London Review of Books - 04 04 2019

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London Review
OF BOOKS
VOLUME 41 NUMBER 7
Henry’s Wars
America Pivots STEPHEN ALFORD
ADAM TOOZE
At the Movies: ‘Swing Time’

Letters MICHAEL WOOD
The Massacre at Amritsar Who killed the 43?

FERDINAND MOUNT RACHEL NOLAN
Short Cuts: The Porn Ban In Zimbabwe

TOM CREWE DIANA STONE
Chris Mullin The Pain Lobby

DAVID RUNCIMAN EMILY WITT
Poem: ‘At Notre Dame de Reims’ Luljeta Lleshanaku

JOHN BURNSIDE MICHAEL HOFMANN
Pigeon Intelligence Abe’s Japan

JON DAY EDWARD LUTTWAK
Nick Drnaso
NAMARA SMITH At the Towner Gallery: Carey Young
BRIAN DILLON
Poem: ‘A Bed of Nails’

HUGO WILLIAMS Credit Data
RACHEL O’DWYER
Gerald Murnane
CHRISTIAN Lorentzen Diary
JOANNA BIGGS
Plain Brian O’Nolan

CLAIR WILLS Contributors
power and American political authority. Two years

Is this the end of the on, that distinction seems more important than
American century? ever.

The idea that Trump is a wrecker of the
Adam Tooze American-led world order rests on three claims.
First, he is manifestly unfit for high office. That
O
such a man can be elected president of the United
N 13 OCTOBER 1806 a young German States reveals a deep degeneration of American
philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich political culture and permanently damages the
Hegel, had an encounter with world country’s credibility. Second, his capricious and
history. En route to their annihilation of the crude pursuit of ‘America first’ has weakened
Prussian forces 24 hours later, Napoleon and his America’s alliances and instigated a departure from
army were marching through the East German globalisation based on free trade. Finally, he has
university town of Jena. Hegel couldn’t disguise his triggered this crisis at a moment when China poses
terror that in the ensuing chaos the recently an unprecedented challenge to Western-led
completed manuscript of The Phenomenology of Spirit globalisation. Each of these claims is hard to deny,
might get lost in the mail. But neither could he but do they in fact add up to a historically
resist the drama of the moment. As he wrote to his significant shift in the foundations of America’s
friend Friedrich Niethammer, ‘I saw the emperor – global power?
this world-soul (Weltseele) – riding out of the city on No question, Trump has done massive damage
reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to the dignity of the American presidency. Even
to see such an individual, who, concentrated here allowing for the personal and political failings of
at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over some previous incumbents, he marks a new low.
the world and masters it.’ What ought to be of no less concern is that he has
Two hundred years later, in rather more sedate received so little open criticism from the
circumstances, the Berkeley historian Daniel J. supposedly respectable ranks of the Republican
Sargent, addressing the American Historical leadership. Similarly, American big business
Association, also evoked the world spirit. But this leaders, though sceptical of Trump, have profited
time it came in the person of Donald Trump and he from his administration’s tax cuts and eagerly
was riding not on horseback, but on a golf cart. assisted in dismantling the apparatus of
Trump can be compared to Napoleon, according to environmental and financial regulation. He has
Sargent, because they are both destroyers of been applauded by the section of the US media that
international order. In the wake of the French caters to the right. And a solid minority of the
Revolution, Napoleon wrecked what was left of the electorate continues to give him its wholehearted
legitimate order of Europe. Trump, in turn, has support. What is worrying, therefore, isn’t simply
apparently ended the American world order, or, as Trump himself, but the forces in America that
Sargent prefers to call it, Pax Americana. enable him.
Sargent’s is an extraordinary suggestion, even Of course, Trump isn’t the first Republican
though overenthusiastic historic comparisons have president to evoke a mixture of outrage, horror and
now become commonplace. Early in 2017 I was derision both at home and abroad. Both Ronald
among those who thought they were seeing the end Reagan and George W. Bush were accused, in their
of the American century. But, even then, in the time, of endangering the legitimacy of the
early days of the Trump administration, it seemed American world order. The cultural conservatism
crucial to draw a distinction between American and overt nationalism of the American right is
4
fiercely at odds with bien pensant global opinion. in that election only exacerbated the lurch to the
This culture clash has historical roots in America’s right. The Republicans in Congress put up a wall of
domestic struggles over civil rights, the women’s opposition and indulged the populist right in
and gay liberation struggles, and in the worldwide openly questioning his legitimacy as president. The
protest movement against America’s brutal war in defeat of the centrist Mitt Romney in 2012 caused a
Vietnam. Since the days of Nixon and the ‘Southern further, decisive slide to the right, opening the
strategy’, the Republicans have been progressively door for Trump. In 2016 no major corporation was
digging in, consolidating their grip on the white willing to sponsor the convention that nominated
electorate in the South and Midwest. By the 1980s Trump as the Republican presidential candidate:
the Republican Party was an uneasy coalition their brand advisers were too worried that
between a free-market, pro-business elite and a Confederate flags would be waving in the
xenophobic working and lower-middle-class base. convention hall. His is the voice of the right-wing
This was always a fragile arrangement, held base, energised by funding from a small group of
together by rampant nationalism and a suspicion of highly ideological oligarchs, no longer constrained
big government. It was able to govern in large part by the globalist business elite.
owing to the willingness of Democratic Party A cynic might say that Trump simply says out
centrists to help with the heavy lifting. The Nafta loud what many on the right have long thought in
free-trade agreement between the US, Mexico and private. He is clearly a racist, but the mass
Canada was initiated by George H.W. Bush, but incarceration of black men since the 1970s has
carried over the line in 1993 by Bill Clinton, against been a bipartisan policy. His inflammatory remarks
the opposition of the American labour movement. about immigration are appalling, but it isn’t as
It was Clinton’s administration that righted the though liberal centrists would advocate a policy of
fiscal ship after the deficit excesses of the Reagan open borders. The question – and it is a real
era, only for the budget to be blown back into question – is whether his disinhibited rhetoric
deficit by the wars and tax cuts of the George W. announces a disastrous slide from the hypocrisies
Bush administration. and compromises of the previous status quo into
Meanwhile, the broad church of the Republican something even darker. The concern is that he will
Party began to radicalise. In the 1990s, with Newt trigger an illiberal chain reaction both at home and
Gingrich and Karl Rove setting the tone, the battle abroad.
lines hardened. With the Iraq War going horribly, At G20, G7 and Nato summits, the mood is
and the Democrats taking control of Congress in tense. The rumour that the US is planning to
2006, the right became ever more dominant within charge host governments ‘cost plus 50 per cent’ for
the Republican Party. In 2008, in the midst of the the military bases it has planted all over the world is
financial crisis, the Republicans in Congress the latest instance of a stance that at times seems to
abandoned the Bush administration. The financial reduce American power to a protection racket. But
crisis-fighting of Hank Paulson as Bush’s Treasury for all the indignation this causes, what matters is
secretary and Ben Bernanke at the Fed relied on the the effect Trump’s disruptive political style has on
Democrats for congressional support. Elite the global power balance and whether it indicates a
leadership of the Republican Party collapsed. John historic rupture of the American world order. How
McCain chose the shockingly unqualified Sarah much difference does the US being rude to
Palin as a running mate in the 2008 election European Nato members, refusing to co-operate
because she was hugely popular with the with the WTO, or playing hardball on car imports
Republican base, who revelled in the outrage she really make?
triggered among liberals. Barack Obama’s victory
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T
This is not merely a debating point. It is the HE RESIGNATION of General James
challenge being advanced by the Trump Mattis as defence secretary at the end of
administration itself in its encounters with its allies 2018 sparked yet another round of
and partners. Do America’s alliances – do speculation about the politicking going on inside
international institutions – really matter? The the Trump administration. But we would do better
administration is even testing the proposition that to pay more attention to his interim replacement,
transnational technological and business linkages Patrick Shanahan, and the agenda he is pursuing.
must be taken as given. Might it not be better for Shanahan, who spent thirty years at Boeing, is
the US simply to ‘uncouple’? Where Trump’s critics described by one insider as ‘a living, breathing
argue that at a time when China’s power is product of the military-industrial complex’. Under
increasing the US should strengthen its alliances Mattis he was the organisational muscle in a
abroad, the Trumpists take the opposite view. For Defence Department with a new focus, not on
them it is precisely in order to face down China that counterinsurgency, but on future conflicts between
the US must shake up the Western alliance and great powers. Shanahan’s stock in trade is
redefine its terms so that it serves American advanced technology: hypersonics, directed
interests more clearly. What we are witnessing isn’t energy, space, cyber, quantum science and
just a process of dismantling and destruction, but a autonomous war-fighting by AI. And he has the
deliberate strategy of stress testing. It is a strategy budget to deliver. The Trump administration has
Trump personifies, but it goes well beyond him. asked for a staggering $750 billion for defence in
In October 2018 the giant Nimitz-class aircraft 2020, more than the spending of the next seven
carrier USS Harry S. Truman unexpectedly pulled out countries in the world put together.
of the Eastern Mediterranean, where its planes had Declinists will point out that the US no longer
been bombarding IS’s positions in Syria. It sailed has a monopoly on high-tech weaponry. But that is
into the Atlantic and then suddenly and without grist to the mill of the Trump-era strategists. They
warning headed north. Aircraft carriers don’t do recognise the threat that great-power competition
this: their itineraries are planned years ahead. This poses. Their plan is to compete and to win. In any
was different. The Truman and its escorts headed case, most of the other substantial military
full steam to the Arctic, making it the first carrier spenders are American allies or protectorates, like
group to deploy there for 27 years, backing up Saudi Arabia or the European members of Nato.
Nato’s war games in Norway. The consternation The only real challenges are presented by Russia
this caused delighted the Pentagon. Unpredictable and China. Russia is troublesome and the
‘dynamic force employment’ is a key part of its new breakdown in nuclear arms control poses
strategy to wrong-foot America’s challengers. important and expensive questions for the future.
The Harry S. Truman is a controversial ship. The But Russia is the old enemy. Shanahan’s mantra is
Pentagon would like to scrap it in favour of more ‘China, China, China’.
modern vessels. Congress is pushing back. The The ‘pivot’ in American strategy to face China
White House wants more and bigger carrier was initiated not by Trump but by Obama in 2011,
groups; the navy says it wants 12 of them. The under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Even then,
Nimitz-class behemoths commissioned between despite their far more tactful leadership, it caused
1975 and 2009 are to be replaced by a new fleet of some crashing of gears. The problem is that
even more gigantic and complex Ford-class vessels. containing China is not what Washington’s system
All have their priorities, but what everyone in of alliances is designed to do. From the early 1970s,
Washington agrees on is the need for a huge the days of Nixon and Kissinger, China was
military build-up. enrolled as a US partner in keeping the balance of
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power with the Soviet Union. Given half a chance, Iraq and the war on terror. But differences in
Trump would like to essay a reverse-Kissinger and threat-perception are no excuse for the dereliction
recruit Russia as an ally against China. But of Europe’s security landscape. If Europe really
Congress and the defence community will have feels as safe as it claims to, it should have the
none of that. Instead, the US is doubling down on courage to push for even deeper cuts. Instead, it
its Cold War alliances in urging both South Korea continues to maintain military establishments
and Japan to increase their defence efforts. This has which, taken together, make it the world’s second
the additional benefit that they will have to buy or third largest military spender, depending on
more American equipment. If the Vietnamese how you add up the Chinese budget. But given that
regime too were to veer America’s way, it is spread across 28 poorly co-ordinated,
Washington would surely welcome it with open undersized forces, Europe’s $270 billion in defence
arms. spending isn’t enough to buy an adequate
None of this is to say that Trump’s version of deployable military capacity. Aside from its value as
the pivot is coherent. If containment of China is the a work-creation measure, the only justification for
aim, America’s Asian partners must wonder why this huge waste of resources is that it keeps the
the president scrapped the Trans-Pacific Americans on board.
Partnership trade and investment deal within days The result is a balance of hard power that has
of taking office. That elaborate package was the for the last thirty years been extraordinarily
foundation of Obama’s China-containment lopsided. Never before in history has military
strategy. But for Trump and his cohorts that is power been as skewed as it is today. For better or
muddled thinking. You cannot build American worse, it is America’s preponderance that shapes
strength on the back of a giant trade deficit. whatever we call the international order. And given
Washington is no longer willing to pay for military how freely that power has been used, to call it a Pax
co-operation with economic concessions: it wants Americana seems inapposite. A generation of
both greater contributions and more balanced American soldiers has grown used to fighting wars
trade. on totally asymmetrical terms. That for them is
In Europe the Trump administration is what the American world order means. And far
proceeding on the same basis. Trump’s antipathy from abandoning or weakening it, the Trump
towards the EU and its political culture is administration is making urgent efforts to
disconcerting. But the problem of burden-sharing consolidate and reinforce that asymmetry.
has haunted Nato since its inception, and until the How can the US afford its military, the
1980s, at least, the Europeans were significant Europeans ask. Is this just another instance of
contributors. Until 1989 Germany’s Bundeswehr America’s unbalanced constitution? Isn’t there a
was a heavily armoured and mechanised force of risk of overstretch? That was certainly the worry at
500,000 men with a mobilisation strength of 1.5 the end of the 1980s, and it recurred in the fears
million. Though its loyalty to the Federal Republic stoked during the Bush era by critics of the Iraq
wasn’t in doubt, it was unmistakably a descendant War and budget hawks in the Democratic Party. It
of Germany’s military past. The break following the doesn’t play much of a role in the current debate
end of the Cold War was dramatic, not just in about American power, and for good reason. The
Germany but across Europe. Spending collapsed; fact is that for societies at the West’s current level
conscription was abolished; Europe’s contribution of affluence, military spending is not shockingly
to Nato’s effective strength dwindled. There were disproportionate. The Nato target, which the
also deep disagreements between Germany, France Europeans huff and puff over, is 2 per cent of GDP;
and the US over strategic priorities, particularly on US spending is between 3 and 4 per cent of GDP.
7
And to regard this straightforwardly as a cost is to opinion. Needless to say, Trump is no respecter of
think in cameralist terms. The overwhelming the Fed’s ‘independence’. When it began
majority of the Pentagon’s budget is spent in the tightening interest rates in 2018 he pushed back
US or with close allies. The hundreds of billions aggressively. (As a man who knows a thing or two
flow into businesses and communities as profit, about debts, he prefers borrowing costs to be low.)
wages and tax revenue. What’s more, the Pentagon His bullying scandalised polite opinion. But rather
is responsible for America’s most future-oriented than undermining the dollar as a global currency,
industrial policy. Defence R&D was one of the his interventions were music to the ears of hard-
midwives of Silicon Valley, the greatest pressed borrowers in emerging markets. The same
legitimating story of modern American capitalism. applies to the giant fiscal stimulus that the
If Congress chose, defence spending could Republicans launched with their tax cuts: despite
easily be funded with taxation. That is what both rumblings of a trade war, it has kept the American
the Clinton and Obama administrations attempted. demand for imports – a key element of its global
The Republicans do things differently. Three of the leadership – at record levels.
last four Republican administrations – Reagan, The world economic order that America
George W. Bush and now Trump – combined oversees was not built through consistent
enormous tax cuts for the better-off with a huge discipline on the part of Washington. Discipline is
surge in defence spending. Why? Because they can. for crisis cases on the periphery, and dispensing it
As Dick Cheney declared, to the horror of beltway is the job of agencies like the IMF and the World
centrists: ‘Reagan showed that deficits don’t Bank. Both have been through phases of weakness;
matter.’ US Treasuries will be a liability for future in a world in which private funding is cheap and
American taxpayers, but by the same token they abundant even for some of the poorest countries in
constitute by far the most important pool of safe the world, the World Bank is struggling to define
assets for global investors. Foreign investors hold its role. But the IMF is in fine fettle, largely because
$6.2 trillion in US public debt, 39 per cent of the the Obama administration pushed the G20 to add
debt held by investors other than America’s own $1 trillion to its funding in 2009. So far the Trump
government agencies. US taxpayers will be making administration has shown no interest in sabotaging
heavy repayments long into the future. But they will Christine Lagarde. Over the latest bailout for
make those payments in a currency that the US Argentina, the Americans were notably co-
itself prints. Foreigners are happy to lend in dollars operative. A key issue will be the rollover of the
because the dollar is the pre-eminent global reserve crisis-era emergency funding; from the point of
currency. view of international economic governance that
The hegemony of the dollar-Treasury nexus in may prove to be the most clear-cut test yet of the
global finance remains unchallenged. The dollar’s stance of the Trump presidency.
role in global finance didn’t just survive the crisis of A stark illustration of the asymmetrical
2008: it was reinforced by it. As the world’s banks structure of American world order came in recent
gasped for dollar liquidity, the Federal Reserve months in the use of the dollar-based system of
transformed itself into a global lender of last resort. invoicing for international trade to threaten
As part of his election campaign in 2016, Trump sanctions against those tempted to do business
undertook an extraordinary vendetta against Janet with Iran. This outraged global opinion; the
Yellen, the Fed chair. But he was more restrained Europeans were even roused to talk about the need
after he took office, and his appointment of Jerome for ‘economic sovereignty’. What they are upset
Powell as her successor was arguably his most about isn’t the lack of order, but America’s use of
important concession to mainstream policy it. To many, Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran
8
I
nuclear agreement is another indication of F Republican policy is just Republican policy,
American unreliability and unilateralism. But why American military power is waxing not
is anyone surprised? It took extraordinary political waning, and the dollar remains at the hub of
finesse on the part of the Obama administration to the global economy, what exactly is it that is
secure backing for the Iran deal in Washington. It broken? The clearest site of rupture is trade, and
was always more than likely that a Republican the associated geopolitical escalation with China.
administration would repudiate it. That may be The US is engaged in a sustained and effective
disagreeable but it can hardly be described as a boycott of the WTO arbitration system. But the
rupture with the norms of American world order. WTO has been ailing for a long time. Since the
The system is hierarchical. While others are bound, Doha round of negotiations became deadlocked in
America retains the sovereign freedom to choose. the early 2000s it has made little contribution to
And that includes the right to revert to the cold war trade liberalisation. In any case, the idea that legal
it has been waging against the Iranian Revolution agreements such as those done at the WTO are
since 1979. what drives globalisation puts the cart before the
The same harsh logic applies when it comes to horse. What really matter are technology and the
the Paris Agreement on climate change. Clearly, it raw economics of labour costs. The container and
is a disaster that the US has pulled out. But the microchip are far more important motors of
Congress and the George W. Bush administration globalisation than all the GATT rounds and WTO
did the same to the Kyoto Protocol at the beginning talks put together. If in the last ten years
of the century. Moves like this should not be globalisation appears to have stalled, it has more to
interpreted as a rejection of international order tout do with a plateau in the development of global
court, let alone as an abdication of American supply chains than with backsliding into
leadership. The Trump administration has a clear protectionism.
vision of an energy-based system of American In this regard the Trump administration’s
leadership and influence. It is based on the aggressive attack on America’s regional trade
transformative technological and business arrangements is more significant than its
breakthrough of fracking, which has broken the boycotting of the WTO. It is in regional integration
grip of Russia and the Saudis on oil markets and is agreements that the key supply chain networks are
turning the US into a net exporter of hydrocarbons framed. The abrupt withdrawal of the US, in the
for the first time since the 1950s. Liquefied natural first days of the Trump presidency, from TPP in the
gas is the fuel of the future. Terminals are being Asia-Pacific region and TTIP in the Atlantic, was a
built at full speed on the Texas shoreline. Fracking genuine shock. But it is far from clear that either
was originally a wildcat affair but big corporate arrangement would have been pursued with any
money is now pouring in. The oil giant ExxonMobil energy by a Hillary Clinton administration. She
is back (after a weak commercial patch and Rex would no doubt have shifted position more
Tillerson’s humiliating stint at the State gracefully. But the political cost of pushing them
Department), investing heavily in huge new through Congress might well have been too high.
discoveries in Latin America. All this will be In spring 2017 there was real concern that
horrifying to anyone convinced that the future of Trump might abruptly and unilaterally cancel Nafta
humanity depends urgently on decarbonisation. – apparently the hundredth day of his presidency
But again it is unhelpful, if the aim is to grasp the had been set as the occasion. But that threat was
reality of international order, to conflate it with a contained by a concerted mobilisation of business
specifically liberal interpretation of that idea. interests. Once the negotiations with Mexico and
Canada started, the tone was rough. In Robert
9
Lighthizer as his trade representative, Trump has does highlight another painful imbalance in
found a bully after his own heart. But again, if you transatlantic relations: the persistent European
look back at the history of Nafta and WTO trade surplus. Of course America contributes to
negotiations, tough talk is par for the course. In the this imbalance with its disinhibited fiscal policy:
end, a replacement for Nafta emerged, in the form the better off Americans feel, the more likely they
of the United States Mexico Canada Agreement are to buy German cars. But as the Obama
(USMCA). Apart from minor concessions on dairy administration repeatedly pointed out, Europe’s
exports to Canada and intellectual property dogged refusal to stimulate faster growth is as bad
protection for American pharmaceuticals, its main for Europe as it is for the world economy. The scale
provisions concerned the car industry, which of the Eurozone’s overall current account surplus is
dominates North American trade. To escape tariffs, highly unusual by historical standards and is both a
40 per cent of any vehicle produced in Mexico must vulnerability for Europe, leaving its producers
have been manufactured by workers earning $16 an hostage to foreign demand, and a potential source
hour, well above the US minimum wage and seven of global shocks.
E
times the average manufacturing wage in Mexico.
Three-quarters of a vehicle’s value must originate UROPE’S freeriding may undermine the
inside the free-trade zone, restricting the use of global order, but the EU does not mount a
cheap imported components from Asia. This will direct challenge to US authority. China is
likely induce a modification but not a wholesale different, and that is what truly marks out the
dismantling of the production networks foreign relations of our current moment as a break
established under Nafta. Though it was not with the decades since the end of the Cold War. No
endorsed by US trade unions, it wasn’t repudiated one, including the Chinese, anticipated how
by them either. As the American Federation of rapidly the Trump administration would escalate
Labour and Congress of Industrial Organisations tensions over trade in 2018 or that this would
commented, the effect will depend on how it is evolve into a comprehensive challenge to China’s
implemented. presence in the global tech sector. The US has been
The auto industry was at the heart of the Nafta putting pressure on its allies to cut the Chinese
renegotiation and it is the critical element in telecoms giant Huawei out of their plans for 5G,
simmering US-EU trade tensions too. Let there be the next generation of internet technology. But
no false equivalence, however: the here the US – and its allies – are in reactive mode:
incomprehension and disrespect shown by the the original shock was China’s unprecedented
White House towards the EU is unprecedented. It growth.
isn’t clear that Trump and his entourage actually China alone was responsible for a doubling of
grasped that America no longer maintains bilateral global steel and aluminimum capacity in the first
trade deals with individual members of the EU. decade of the 21st century. Its huge investment in
Trump’s open advocacy for Brexit and R&D transformed it from a ‘third world’ importer
encouragement of further challenges to the of Western technology into a leading global force in
coherence of the EU has been extraordinary. The 5G. As the likes of Navarro and Lighthizer see it, it
use of Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act to was the naivety of enthusiasts for an American-led
investigate car imports from Germany as a threat to world order in the 1990s that allowed China’s
American national security is absurd. Such things communist-run state capitalism into the WTO.
mark a bewildering break with previous experience. What the globalists did not understand was the
That said, Trump’s obsession with the prevalence lesson of Tiananmen Square. China would
of German limousines in swanky parts of New York integrate, but on its own terms. That could be
10
ignored in 1989 when China’s economy accounted the US. America’s farmers converted their fields
for only 4 per cent of global GDP: now that figure is wholesale to grow soy beans for export to China,
close to 20 per cent. As far as the American trade only to find themselves cut out of their biggest
hawks are concerned, competition within an market by Brazilian competitors. And it isn’t just
agreed international order is to be welcomed only American firms that are caught up in the escalation
so long as the competitors agree to play by of tension. Important European, South Korean,
America’s rules, both economic and geopolitical. Taiwanese and Japanese businesses have staked
This was the lesson Europe was made to learn after huge wagers on China.
the Second World War. It was the lesson that Japan Given these investments, one might have
was taught the hard way in the 1980s and early expected more pushback against Trump’s China
1990s. If China refuses to learn that lesson, it must strategy from US business. So far there has been
be contained. little. The radical decoupling of the Chinese and
America retains some huge advantages. But it American economies may be so horrible a prospect
would be dangerous, the argument goes, simply to that business leaders simply prefer not to discuss it
count on those. Sometimes American in public. They may be lying low hoping the row
preponderance has to be defended by a ‘war of blows over. Or it may be that American business
manoeuvre’. The emerging American strategy is to itself buys the increasingly pessimistic diagnosis of
use threats of trade policy sanctions and aggressive the US intelligence and defence community, who
counter-espionage in the tech arena, combined argue China’s persistent protectionism and
with a ramping up of America’s military effort, to economic nationalism may mean that it presents
force Beijing to accept not just America’s global more of a threat than an opportunity. Even top
preponderance but also its terms for navigation of ‘China hands’ like Steve Schwarzman and Hank
the South China Sea. In pursuing this course the Paulson have warned of a chill in the air.
Trump presidency has a clear precedent: the push The hardening of attitudes towards China is not
against the Soviet Union in the early 1980s by the confined to America. It was the Anglo-American
Reagan administration, which deployed economic intelligence consortium known as ‘Five Eyes’ that
and political pressure to break what was perceived raised the alarm about Huawei’s capability to build
to be a menacing phase of Soviet expansion in the back doors into the West’s most sensitive
1970s. Despite all the risks involved, for American telecommunications networks. Canada and
conservatives that episode stands as the benchmark Australia are deeply concerned about Chinese
of successful grand strategy. penetration. The new pessimism about Sinocentric
The reason the attempt to apply this lesson to globalisation isn’t confined to security policy
present-day China is so shocking is that US hawks, but shared by many mainstream
business is entangled with China to an economists and political scientists in US academia,
immeasurably greater degree than it ever was with the think-tank world, and journalists and
the Soviet Union. If you are seeking a component of commentators on Chinese affairs. The liberal
the American world order that is really being tested version of the American world order is deeply
at the present moment, look no further than influenced by strands of modernisation theory, the
Apple’s supply chain in East Asia. Unlike South up to date version of which is encapsulated in the
Korea’s Samsung, the Californian tech giant made doctrine of the middle-income trap. Very few large
a one-way bet on manufacturing integration with countries have managed to grow beyond China’s
China. Almost all its iPhones are assembled there. current level of income. Those that have done so
Apple is an extreme case. But it is not alone. GM have kitted themselves out with the full set of
currently sells more cars in China than it does in liberal institutions and the rule of law. On this
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reading, China is in a precarious position. Xi’s democracy articulated the deepest feelings of
authoritarian turn is a decisive step in the wrong liberal humanity. A hundred years later, Trump has
direction. Further frequently cited signs of Chinese for ever personified the sleaziness, cynicism and
weakness include ethnic tensions and the ageing of sheer stupidity that dominates much of American
the population as a long-term effect of the one- political life. What we are facing is a radical
child policy. There is a belief, held well beyond the disjunction between the continuity of basic
administration, that the tide may be turning against structures of power and their political legitimation.
Beijing and that now is the moment for the West to If America’s president mounted on a golf buggy
harden the front. is a suitably ludicrous emblem of our current
This would indeed constitute a break with the moment, the danger is that it suggests far too
narrative of globalisation since the 1990s. But it pastoral a scenario: American power trundling to
would hardly be a break in the American-led world retirement across manicured lawns. That is not our
order. To imagine the American world order as reality. Imagine instead the president and his
fully global is after all a relatively recent buggy careening around the five-acre flight deck of
development. After 1945, the postwar order that is a $13 billion, Ford-class, nuclear-powered aircraft
generally seen as the non plus ultra of American carrier engaged in ‘dynamic force deployment’ to
hegemony was built on the hardened divisions of the South China Sea. That better captures the
the Cold War. Where China is concerned, the issue surreal revival of great-power politics that hangs
is not so much America’s intention to lead as over the present. Whether this turns out to be a
whether others are willing to follow. Building the violent and futile rearguard action, or a new chapter
Cold War order in Europe and East Asia was in the age of American world power, remains to be
comparatively easy. Stalin’s Soviet Union used a lot seen.
of stick and very little carrot. The same is not true
of modern-day China. Its economy is the thumping Adam Tooze gave the third of this year’s LRB
heart of a gigantic East Asian industrial complex. In Winter Lectures at the British Museum on 22
the event of an escalation with China, particularly February. Crashed, a history of the global financial
in East Asia, we may find ourselves facing not so crisis, came out last year.
much an end of the American-led order, as an
inversion of its terms. Where the US previously
offered soft-power inducements to offset the threat
of communist military power, backed up by hard
power as a last resort, in the next phase the US may
become the provider of military security against the
blandishments offered by China’s growth machine.
But this is premature. As of today, two years
into the Trump presidency, it is a gross
exaggeration to talk of an end to the American
world order. The two pillars of its global power –
military and financial – are still firmly in place.
What has ended is any claim on the part of
American democracy to provide a political model.
This is certainly a historic break. Trump closes the
chapter begun by Woodrow Wilson in the First
World War, with his claim that American
12
Letters Crisis in Venezuela

