Review: Barracuda by Christos Tsiolkas

Christos Tsiolkas’s last novel The Slap centred on a single initial incident, a man slapping a child, that set off a complex chain of events — Tsiolkas employed this plot device to observe its repercussions on the book’s characters through a series of episodic sections. His latest novel, Barracuda, has neither the instant intrigue of The Slap nor the sensationalism of its treatment of cultural mores and instead draws upon an almost 19th-century inclination to find meaning in the shape of a life.

Speaking at the 2010 Edinburgh International Book Festival, Tsiolkas compared “dry and academic” European literature unfavourably to books about the American suburban experience, describing John Updike’s Couples as an example of the “fearlessness that I am hungry for”. What is this fearlessness? In his desire to find beauty in the ordinary, often unpleasant, always honest, inner lives of suburban Australia, Tsiolkas attempts to express something almost beyond his artistry.

Barracuda is the chopped-up biography of Danny Kelly, a once aspiring swimmer trying to escape his working class upbringing. The novel begins in first-person before shifting its focus to 1994 and a third-person narration — the story of Danny’s life moves the same way, between first and third, past and present and creates the sensation of a self complete only in transitory moments.

Initially, Danny comes across as a promising and ferociously ambitious swimmer. His athletic prowess wins him a scholarship to an esteemed private school he calls “Cunts College”where he doesn’t belong. It’s a boyish, working class gesture at once rebellious, defiant, aggressive and compensatory. Here, Danny struggles to deal with the chasm in privilege and feels shame at his background.

Status anxiety becomes a kind of inverted snobbery. He is obsessed with his own standing, feelings of cultural inferiority and shame. It’s interesting to note that many of the boys simply don’t even think these things or may even admire, fear or respect him. Barracuda allows all these issues to breathe, naturally. There is a sense in that Tsiolkas is writing fiction in the truest sense. His characters are coruscating and real.

Throughout, sport is used as a metaphor for male competition, cultural and class conflict. Danny watches the Sydney Olympics with languor and idleness, now an unfulfilled spectator and literary descendent of Albert Camus’ Meursault: an outsider bearing up to the absurdity of his life.

The personal and the political meet in a national stage. Danny simultaneously reviles the xenophobia, self-righteousness and self-entitlement on display, but also, the smug intellectualism of his now university educated leftwing friends. Most of all, he hates himself. The second half of the novel doesn’t offer Danny redemption. Instead, it shows how people grow, change, heal and simply forget.

Tackling existentialism seems at odds with the contemporary fashion of cool, knowing, ironic novels. But this is literature as it should be: challenging, tender and lacerating. Barracuda is a profoundly moral novel, asking how should we live? While Danny is superficially preoccupied with class and status, the deeper needs of an individual, friendship, family, memory and acceptance are delicately measured beneath the surface glitter of the waves. How do we live with failure? What do we do when we can’t be the strongest, the fastest, the best? How do we live with our mistakes? In his follow up to The Slap, Tsiolkas has found a moral force and authenticity rare in contemporary fiction.

Essay: The Brutalism of Big Don

“A specter is haunting the world – the specter of capitalism” advertises an electronic display during an anti-globalisation protest across the road from where Eric Packer, a 28 year old cyber-capitalist watches, sitting in the hearse-like space of his limousine. Cosmopolis, DeLillo’s fourteenth and most derided novel, is set very much in the post-Fukuyama world, living in the End Times.

DeLillo’s work has always been prescient. An author who has been fascinated by the “curious knot” that binds terrorists and novelists. His subject has been variations on the paranoiac nostalgia for disaster, technology’s appetite for immortality and extinction and the threat of the artist being supplanted by the terrorist. In Cosmopolis, he turns his attention, ten years before the global financial meltdown, to the sinister effects of extreme greed and wealth.

Cosmopolis is a day in the life novel with events coming off simultaneously speeded up (there are numerous sexual exploits, a raft of fast-talking meetings, lunches, a riot, a funeral and, ultimately, assassination plots and gunplay) yet the prose is glacially slow, attending to the nanoseconds of moments.

The style is a kind of literary brutalism. Denatured, scientific, sparse, liminally cool. Like the looming geometries of brutalist architecture, it seems the purpose ofCosmopolis is to be uncompromising, stark, post-human. The conversations Packer has with his consultant, theoretician, wife and mistress read like cut-ups of Baudrillard. He has no motive beyond wanting a haircut. Packer is a cypher and a scapegoat for the horrors of what has increasingly come to be known as “Capitalist Realism”. He barely has a human impulse.

