authority to take and make money without trade or production of wealth.  At a very basic level, an example of this is where a government official with access to aid money set aside for public welfare takes the money for his own personal use.  Obviously there cannot be rent-seeking without rent.

It isn’t just a matter of outright corruption, though.  In all kinds of ways, Moyo argues, aid creates a system where the best way for ambitious people to get on is to gain access to the money tap, rather than to create wealth themselves.  A mineral resource such as oil can have a similar effect, resulting in a country’s elite simply living on the income derived from the sale of that resource, rather than building up an economy that would deliver wealth when the oil has gone.

Indeed, aid may not only discourage local economic activity, it may even actively undermine it:

There’s a mosquito net manufacturer in Africa.  He manufactures around 500 nets a week.  He employs ten people who (as with many African countries) each have to support upwards of fifteen relatives…

Enter vociferous Hollywood movie star who… goads Western governments to collect and send 100,000 mosquito nets… at a cost of a million dollars.  The nets arrive, the nets are distributed and a ‘good’ deed is done.

With the market flooded with foreign nets, however, our mosquito net maker is promptly put out of business.  His ten workers can no longer support their 150 dependents (who are now forced to depend on handouts) and one mustn’t forget that in a maximum of five years the majority of the imported nets will be torn, damaged and of no further use….

The gift of nets, in other words, creates a need for more gifts, and so on and on.  It’s not hard to see how such a pattern, repeated in many different ways and at many different levels, could indeed result in a permanent dependency on external aid.

Moyo advocates a gradual phasing out of aid as we now understand it, and discusses a range of different ways in which Africa could begin to finance its own development.  Her suggestions include trade, a sore point for Africa since most donor countries take away with the left hand what the right hand has given by denying Africa fair access to their markets, but Moyo points out that there are other new trading partners in the rest of the developing world (notably China and India), and opportunities for trade within Africa itself, or indeed within single countries.  They also include foreign direct investment in capital projects (such as China is now enthusiastically engaged in), borrowing money in capital markets, use of micro-finance (a means of providing small loans for local businesses which has been very effective in other parts of the world), and making better and more effective use of Africa’s own savings.  (Apparently there are huge quantities of savings in developing countries, but in the absence of access to an appropriate banking system, they are often simply held in cash, or in the form of other assets like gold, with the result that they are not available to the economy: ‘borrowers cannot borrow, and lenders do not lend’).  To those who might object that African countries would find it difficult in raising money in these kinds of ways, Moyo’s response is that dependence on aid is one of the things that make it difficult.

I’m no economist, and I’m not familiar with the literature on aid and development (as I am sure would be evident to any development expert reading this post), but I found her arguments compelling.   I suspect many people of a leftish persuasion would be inclined to dismiss her essentially market- and business-orientated solutions out of hand, but I don’t feel so inclined myself.  Another thing that struck me about Malawi (based on my own observations and those of my daughter) was the very visible presence of European and American development professionals, travelling back and forth across the country in their SUVs, doing deals, attending meetings, enjoying a bit of R & R with their families in lakeside resorts.  I’m not saying these weren’t good people doing their best, but I would much rather have seen business people looking for opportunities for investment and trade.

“I’d pestered and pestered to be allowed outside to play in the fine scatter of snow and eventually my mother gave in.  She packed me into my red snowsuit, fastening the zip so high that it caught my throat.  Then she escorted my outside and positioned me on the patio.  My eyes were awash with unshed tears as my father called, ‘Say cheese.’  Afterwards, when I wanted to play they said it was too cold and made me come straight back indoors.  They have forgotten this.  It is something that has been… unremembered.  They refer to the photograph as ‘that lovely picture of you having fun in the snow.'”

In 2010, I was one of the judges for the Edge Hill Short Story Award.  As well as the main prize, which is given for single-author collections (that year it was won by Jeremy Dyson for The Cranes that Build the Cranes), we were also asked to give an award for individual short stories submitted by students on Edge Hill University’s creative writing programme.   This proved to be an easy task, for we were all immediately agreed that the most outstanding submission was a story by Carys Bray that began:

“I have been looking for a baby to borrow for a number of weeks.  I’ve offered to look after several, even some I don’t know very well.  But their mothers seem suspicious.  I ask nicely.  I say please and I smile.  I remember to ask if it’s a girl or a boy and how old it is, although I’m more interested in its length than anything.”