Among the Gilets Jaunes I’m not surprised Malcolm Deas disagrees with my
Just two points to add to Jeremy Harding’s excellent assessment of the situation in Venezuela (Letters, 7
piece on the continually surprising gilets jaunes March). But I do take issue with his suggestion that
(LRB, 21 March). First, the durability of general I attempted to ‘disguise’ the nature of the crisis
public support for the movement is, I think, largely there. I simply described the actual character and
owed to the daily visibility of ordinary people positions of the Venezuelan opposition, and
demonstrating at road junctions and roundabouts highlighted the less than pure motives of the
throughout the country. The sight of (mainly older) external actors who have involved themselves in
careworkers and pensioners standing out in the Venezuelan affairs.
cold and wet with their placards, barbecues and As for his claim that the crisis ‘certainly is about
picnics inspires a cheerful respect from a great restoring democracy and prosperity to Venezuela’, I
number of people who would be completely put off would ask Deas, as a distinguished historian of
if they were aware of the movement only through Latin America, how many instances of US-driven
media coverage of the violence that takes place on regime change in the region he can identify that
the fringes of the weekly actions in the big cities. have improved the lot of the population as a whole.
Second, the movement is a powerful The weight of historical examples, from the
demonstration of the near bankruptcy of party removal of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 to
politics in France. Since the electoral collapse of the coup in Honduras in 2009, tilts overwhelmingly
the Communist Party, all the traditional parties in the other direction, with regime change bringing
have struggled to attract viable levels of neither prosperity nor democracy, but instead
membership or significant non-state funding and decades of poverty, dictatorship and in some cases
are now widely perceived as tools for a tiny minority genocidal wars. (I leave aside notable examples
of the wealthy and/or educated to exercise power from outside the region such as Afghanistan, Iraq,
without any real engagement with the mass of the Libya etc.) Like it or not, any realistic assessment of
population. The success of Macron and his centrist what is going to happen next in Venezuela must at
party in 2017 was itself a symptom of the widening the very least reckon with the strong possibility of a
gulf between people and politicians. As Harding similar outcome. Pace Deas, it seems ‘absurd and
points out, Macron’s adoption of a right-of-centre perverse’ to pretend otherwise.
neoliberal position once in power was a
fundamental cause of the rise of the gilets jaunes. Tony Wood
Perhaps more significant, however, is the complete New York
failure of both the extreme right (the recently
renamed Rassemblement National) and the Hitch
extreme left (Mélenchon’s France Insoumise) in
Daniel Soar writes about Christopher Hitchens
their attempts to infiltrate and recuperate the gilets
(LRB, 21 March). Hitchens, along with his brother,
jaunes. Not unlike much of the support for Brexit,
Peter, attended The Leys school in Cambridge in
the movement is a massive and simultaneous
the 1960s. The Leys is a Methodist foundation.
rejection of all current political offerings.
Shortly before Hitchens died I was organising a
reunion at the school for his years. Although he
Jon Harry
hadn’t been in contact at all since he left, he flew in
Bordeaux
from New York for the occasion. During the day it
13
is our habit to arrange a chapel service, attendance megadeaths we would come out OK in the end.
voluntary (there was of course compulsory daily Stanley Kubrick read all the reports; in Dr Strangelove
chapel in his day). It is well attended, though some he named it the Bland Corporation.
go off to the pub. This particular year, shortly after
the service had started, Christopher slipped in at Jeremy Bernstein
the back. Afterwards I expressed my surprise. He New York
responded: ‘I learned more in that building than in
any other place in the school.’ You can’t call it that
Ferdinand Mount refers in passing to the
John Harding
Ecclesiastical Titles Act 1871, one of Gladstone’s
Dry Drayton, Cambridgeshire
many contributions to a better world (LRB, 21
March). Replacing the overtly anti-Roman Catholic
The Vice President’s Men Act of 1851, it enabled the Roman Catholic Church
Marc Dubin’s Latin American specialist declared to establish dioceses throughout the UK, and to
that his career had been compromised because of name them after actual places, although, following
his principled refusal to draw up a feasibility study strong lobbying from the Church of England they
for a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union could not be given the same names as existing C of
(Letters, 21 March). The notion that nuclear strike E dioceses. So, for example, Clifton not Bristol, and
plans of any sort would be drawn up by a Latin Westminster not London (this one was highly
America specialist or any number of them is controversial in that it implied a Roman Catholic
fantastical in itself, and of course by the time archbishop might have some authority over
Ronald Reagan became president and rejected Parliament).
them all, there were any number of nuclear strike A few decades later, the Church of England
plans. discovered that it needed to establish new dioceses
It seems that even after all these years the idea that to deal with the increase of population in industrial
Reagan was not a John Birch Society nuclear areas, a phenomenon that had previously escaped
warrior but its exact opposite is still hard to its attention. This time round, as the new dioceses
swallow for some – much as Trump’s persistent were established, the die-in-a-ditch attitude that
pressure to withdraw US troops from futile wars in ‘Our dioceses can’t have the same name as Roman
hopeless countries is studiously overlooked by his Catholic dioceses’ dropped away, and we got the
critics, who are determined to find fault with Anglican dioceses of Southwark, Portsmouth,
absolutely everything he does. Birmingham, Liverpool and, as recently as 2014,
Leeds – all with the same names as the relatively
Edward Luttwak recently established Roman Catholic dioceses.
Chevy Chase, Maryland
Timothy Beecroft
Marc Dubin expresses his shock that the US State St Albans, Hertfordshire
Department was looking at plans for a first-strike
nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. I spent some Even the Buzzard
time in the summer of 1957 at the Rand
In his review of Stephen Moss’s book about how
Corporation in Santa Monica. There were
birds got their names, Francis Gooding omits to
departments devoted to Russian history and others
mention the analysis of the etymology of British
to hydrogen bombs. There was Herman Kahn
bird names undertaken by W.B. Lockwood, which
informing us that even if we suffered a few
14
Moss himself credits as ‘a constant inspiration’ stayed in Brora, Golspie and Embo, and continued
(LRB, 21 February). The prime sources for to speak Gaelic until recently.
Lockwood’s lifetime’s work (consolidated in The
Oxford Book of British Bird Names, published in 1984) Ronald Macaulay
were dictionaries – the OED, but also dictionaries of Claremont, California
Middle English, English Dialect, Scots etc – as well
as the standard ornithological treatises. Lockwood, But for the Poles
usefully, also had an extensive command of North
Laura Beers mentions the ingratitude shown by the
and West European languages, including Proto-
British immediately after the Second World War to
Indo-European, Proto-Germanic, Faeroese,
the Polish servicemen who fought for the country
Icelandic, Frisian and various Celtic tongues. While
(LRB, 7 March). The ingratitude was particularly
Moss’s coverage of British bird names is partial and
egregious in light of the vital contribution made by
selective, Lockwood discusses the etymology of 257
Polish fighter pilots in the Battle of Britain in 1940.
British species and another 1250 local and dialect
The outcome rested for some time on a razor’s
names in a concise dictionary half the length of
edge; had it ended in defeat, Britain might well
Moss’s volume. Moss’s readers will look in vain for
have fallen. Britain was down to its very last
the etymology of evocative and intriguing names
airframes and pilots. But it did have the Polish
such as twite, siskin, avocet, cormorant, garganey,
pilots, who were more experienced and combat-
gadwall, pochard, scaup, capercaillie, ptarmigan,
ready than most of the British pilots, and had better
goshawk, osprey, and even buzzard.
tactical skills derived from prior experience against
the Luftwaffe. ‘Had it not been for the magnificent
Ian Jackson
work of the Polish squadrons and their
Edinburgh
unsurpassed gallantry,’ the commander-in-chief of
Fighter Command, Air Chief Marshal Hugh
A Country Emptied Dowding said, ‘I hesitate to say that the outcome of
Ian Jack asks what made possible the lack of battle would have been the same.’
compassion on display throughout the period of
the Highland Clearances (LRB, 7 March). We Kenneth MacWilliams
should be able to understand it, since we display Portland, Maine
the same determination to characterise our wishes
and interests as economic necessities. In the global Benevolent Revolution
South farmers are today being deprived of their
Not all the conclusions reached about new forms of
land and their water so that these limited resources
political legitimacy after the 1848 Revolutions were
can be used industrially to provide us with salad
as benevolent as those Christopher Clark identifies
leaves. But the refugees from modern agriculture
(LRB, 7 March). King Louis Philippe of France,
have no empty spaces to go to across the seas, no
deposed in February that year after his soldiers
snug Canadian cabins.
fired into a crowd, watched from exile as the new
government brutally put down radical uprisings in
Julian Crowe
June and mused, ‘Republics are lucky: they can
St Andrews
shoot people.’
Ian Jack says ‘the Sutherland evictees eventually left
June Farrow
the country.’ Not all of them. Nancy Dorian has
Middlesbrough
shown that the descendants of some of the evictees
15
The Son, Not the Father