DeLillo’s fiction post-Underworld and post-9/11 has become noticeably smaller and slower. His aura of prescience has been uprooted and as Andrew O”Hagan has noted, his out and out ‘terrorist’ novel lacks everything good we have come to know about DeLillo beyond a couple of set pieces and strong sentences. Aside from Falling Man, there is The Body Artist and Point Omega, which opens with the gambit that, “The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we’re alone thinking feeling, lost in memory, dreamily selfeaware, the submicroscopic moments.”

Progress and catastrophe are horrifyingly interlinked, even on a personal level and Packer’s actions, abstractions, speculations and prophesies have the power to shake the world.

“In fact data itself was soulful and flowing, a dynamic aspect of the life process. This was the eloquence of alphabets and numeric systems, now fully realised in electronic form, in the zero-oneness of the world, the digital imperative that defined very breath of the planet’s living billions.”

Packer, like a Pharaoh, lives for death. He has amassed a huge fortune, has 6% body fat and a beautiful wife yet he longs for the sort of bodylessness that can truly set him free. Packer is without motive and is going through a crisis of protagonisity. There’s nothing wrong with having ideas in novels. They’d be insubstantial without them. But DeLillo doesn’t allow them to develop beyond cuttings of theory and take on deeper, more abstruser meanings through dramatic action. The question of intent is whether DeLillo intends for Packer to be real at all. Whether he want to use the artifice of fiction as a visible exterior like Richard Rogers’ le centre Pompidou exposing the many fictions that invent reality.

Fukuyama was right. This is the End of History. There are no serious alternatives to the “global social totality” of the market. The acceptance of this ‘ideology’ has been called Capitalist Realism. Intended to mean that this isn’t the only alternative, but the ideology presents itself as a non-ideology, not as a positive programme of improvement or values, but as a necessity and ruthlessly pragmatic. The other Capitalist Realism is a pun on ‘Socialist’ or Social Realism. This is a neo-noir worldview implicit within works by Frank Miller and James Ellroy (and even my own beer-stained, working class spaghetti Western, Shark), that present rugged individuals merely surviving within the ‘realism’ of capitalism. Critics like Mike Davis have written that such works endorse ‘homo reaganus‘ and desensitise outrage.

There is also the extent to which capitalism is able to redefine reality and the boundaries of the human through technology. This seems to be the real starting point forCosmopolis. So a traditional novel form that plays to bourgeois class prejudices might not be desirable. Another way of expressing this concern might be found in the paradox of a film like Avatar, that, while being ostensibly leftist, anti-imperialist and green is a multi-million pound popcorn movie that functions as a vicarious thrill of radicalism while maintaining the structures it seeks to disinherit.

Yet the antimony within DeLillo has always been between postmodern abstraction and secular mysticism. For all the predilection toward fashionable theory, anti-globalisation and post-human themes, there is a moral centre to Cosmopolis. There actually is a motive beneath the surface of wanting to get a haircut and for all the futurist prose Packer goes through something of a change of fortune. He understands that he’s missing the predatory impulse to be human. The dynamic essence of human nature. DeLillo is most rooted in his connection within the American transcendental tradition. Like Whitman, Emerson and Melville, DeLillo is a mystic. Eric Packer wants to transcend his physical limitations with digital technology. This is the true life. Great art is not simply relevant. The latest update on social theory or reductive allegories for power structures and political viewpoints. The purpose isn’t to just to broadcast, stock information or present arguments (though it can do all of these things). It is to tell us how it feels, how ideas feel lived in characters, what it means to live in a mass, in transition, transformed by science. As all fiction becomes the stuff of science fiction, Cosmopolis is an attempt at a kind of realism that is barely real at all.

Review: Arguably by Christopher Hitchens

If ever anybody lived for outraging new forms of correctness, it was Christopher Hitchens.

Anybody would think a man who’s targets ranged from Mother Teresa to Henry Kissinger, Noam Chomsky to Sarah Silverman, actively sought attention. Or so detractors have said. Though why should this be a sleight on the accuracy of his convictions is debatable. For when Hitchens is right, he is very right. Yet there is a lurking suspicion of controversialists: that what they miss in accuracy they make up for in shock value, and, ultimately, lack sincerity. While this may contain a grain of truth, it can be too easy, too safe to deny the liberating impulses of a contrarian. In an earlier book of missives exploring radical, dissenting positions, Letters to a Young Contrarian, Hitchens wrote: “The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.”

And it was the independence of Christopher Hitchens mind that was shocking. Not the bombast – the performance, and the bravado – the sensitive and broad-ranging erudition that made counter-intuitive points sound right. Beyond the Wildean character was a brilliant literary critic who habitually stormed the world stage to outrage, delight and inform.