The story, ‘Just in case’, is included in this new collection from Salt, along with 16 others.   They are all  more or less about domestic life.  Many of them, like ‘Just in Case’ are downright dark, and others are sad and bleak.  A dementing old women in ‘My burglar’ hides her possessions in strange places because she is convinced that a burglar comes in the night, and their resulting absence then becomes more evidence of the threat, and a reason to hide yet more things.   The ‘Wooden mum’, worn out by the incessant crazy-making demands of her autistic son Tom and the cruelly underming ‘help’ of her mother-in-law, reflects on the moment when Tom was born, and she imagined herself the happiest woman in the world.   A father in ‘The Rescue’ waits outside the flat of his heroin-addicted son in a concrete corridor in a tower block, for someone from somewhere to come and rescue him, as those Chilean miners were rescued from underground.

But this book is not just an orgy of bleakness and despair.  The quote I started with cames from a story called ‘Love: terms and conditions’.  It begins with a woman  visiting her parents with her husband and three children, and being reminded of her own wretched childhood, but it ends with an account of how she has managed nevertheless to achieve for her own children ‘a family where love doesn’t track a base rate of obedience’ (what a brilliant line!).   You can see this is hard for her, you can see that sometimes she tries too hard – at one point, remembering how she wasn’t allowed to play in the snow, she tries to get her reluctant children out of their warm beds to come out and enjoy the snow in the middle of the night – but she has succeeded.   Life is often sad, and that can make us afraid to tell hopeful stories for fear that we are sugar-coating the truth, but this story really earns its happy ending.

It’s a difficult thing too, I think, to write about family life, which unlike wars and love affairs and murders and all the other staples of fiction, does not tend to come with a beginning, a middle and an end, but follows a daily cycle, on and on for years.  But it’s a trick that Carys Bray pulls off in various ways.  The final story in the collection, ‘On the way home’, works like a relay race in which the baton is passed on from family to family.  In the final scene, a little girl called Anna realises that her mother is fed up with her for grazing her leg and making a hole in her tights. “The mild rebuke presses a slump on Anna’s shoulders.  Mummy is disappointed again.”

Her mother tells her to wait while she goes into a shop.   When she comes out again, she is holding a  lollypop in a bag.

“‘ Don’t worry about the tights, sweetheart.  That looks sore.  Does it hurt?’

“‘A bit,’ Anna admits.

“‘I know something that always makes people feel better,’ Mummy says.  She hands the lollypop to Anna.  Then she crouches on the pavement of Bridge Road and places winter-cool lips on the exposed cap of Anna’s knee where it pokes through the hole in her tights, round as a biscuit.

“And on the nobble at the base of Mummy’s neck, in the delicate fuzz of hair, Anna places a soft, dry kiss of her own.”

What a great ending.  It made me wonder why literature deals so little with such kisses, and treats them so lightly on the whole, and yet deals so often with, and treats so very seriously, the quickly fading kisses of romantic love.

This is an odd book, an attempt to evoke a piece of semi-urban landscape which most people don’t even recognise as a geographical entity: the escarpment which runs north of London between Hertfordshire and the old county of Middlesex, which the author christens ‘Scarp’.   To the north and south of it, he points out, other strips of high ground have names and identities and are seen as distinct features – the South Downs, the North Downs, the Chilterns – but Scarp is to all intents invisible.   The book describes his attempts to get to know it, to get inside it, and to make it visible and tangible, trudging to and fro across it, sleeping out in it, reading about it, gathering up scraps of it, fantasising about it, studying it on maps.

Scarp isn’t ‘beautiful’ like the South Downs.  It is never going to be made into a national park, or find its way onto the lid of a biscuit tin.  Suburban sprawl, satellite towns, sewage works, golf-courses, and major roads are flung across it, creating new, human geographical categories (towns, boroughs, motorways…) which cut across and camouflage the physical fact of Scarp.  But, as the author says, ‘everywhere is somewhere’.  I like this thought.  Our conventional idea of communing with landscape is to leave our urban dwellings to visit ‘wildernesses’ and beauty spots.  But this is limiting, perpetuating an artificial division between the human and the ‘natural’ which actually diminishes nature (perhaps rather in the way that men diminish women by reducing them to objects of desire, fantasy and idealisation).

I remember many years ago, when I lived in the hilly city of Bristol, wondering what had become of the streams and rivers that had shaped the land on which the city stood, and suddenly realising that of course they were still there.  The rain still fell, the laws of gravity still applied, the same amount of water must flow across the land along the same pathways.  True, the streams now ran through drains beneath the roads, but the essential machinery of the land remained unchanged.

It’s this kind of insight that Papadimitriou seeks to deepen and integrate into his understanding when he describes litter-clogged streams in concrete culverts, squashed squirrels on dual carriageways, the musty smell of abandoned industrial units… all in one and the same breath (so to speak), as he talks about wildflowers, hedgerows, sheep fields, trees and birds in flight.  And this weaving together, this refusal to go along with conventional oppositions of human/natural, ugly/beautiful, spoilt/unspoilt, negligible/significant, also includes an attack on the boundary between interior/exterior, as he adds to the mix his own state of mind, fragments of autobiography, and scraps of the documented or imagined lives of people who live, or have lived, in this same landscape.