In my recent piece on Justinian’s Code I
inadvertently misstated the point at issue in the
central theological controversy (LRB, 21 March).
This was indeed Christological, dealing solely with
the problem of God the Son and having nothing to
do with God the Father. The question was whether
the son had two different natures, divine and
human, in one indivisible divine person, or was one
nature, single and indivisible.
Michael Kulikowski
Pennsylvania State University
When will it end?

In the LRB of 7 March there is a long review by
Adam Phillips of a book about misogyny. There are
11 further pieces by men, and two pieces by
women. And the letters? 100 per cent of them by
men. Where does it begin and when will it end?
Helen Hills
University of York
16
wasteland, about 150 by 200 yards. It was a

They would have laughed traditional place for the citizens of the closely
Ferdinand Mount packed holy city of Amritsar to meet and stretch
their legs. General Dyer had paraded his men
Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a around the streets that morning, warning that any
Massacre by Kim A. Wagner. Yale, 325 pp, £20.00, gathering of more than four men would be looked
February on as an unlawful assembly and might be dispersed
T
by force. But he had processed only through the
HIRTY SECONDS after he first entered western half of the city, near the railway and the
the Jallianwala Bagh, he ordered his men European quarter. He had not penetrated to the
to open fire. There was no word of centre and east, where the Jallianwala Bagh and the
warning to the crowd, not a gesture. ‘My mind was Golden Temple lay. He himself was not stationed
made up as I came along in my motor car. If my in Amritsar: ‘I do not know the city very well,’ he
orders were not obeyed, I would open fire later admitted. He also admitted that as a result
immediately.’ After a bit, Sergeant Anderson, ‘there may have been a good many who had not
General Dyer’s personal bodyguard, ‘noticed that heard the proclamation.’
Captain Briggs was drawing up his face as if in But then Dyer also said that ‘it was no longer a
pain, and was plucking at the general’s elbow. Mr question merely of dispersing the crowd; but one of
Plomer, deputy superintendent of police, told the producing a sufficient moral effect, from a military
general during a lull that he had taught the crowd a point of view, not only on those who were present
lesson they would never forget. The general took no but more specially throughout the Punjab.’ In fact,
notice, and ordered fire to be resumed.’ At one he remarked: ‘I think it quite possible that I could
point, the general turned to one of his officers and have dispersed the crowd without firing but they
said: ‘Do you think they’ve had enough?’ He then would have come back again and laughed.’ He had
answered himself: ‘No, we’ll give them four rounds already seen them laughing in the streets as he
more.’ passed through on the way to the Jallianwala Bagh.
By the end, the fifty Sikhs and Gurkhas under No officer of the Raj more candidly confirmed the
his command had fired 33 rounds each, a total of truth of George Orwell’s confession in his essay
1650 rounds. The official estimate was that 379 ‘Shooting an Elephant’, written 17 years later, that
people had been killed and more than one his ‘whole life, every white man’s life in the East,
thousand injured. But it was hard to be sure of the was one long struggle not to be laughed at’.
exact figure. Dyer explained that he’d returned to The horror of what happened that day sank in
the Ram Bagh (the garden with palace at the heart immediately. Gerard Wathen, the principal of
of the British cantonment) ‘without counting or Khalsa College, who had intervened to stem the
inspecting the casualties’ – or offering any medical street violence of two days earlier, told Dyer that
assistance to the wounded – for fear, he said, that evening that ‘India would never forget.’ That same
his little force might be ambushed. This was evening, Dyer himself told the British women
extremely unlikely. The crowd of fifteen thousand huddled at the consulate that ‘I’m for the high
or more that had gathered on 13 April 1919 was jump but I saved you women and children.’
unarmed and peaceable, some of them listening to The story of the massacre has been told many
speeches, others simply milling about and times, but rarely with such narrative vigour and
chatting, many of them having come in from the moral passion as by Kim Wagner in this centenary
countryside for the Baisakhi festival, the Sikh New account. He quotes at length from Dyer’s own
Year. The Jallianwala Bagh (Jalle was the garden’s evidence to the commission of inquiry led by Lord
original owner) was in fact a large, irregular walled
17
Hunter, who had been solicitor general for the secretary of state for war, Winston Churchill.
Scotland in the Asquith government. Again and Eleven days later in the House of Lords, as always
again, Dyer convicts himself out of his own mouth. on the wrong side, the government was defeated by
As his friend Major General Nigel Woodyatt later 129 to 86, despite the sinewy arguments advanced
told him, ‘he was bound to get the worst of it; not by the lord chancellor, Lord Birkenhead. In the
so much for what he had done, but for what he had 1920s and 1930s, Birkenhead and Churchill were to
said.’ become leaders of the diehard opposition to Indian
As Nigel Collett declares in The Butcher of independence. Now even their rhetoric was
Amritsar (2005), his magisterial Life of Dyer, it’s scarcely enough to rescue the government. A public
difficult to exaggerate the effects of the massacre. collection for Dyer raised £26,000, with Rudyard
Not merely did it horrify all shades of Indian Kipling contributing £10. There was, however,
opinion, the failure of the British government to more than a little ambiguity about the inscription
punish or disown the perpetrators, and the Kipling offered for a never completed memorial to
heartfelt support Dyer got from a large section of Dyer: he ‘did his duty as he saw it’.
the British public, ‘was a critical factor in the Dyer died in 1927, after suffering several
metamorphosis of key leaders of the Indian strokes. He was given a military funeral at Long
National Congress, in particular of Gandhi, from Ashton, the village near Bristol to which he and his
loyal subjects … into implacable nationalists who wife, Annie, had retired. But then, amazingly, he
came to reject every facet of the British connection. had a second great ceremonial funeral through the
The massacre at the Jallianwala Bagh led directly to streets of London, his body carried on a gun
the bitterness and bloodshed of Indian carriage draped in the Union flag, from the Guards’
independence and partition nearly thirty years Chapel to St Martin-in-the-Fields. Wagner
later.’ What entrenched and inflamed the memory underplays the extraordinary fact of this rite,
of Amritsar was the belief shared by so many normally reserved for a national hero, being
servants of the Raj and hardline conservatives in accorded to a disgraced temporary brigadier. Only
Britain that ‘Dyer saved India.’ Jawaharlal Nehru, Collett puzzles over who could have given
who had collected much of the evidence for the permission for this and fingers those notorious
Indian National Congress’s separate inquiry into reactionaries and outspoken Dyer supporters, Sir
the massacre and who first developed his William Joynson-Hicks, the home secretary, and Sir
admiration for Gandhi as they worked together on Laming Worthington-Evans, then war secretary,
it, reflected: ‘This cold-blooded approval of the but he can find no trace of the necessary
deed shocked me greatly. It seemed absolutely arrangements in the papers of either ‘Jix’ or
immoral, indecent; to use public school language, ‘Worthy’, suggesting that even they felt the need to
it was the height of bad form. I realised then, more conceal what they were up to. All the same, by 1927
vividly than I had before, how brutal and immoral the Tories were back in power and they were
imperialism was, and how it had eaten into the determined to give their hero a supercharged send-
souls of the British upper classes.’ off.
A year later, on 8 July 1920, Edwin Montagu,
the Liberal secretary of state for India, was howled Even in our own day, Dyer has had his
down in the Commons by baying Tories in the defenders, or at least mitigators. Nick Lloyd, like
debate on Dyer’s conduct, which eventually led to Wagner a fortyish historian at King’s College
his dismissal from the army on half-pay. The London, gave his account of Amritsar the subtitle
coalition government only won the vote deploring ‘The Untold Story of One Fateful Day’ (2011). It is
his actions after a robust condemnation of Dyer by certainly an unfamiliar story. According to Lloyd,
18
the label on the tin would give you a pretty good