Hitchens had two basic modes: the commentary and the polemic. The former brought out his female qualities of intuition, gossip, sympathy; the latter, were either attacks on anything he didn’t like (generally some form of dogma, illiberalism or stupidity) or defenses of ideas or people he did liked. Or loved. These are macho, loud, and scolding. In She’s No Fundamentalist, Hitchens takes up the task of defending Ayan Hirsi Ali and happily names and shames his former acquaintances Timothy Garton Ash and Ian Baruma for incorrectly slurring Hirsi Ali as an “Enlightenment Fundementalist.”

“But who dares to say [that belief in free speech is] the same as the belief that criticism of religion should be censored or the belief that faith should be imposed? To flirt with this equivalence is to give in to the demagogues and to hear, underneath their yells of triumph, the dismal moan of the trahison des clercs and “the enlightenment driven away.”

This enlightenment is not uncontroversial. The Greatest Think Tank in History, its promise of what Saul Bellow calls, ‘the universal eligibility to be noble’ is self-defeatingly seen as a cover for Western hegemony. Hitchens railed against cultural relativism and sacred cows, his pet hate being the idea of ‘moral equivalence’. And, in the intellect of Hitchens, we had a living specimen of the paradoxes of our politics. Had Hitchens classically moved Left to Right? Had he become a megaphone for Western Imperialism? Was he an advocate of universal freedom? Had the Left, as Nick Cohen contends, moved Rightward by implicitly supporting reactionaries in the name of multiculturalism? Hitchens saw a schism he thought transcended the traditional Left / Right divide: and it was this:

“Briefly stated, this ongoing polemic takes place between the anti-imperialist Left, and the anti-totalitarian Left. In one shape or another, I have been involved – on both sides of it – all my life. And, in the case of any conflict, I have increasingly resolved it on the anti-totalitarian side.”

For the anti-imperialist, loyal to popular Marxist critique, the West is still the great superpower and the enemy of an enemy can so often be a friend. Islamists are resisting American hegemony. For the anti-totalitarian, Islamism and theocracy are barbaric, reactionary, oppressors of freedom. In Saul Bellow: The Great AssimilatorHitchens writes of Bellow’s political evolution: “His life as public intellectual is sometimes held to have followed art or trajectory: that from quasi-Trotskyist to full-blown ‘neocon’.” And, yet, like so many so-called neocons, like Hitchens himself, Bellow was hesitant to embrace the term. Further complicating the Left / Right diagnosis is the fact that many conservatives oppose liberal interventionism on the grounds that it is Leftwing Utopianism. Others, like Michael Gove, vehemently advocate interventionism as essential to defending the West. There are other Marxist critiques: no less the accelerationists who argue that capitalism, a revolutionary force, must be ‘speeded up’ in order to collapse itself, before moving onto a new stage of materialism. America, therefore, embodies the ideals of former Leftist movements and is the perfect agent of revolutionary change.

Left or Right, evidenced in these essays is a garrulous, individualist, raconteur glinting with contradictions: eloquent, literary, moral, boyish, patriotic, and charismatic in the way only a sort of upper-class Englishman can be. Essays range from the female humour deficit, to food and drink, to a cultural history of fellatio, the experience of torture and the oppression of the burka. Again, with the eclecticism of subject matter and forceful clarity of prose, parallels with his, Leftwing-patriot hero are easily drawn. Revealingly, in Hitchens’ view, George Orwell: “Decided to write as if people could be addressed as if they were humane and intelligent and democratic.” When we write about our heroes, we are really writing about the aspirations of our higher selves.

At its best, Arguably is Hitchens being Hitchens. George Orwell was novelist as well as journalist and committed himself to fighting earthly totalitarianism. Hitchens, by extension, no less courageous, no less anti-totalitarian, possibly stretched the definition of fascism to include Bin-Ladenism. Though what matters most is not whether Hitchens was Orwell, for, he was, unfailingly himself. Playing by the rules, keeping your head down, not speaking out for fearing the condemnation of peers may be safe, even lucrative, but it is not necessarily the path to truth. Arguably, true or untrue, Left or Right, reminds us of the sacred freedom of an unchained mind.

Review: The Circle by Dave Eggers

In response to Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing on the use of mass surveillance techniques by the NSA and GCHQ, 500 leading authors including Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo and Arundhati Roy have signed an international bill of digital rights. The declaration calls for, among other freedoms, the right of humans to “remain unobserved and unmolested” in their thoughts, personal environments and communications. “This fundamental human right has been rendered null and void through abuse of technological developments by states and corporations for mass surveillance purposes.”

In The Circle, Dave Eggers’ novel about privacy and democracy in an internet age, if you aren’t transparent, what are you hiding? In a near future, an omniscient tech-company has superseded all other internet and social media titans. The Circle wants to see your past, your present and your future. What’s more, much of the personal data is freely volunteered and the march toward total transparency is embraced by populist governments and the online population alike. The company’s intentions are to further ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy’ and its language is that of overarching rationality and progress. Tracking children from birth to make sure one never goes missing again. It just makes sense, right? The purpose of The Circle the novel, rather than The Circle the company, is to show the soft-totalitarian nightmare that waits at the logical extreme of this thinking. It is an extreme metaphor about transparency as a virtue, but maybe not extreme enough.