It’s a rambling book – you could even say it was a bit of a mess – and, some way into it, I wasn’t sure it was really to my taste.  I suppose I’m not a natural reader for this book, in any case, as I can’t call to mind the specific places he evokes.  I was also slightly irritated in the early chapters by aspects of the authorial tone: Papadimitriou, it seemed to me, was a little too self-consciously inviting the reader to see him as a sort of driven obsessive out of some JG Ballard story.  (Papadimitriou himself talks about how his ‘internal balance would oscillate between the ego’s surrender in the face of a larger entity… and a desire to gain ownership and mastery of that same entity through cultural production’, and I guess that the bits that bugged me are the bits when the needs of the ego became a bit too dominant in that particular tussle).  Anyway, as I read on, I stopped noticing this (and/or Papadimitriou seemed to stop talking about himself in that particular kind of way).  I also stopped worrying that I was only getting a tiny fragment of what the author would have had in his mind as he described these scenes, and allowed myself to be absorbed in the project itself, tapping into my own memories of comparable places to fill the gaps and allow myself, so to speak, to join in.

It was when he described a particular rubbish-strewn piece of wasteland (a scrappy little piece of ground between two busy roads) in which he used to hide while playing hooky from school, that this book really got under my skin.  I’m not aware of any place in my own past which is exactly like that, and yet this scene hit me with great force.  A somewhat solitary and troubled teenager, I did play hooky from school myself, once going into hiding for several days and nights, and, during that time, I too found myself hunkering down in odd little corners, trying to entertain myself and keep myself warm beyond the gaze of the adult world.  So perhaps some of those memories were what this triggered.  But, for whatever reason, I had the sense that the book had somehow found a mainline to my own unconscious, the wellspring of my dreams.  (In fact, reading this passage was like suddenly remembering a place that I had visited in my dreams.)  After that point I was fine with whatever Papadimitriou wanted to tell me.  I particularly loved the Appendix, purporting to be the journal of a hairdresser called Perry Kurland, scrawled in the pages of a Caravan Club of Great Britain logbook.

I myself am interested in landfill sites.  I can’t really say exactly why, but there is something I find quite fascinating about these wide low man-made hills of refuse, usually infested with seagulls, and covered with black plastic pipes to carry away the methane from the stew beneath.   I crane round to look at them when I drive past them – there is a particular fine group of them that I often pass between Bedford and Milton Keynes – and then mull over pleasurably in my mind the processes, chemical and mechanical, that must be taking place within them, and the engineering challenges that must face their human guardians.  (How do they trap that methane for instance, and what do they do with it?  How to they encourage the ground to settle?).  Why, when you think about it, should this pleasure be any less worthy of celebration  than the pleasure of watching a mountain stream, or leaves falling in autumn, or flames flickering in a fire place?

I read a while ago, in a book about Queen Mary, about a teenaged servant girl in Mary’s reign who was tried, convicted and burnt at the stake for suggesting that the bread and wine in the communion service did not really turn into the flesh and blood of Christ.   It seems bizzarre now that such a thing could be seen as a capital offence (indeed a worse than capital offence, requiring not merely death, but prolonged excruciating pain).  But those who tried her and found her guilty, those who tied her to the stake, those who lit the fire, must somehow in their minds have been persuaded, or more or less persuaded, that what they were doing was justified (even though many of them would have been old enough to have lived and worked under Mary’s protestant brother Edward, when what was now compulsory had been a crime), or how otherwise could they keep on going?

To live, to stay sane, to get on with our lives, most of us adjust, accept (within parameters) the rules, and even (at least to some extent) buy into the rationale (Foucault’s ‘regime of truth’) that is said to justify those rules.  The death of that servant girl made many people complicit, gave them a stake (no pun intended) in believing in the rationale.  Perhaps that, even more even than its obvious deterrent effect, was its real point.  Queen Mary, as I understand it, would sincerely have believed in the weird cannibalistic doctrine of transubstantiation, but, in terms of the machinery of power, that is a minor point.  The point is to shape and control.

What Ken MacLeod has achieved in this clever and erudite book, is to bring into focus the rules and assumptions that shape and control us in our own society by the time-honoured method of extrapolating them into a near future context, where they are a little more obvious pronounced.   Torture is  routinely and unabashedly used, for instance, rather than furtively as now, and this is justified by the need to fight terrorism.  (In a nice touch, you get offered trauma counselling afterwards).  More insidiously, and more challenging to me personally, with my own career in social work, are the ways in which public health and child protection are also used as a means of control in the world of Intrusion.