Dyer was no premeditated murderer. His idea of what was in it.
decision to fire in the Jallianwala Bagh was a It was against the Rowlatt Act that Gandhi led
sudden reaction to the size and composition of his first nationwide satyagraha, or ‘soul-force’, in
the crowd that he faced … which was India, after practising this tactic of civil
considerably larger than previous estimates – disobedience in South Africa. The campaign
upwards of 25,000 people – and was mainly involved a series of hartals in different regions.
composed of male Hindus who had entered the Lloyd translates hartal somewhat crudely as ‘strike’,
Bagh primarily for political purposes. Because Wagner more carefully as combining ‘the political
Dyer had so few troops he had no option but to strike and voluntary closure of shops and schools
keep firing. with a more spiritual notion of fasting and
purification for the individual’. Most of the hartals
But this totally contradicts what Dyer himself
went off quite peacefully, not least the first one in
told Lord Hunter. Lloyd’s way out of this fix is to
Amritsar itself, but the Punjab was unknown
argue that Dyer was a vain and hysterical character
territory to Gandhi and O’Dwyer managed to keep
who panicked and then offered several conflicting
him out of the province. He first hoped to have him
explanations for his conduct. But this hardly
deported to Burma, as the ex-emperor of Delhi had
squares with his overall conclusion on the
been after 1857, but only managed to have him
following page, where he says that the ‘way in
detained in Bombay. O’Dwyer then went on to
which the British dealt with the disorders of 1919
arrest and deport the two leaders of the Rowlatt
was, therefore, on closer inspection, much more
protest in Amritsar: the Muslim barrister Dr
restrained and responsible than has always been
Saifuddin Kitchlew, and Dr Satyapal, a medical
assumed’.
doctor educated at Peterhouse, where he had been
To examine this breathtaking assertion, we
a friend of Nehru’s. Satyapal had made his name in
need to look at the series of British actions leading
a demonstration against the absurd regulation that
up to the massacre, in particular those of Sir
required Indians to buy platform tickets at railway
Michael O’Dwyer, the lieutenant governor of the
stations while Europeans could stroll on free of
Punjab. Unlike Dyer, O’Dwyer could not be said to
charge – the kind of racist nonsense that would be
be a stupid man; he had a first in jurisprudence
unthinkable were India to enjoy dominion status,
from Balliol. But like several clever men who went
like Canada or Australia.
out to India – Virginia Woolf’s uncle James
Thus after securing repressive legislation to
Fitzjames Stephen, for example – his intelligence
squash freedom of expression, O’Dwyer then
only intensified his reactionary instincts. Brought
managed to remove from the scene the three
up in the lawless backwoods of Co. Tipperary,
leaders of the inevitable protests against the new
O’Dwyer believed in Order first and last (and not
law. The protesters at Amritsar began by chanting
much Law to go with it). He regarded any reforms
their names, but not surprisingly the leaderless
designed to give Indians a greater share in their
mob turned nasty and there were deaths on both
own government as ‘diabolical’. It was his alarmist
sides, although the situation had more or less
call for emergency legislation that pushed Lord
quietened down by the time Dyer arrived in the city.
Rowlatt and his committee to devise the Anarchical
After the massacre Gandhi immediately called off
and Revolutionary Crimes Act, or Rowlatt Act,
the campaign, admitting that it had been a
which provoked protests all over India in the first
‘Himalayan miscalculation’ to launch a satyagraha
months of 1919. Nick Lloyd dismisses these
in an area ill-prepared for so delicate an operation.
protests as whipped up by ignorant agitators who
O’Dwyer made no such apology. On the contrary,
hadn’t even read the act. I should have thought that
19
he told the viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, a week later: insulated India indefinitely from the liberal
‘The Amritsar business cleared the air, and if there democracy and the racial equality before the law
was to be a holocaust anywhere, and one regrets that were the coming thing in the mother country?
that there should be, it was best at Amritsar.’ Where would a straitened Britain have found the
According to the OED, this wasn’t the first time troops in the 1930s, if there had been no calming
‘holocaust’ had been used to describe a massacre, prospect of advance towards self-government and
but it was possibly the first time it was identified as eventually independence? Yet intelligent men like
an air-freshener. It was certainly a holocaust for O’Dwyer and less intelligent men like Dyer never
which O’Dwyer had stoked the fires. They were still stopped believing that Britain could hold India
smouldering twenty years later when he was shot down by force ad infinitum. And Nick Lloyd
dead in Caxton Hall by a Punjabi revolutionary. appears to think so still.
O’Dwyer was, besides, wilfully obtuse to the Kim Wagner’s view is no less forthright, but
global background. Adult male suffrage had just entirely opposite. For him, the Raj was always an
come into operation in Britain, and votes for ‘Empire of Fear’. The massacre at Amritsar was not
women were on the way. India had contributed an exception but a terrible instance of the rule. He
hundreds of thousands of men to the Allied war takes us back to the Mutiny: to the retribution
effort, with the Punjab contributing the lion’s exacted by the appalling Frederick Cooper, the
share. Gandhi had been an energetic recruiting deputy commissioner at Amritsar, who shot more
agent for the Raj, at great risk to his reputation. It than two hundred of his unarmed prisoners and let
was understood, at least by the Indian side, that if the rest suffocate in his bastion, which he proudly
they suspended their agitation for the duration, dubbed the ‘Black Hole of Ajnala’; and to General
they could expect a generous political quid pro quo. James Neill, who strung up hundreds of Indians on
If the reforms delivered by Montagu and the road to avenge the terrible murders in
Chelmsford fell short of nationalist hopes, at least Cawnpore and then made the murderers lick the
they were a step in the right direction. The Rowlatt blood off the floor before they themselves were
Act was a step back towards despotism, the hanged – an episode that makes us think of Dyer’s
direction made even more glaring and unpalatable own infamous ‘crawling order’ after the massacre,
by O’Dwyer’s actions. under which dozens of innocent Indians were
Yet it is Montagu who gets it in the neck from compelled to crawl on their bellies along the street
Lloyd. ‘His pious hope … was in tatters, shown to where an English mission school teacher, Marcella
be the naive illusion it always was.’ By Sherwood, had been beaten up. Dyer claimed that
commissioning the Hunter Report, Montagu ‘was this street, like the well at Cawnpore into which the
responsible for undermining support for the Raj in bodies of the British women and children had been
a period of acute difficulty. This was not the way to thrown, was ‘sacred ground’. Dyer, like Neill and
run an empire; it was, on the contrary, a recipe for the equally psychopathic John Nicholson, was
complete and utter disaster.’ According to Lloyd, notable for his piety.
the right way was to stand firm as Birkenhead did Wagner might also have reached further back,
when he was India secretary between 1924 and to Rollo Gillespie’s execution of hundreds of
1929 and ‘rebuff nationalist agitation in the way unarmed prisoners in a fives court after the mutiny
that Montagu never had’. Was it really plausible, at Vellore in 1806, which recalls Dyer’s brutal
though, that a desperately thin upper crust of floggings on the tennis courts at the Ram Bagh –
British officials could continue to rule without the British recreational space always coming in handy
participation of the Indians? Is it not just as naive as a punishment area. Strapping prisoners to the
an illusion to imagine that Britain could have mouth of a gun and blowing them into sticky pieces
20
which often floated down onto the dresses of lady Gerard Wathen’s wife, Melicent, a more bellicose
spectators had been a regular feature of British character than her husband, recorded in her diary
retribution, from Hector Munro in Bengal in 1764 the relief that the British all felt when they saw RAF
to Deputy Commissioner Cowan in the Punjab, planes patrolling overhead (Lt Col Smith, the civil
who executed fifty prisoners by blowing them from surgeon, had suggested they might bomb Amritsar
guns after the Kuka outbreak in 1872. Sir Robert too, but the city was quiet by then). The aerial
Davies, O’Dwyer’s predecessor as lieutenant threat may have been in its infancy, but already it
governor of Punjab, defended Cowan was seen as a low-budget answer to terrorism – a
wholeheartedly: ‘Blowing from a gun is an comforting thesis confirmed in the age of the
impressive and merciful manner of execution, well drone.
calculated to strike terror into the bystanders.’ So frightfulness was certainly available on
Mountstuart Elphinstone, the famously liberal and prescription. All the same, I think Wagner is too
humane governor of Bombay, had said almost ready to dismiss Churchill’s argument about the
exactly the same thing half a century earlier. exceptionalism of Amritsar. In the same way, I
Wagner’s central purpose is to demonstrate think he is too quick to denounce Richard
that brutality was the driving principle of the Raj. Attenborough’s film Gandhi for depicting the
There was, he says, nothing exceptional about Dyer massacre as an aberration in the history of British
and nothing extraordinary about what he did at India. From his opposite perspective, Wagner’s
Amritsar. The bigger fish he has his sights on here thesis is almost as peremptory as Lloyd’s. Yes, as
is Churchill and the subtle and effective speech by imperialists like Sir John Kaye were always willing
which he helped the government home in the to admit, ‘India had been won by the sword and
furious debate of 8 July 1920. Churchill asserted must be retained by the sword.’ Yet the disjunction
that what happened at Jallianwala Bagh was an between imperial repression and the more or less
‘episode which appears to me without precedent or liberal values that prevailed back ‘home’ had been
parallel in the modern history of the British painfully evident in the India debate as far back as
Empire. It is an event of an entirely different order the unequalled critiques of Burke, Sheridan and
from any of those tragical occurrences which take Adam Smith. That liberal critique was never
place when troops are brought into collision with silenced, though often ineffective in the face of the
the civil population. It is an extraordinary event, a greed and panic of the British who were actually in
monstrous event, an event which stands in singular India. Corrupt practices were eventually punished
and sinister isolation.’ It had to be made clear that and cleaned up; brutal conduct was often punished
‘this is not the British way of doing business.’ and the offenders sent home. None of this palliates
According to Churchill, ‘frightfulness is not a the racism of imperial rule, but it did soften the
remedy known to the British pharmacopoeia.’ practice.
Wagner points out that this was a bit rich, Wagner really only manages to make his thesis
coming from a man who only a few months later stand up by failing to pay much attention to Dyer
was to send out the Black and Tans to terrorise the himself. For Amritsar was unique in its horror, in
Irish, and later ordered similar therapy in Iraq, the innocence of the victims and the number of
bombing villages with the aid of Arthur (not yet them, and in the dead-eyed callousness of the
Bomber) Harris, who had already done some perpetrator. To put it as simply as I can: no Dyer,
‘policing from the air’ on the North-West Frontier. no massacre.
O’Dwyer too was not slow to send in the RAF to
bomb rioters in Gujranwala, about fifty miles north
of Amritsar on 14 April, the day after the massacre.
21
W E NEED to turn back to The Butcher of

Amritsar to understand just how
peculiar Dyer was. Nigel Collett,
himself formerly a colonel in the British army who
theory of conducting small wars – roughly
speaking, what is today called ‘shock and awe’ –
and military law, which stipulated then as now
minimum force in dispersing any unlawful
has served in many colonial outposts, exposes in assembly and firing only when absolutely
painstaking and nuanced detail both Dyer’s necessary: principles known to Dyer from his two
character and his career. Reginald Dyer, always years at Staff College and totally disregarded by him
known as Rex, was the son of a successful brewer in at the Jallianwala Bagh.
north India. Rather oddly, he was sent to school in Dyer was also unnervingly indifferent to the
Co. Cork, where he saw in his teens the lootings orders he was given. When at last he received an
and burnings of the Landleaguers. His first active command, on India’s western border with
experience of warfare was much the same as Persia, he disregarded his clear instructions, which
Churchill’s: burning the villages and crops of were to pick up any German agents inciting
dissident tribesmen on the North-West Frontier. disaffection. Instead, he proceeded to take over
That sort of anti-guerrilla operation was the sizeable chunks of eastern Persia, much to the
common lot of British officers in India. What was alarm of Chelmsford and his suite up in Simla.
clear from the first, however, was that Dyer ‘was Rex’s uncalled-for incursions imploded only when
just not like everybody else’. When he attended he ran out of food and had to scuttle back over the
Staff College at Camberley, the commandant told frontier, which didn’t deter him from publishing in
some of the young officers: ‘There is a very strange his retirement a boastful and largely mendacious
officer in your batch … I think him strange; my staff account of his exploits, The Raiders of the Sarhad.
think him strange; I am minded to send him away.’ Equally unnerving was his insistence that in
And his fellow subalterns agreed: ‘He shuns our order to muster the authority required to
society … When we speak to Dyer, he does not accomplish his mission, he needed to be promoted
appear to grasp what we say, and looks at his to general. When Simla was slow to answer this
questioner with uncomprehending eye; he does not impudent request, he had the regimental tailor run
appear to be all there.’ Yet Rex turned out to be up a set of crossed swords and red tabs, so that he
popular with his men, and good fun in regimental could play the part. The phrase ‘loose cannon’
sports. He was intensely ambitious too, hard- might have been invented for him. Chelmsford
working, and mathematically minded – for years he later told George V that had Dyer not succumbed to
was obsessed with devising an improved range- a convenient bout of dysentery, he would have
finder for artillery and submitted half a dozen recalled him. Certainly the mess he made in the
patents, none of which was taken up by the army. Sarhad prevented him from ever being promoted
He was, in short, an intermittently autistic geek, beyond temporary brigadier. It’s worth noting too
and one with a violent temper which often ended in that nobody actually ordered him to take command
his knocking down people who annoyed him. at Amritsar. The place happened to fall within his
Collett makes clear that Dyer was capable of jurisdiction as commandant of Jullundur District,
cool and decisive leadership in actual battle, as in and he simply rolled up – and paid little or no
his exemplary relief of the siege of Thal in the Third attention to what anyone on the spot told him.
Afghan War, which immediately followed the He was a catastrophe waiting to happen. Pace
Amritsar massacre. But he was scarcely the officer Nick Lloyd, it would have been unthinkable for his
you would send to calm a fractious crowd or to find actions at Amritsar not to have been subjected to a
a peaceful way out of a tight spot. Collett nicely searching public inquiry. Indian nationalists
exposes the implicit conflict between the military caricatured the Hunter Report as a whitewash. In
22
fact, Hunter made it absolutely clear that there had

been no conspiracy to take over the Punjab and that
Dyer’s conduct had been deplorable. It was only the
incorrigible adulation of the diehards that saved
him from receiving the much harsher treatment he
deserved.
For the British Raj, the long process of coming
to terms with the modern world had begun forty
years before the massacre, with Lord Dufferin
inviting the leaders of the newly formed Indian
National Congress to a garden party at Government
House. It continued through the gradual
Indianisation of the legal profession and the civil
service and the rise of Indian entrepreneurs to the
Morley-Minto reforms of 1909 and the Montagu-
Chelmsford reforms ten years later. The whole
thing was agonisingly slow and resisted by the
diehards every step of the way, but by the 1930s
they had been reduced to a rump on the Tory
backbenches, mocked as dinosaurs even by their
fellow Tories. It was an ungainly and unlovely
process, which even Gandhi’s indefatigable
resourcefulness was incapable of hurrying along.
But it did move. And it would have moved faster if
between them O’Dwyer and the temporary
brigadier hadn’t got in the way. If only the
commandant or the viceroy had sent Rex Dyer
away.
Ferdinand Mount’s most recent book is Prime