The Circle follows the fortunes of Mae Holland, our innocent conduit on the sprawling campus of the world’s most powerful internet company. Used to the drudgery and chicken-coop work of a call centre, at first The Circle’s amenities and open plan, superficial freedom are enticing. The medical care extends to her parents (and sick father). The Circle’s tools are the best tools, the most dominant, ubiquitous and free. They begin voluntary and become mandatory. Privacy is theft. Caring is sharing. Secrets are lies. The first book is mostly made up of a leisurely and undramatic introduction to The Circle’s Californian campus with its zones named after historical eras and the odd synergy between upbeat, blue sky thinking creatives and the underlying need for rapacious expansion and intrusion, the institutionalisation of suspicion, conformity and mutualised invigilation.

The Circle is managed by ‘Three Wise Men’. Tom Stenton, ‘world-striding CEO and self-described Capitalist Prime’, Eamon Bailey, the loveable, witty face of the company and enigmatic, Ty Gospodinov, The Circle’s ‘boy-wonder visionary’ and founder who somehow manages to remain unseen and anonymous despite The Circle’s insistence on ‘community’ and ‘sharing’. Ty’s first sea-change was to simplify the internet. He has devised a ‘Unified Operating System’ which combined everything online: social media profiles, payment systems, passwords, email accounts and interests into TruYou, ‘one account, one identity, one password’. TruYou changes the internet, ‘in toto’, within a year. Overnight, all comment boards and trollers are supposedly held accountable. The Circle’s innovations are the best and TruYou is followed by SeeChange (small cameras that can be planted everywhere and stream direct to The Circle) and Demoxie – a system that makes Circle membership and direct democracy mandatory. Mae, along with numerous desperate and popularity-hungry politicians, volunteer themselves to ‘go transparent’.

There’s an amusing silliness belying a deeper point with much of this. There are a lot of good ideas, YouTru not being too far away from what would happen with blanket social log ins and the ‘closing’ of The Circle is skilfully played out. Where Eggers is strongest is critiquing existing trends through the exaggerations of his near future liberal utopia. The vapid nexus of endorsements. The elevation of self-expression as an achievement in its own right. As one Circler says, “You’re here because your opinions are valued. They’re so valued that the world needs to know them – your opinions on just about everything. Isn’t that flattering?” This is typical of the Circlers mindset. A sort of heady, feel good vision of things that sound progressive juxtaposed with an unconscious acceptance of the authoritarian mechanisms supporting it. The utopianism may be a necessary delusion, a self-anointing disconnect, while such companies urge people to share more in order to mine their personal information for commercial and now, political, purposes.

Do novelists now have to be technologists to write contemporary fiction? Of course not. But intentionally not researching your milieu or inventing more convincing fictional technologies is a failure of craft. For such a contemporary novelist, Eggers’ prose lapses into primness and old-fashioned phrasing that takes some of the edge away from The Circle’s silicon-gloss. Hats are worn ‘atop’ heads and his sex scenes are cringe worthy. The two main opponents to the closing of the Circle are both fairly unappealing, didactic, moralists who spout Eggers’ anti-modern humanism. Mae is absurdly passive. Which, presumably, is Eggers’ big idea? But it lacks narrative drama. In 1984, Winston Smith’s re-education is all the more tragic because he resisted. Mae will go along with anything and is easily persuaded by loaded arguments. There’s mockery of the herds who like to share selfies and post status updates about food. But this distance keeps Eggers away from engaging with how social media works. Young people are already leaving Facebook and too much social networking is not just alienating, it’s unpopular.

We don’t yet live in a panopticon of co-opted mass surveillance where somebody watches everything we do. The information mined by the NSA and GCHQ has been user-generated for semi-public viewing. But how much freedom should we have over our own data? How public is private? The Circle will make you think twice about how much you do share. After all, sharing is caring. Right?

Review: A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (The App)

In 2012, Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange turned fifty years old. Much has changed since its first publication. The great period of authorial experimentation – the prodding and poking of the traditional novel form – is over. In Joysprick, his introduction to the language of James Joyce, Burgess makes the distinction between A and B novels. The A novelist is interested in character, plot, motivation. The B is marginally interested in all of this, but more so in form, narrative, and the words themselves.