Hope Morrison is being pressured to take ‘the fix’: a pill which will correct most harmful mutations in her unborn child.  It isn’t exactly compulsory, but not to take it, you are told, will lead to questions being asked about your parenting, since what truly protective parent would want to deny her child protection from disease? And if you don’t take it, this becomes part of your profile, a profile built up by surveillance of many different kinds, from the ring you wear on your finger to monitor your health status, to the cameras that watch you at home and in the street.   If you don’t take the fix, and have visited unlicenced open air cafes where people take cafeine and smoke, and have had contact with people who themselves have come under some kind of suspicion (perhaps because they are Asian, and have been questioned under torture about links with Hindu extremists, and have said something or other to make the torture stop), then things start to look pretty bad for you. And if your husband…  Well, read the book.

I must admit, when I read Intrusion’s early digs at current anti-smoking policy, I wondered uneasily if I was letting myself in for a Jeremy Clarkson-style rant about health-and-safety-gone-mad etc.  But MacLeod is doing something much more subtle than that, showing how the very reasonableness of (for instance) concern about public health or child protection, can be used to rationalise a regime of surveillance and control, in which midwives, doctors and social workers feel quite justified in being part of the same system as torturers, drone pilots and secret police.   Surveillance and control always have a rationale, always seem more-or-less justified to those complicit in them, but they always have additional consequences to those that provide the rationale.  (In the book, pregnant women aren’t allowed to work in places where smoking once occurred: ostensibly it’s about the health of unborn babies.  In practice it restricts women’s access to employment.)   I admit that, in a career in social work, the existence of these kinds of additional unstated consequences are something that I have often worried about (as indeed have many others: see this book for instance, which argues that social workers’ belief in their own benevolence is precisely what makes them effective agents of control).   MacLeod goes on to show that even the critics of the system, even those whose function is to expose and anatomise it, can in fact be part of the machinery that makes it work.

There’s a lot more to this book.  It’s sharp too on the way that things mutate over time: an Indian Marxist group absorbs Al-Qaeda and becomes a globalist Nihilist network, the Labour Party becomes the party of the Free and Social Market (which helps people to make the consumer choices they would have made if they’d been properly informed), Iran becomes a militantly atheistic ally, India a hostile threat.  It’s interesting on the way that unorthodox ideas can be permitted if they are part of a recognised belief system, but not if based on personal belief.   It’s strong on the technology of control, the way that devices that make life easier for us, also have the effect of making us trackable and measurable and countable (as is already the case of course, with mobile phones, google, debit cards etc etc all making us much easier to track than was the case with their predescessors).

And the book is also a well-constructed page turner, with a plot (hinging not only on Hope’s resistance to the fix, but on an unusual genetic ability possessed by her husband) that leads the reader willingly through this scary, and in many ways very plausible, world.

Intrusion on Amazon UK.

This is the most engaging novel I’ve read for a while.  It’s about the Iraq War but is entirely set in America.  Billy Lynn is one of a group of soldiers who took part in a conspicuously heroic action in Iraq, an action which was fortuitously captured in its entirety by a Fox TV cameraman, and put on the internet.   Billy and his surviving fellow-soldiers are being paraded around the USA (and particularly, some of them notice, to swing-states), in order to boost flagging support for the war with their story of American heroism and military success.

The story is told, in the third person and the present tense, from the viewpoint of 19-year-old Billy himself, who played a particularly prominent role in the famous firefight.   The whole book covers a single day in which he and the other soldiers visit the Dallas Cowboys football stadium, where, as well as a football game, Destiny’s Child will be performing, and the soldiers themselves will be taking part in some unspecified event.  They are being followed around by a Hollywood movie producer who has promised to make their story into a film, and is constantly on his Blackberry to well-known stars and funders.

The book is funny, I suppose, though the funny things are so close to being real, that they didn’t exactly make me laugh.  What we are shown is the attempt by the well-heeled supporters of the war and of George W Bush, to repackage these young men’s terrifying existential experience to meet their needs, personal and political, and the young men’s growing awareness of just how much they are being used (and used by people, by and large, who themselves have always managed to avoid being directly exposed to war.)

Reviewing this book in the Guardian, Robert McCrum observes ‘The unintended consequence of Fountain’s bravura performance is to reduce the experience to words and style. It is… extraordinary writing, but essentially fiction for non-fiction readers.’  This doesn’t make any sense  to me at all.   The writing is consciously stylish (and very occasionally I felt it wasn’t sure what style it was aiming for), but I felt the experience of these soldiers was rather vividly conveyed, and that Billy himself, a very young man attempting to negotiate the transition to adulthood in quite exceptionally weird and difficult circumstances, was really beautifully drawn.