Movers: From Pericles to Gandhi.
23
found that 67 per cent approved of the basic

Short Cuts principle underlying the ban – while stifling by
Tom Crewe embarrassment any dissenting grown-ups, who
will effectively be challenged to make a public stand
H
on their right to masturbate anonymously over
AVE you p-p-picked up a porn pass? In child-polluting videos in the privacy of their own
April the UK government plans to homes. This is a brand of British hypocrisy
introduce – or at least plans to practised with peculiar efficiency by the tabloids,
announce a definite date for the introduction of – and so it’s no surprise to find the Sun helpfully
the world’s first ‘porn ban’, which will block all referring to porn users as ‘randy internet lurkers’,
access to porn websites nationwide unless the user while explaining to its readers how to navigate the
can prove they’re 18 or older. One such proof will ban.
be a ‘porn pass’, available at your local newsagent This same bind may also allow the Tories to
for £4.99 per card, one for each device, your age escape serious criticism of the policy itself, which
checked by the seller. Though that will only be seems doomed to fail, while remaining on the
necessary, apparently, if you don’t feel comfortable statute book for want of anyone brave enough to
submitting your name and driving licence or repeal it. Teenagers will find the ban easy enough
passport details online. I say ‘apparently’ because to dodge, simply by tricking the web into thinking
as well as not knowing precisely when it’s due to they’re accessing it from outside the UK, or by
come in, no one is completely sure how the porn switching to social media channels, which the
ban is going to work. Most people – 76 per cent of government isn’t proposing to submit to the same
the population, according to YouGov – have never strictures. It’s in any case not clear that the
heard of the ban, and this despite the fact that the appointed regulator, the British Board of Film
UK is the second largest consumer of porn in the Classification, experienced as it is in distinguishing
world after the United States, according to the an 18 from a PG, has the capacity to ensure
website PornHub (which gets more than 100 billion compliance across thousands of websites. The
views per annum). Per capita, we’re the largest. darker, wilder corners of the internet might
That’s an awful lot of people about to be caught become more populated as a result, which can
with their pants down. hardly have been the intention. And all this before
Presumably part of the reason the government we even consider the risks posed by asking millions
has been so quiet about its world-leading initiative of adults to register themselves as porn users: an
– which derives from the 2017 Digital Economy Act unreassuring precedent is the 2015 data hack of
– is that it’s feeling shy. A policy which, though Ashley Madison, a website facilitating extra-marital
framed to prevent children from accessing affairs, which released the details of 35 million
inappropriate material, will predominantly affect clients into the public domain. The government
adults presents particular difficulties, compounded has left the task of constructing and managing the
by the fact that it’s still not really admitted in public age verification processes at the heart of its strategy
that watching porn is something lots of adults like to the porn industry itself. MindGeek, the
to do. (It’s hard to imagine Theresa May gearing up monopoly behind PornHub, RedTube and
to speak on the matter. Or Philip Hammond. Boris YouPorn, among others (free sites that between
Johnson perhaps, but he’s off the pitch.) And yet them make around $500 million a year), has
the craftier Tories, if any still exist, may see this as devised a system called AgeID – a log-in requiring
an advantage: the party can adopt its traditional, the input of passport or driving licence details just
electorally friendly posture in defence of the once as proof of age – which will apparently (that
sanctity of childhood – the same YouGov poll
24
word again) be rolled out across the web. They say children aged 6-14 who spent time online watched
they are anticipating 25 million UK sign-ups. Jim some, according to the government – and we know
Killock, of the campaign group Open Rights, has quite a bit about its effect on boys, or young men,
said that it’s like ‘giving all your data to the who watch more of it, and the consequent
pornographic equivalent of Mark Zuckerberg’. (The expectations created for girls, or young women,
Zuckerberg in question is a German called Fabian who watch less of it. But how do we get from that to
Thylmann. MindGeek, naturally, is based in the principle of a porn ban?
Luxembourg.) The AgeID people say there’ll be no Implicit in a lot of commentary on this issue is
record of viewing habits attached to an individual’s the idea that we live in radically new times; that a
account, and that they won’t share the data they halcyon period of childhood innocence is over and
gather, but the government isn’t mandating that that major action must be taken to reverse the rot.
they or any other rival verification system sign up to But Breathnach also writes about buying copies of
an agreed set of privacy standards, to vouch for the the Sun aged 12 or 13 in Ireland, in the summer of
security of the information they hold about users’ 2000, storing them in a secret place on a bit of
identities – only that they abide by the GDPR. So scrubland he would visit with a friend at the
the system’s good to go, backed by a porn baron’s weekends, the two of them poring over the musty
word. Fingers crossed. page 3 girls. ‘One day that summer,’ he writes,
There’s a bigger question here, which is why ‘bored of our ritualised looking, we improvised a
the government is doing what it’s doing, or rather way of rehearsing intercourse.’ They dug a hole,
what it thinks porn is doing to children (which in laid down some perforated cardboard over it, and
its definition includes 16 and 17-year-olds, who are ‘selected a favourite picture’. ‘Peter turned around.
over the age of consent). It describes pornography I got down on the ground, checked to see if he was
when used by children as a ‘demerit good’ (a looking, took my dick out of my trousers, and
product or service that negatively affects the fucked the wet black hole.’ Around the same age I
consumer): ‘evidence suggests that accessing porn also bought copies of the Sun with my friends, as
can be detrimental to children’s development and well as the Star and the People. It may have been the
children are likely to be not sufficiently informed to same summer. There was nothing to stop us
make optimal consumption decisions.’ It’s hard to making our purchases. We too had a secret place to
know what to make of arguments like these (one keep them. When we became too ashamed they
report notes in passing that the Netherlands ‘takes were burned. I didn’t fuck a hole in the ground, but
the view that evidence definitively proving the only because I didn’t think to.
harmful effect of sexualised content on minors is Children aren’t innocent, only more or less
not available’, and that this opinion is shared by the alert. They live in an adult world, and adults are
UK Children’s Commissioner, whom the careless of that fact. My sex education, if you could
government is ignoring). What does seem pretty call it one, was a mixture of hints and half-truths,
clear is that porn can have a corrosive effect on whispers and wayward glances, intended and
adults and their relationships; in his accidental – at porn mags on the top shelf, or in a
uncategorisable book Tunnel Vision (Faber, £12.99), friend’s dad’s magazine rack, at porn videos lined
Kevin Breathnach describes his internet porn up in rental stores, or in a relative’s TV cabinet
addiction in highly non-arousing terms: ‘I had been drawer. It was an education defined by absences
presiding over the destruction of my own sexuality’ and guesswork, as much as by obtrusions and illicit
is his final conclusion. Equally, it doesn’t seem knowledge. The formal teaching I received was
especially desirable for young children to be shoddy. I remember conceiving of blow jobs as the
watching porn – in May 2015, 13 per cent of all purposeful application of air to the genitals. The
25
first time I masturbated, I had to look up in the out over 2010-12 and known as Natsal-3, only 27
dictionary ‘wanking’ (the word I’d overheard), per cent of young men and 43 per cent of young
‘masturbation’, ‘orgasm’, ‘ejaculation’ and ‘semen’ women aged 16-24 cited their parents as a source of
before I knew how to go about it and what to information about sex. This has pushed
expect. Then I felt guilty about it for years. The first responsibility onto schools, which haven’t been up
time I saw footage of people actually having sex – it to the task. Natsal-3 found that 68 per cent of
was on TV, not online, and my friend switched the young men and 70 per cent of young women felt
channel without warning – I remember thinking: they had their first sexual encounters not knowing
Oh, so that’s what it looks like. Previously I’d had the enough about what they were doing. A year later, in
impression that it was very top-down, something 2013, Ofsted inspectors concluded that sex
like laying a sausage in a hot dog bun. The most education required improvement in more than a
misogynistic (and homophobic) environment I’ve third of UK schools. Successive surveys of
ever inhabited was my school – and I don’t think schoolchildren over the years have supported this
online porn bore much of the responsibility. verdict. One conducted in 2018 reported that 52
Simpler if it did. per cent of students wanted more time to be spent
I’ve recently been reading You Always Remember on sex education and 34 per cent wanted it to be
the First Time, a collection of essays about losing taken more seriously; 30 per cent had been given
one’s virginity and the build-up to it, edited by B.S. no instruction on sexual pleasure; 25 per cent had
Johnson and published in 1975. The scary thing been taught nothing about porn; 23 per cent had
isn’t how different everything is, but how familiar: been given no guidelines on healthy relationships;
people fumbling their way to some kind of 22 per cent nothing about LGBT issues; 12 per cent
awareness, thwarted, misdirected, uselessly nothing about HIV.
anguished. This in turn tallies with the accounts To give the government some credit, it knows
given by the contributors to Simon Szreter and Kate this. In 2017 it made it compulsory for all
Fisher’s endlessly fascinating oral history, Sex before secondary schools – not just state secondaries – to
the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England, 1918-63 teach sex education, and for primary school
(2010), who testified to an opaque regime of sexual children to be taught about ‘relationships’, if not
knowledge, structured by gender and class sex, from the age of four. It has talked about the
distinctions, with men, equipped with a muddle of need to put consent, porn and LGBT issues in
information, expected to take the initiative with prominent place. But there is something truly
women, who had less information, or thought they perverse about stressing the complexity of human
did. If, after roughly a century, we can still see clear sexuality and promising deeper engagement with it
lines of continuity running down to the present, in while at the same time placing a ban on the images
spite of the sexual revolution and the institution of and footage which should form part of the
sex education in schools nearly eighty years ago (in discussion. Something perverse, too, about the
1942), then we’ve been doing a consistently poor government’s continued insistence on a parental
job of getting people to adulthood in full ‘right’ to withdraw children from sex education –
possession of the facts of life. though it has also stipulated that from the age of 15
Rather than instituting an unworkable porn children can opt in against their parents’ wishes.
ban, then, it might be worth asking why children This month six hundred children were taken out of
don’t understand sex, or understand it in the wrong Parkfield Primary School in Birmingham by their
ways. Parents are still reluctant to talk to their parents after they were taught about the existence
children about it: in the most recent National of gay people. There have been angry
Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, carried demonstrations outside the building, with placards
26
attacking ‘indoctrination’. Andrea Leadsom said

charmingly by way of response that parents should
decide when their children are ‘exposed to that
information’, delusions of control being central to
her political philosophy. It makes me think that
porn might well provide some welcome and
enjoyable instruction for all those kids kept out of
sex education, especially the gay ones. But if they
are fucked up by it, it won’t just be the porn that’s
to blame.
Tom Crewe is an editor at the LRB.
27
Blair and Gordon Brown were in Parliament and

Spookery, Skulduggery Neil Kinnock – scarred by having to defend
David Runciman unilateral disarmament in the 1987 general election
– was on the long march to respectability and
The Friends of Harry Perkins by Chris Mullin. Scribner, another defeat in 1992. That defeat didn’t breathe
185 pp, £12.00, March new life into the left. It redoubled the modernisers’
C
determination to get over the top with one last
HRIS MULLIN’S A Very British Coup was a push. The televised version of A Very British Coup was
nostalgic book that turned into a more up to date than the novel (and was set a few
prophetic one. First published in 1982 years later, in the early 1990s). The suits worn by
and set towards the end of that decade, it some of the politicians were sharply cut; the spies
nonetheless recalled the politics of the 1970s. The laid their schemes not in smoke-filled rooms but by
novel tells the story of Harry Perkins, a Bennite the flickering green light of computer screens. Still,
leader of the Labour Party, who wins power at a it was comfort TV. It depicted a world that looked
general election but has it prised away from him by just like the real one except that nothing in it would
a conspiracy of securocrats, tycoons and Labour actually come to pass. The voters weren’t about to
turncoats. Its characters were recognisable as an embrace socialism, forcing the establishment to do
amalgam of the passing generation of Labour its worst. Labour was about to become the
heavyweights, from Benn himself to Barbara Castle establishment.
and bruisers like Denis Healey and Eric Heffer. Its Since then, two things have changed the way
atmosphere derived from the lurid tales of spookery Mullin’s book is viewed. First, its title has become
and skulduggery that emerged in the dying days of part of our political lexicon and is regularly used to
Harold Wilson’s premiership, when the describe any attempt to subvert the will of the
longstanding suspicion that Wilson was a KGB people without being seen to do so. In the
plant led to rumoured attempts by MI5 and others conspiratorial, confrontational, confused state of
to undermine him by any means necessary. Even in our politics this is an idea we seem to find it harder
1982, these stories seemed to be going out with the and harder to do without. (When I googled A Very
tide. Benn had lost the Labour deputy leadership British Coup, the first result was an article by Robert
contest to Healey in 1981 – it was a close-run thing, Peston describing the recent attempt by Yvette
but it was also the closest he would ever get to the Cooper, Hilary Benn and Oliver Letwin to seize
top. Michael Foot, the party leader, was facing the parliamentary control of the Brexit process. The
brute realities of the Falklands War and the headline read: ‘A very British coup against the
defection of the so-called Gang of Four to the SDP. PM’.) The second thing is Jeremy Corbyn. The book
The Labour left wasn’t about to have power wrested is now being marketed with the subtitle: ‘The novel
from it. It was beginning to dribble away. that foretold the rise of Corbyn’. This is stretching
The sense of nostalgia was even more it a bit. Harry Perkins isn’t much like Corbyn. He’s
pronounced when the book became a successful TV more of an insider’s outsider who has manoeuvred
series in 1988. Harry Perkins was played by Ray his way to the top of the party by design rather than
McAnally, who seemed entirely plausible as a man by accident. He’s quite comfortable playing the
swept to office on a wave of popular affection, game of conventional politics, unlike Corbyn, who
notwithstanding his radical programme (quit Nato, often refuses to play the game at all. But the arrival
dismantle Trident, take down the press barons). of Corbyn at the summit of Labour politics, and
The trouble was no one in the actual Labour Party perhaps one step away from Downing Street, has
remotely resembled him. By this point, Peter raised the question of what would happen if he got
Mandelson was communications director, Tony
28
there. Would the dark forces of the establishment since that Tony Blair let in all those migrants’ – yet
do their worst? Would the Parliamentary Labour the political mood music seems to come from the
Party allow them to get away with it? Even if time when Mullin was making his own way in
Mullin’s book didn’t foresee Corbyn’s rise, it might Parliament (he became an MP in 1987 and served
yet map out his fate. for a time as a junior minister in the Blair
This is a propitious time for a follow-up. Mullin government). The ‘friends’ meet regularly in a
has now written the sequel, which picks up the tale restaurant in Soho that sounds suspiciously like the
after the death of Perkins, who is depicted as Gay Hussar, once a haunt of Labour politicians
having lived out the remainder of his life as a (now closed). They communicate by handwritten
political ghost, unreconciled to his public demise notes or on the phone, and political vendettas are
but unable to avenge it. He gets a warm and wistful played out through the leader pages of the
send-off. ‘In death,’ Mullin writes, ‘Perkins broadsheets. Politicians make or break their
attracted a much friendlier press than he had done reputations with speeches in Parliament and live in
in life. Those who had most reviled him were most fear of becoming the subject of a Panorama exposé.
fulsome in their tributes.’ So this isn’t going to be Mullin pays lip-service to the existence of social
Corbyn’s story, at least not yet. Instead, the book media, but only in order to trivialise it. One of
follows the fortunes of Perkins’s former press Thompson’s allies is ‘said to command a large
secretary, Fred Thompson, who was portrayed in following in the Twittersphere’, as though that
the first novel (and especially by Keith Allen who were something both superficially fashionable and
played him in the TV version) as a proto Seamus essentially unverifiable. Death threats, when they
Milne, all flinty attitudes and angry disdain for the are received by politicians, come ‘in envelopes
bastards trying to do down his boss. But this isn’t enclosing the very newspaper cuttings that had
Milne’s story either. We discover that after the coup provoked the ire of the righteous’. This unreality is
that did for Perkins, Thompson gave up on politics compounded by the description of Thompson’s
altogether and moved to a remote Scottish island rise to the top. He forges a name for himself with
with his aristocratic wife and their two adorable his fearless performances in the Commons. For
daughters. He only comes back when he’s offered example:
the chance to fight Perkins’s safe Sheffield seat. He
He painted the housing crisis as yet another
is by now a changed man, less cocksure and more
of the bills coming in for the Thatcher decade.
wary, wanting to do some good and make a
At the very mention of their hero’s name, the
difference, but afraid it may be too late. The Friends
pinstripes on the government benches rose like
of Harry Perkins traces his rise from the backbenches
a lot of Pavlov’s dogs. ‘Will the honourable
to the brink of Downing Street.
gentleman give way?’
The time frame for this is deliberately
Fred ploughed on. The cries of ‘give way’
confusing. As Mullin tells us in his preface, the new
intensified. He looked around, his eyes
book is set in a future that overlaps with the recent
alighting upon Jason Joslin – J.J. to his friends –
past. Many of the characters from A Very British Coup
a smug young man of modest origins who had,
reappear – these are the ‘friends of Harry Perkins’ –
by fair means or foul, clawed his way to
even though most of them would be far too old for
considerable wealth. Witness the Armani suit
active politics and some, like their former mentor,
and the gold cufflinks that protruded a full
would surely be dead. The political landscape is
three inches from the sleeves of his jacket.
also hard to pin down. We are somewhere in the
‘I give way.’
mid-2020s – Brexit has taken place and people say
things like ‘I haven’t voted for twenty years. Not
29
‘The honourable gentleman traduces a on the ‘no compromise with the electorate’
woman whose shoelaces he is not fit to tie,’ wing of the party didn’t wish to hear.
snorted Joslin.
As things stand today, Labour has lost the last
Parliamentary debates, for anyone who can still three elections. Mullin is anticipating two more
bear to watch them, no longer contain much of this defeats before the party pulls itself together. If New
kind of rhetoric and Armani suits are thin on the Labour was a hard slog – Blair and Mandelson
ground. It sounds a lot more like 1995 than 2025. needed four defeats in a row to get people lined up
And even in 1985 Thatcher wasn’t much to be seen where they wanted them – this next iteration
wearing boots with laces. sounds almost interminable. Compared to Harry
The effect is to make the new book appear even Perkins’s breezy popular triumph, Thompson has
more nostalgic than its predecessor. Ironically, it to do it the hard way.
draws on the age of politics that put paid to the era He also has to make an agonising choice as
for which A Very British Coup was still holding a leader of the opposition. After much soul-
flame. Thompson is not exactly Blair, but he is searching, he commits Labour to reverse Brexit and
more Blair than he is Corbyn, and he also has a decides to campaign on a promise to take the UK
streak of the early Gordon Brown – purposeful, back into the EU. It’s a difficult decision because
crusading, high-minded, effective. He skewers the although, in Mullin’s novel, Brexit has been a
Tories for their greed and their hypocrisy and he catastrophic failure – the country is poorer, even
promises that Labour can do better: not more ill at ease with itself and just as resentful as
fantastically better, just better than we have grown ever – it has also become a fact of life. Trying to
accustomed to. Thompson is the sort of politician undo it means confronting all the pent-up
who discovers what’s possible as he tries to make frustration that led to Brexit in the first place. This
the case for it and who keeps being surprised when produces the deepest irony of all, and the one that
he gets a hearing. He is cautious and constantly gives this novel its peculiar bite. The security
fearful of overstepping the mark. But in the end, he services, who helped to bring down Perkins and
brings the party round to his point of view. drive Thompson into political exile on his Scottish
The party here primarily means its island, now signal that they are willing to support
parliamentary representatives and its voters. The him. He has come to represent the sort of political
members barely get a look in. Mullin’s description responsibility they are hankering for after years of
of the Labour leadership contest – one Thompson feckless and fantasy-driven Tory rule. The
eventually wins – treats the hustings in Parliament securocrats are looking for a politician who can
as far more consequential than the subsequent rescue the country from the Brexit nightmare: no
hawking for members’ votes. Once the MPs have more very British coups for them. The enemy
had their say, Thompson has to take his message within is no longer the deep state – it’s the angry
outside Westminster: mob. Thompson’s hopes for national renewal are at
risk of being undone by the implacable resistance
There then followed months of navel-gazing
of rogue elements among the people themselves.
as the candidates processed around the country
The Brexit-related event that overshadows this
addressing closed meetings of members. At
book isn’t the referendum result but the murder of
every stop Thompson hammered home his
Jo Cox. That, for Mullin, is where the real danger
message. ‘We’ve lost five successive elections,
lies: the true irreconcilables are the individuals on
we can’t afford even a little punt on the
the margins of public discourse whose sense of
outcome of the sixth.’ It was a message many
betrayal will never be assuaged. The Friends of Harry
Perkins is a far bleaker book than its predecessor.
30
Long sections of the narrative are given over to