While the B-gang stretched the boundaries of fiction, sometimes too far, the great age playing with the shape of the novel has been presumed dead. But is there life in the old form yet? To mark the 50th anniversary of the first publication of A Clockwork Orange, Random House have developed an iPad app. The app contains the novella complete with annotations and glossary, and also includes the original typescript, pop ups and videos and additional materials (including geeky miscellany: the reader’s report, original contract, information sheet, illustrations, musical scores and Burgess’s various prognostications on his own work).

The app is orange and lavishly produced, with a user-friendly interface and a binge of scholarly material. The option to have audio available alongside the work is welcome (though Tom Hollander’s whiny Estuary tones are no match for Burgess’s own Mancunian). The talking heads are varied and broad-ranging. Andrew Biswell, biographer of Burgess and Director of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation is quietly illuminating, Martin Amis drawls about the A / B novel distinction and claims A Clockwork Orange is “the only successful B novel”, and Laurie Penny adds a welcome contemporary context to structural violence and the novella’s conduct toward women. Coming from the ‘Death of the Author’ school, Penny has given herself the license to misinterpret the theology of the work. Burgess believed that ‘it is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.’ This Catholic viewpoint means that though we’re born fallen, we’re born free, but Penny shifts the pathology of Alex’s badness away from original sin and onto society.

While the option for hyperlinked glossaries, notes, video, audio and pop ups can be paradoxically both useful and distracting, the vigour of Burgess’s language itself, the charisma of the horrorshow and ultraviolence is still unswervingly alert. The famous initiation, like the rest of Alex’s vicious confession, is swaggering, dry, anarchic, deviant, antisocial:

What’s it going to be then, eh?’ 

There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.

‘Nadsat’ – an invented language combining Romany, Russian and slang – is the perfect vehicle to tell the story. As a device it distances the reader from the particularities of the era and the lashings of violence: it adds a scrofulous side of black comedy that makes Alex’s gang rape, robbing, punching, kicking and boyishness all the more disturbing and all the more beguiling. Only fifteen years old and already an accomplished hooligan, Alex is obsessed with classical music and ultraviolence. We are introduced to Alex and his droog companions Dim, Georgie and Pete as they hang out in the Korova Milkbar drinking ‘milk plus’ (another brilliant, dissociative Burgess inversion to make the innocent child drink of milk strange and menacing). After joyriding, breaking and entering, assaulting and raping a novelist’s wife, Alex returns home to listen to music and fantasize over more orgiastic violence:

Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh. The trombones crunched redglold under my bed […] I would have tolchocked them both harder and ripped them to ribbons on their own floor.

So-called ‘high culture’ proves not to be so self-improving. Instead, Alex is inspired by his beloved old Ludvig Van to spend the next day in an orgy of violence that ends in bloody murder. Alex is subsequently tried for the crime, and sentenced to the ‘Ludovico’ aversion therepy technique. This conditions Alex’s desires and makes him feel violently nauseous whenever he thinks freely. Not only does the Ludovico technique end his capacity for bad, it nulls his capacity for good. There’s dark catharsis in this riotous shattering of polite pretense. We are bad because we are bad. Utopia is an illusion and there is no hope in progress. What we have is the dignity of freedom, the genius of our individuality. How desirable is imposed change? Can goodness be imposed? Mischievously, Burgess reveals that without the structural violence of the Ludovico technique, Alex would’ve become a great composer, the Ludwig van of his generation.

A Clockwork Orange is an act of deviant art in the great tradition of the darker side of English literature. It revels in anarchy, viciousness, its own rebelliousness and criminal individuality. The unflattering suggestion is that violence is a natural part of adolescence; that young men outgrow or integrate into structures of violence. The virtuoso wordplay elevates the tale from parochial concerns about 60s subcultures and a Soviet style superstate to a fable about freewill, good and evil, social decay, youth violence and the prestige of the individual. A Clockwork Orange’s excitement in language and its pleasure in disgrace remains eternally youthful. A condition of great satire is that it’s always and increasingly relevant.

Where would this app version sit in Burgess’s own distinction? A? B? Possibly C? None of the above? Here we have the original B novel presented with DVD style bonus materials. It provides a brilliant introduction to the work, and it will go down like Alex’s spiked milk for fans of Burgess and his oeuvre. As for the possibility of this being the beginning of the C novel form, a new innovation – well, what’s it going to be then, eh?

This review was originally published in Litro.

Review: Clay by Melissa Harrison

What are the borders between the urban and the rural? Between consumerism and conservationism? Between innocence and experience? These are some of the questions concerning Melissa Harrison’s debut novel Clay. In it, a disparate trio are both brought together and separated by their sense of isolation from, and curiosity about, the natural world.