describing the terrible illness that afflicts one of
Thompson’s young daughters and the toll this
takes not only on his marriage but on his sense of
political optimism. A Very British Coup was a
comforting book because it concerned an actual
conspiracy, and conspiracies only have to be
exposed to be defeated. They give us a sense of
political agency: stop the conspiracy and stop the
rot. The dark powers at work in The Friends of Harry
Perkins are not the result of anyone’s scheming.
Some are acts of God. Others are the result of
forces no one seems able to control. Hovering in
the background throughout is a brewing war
between the US and China, which makes the
goings-on inside British politics look redundant. In
A Very British Coup bad things happen to good
people because of public indifference and
inattention. The solution is clear: wake up the
people! In The Friends of Harry Perkins, bad things just
happen. And the public is wide awake enough
already.
David Runciman teaches politics at Cambridge

and hosts the podcast Talking Politics. How
Democracy Ends came out last year.
31
At Notre Dame de Reims

John Burnside
the snake
is a snake;
but the toad has a human face, in the hidden

gallery under the roof, where the masons
practised their art, away from the bishops

and kings.
We’ve seen this much before (in Salisbury, say,

or that chapel above the Esk
at Rosslyn):
a refuge for the pagan in the chill
of Christendom, a Green Man

in the fabric of the stone; a running
boar; the sacred

hare; or else
the common wren, so

lifelike it might flit at any time
into a corner, tail

erect, the eye
agleam, as if to indicate
its known propensity
for lust
(which, in the old tongue, meant no more
than pleasure: no-one’s

shame and not a sin,
but life as such, immediate

and true
like flight,
or song).
32
At Reims,
they say,
the toad is done

from life - sans doute
un proche - a relative
or friend,
and high in the highest beams,

where no one goes,
a workman has sculpted a cat

with a woman’s smile.
It’s cold in here:

a memory
of life,
not life itself,
but just as the light

that falls through the stained-glass
windows falls
to scattered points of colour in the dark,
not from a god, but from a common

memory of being
lost amongst the trees,

old demons
watching from the murk,

some errant body
flitting back and forth

from light to dark
till something more familiar

than a god
escorts the wanderer home

– no shame in that,
nor any sin: a rabbit for the pot,

a brace of quail,
33
and nothing to confess,

should there be warmth
and laughter in the house

(a hut, no more,
under the cold facade

their hands have raised
to someone else’s god, a stone

conclusion,
while the old life

bides its time)
nothing to be refused,
where there is hearth
and humour
and the fleet
mysterium that runs

from skin to skin:
a mischief in the eye,

a sly remark,
a live cat
lapping the cream
while the stew-pot

simmers.
John Burnside’s latest collection is Still Life with Feeding Snake.
34
comprehend a two-second delay). They are able to

Operation Columba recognise individuals from photographs, and a
Jon Day neuroscientist at Keio University in Japan has
trained them to distinguish between the paintings
Secret Pigeon Service by Gordon Corera. William of Matisse and Picasso. ‘Modesty,’ Marianne Moore
Collins, 326 pp, £20.00, February 2018 wrote, ‘cannot dull the lustre of the pigeon.’
T
Pigeons move through a human world. They
HERE are 290 species of pigeon in the stay close to the land, often flying at street level,
world, but only one has adapted to live in below the height of the rooftops. Recent studies
cities. Feral pigeons are synanthropes: have suggested that they navigate using human
they thrive in human environments where they can structures as well as natural ones: they follow roads
skim a living off our excess, nesting in the nooks and canals, and have been observed going round
and crannies of tall buildings that mimic the cliff roundabouts before taking the appropriate exit.
faces on which their genetic ancestors – Columba They can fly extremely fast – up to 110 miles per
livia, the rock dove – once lived. We think of hour – and with a following wind can cover 700
pigeons as grey but they are composed of an miles in a single uninterrupted flight (pigeons
oceanic palette: deep blues and greens flecked with don’t like to fly at night but can be trained to do
white, like the crest of a wave. When not mangled so). There are faster birds – peregrine falcons, the
or amputated by wire and string, their feet – which pigeon’s main predator, can reach 200 miles per
the poet Mina Loy described as their ‘coral landing hour on the stoop – but none can fly horizontally,
gear’ – are strong, elegant and reptilian. They can under its own power, as quickly as a pigeon.
see far further and with greater clarity than we can. Feral pigeons are close cousins of the hundreds
In the 1970s and 1980s, the US Coastguard trained of varieties of fancy pigeon that have been bred
pigeons to recognise people lost at sea as part of since their domestication by the Sumerians four
Project Sea Hunt. The birds were placed in thousand years ago. The most celebrated, and
observation bubbles mounted on the bottom of familiar, of these is the racing homer, a breed
helicopters and trained to peck at buttons when selected for its unrivalled navigational abilities.
they spotted a scrap of coloured fabric floating in Once their enclosure, or loft, has been imprinted
the sea. Pigeons were able to find the fabric 93 per on them – something that happens when a bird is
cent of the time. Human subjects managed the around six weeks old – homing pigeons will return
same task 38 per cent of the time. to it for the rest of their lives, even after many years
Pigeons are more intelligent than we give them away. They can fly thousands of miles and cross
credit for, one of the few animals – along with great oceans in order to get home. One of the longest
apes, dolphins and elephants – able to pass the homing flights ever recorded was made by a bird
mirror self-recognition test. If you mark a pigeon’s owned by the Duke of Wellington, which was
wing and let it look in a mirror it will try to remove liberated from Ichaboe Island, off the coast of
the mark, realising that what it sees is a reflected Namibia, on 1 June 1845. It took 55 days to fly the
image of its own body. Pigeons can recognise video 5400 miles back to Nine Elms, where it was found
footage of themselves shown with a five-second dead in a gutter a mile from its loft.
delay (three-year-old children find it difficult to
35
A carrier pigeon being released from a British tank during World War One.
Just how pigeons navigate is much disputed. locate themselves. In the 1970s Italian scientists
Darwin believed that they found their way by discovered that cutting the olfactory nerve
keeping track of the twists and turns of the outward prevented pigeons from finding their way home
journey to calculate the route back. But placing and subsequent studies have suggested they use
pigeons in darkened revolving drums before scents carried on the wind to form an ‘olfactory
removing them from their lofts in an attempt to map’.
disrupt their impression of the journey doesn’t It is the remarkable, if poorly understood,
seem to affect their ability to home. In the 1950s ability to home that has made pigeons one of our
the biologist Gustav Kramer found that pigeons, most exploited companion species. Pigeons flew
like all migratory birds, possess an incredibly across the Roman Empire carrying messages from
accurate internal chronometer which allows them the margins to the capital. Decimus Brutus broke
to use the sun as a compass, but even when Marc Antony’s siege of Mutina by sending letters to
released under cloud cover they can still the consuls via pigeon. ‘What service,’ Pliny wrote,
successfully return home. It seems most likely that ‘did Antony derive from his trenches, and his
pigeons use a range of little understood sensory vigilant blockade, and even from his nets stretched
abilities to navigate. Vision plays a part, especially across the river, while the winged messenger was
when they are flying over the area around their traversing the air?’ Pigeons only really came into
lofts, but birds given opaque contact lenses can still their own with modernity, however, when their
fly home with little difficulty, though they can’t find speed, reliability and tractability made them
their way into their lofts once they get there. particularly attractive to communications
Researchers have fitted pigeons with devices that entrepreneurs and military strategists. During the
change the magnetic fields around their heads to 19th and early 20th centuries they became
see if, like many sea creatures, they use the poles to important auxiliaries to the technological networks
36
that were springing up across the world. Reuter’s which were allowed to be taken across enemy
News Agency was established in 1850 with a flock lines’, and to transmit Morse code with ‘infra-red
of 45 pigeons, which were used to cover a gap in rays’ by signalling back and forth in front of a hot
the telegraph network between Brussels and oven.
Aachen, giving Paul Reuter a monopoly over all Successful communication was often extremely
telegraph traffic between Belgium and Germany. slow: messages were passed from hand to hand, as
The five sons of Mayer Amschel Rothschild used radio technology was crude and easy to intercept.
pigeons to stay in touch as they travelled around The Funkabwehr, German radio
Europe consolidating their father’s banking counterintelligence, became more sophisticated as
dynasty. During the Siege of Paris in 1870, pigeons the war went on, and by 1943 it was dangerous for
were taken out of the city by balloon and returned an agent to use a radio for more than a few minutes
carrying thousands of letters stored on microfilm at a time. It took around three months for an
and sewn into their tail feathers. agent’s report to reach MI6 from the field.
During the First World War, soldiers at the Compared to radio, pigeons were reliable,
front used pigeons to communicate with those especially over short distances. Unless they were
behind the lines, and with tank commanders when caught in the act of releasing the birds, the
their radios failed. In the Second World War most locations of the handlers couldn’t easily be
bomber crews carried a pair of birds in a specially discovered. But the main attraction of pigeons was
designed floating cage. If they were shot down they that they might allow British intelligence agencies
would release a pigeon bearing a message detailing to communicate directly with people living in
their position. ‘If it became necessary immediately occupied territory, whose information was often
to discard every line and method of more detailed and dependable than that of their
communications used on the front, except one,’ own spies. According to Corera, one agent sent a
wrote Major General Fowler, the British army’s report claiming that ‘German troops in Norway
chief of signals and communications, ‘and it were were training to swim ashore wearing green
left to me to select that one method, I should watertight suits and had been heard practising on
unhesitatingly choose the pigeons. When the battle Scottish bagpipes.’
rages and everything gives way to barrage and Operation Columba was conceived and run by a
machine gun fire, to say nothing of gas attacks and raggle-taggle band of secret service officers,
bombings, it is to the pigeon that we go.’ pigeon-fanciers, aristocratic animal lovers and
The idea of using pigeons to gather intelligence soldiers, who didn’t always work well together. It
was one of a number of responses to the difficulty was directed by MI14(d), the Special Continental
of getting information out of Europe at the start of Pigeon Service, a branch of Military Intelligence
the Second World War. During the previous war, (MI16), and was the brainchild of Rex Pearson, an
MI6 had employed couriers and passeurs to carry agent who spent the interwar years at Unilever in
intelligence across enemy lines. It was dangerous Switzerland as cover for his work for the Z
work and many were caught and executed. The organisation, a parallel intelligence network run by
need for new means of communication led to some MI6. In 1939 he suggested that pigeons could be
curious schemes, of which Operation Columba was used not only to receive intelligence from
among the more successful. In Secret Pigeon Service, established agents but also as a means of recruiting
his book about the operation, Gordon Corera new ones. MI6 thought the idea ridiculous and
reports that attempts were also made to send wanted nothing to do with it. But Military
messages ‘written in invisible ink on banknotes and Intelligence, which was run by the army and based
dropped in offertory boxes in Catholic churches,
37
at the War Office rather than the Foreign Office, to be condemned on the radio, or to tell the allies to
allowed Pearson to go ahead. be more careful when they dropped their bombs.
His plan was enabled by the work of William Sometimes they just seemed intrigued by the birds.
Osman, a combative member of a famous dynasty ‘I found this pigeon … early in the morning while I
of fanciers. William’s father, Lieutenant Colonel was cutting clover for the animals,’ one person
Alfred Henry Osman, had abandoned his legal wrote, ‘and I have looked after it well and given it
career to spend more time with his birds and in food and drink and am now anxious to know if the
1898 founded the Racing Pigeon, which is still in little animal reaches its loft.’ A message from the
print today. Alfred had been responsible for pigeon Netherlands to Lancashire signed by ‘The Two
training and organisation during World War One. Pirates’ sent greetings to Churchill as well as to the
After the war the pigeon units had been disbanded, queen of Holland, who was in exile in Britain. ‘I
but in the 1930s William argued that a standing would ask you, my friends,’ wrote a French farmer
National Pigeon Service should be established, and who had found a pigeon in his beetroot field, ‘to
recruited a network of two thousand amateur warn the population a few minutes before the
fanciers to provide birds. After war broke out bombing because you kill many civilians who are
members of the NPS agreed to provide twenty birds your friends. Very few Germans get killed.’ A
a month, in return for which they were allowed to message sent from Assen in the Netherlands read
keep their lofts running and to buy feed for their simply: ‘Help our Jews.’
pigeons. Most of the people who found Columba’s
T
pigeons were civilians – villagers and farmers who
he first experimental pigeon drops of came across the birds lying in their fields – but a
Operation Columba took place at the end few fell into the hands of more organised groups.
of 1940, and from early 1941 until In some cases resistance units formed around the
September 1944 the service dropped 16,000 discovery of a pigeon and Corera follows one such
pigeons on small parachutes over occupied Europe, group in particular, Leopold Vindictive, a Belgian
in an arc running from Copenhagen to Bordeaux. cell led by a charismatic priest called Joseph
Attached to the pigeons was a questionnaire asking Raskin. During the First World War Raskin had
whoever found them to provide intelligence – on been an ambulance driver, stretcher-bearer and war
troop movements, the position of guns or radar artist, painting watercolours of German positions
arrays and ‘the extent to which people could hear at the front. He had spent time in China as a young
BBC radio clearly and their views of the service it man, where he developed calligraphic skills that
provided’ – by return of pigeon. Many of the birds would come in useful for writing pigeon messages
were lost (Corera says that over the course of the on tiny slips of rice paper. When, in 1941, some
war only one in ten birds made it home), dying friends discovered a Columba pigeon on their land,
when their parachutes failed to open, or falling into Raskin organised the assembly of an extraordinarily
enemy hands, or being eaten by starving locals. But detailed message – five thousand words long and
thousands of birds did make it back to their containing several maps – to send back to London.
ramshackle lofts in the gardens of suburban semis The group released the pigeon on 12 July and it
across Britain. arrived at its loft in Ipswich the same day. Their
The messages they carried were by turns useful, message was on a desk in Whitehall within 36
unintelligible, petty, funny and moving. People hours. Despite describing Columba as a ‘racket’,
wrote asking for supplies (sometimes guns and MI6 had to admit the report was useful.
ammunition; often whisky and cigarettes), to taunt While they waited for another bird to be
the enemy, to denounce traitors and ask for them delivered, Leopold Vindictive spent months
38
mapping Germany’s Belgian defences from De Towards the end of the war, the Columba birds
Panne, near Dunkirk, to Knokke on the Dutch were used not to collect intelligence but to spread
border, covering 67 km of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall. misinformation. The questionnaires were modified
The message they put together – a minute and in an attempt to draw German forces away from
beautiful map detailing gun emplacements, railway Italy to the Eastern Front by pretending an attack
lines and points where bombs might be most on France and Norway was imminent. Some of the
effectively dropped – would have been incredibly last birds used in the war were sent with soldiers as
useful to British Intelligence. But the group they landed on the beaches of Normandy. They
received no more pigeons and the new message weren’t needed for messages in the end – the
never made it to Britain. Raskin and his co- soldiers’ radios worked well enough – but a few
conspirators were betrayed, and he was executed in birds arrived back home covered in blood, having
1943. been released in the confusion when their handlers
Over the course of the war the Germans were shot on the beaches.
became, as MI6 put it, ‘pigeon minded’. Rewards Operation Columba was formally closed down
were offered for pigeons turned in, and booby- on 14 February 1945, three months before VE Day.
trapped birds were placed in fields to injure anyone In the months after the war there was some
who might be tempted to send information back to discussion about whether pigeons should be
Britain. Sometimes the Germans left their own eligible for the Dickin Medal, the animal equivalent
birds disguised as British ones, and these would fly of the George Cross, awarded for gallantry. One
back to German lofts, betraying those who had bureaucrat argued that it would be unfair to dogs if
used them to send messages. The German army pigeons were awarded the medal, as dogs had been
even developed a hawking division, led by taught to use their brains whereas pigeons were
Hermann Goering, to fly peregrine falcons at just following instinct. ‘Do pigeons have brains?’
pigeons along the coast. he wrote in a memo, ‘please comment.’ In the end
The British, too, were worried that German a senior officer overruled him, pointing out that on
spies were using birds to communicate, and a team their most arduous flights pigeons displayed not
of British falconers was established to try to just instinctive behaviour but ‘voluntary
intercept them, but they only managed to catch determination’. ‘The pigeon,’ he concluded, ‘had
friendly birds, probably because, despite the to overcome its fear of drowning and take huge
hysteria, there were no German pigeons in Britain. risks despite being more naturally timid and
As the war progressed, MI14(d)’s pigeon plans nervous than a dog.’
became more elaborate. Fanciers along the coast After the war the armed forces continued to
would train their pigeons all at once, creating research possible military applications. Could
‘screens’ of birds that were supposed to tempt any pigeons be trained to home to a particular object –
stray German birds away from their home lofts. a searchlight, say– while carrying tiny bombs or
None was captured. Another proposal was to drop biological weapons? ‘A thousand pigeons each with
‘second-rate’ British pigeons wearing fake German a two ounce explosive capsule, landing at intervals
identity rings over France, in the hope that they on a specific target might be a seriously
would follow German pigeons into their lofts. If inconvenient surprise,’ one enthusiast wrote. The
they were chosen for communication they would psychologist B.F. Skinner was approached by the
then carry their messages back to Britain – what CIA to develop a new kind of homing missile,
Corera calls ‘the avian version of the double cross codenamed Project Orcon (‘organic control’). He
system’. trained pigeons to peck at the image of a target on a
screen – a capacitor on the pigeon’s beak translated
39
this pecking into directional information, guiding

the missile onto its target. Skinner was convinced
of the utility of the scheme, but the project was
shelved. ‘Our problem,’ as he later admitted, ‘was
no one would take us seriously.’ Within a few years
the British and American armies had lost interest,
and the government’s pigeon subcommittee, which
considered such proposals, was wound up in 1953.
Despite the waning military interest, after the
war pigeons in Britain were treated not as pests but
as heroes. Pigeon racing became hugely popular.
During the 1950s and 1960s it was the most
popular sport, by participation, in the country, with
a quarter of a million active flyers tending to 70,000
lofts. Today the sport is in decline. The Royal
Pigeon Racing Association now has only 21,500
members, and numbers are dropping all the time.
Jon Day’s new book, Homing, will be published

in June.
40
led him to recover the true Church of England,

Under the Soles of His Feet freeing his kingdom and subjects from the popish
Stephen Alford yoke. Or so Henry believed, always the superlative
consumer of his own propaganda.
The English People at War in the Age of Henry VIII by Whether Henry’s subjects shared his affection
Steven Gunn. Oxford, 297 pp, £35.00, January 2018 for war is, as Steven Gunn’s book shows, less
I
certain. War was, however, central to the English
N THE First Book of Kings (5:1-5) Hiram, experience, both in the practical sense that armies
King of Tyre, sends servants to Solomon, ‘for were sent frequently into battle, but also in the
he had heard, that they had anointed him more amorphous sense that national identity was
king in the room of his father,’ David: shaped by the memory of the Hundred Years War.
For Hiram was ever a lover of David. And Henry was highly conscious of the military
Solomon sent to Hiram, saying: thou knowest achievements of his ancestors, especially Henry V,
how that David my father could not build an in France. He itched to fight, even in obese middle
house unto the name of the Lord his God, for age: he had a huge suit of armour made for himself
the wars which were about him on every side, in the year the Great Bible was published,
until the Lord put them under the soles of his engineered to contain a royal waistline of 54
feet. But now the Lord my God hath given me inches.
rest on every side, so that there is neither The costs of war were immense. The French
adversary nor any evil plague. And behold, I am campaign of 1513-14 consumed a million pounds,
determined to build an house unto the name of equivalent to ten years’ worth of ordinary revenue.
the Lord my God, as the Lord spake unto David (It’s impossible to calculate modern equivalents for
my father. sums like these with any precision, but a rough rule
is to multiply by a thousand.) Military costs
This passage is very close indeed to the between 1539 and 1552 came to £3.5 million, a
translation in the Matthew Bible of 1537 (by million of which was spent on campaigns in
William Tyndale) and there are just two differences Scotland, £1.3 million ‘on getting and keeping
from the King James Bible of 1611 (‘evil occurrent’ Boulogne’. Henry felt deeply the importance of
in place of ‘any evil plague’; ‘purpose’ for ‘am holding on to his possessions in France, but he was
determined’). But this version is from the Great also the master of war on multiple fronts, as he had
Bible of 1539-40, ‘the Bible appointed to the use of to be thanks to the dizzying succession of treaties
the churches’, famous for its title-page showing of offence and defence between Europe’s powers.
Henry VIII enthroned handing the word of God to Henry’s first effort to flex his muscles in France, in
his subjects, who are set out below, dutiful and 1513, saw him lead an army of something like
obedient. Unencumbered by priests or pope, the 28,000 men joined in France by around seven
king is the recipient of divine favour. Resolute in thousand German and Dutch mercenaries. At the
his duty to lead his people in the true religion, he is same time a force of more than 26,000 marched
no different from any Old Testament monarch. north at speed to meet King James IV’s army in
The two greatest kings of Israel were models for Northumberland for the slaughter of Flodden.
Henry’s own imperial kingship. David fought There was campaigning on a similar scale in 1522,
bloody wars: ‘Saul hath slain his thousand, and 1544 and 1545. Even the huge windfall delivered by
David his ten thousands’ (1 Samuel 18:7). Solomon the dissolution of the monasteries wasn’t enough
built the Temple. Henry did both. God put Henry’s to cover all the bills. His subjects frequently bore
enemies under the soles of his feet and Providence the burden in the form of higher taxation.
41
Gunn describes the ways England was primed preachers and generals who spoke in the name of
for war. Parishes and towns kept stores of armour God and the king. The murder of his majesty’s
and weapons and raised troops. Coastal works – enemies was sanctioned by his authority.
bulwarks, beacons and bastions – provided a line of For all the evidence we have of atrocities – the
defence against invasion. Strategically important English were known to be fond of burning great
towns like Southampton possessed considerable swathes of enemy countryside, and some men
firepower: ‘Thomas with the Beard’, a gun of served as mercenaries and adventurers in the hope
somewhere between six hundred and one thousand of plunder – farm labourers and yeomen, unused to
pounds, had been in the town’s arsenal since at the realities of war, could easily panic under fire,
least 1468. The government kept an eye on the and desertion and mutiny were common. In 1523
number of horses suitable for military service that one body of troops in an English army chanted
were available throughout the kingdom. Men, ‘Home, Home’ while another chanted in response:
landowners in particular, were expected to hold ‘Hang, Hang’.
I
weapons and to have them ready. The king had no
standing army, and his permanent military N Henry V (1599) Shakespeare gently satirises
establishment was tiny. Every able-bodied man was the military specialists of his day, gentlemen
to fight if needed. who bear the title of captain and lead troops
Early Tudor Englishmen liked military kit, even in Ireland, the Low Countries and France. Captain
if they weren’t so keen on actually using it. Macmorris of Ireland has, in the opinion of Captain
Increasingly sophisticated guns became popular, as Fluellen of Wales, ‘no more directions in the true
did armour, from the inexpensive almain rivet disciplines of the wars’ than a puppy. Captain
(plate armour manufactured in southern Germany) Jamey of Scotland he holds in higher regard: ‘a
to the handsome gilded Greenwich armour marvellous falorous gentleman … and of great
favoured by the elite. As well as status and expedition and knowledge in th’anciant wars … in
masculinity the habiliments of war reflected the disciplines of the pristine wars of the Romans’.
regional identity. When mustered, the men of West The English weren’t great theoreticians of war,
Cornwall turned up with slings, those of North though translations of Caesar and Machiavelli were
Wales with clubs and those of South Wales with printed in Elizabeth I’s reign. Arthur Golding, the
long spears. Turning out on parade, taking part in translator of Gallic War (1565), made a robust
civic watches, or, later in the century, drilling with statement of the English crown’s rightful claim to
trained bands, was as much as many, particularly the kingdom of France, the central assumption
those of a higher class, were willing to do. In a underlying Henry’s campaigns; while Peter
society where the obligations and prestige of Whitehorne offered The Art of War (1560) ‘for the
military service still mattered, the grubby business universall delight of all studious gentlemen’.
of killing and dying was increasingly left to the Noblemen, by tradition leaders in war, were often
lower classes. made gifts of classic texts by their scholarly
Mass killing did not come naturally. Violence in translators and editors: Vegetius for the Earl of
early Tudor society was purposive and Bedford, Sallust and Onosander for two Dukes of
proportionate. Talk could be robust, action in Norfolk, a life of Scipio Africanus for the Earl of
response less so: in an everyday argument the Pembroke.
threat to stab an opponent was more likely to result War was still the business of the landed elite,
in a shove, a trip or a beard-pull. It took serious who were expected to raise and supply the troops
effort to persuade men that it was right to kill the king needed to go on campaign. But times were
perfect strangers. Soldiers were called to battle by changing, and Gunn plots Henry’s reign on a
42
trajectory of military development that was middle of a battle sounded like.) Other
probably fairly obvious even to contemporaries. commanders beat and bullied their soldiers into
Gone, pretty much, were the medieval noble action.
retinues. Commissions of array, whereby The number of soldiers who died in combat
contingents of men were levied by county, came to was, so far as the evidence can tell us, surprisingly
replace the old feudal levy. Conscription, however, low. Sieges were risky and so was service in Ireland,
led to rumblings of dissatisfaction, especially when at Boulogne in the 1540s, and against rebels.
men tied by tradition to their localities and by Disease was the biggest killer, either in the form of
necessity to their fields were sent abroad to fight. epidemics of plague and sickness, or as the result
Military leadership and direction was increasingly of wounds or accidents; here the reader benefits
subcontracted to professionals. from Gunn’s cheerfully unrivalled knowledge of the
With this came social change, slight but causes of accidental death in Tudor England (the
noticeable in a society highly sensitive to even tiny subject of his next book). Most soldiers made it
movements in social rank. Coats of arms, whose home, but they were often returning to a life of
origins are reflected in the name, began to have less poverty and vagrancy. For the elite, however, there
to do with military service and distinction and more was room for the celebration of military heroism.
to do with claims to gentility. The English social Wounds were for some a permanent mark of
elite was changing, its boundaries more fluid than honour. Those suffered by Sir William Godolphin,
before. Younger sons of landed families were injured at Boulogne, were ‘no less to the
taking up arms as a means of making a living, while beautifying of his fame, than the disfiguring of his
advancement might follow on military distinction: face’. Successful captains gave their names to
there were substantial increases (in 1514 and 1544- bulwarks and defences; victories and honours were
47 especially) in the numbers of knighthoods celebrated in tomb inscriptions, maps and
granted during the king’s campaigns. Honour, paintings, even in gardens. Sir Richard Bulkeley
military service and social standing were still seems to have had the ash trees on his estate on
linked, but not in the same ways they once were. Anglesey planted in the formation taken by the
Even the greatest noblemen felt – and knew English army at the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh, near
they should feel – the discomforts of campaigning. Edinburgh, in 1547.
One royal commissioner, William Body, who Gunn shows us that war in the age of Henry VIII
complained about his lodgings was put very firmly forced change. The levels of mobilisation required
in his place by Lord Leonard Grey: ‘I saide,’ Grey by the king’s campaigns, especially the huge armies
reported, ‘I was sure he sholde never be so good, as he gathered for France in 1544 and 1545, meant
the Dukes of Norfoke, and Suffolke, and my lorde that the creaking system of military infrastructure,
my brother [the Marquess of Dorset], whom I had insofar as one existed, had to adapt. But the king’s
seen lodged wors.’ Those in command exhibited need for martial glory outweighed everything else.
many qualities. Grey was praised as ‘a stirrer There were bonfires, bells and prayers to ‘the gret
abroode, and no sleaper in the morning’. Lord God of batells’. Everyone knew they were meant to
Clinton led from the front, ‘greatly beloved among ‘cry God for Harry, England and St George’.
all ranks’, playing ‘his part like a brave and noble Unfortunately there was also a nagging feeling that
captain by risking his life among his soldiers … wars were destructive of the common good and
courteously thanking and rewarding generously prosperity. ‘The world is dead and [it is] hard to
those soldiers who did any brave deeds … while come by money as ever it was in any man’s days
courteously rebuking those who were to blame’. alive,’ one estate official, Peter Collys, wrote in
(One wonders what a courteous rebuke in the 1513: ‘This busy world of war that setteth men’s
43
hearts away clean so that it maketh the world as