We begin with a prologue, a two-page paean to ‘The little wedge-shaped city park [that] was as unremarkable as a thousand other across the country… despite the changing seasons many of the people who people who lived near it barely even knew it was there’. This little wedge-shaped park is at the centre of the novel. It is an edgeland where Clay’s characters move and gather, following plotlines that are less linear than seasonal. The chapters are named after pagan holy days, and there are brief eddies and flourishes, moments of growth and decay.

The story proper starts in media res, in a council flat. The police are interviewing eight-year old nature lover TC about his friendship with kind-hearted Polish immigrant Jozef. TC lives with his estranged mother and her half-decent boyfriend, Jamal, while Jozef works in a takeaway and longs for the farm he lost in Poland. He finds solace with TC and their innocent enjoyment of nature. These opening chapters are expositional and slow-moving, the city park quietly teaming, flourishing, growing, dying, living.

Then there’s Sophia, a seventy-eight old widow who lives opposite the wedge of city park. She exchanges letters with her granddaughter, the florally-named Daisy, who despite living less than half a mile away is spiritually and socially distanced from the acre of ‘grimy’ and ‘litter-blown’ common. Despite this, her connection with her grandmother leads her to enjoy the park, where she meets the working-class TC. The suggestion is that the common makes us communal, while the consumerism, ugliness and drab routine of modernity is fundamentally inauthentic.

A great deal of time is devoted to describing the changing of the seasons, the small majesties and intricate dealings that we would see if we only bothered to notice.

The brambles formed a dull, purplish carpet beneath the trees, but at the paths’ margins was the fresh green of the new season’s cow parsley and nettles, still just a few inches tall.

While Harrison is a skillful nature writer, there can be a hard-edged primness to her prose. She lacks the deftness needed to describe her characters in their urban dysphoria with as much fullness and life as she does her closely observed fauna. At times, Clay can lack contrast and drama, the impersonality of the third-person omniscient narrator failing to connect us with the characters.

For all the insistent loveliness of Harrison’s nature, there feels little at stake. We are told as much as shown about these characters. Even the bad guys, TC’s negligent mother and the brutish Denny, are lost in Harrison’s softness and lyricism. Her style doesn’t convey interiority with precision, and I noticed many plot holes. Where has TC’s father been throughout the novel? He simply turns back up at the end. Is the police’s evidence against Jozef credible? I didn’t feel it was. And, my biggest question: if we have lost our innocence and connection to the natural world, can a simple trip down to the local park really sort us all out?

Clay is Harrison’s lyrical attempt to make us notice. It is a modern fable designed to show us what happens when we lose our innocence, yet Harrison’s construction of her nature-loving characters have too palpable a design upon the reader. Having everybody getting off on nature all the time can be grating. I began to wonder whether a belief in the consolation of nature is actually just another bourgeois myth. Is there really more authenticity in the soul of the world, the hushed breathing of the acacias, the belief in our elemental bond with nature?

Nevertheless, despite the simplicities in Harrison’s character motivation and her overly simplistic philosophical distinctions between the layers of real and unreal, Clay does still - almost - connect us to the edgelands, to the urban pastoral, to the earth that made us.

This review was originally published in Litro.

Review: Chavs and The Likes of Us

Two of the most taboo subjects – class and race – are back on the agenda with two new books “Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class” and “The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class”. Wes Brown, novelist, blogger and political commentator, reviews this new brace of writings on white working class culture.

What do you call a chav in a suit? The accused. Two chavs in a car, no music on, who’s driving? The police. What’s the difference between a chav and a coconut? One’s thick and hairy, the other is a coconut. From salt of the earth to scum on the streets, the white working class are the minority group it’s OK to discriminate against, and, curiously, it’s not just uppity snobs at it, it’s the left-liberals too.

Owen Jones, an Oxford graduate and former trades union worker has launched himself headlong into the subject. Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class is an invective against the injustices of contemporary Britain and a call to arms for a new class-based politics.

Jones begins with an anecdote about a party of well-to-do liberals where an offensive comment is made, yet, strangely, nobody picked up on it. He then leaps into The Strange Case of Shannon Matthews, and asks, “Why does the life of one child matter more than another’s?” Jones uses the case, the confusion and variety of attitudes, the difference in terms of press coverage, tone and polity to that of the McCanns’ to explore and unconvincingly attempts to debunk the ‘Broken Britain’ argument and the contorted views ranging across the commentariat on the underclass. For Jones, class is clear cut, and he fluctuates between the classic ‘them’ and ‘us’ when he’s being particularly factional; and the more usual tripartite system of working, middle, and upper. Jones makes the assumption that working class are a homogenous block, with shared interests, that are represented by the trades unions and old Left politics alone. Such naiveté is self-defeating. This is the illiberalism of a millennialist.

And it’s not long before Jones’ trades union sympathies and shibboleths begin to appear, the bones of his argument. Ultimately, Thatcher is to blame for anything and everything and started the class war. But what of 13 years of New Labour? They’re Thatcherite too. For Jones, you are either a trades unionist and old Labour, ‘right-wing’, ‘a maverick’ or ‘Blair-like’. The only solutions can come from the old Left, and they know exactly what these solutions are. Beyond nods to The Spirit Level, opposing plutocrats and calling a new society ‘based around people’s needs’ there’s no suggestion of how these aims can be met. It’s true to say the New Economy has its troubles – but we need to recapitalise the poor, not shackle them in restrictive ‘class identities’. The British economy was turning toward the services because they were higher up the value chain. To credit Thatcher with transforming, rather than reshaping the economy is to play into her mythology.

The trouble with the word ‘chav’, like any ‘hate speech’, is the instability of meaning. I may call my brother a chav as part of our brotherly bravado. My mother may call slobs and scroungers chavs because it’s a way of cleaving the respectable from the unrespectable working class. And snobs or bigots may use the word to mock and chide those who are less educated, less wealthy and less fortunate. And, equally, my mother may take offence to this. The origin of the word is contentious. Some plump for the vituperative “Council House And Violent”, others claim the word derives from the Romani ‘chavi’ meaning child. More convincingly, the origin may be the Hebrew word, ‘chaverim’. Which, “[entered] working-class London usage through the East End Jewish mobs, who shared the affection for vulgar and extravagant ostentation in dress and jewellery.”

What may, consciously or unconsciously, be alluring to left-liberals, the revulsion towards chavs is displaced disgust at the excesses of consumer-capitalism, and the supposed vulgarity of those who shamelessly enjoy Sky TV, Burberry hats, gold rings and tabloid newspapers. In the superior worldview of the cosmopolitan multiculturalist, which separates people into identities rather than economic groups, the working class has come to be seen as everything that is reactionary, thuggish and backward about 21st century Britain. They are flag-waving, Sun reading, Little England scumbags.

“Working-class voters were taken for granted as the ‘core vote’ who had nowhere else to go, allowing New Labour politicians to tailor their policies to privileged voters.” Goes Jones’s analysis. By no longer representative the working class and, cosmopolitan liberalism has characterised anybody who disagrees with its assumptions as reactionary, xenophobic hateful, backward, or worse. Such views are typified by the racist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown who claims the white working-class are “Either too lazy or too expensive to compete” and “tax-paying immigrants past and present keep indolent British scroungers on their couches drinking beer and watching TV”.

Such slurring of white working class, sometimes referred to disgracefully as “white trash” is the subject of Michael Collins, The Likes of Us: a Biography of the White Working Class. It’s no so much a biography of the class, as much a memoir taking us through a personal story of his family’s history. Collin’s touches on similar themes to Jones but without the precepts of trades unionism. Orwellian in observation and approach, Collin’s is trying to point toward hypocrisies and cleansing truths. He is an instinctive liberal. He had faced criticism that he can’t have it both ways – scornful of middle-class ‘tourists’ who descend into Elephant & Castle looking for a more authentic way of life (often to abandon their fancies when the reality sets in); and equally scornful of those who disregard the working class. The ‘us’ and ‘them’ mentality so carefully detailed in David Cannadine’s The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain.

While this factionalism may ultimately be narrowing, it does not betray Collin’s aims of speaking up for the working class against the insults of latte liberals, town planners, snobs, class tourists and slum novelists. Paul Gilroy has called Collins, ‘an intellectual outrider for the BNP’ – meaning Collin’s defence of the white working class is tantamount to support of a far-right party arguing for the repatriation of immigrants. This argument is obviously flawed yet reveals more about the mindset of sententious progressives, incapable of counter-argument, and rinsed with hot sweats of outrage.

For while it is true to say party membership of the BNP, and followers of the English Defence League are overwhelmingly working class, these numbers pale in comparison to the vast majority who live alongside immigrants, and have a higher proportion of inter-racial marriages. Yet such realism is rarely reported and instead, the white working class is misrepresented by it’s most extreme malcontents, or as sources of amusement for reality TV shows.

Collin’s thesis is prescient, “Now, middle-class progressives who had traditionally come out fighting these underdog’s corner, or reporting their condition as missionaries or journalists, were keen to silence them, or bury them without obituary.” He goes on, “They loved Gucci; loathed the Euro. More important, to their pallbearers in the press they were racist, xenophobic, thick, illiterate, parochial.”

The resulting chapters vary in interest and resonance – from a curious history of working people and the evolving attitudes of their supporters and detractors, to sometimes less vital passages about Collin’s family and upbringing. His insights are often damning. Seeing a leaflet promoting Southwark, championing its diversity and ‘rich mixture of communities going back centuries’, one community is conspicuously absent:

“They don’t mention the English…You wouldn’t think we’d ever existed would ya?”

In the flight from Britishness, its history and its imperialism has led to an embrace of diversity, and the white working-class seem to have been left behind.

There are no easy solutions are explanations. Both these books are important, timely contributions to a mainstream debate on what has for too long being an ignored issue. Class, at least for the short-term, is back on the agenda. Perhaps what sums up the sentiment of both books best, and the unrest of the white working people, is the T.S. Eliot extract that prefaces Collin’s The Likes of Us:

The good man is the builder, if he build what is good.

I will show you the things that are now being done, And some of the things that were long ago done,
That you may take to heart. Make perfect your will.Let me show you the work of the humble. Listen.

T.S. Eliot, ‘Choruses from “The Rock”

Review: Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy

'What a woman was criticised for doing yesterday, she is ridiculed for doing today.'Edith Wharton, 1915.

We might adapt Edith Wharton’s sage observation to read: ‘What a woman is criticised for doing today, she was ridiculed for doing yesterday’. In Ariel Levy’s lightweight polemic (a slim 200 pages, written in an accessible, sometimes friendly, sometimes geeky prose style), she argues that ‘raunch culture’ has hijacked the project of feminism and now it is women who are subjugating themselves. As the blurb reads, ‘[Levy’s] polemic explores the myth of this new brand of empowerment and refuses a culture-wide obligation for young women to look and act like porn stars’. That’s a heady statement, and one which has faced little counter-argument from newspaper reviews here in the UK or in the US. This new brand of empowerment, or in other words, guiltless sexual enjoyment, really a myth? Is it not one of the achievements of feminism that woman are freer to pursue sexual behaviours rather than stick to traditional gender roles? Is the obligation to act like a porn star really culture-wide?

There is a myth, certainly, but it is a myth that our current generation are ‘pornified’ wholesale, with porn being somehow inherently corrosive and making people exponentially more sexually permissive than before. In America there’s a popular movement toward abstinence; and in the UK, many young people are involved in loving, trusting, mutually respecting and long-term relationships. Levy is right, however, to argue that a process of pornification is going on; that popular culture, at least, is becoming increasingly comodified and that previously hidden, previously encountered on top shelves, or passed samizdat round schoolboys’ dorm rooms, are now in mainstream culture. In a moment of startling observation, Levy notes that the word ‘sexy’ has become a byword for anything exciting, dangerous or good and is fast becoming ubiquitous. She rightly points out that children as young as 12 or 13 are performing sexual acts on one another with the intention of broadcasting them to their friends on mobile phones and other such media. The effect of this could injure and deform the development of a young person.

Levy tackles the excesses of the porn industry, and shows how female role models in popular culture like Samantha in Sex and the City are oblivious consumers (‘I don’t believe in the Republican party or the Democratic party. . . I just believe in parties.’) and that too strong a focus on cultivating a designer lifestyle can encourage a population of happy consumers rather than civically aware citizens. And her aim is far reaching, too far: Girls Gone Wild, Olympic athletes posing in playboy, sex parties, blokey lesbians, Paris Hilton, pole-dancing classes and women who go to strip shows. It’s often difficult to see how Levy equates such disparate strands of behaviour: what brings such targets together for Levy doesn’t always read like concern that women have become ‘female chauvinist pigs’ so much as a deep-seated dislike of promiscuity, hedonism and sexual permissiveness.

Female Chauvinist Pigs could easily be seen as a call for modesty, as Levy energetically chastises raunch culture and then struggles to put the positive case for sex forward without sounding prudish, vague or obtuse. ‘If we are going to be sexually liberated, we need to make room for a range of options as wide as the variety of human desire.’ Tellingly, ‘the variety of human desire’ doesn’t include the many acts of promiscuity lambasted throughout the book

The biggest obstacle for progressive and sententious feminists may not be pornography and consumerism, but the dark edges of human sexuality, harnessed and propagated by new communication media. While political and women’s movements have doubtlessly had an impact on society at large, it has been the market that has driven radical cultural change. In true Ballardian style, technology is not necessarily leading us to more enlightened lives and toward greater social good; it has unleashed the private, subconscious, and beastly urges that manifest in pornography. Such material that was once kept hidden away and stigmatised as seedy has now streaked into the mainstream: on mobile phones, on laptops, in children’s bedrooms and making mega-millions for respectable banks, hotel chains and even funding political lobby groups in Washington.

We have to acknowledge the damaging affect porn can have on people, particularly young people; giving caricature examples of sex, and worryingly, being more influential a sex educator than teachers. But the sexual liberation has happened, freedom is unpredictable, and using crypto-conservative approaches to such problems won’t give women the ‘freedom and power’ Ariel Levy demands.

This review was originally published in Culture Wars.