dead as ever it was for selling of anything.’ By 1552
the exchequer of Edward VI, Henry’s son and
successor, was empty. Edward’s secretary was told
that they had ‘spent out all our riches, and
destroyed a great number of subjects’, leaving the
kingdom’s wealth on the battlefields of Western
Europe, ‘to the utter destruction of our realm’.
Henry’s successors hadn’t the means – or in the
case of Elizabeth, the inclination – to fight abroad
for glory. This was not what Solomon inherited
from David.
Henry always had a competitive eye on Francis I
of France and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V,
against whom he measured the potency of his
kingship. In peace Henry trained for war in
tournaments and combats. Even celebrations of
peace, as at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520,
when Henry met Francis, were simply war and
dynastic competition by other means – a pause for
breath, a moment to make sense of the enemy. In
the following decades enemies changed, as did the
reasons for engaging them. The defence of
international Protestantism became a more
significant strategic focus than any attempt to relive
the glories of the Hundred Years War. Later wars
were fought reluctantly, out of perceived necessity.
The legacy of Henry’s wars was a peculiarly
mixed one. Probably it was as well to make a virtue
out of the unavoidable. Peter Whitehorne,
introducing Machiavelli, put it neatly: ‘No one
thing [is held] to be more profitable, necessary, or
more honourable, than the knowledge of service in
war, and deeds of arms: because considering the
ambition of the world, it is impossible for any
realm or dominion, long to continue free in
quietness and safeguard, where the defence of the
sword is not always in a readiness.’
Stephen Alford teaches early modern British

history at the University of Leeds. His most recent
book is London’s Triumph: Merchant Adventurers and the
Tudor City.
44
(1972) that ‘dancing is often the only real, the only

At the Movies serious business’ in these movies, but we may not
Michael Wood have remembered how much and how variously
they are about dancing. In Shall We Dance a Russian
W
star of classical ballet played by Fred Astaire wants
ATCHING Astaire and Rogers films to tap like Fred Astaire, although his manager
again, especially the classic trio of Top thinks this slip into popular nonsense may wreck
Hat (1935), Swing Time (1936) and Shall his career. The character isn’t Russian, his actual
We Dance (1937), leaves all kinds of old impressions name is Pete Peters, and he rather apologetically
intact. The air is light, the stars are perfectly says the urge to tap is ‘just the Philadelphia in me’.
matched in their plot-driven attempts not to get In Swing Time Ginger Rogers sarcastically calls tap
along with each other except when they’re dancing. dancing ‘sap dancing’. In Top Hat, Astaire dances
Rogers needs to be sulky a lot of the time, but that compulsively and keeps awake the woman
makes her smile, when it appears, a sort of secret downstairs, who is Ginger Rogers. When she
she herself is surprised to have. Astaire is complains, he pretends – but is he pretending? –
incessantly perky, always ready with the next trick that dancing is an affliction and that he needs her
or fiction. He doesn’t find this job hard – he care. A little later he spreads sand on the floor so
doesn’t find anything hard – but it is clearly a job, that he can still dance and not interrupt her sleep.
which slightly changes the meaning of the ‘I’ve appointed myself her official sandman,’ he
perkiness. The supporting actors are as impeccably says, and by the end of the performance he himself
over the top as ever: Eric Blore as the simpering, is dropping off, the music sags and he falls into a
snobbish English servant or manager; Helen chair. Later in the film, a dance number includes
Broderick as the friend who has seen it all before, the mock execution of a whole male chorus, lined
several times; Edward Everett Horton as the dopey up for the one-man firing squad formed by Astaire,
impresario whose every take is a double-take. his snapping feet and his rifle-imitating cane.
Horton is missing from Swing Time, soon to be The most elaborate thematising of dance occurs
released in a newly restored version by the Criterion in Swing Time, starting with its title, taken from a
Collection, but everyone and everything else is central number that is a ‘waltz in swing time’, an
there. unlikely but convincing combination of tradition
Still, I now see all kinds of details I hadn’t seen and trend. The tones run improbably from slapstick
before, or hadn’t stopped to think about. There is to the melodrama of almost mangled fate.
the careful, non-intrusive touch of the directors Penniless in New York, Astaire meets Penny
(Mark Sandrich for Top Hat and Shall We Dance and (Ginger Rogers), who is a dancing teacher. The
George Stevens for Swing Time); and there are the joke about the pennies anticipates the lyric of the
differences among Irving Berlin (Top Hat), Jerome film’s last number. Himself a professional dancer
Kern (Swing Time) and George Gershwin (Shall We trying to become a businessman, Astaire pretends
Dance) as composers. There is some amazing to need a lesson, and overdoes his impersonation
dialogue (in this case by Allan Scott and Ernest of ineptness, falling on the floor several times, the
Pagano – Allan Scott is credited on all three last time bringing her down too. After the first slip
movies): ‘What are the grounds for divorce in New she sings the great song ‘Pick Yourself Up’ to
Jersey?’ ‘Marriage’; ‘To tell you the truth, I don’t encourage him; after the last she says he’s
know you well enough to tell you the truth.’ hopeless, and her manager (Blore) fires her for
We have known since the appearance of Arlene breaking the dance studio’s code: never turn a
Croce’s marvellous Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book client away. This is the film’s second ironic
45
reference to capitalism as a model for behaviour. abandon both her and their dancing for the
Right at the start, Astaire was supposed to be different footing of marriage. Before the number
getting married. His fiancée’s father disapproved starts, Rogers asks him if the girl he loves dances
fiercely of her alliance with a dancer, but when beautifully. He says yes. She says she means the girl
Astaire announced he was giving up dancing and he’s going to marry. He says he doesn’t know and
going to make a lot of money (by gambling, anyway he isn’t going to dance again. He does
although he didn’t say that, just made the Freudian dance with Rogers this one time, but the great
slip of calling stocks stakes), the angry father sequence doesn’t bring them together for anything
turned into a grovelling fan. Making money, he more than a magnificent reprise of the tunes and
said, ‘shows character’. Later in the film, when movements of the movie, and she leaves him bent
Rogers isn’t talking to Astaire, he and a friend over in stylised anguish. What ‘Never Gonna
picket her room, and there is discussion of Dance’ means by the end of the number is ‘If I can’t
comrades and arbitration – the other side of the dance I’m nobody, and I don’t want to dance with
1930s. Swing Time is not a political film but it knows anyone but Penny.’ The fancy faux-French of the
that dancing isn’t exempt from politics, and a great lyric (‘La belle/La perfectly swell romance’)
deal of the plot hinges on who owns the band and shouldn’t mislead us. This happy end nearly didn’t
the band leader, and therefore can choose who happen.
dances. There are fantastic songs in all of these movies,
This question comes up because Astaire, having and many of them have had long lives in other
lost Rogers her job, gets it back for her by showing repertoires. The film most crowded with riches,
how much he has learned in such a short time, rather undersold as George and Ira Gershwin
conscripting her for a dazzling tap number full of thought at one time, is Shall We Dance (‘They All
leaps and twirls. Blore isn’t taken in, but sees the Laughed’, ‘Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off’, ‘They
opportunity and gets them a gig at a nightclub, Can’t Take That Away from Me’), and both Berlin
where the band, initially, will not play on: the and Kern generally offer easier lyrical rides, letting
leader fancies Rogers and doesn’t want to give a the swell romance have its say without too much
rival an opportunity. Astaire then wins the ironic counterpoint. This isn’t true of ‘Never Gonna
ownership of the band in a gambling scene. Dance’, though, which is beautiful but close to a
Perhaps the once irate father wouldn’t have musically managed torture; and the key song in
minded: gambling shows character too, when Swing Time, ‘The Way You Look Tonight’,
you’re winning. memorably dedicated to Rogers as she is washing
By the end of the film, the rather awkward plot her hair, runs through the film as a sort of pre-
has sorted itself out. Astaire loves Rogers but can’t emptive memory, telling us what will last if nothing
bring himself to break his promise to his fiancée. else does, and has a curious sense of low pressure
Rogers doesn’t know anything about the fiancée about it, makes no demands. It’s not ironic or
and wonders why Astaire is so erratically hot and funny, but it is a comment on the grasping modes
cold – hence the wonderful song ‘A Fine Romance’, of ownership that keep cropping up in the film.
sung in the snow. Finally, it turns out that the This may be part of the reason why Croce wants to
neglected fiancée loves someone else, and Astaire call this work ‘the true miracle film of the series’.
is off the hook. ‘Gee, that’s swell,’ he says,
remembering only a moment later to feign regret. Michael Wood is all singing, all dancing.
Earlier, he had said goodbye to Rogers in the
number with pennies (‘I’m left without a penny/I’m
left without my Penny’), thinking he has to
46
been possible and families had no remains to bury.

It is very easy to die here Each year on 2 October a memorial service is held
Rachel Nolan in the plaza in the Tlatelolco area of Mexico City
where the massacre took place. This is where the
A Massacre in Mexico: The True Story behind the Missing students attacked in Iguala planned to go, and this
43 Students by Anabel Hernández, translated by John was why they commandeered the buses, boarding
Washington. Verso, 416 pp, £16.99, October 2018 with their faces covered and forcing the drivers to
I Couldn’t Even Imagine that They Would Kill Us: An Oral take them where they asked. The practice is known
History of the Attacks against the Students of Ayotzinapa as ‘kidnapping’ buses, and was of a piece with the
by John Gibler. City Lights, 264 pp, £12.99, ethos of the school the teenagers attended.
December 2017 The Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers College
O
is known to everyone as Ayotzinapa, the name of
N the night of 26 September 2014, in the the village where it is located. Ayotzinapa was one
town of Iguala in the Mexican state of of a network of teacher training colleges founded in
Guerrero, local police opened fire at the 1920s, during the most radical period of the
several buses – some full of students, one carrying Mexican Revolution. The revolution led to two
football players coming home from a match. Six lasting changes: more land and rights for peasants
people were killed. By midnight, 43 more students (campesinos), and the emergence of a political party
had disappeared, or, rather, had been forcibly that brooked no opposition. Its name has always
disappeared. That’s where the story fades to grey. struck me as a contradiction, almost but not quite a
The Mexican government at first claimed that the joke: the Partido Revolucionario Institucional
police had handed the students over to a local (PRI), the Institutional Revolutionary Party. It
narcotrafficking outfit, which murdered them, ruled, uninterrupted, from 1929 to 2000 by stealing
incinerated their bodies and buried the bones in a elections, buying the press and stubbing out
mass grave. But the official story kept changing, dissent. Mario Vargas Llosa called the Mexican
and it was plain a cover-up was underway. As the system the perfect dictatorship, since it was
case of the missing students became international dressed up in enough elections to pass as a
news, parents and activists went looking. They democracy. The PRI of this period is sometimes
found first one mass grave, then another and described by historians as a dictablanda, a soft
another and another. Not their children’s. Other dictatorship, punning on dictadura. The PRI, a
bones. It turns out that Mexico is riddled with nominally left-wing party, resorted to dirty war
secret mass graves (fosas clandestinas). tactics – forced disappearances, infiltration of
Forced disappearances call to mind the Cold socialist and communist groups – to maintain
War era dictatorships in South and Central power at national, regional and local levels. In
America, but Mexico had its own dirty war. When states like Guerrero the soft dictatorship was not so
the teenagers disappeared, they had been preparing soft. Local elites had their enemies flown out over
to commemorate the most infamous episode in the Pacific and then pushed out of helicopters.
that war, the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre. Ten days The radical strain of the revolution that
before the Olympics opened in Mexico City, at the produced the rural teacher training colleges quickly
president’s orders, soldiers in plain clothes and faded, and for decades the students have had a
rooftop snipers ambushed a student protest, killing contentious relationship with the authorities.
at least three hundred. The government denied that Ayotzinapa’s walls are decorated with murals of
a massacre had taken place, calling it merely a Lenin, Che Guevara and Subcomandante Marcos –
‘confrontation’. Soldiers bundled away the bodies the leader of the 1994 Zapatista uprising. The
so that an accurate count of the dead has never
47
colleges maintain their original teaching style, a seen locally as an annoyance at worst, it would be
hands-on education à la Montessori mixed with exploited by mass media on the government payroll
political consciousness-raising. Room, board and to portray the teenagers as thugs or even narcos.
tuition are free, but the students lead a gruelling During the Cold War, global conflict provided a
life. They clear weeds with machetes, feed pigs and context and excuse for local score-settling and
hens, and grow corn, beans, vegetables and suppression of enemies in Latin America.
flowers, which they sell at market and share with Government officials could torture or disappear
the locals they call ‘aunt’ and ‘uncle’. Students are anyone: all they needed to do was to call them a
from poor, often indigenous families. One student communist. Now the drug war provides similar
cited by John Gibler in his valuable oral history of cover. In Mexico in the 1970s some left-wing
the massacre, said that ‘we don’t have any other guerrilla groups were indeed plotting a revolution.
options for study or pursuing a career, my small But the government vastly overestimated their
town is a bit more fucked-over than other places. I reach and power in order to justify repression. Two
decided to come to this school, to study, to be of Mexico’s best-known guerrilla fighters were
someone.’ Graduates become teachers in the teachers who graduated from Ayotzinapa and were
countryside, one of the few avenues of social later hunted down by the army. Now, anyone whom
mobility that doesn’t involve joining a gang or agents of the Mexican government wish to arrest,
hiring a coyote – someone who smuggles people – torture – even murder execution-style – can be
and crossing to the United States. disappeared if they are said to be a narco.
The PRI has long seen the teacher training Sometimes they are. Often they are not.
colleges as seedbeds of political dissent, which Many Mexicans assume that the cartels work
spreads to the rural schoolhouses where graduates hand in hand with the government, at local, state
teach. Rural teachers helped start the revolution, and even federal level. In 2006, by which time the
and the PRI has not been anxious to see another drug war’s frontline had moved from Colombia to
one. There were once 36 similar teacher training Mexico, the newly elected president, Felipe
colleges across Mexico, but following the student Calderón, announced that he would wipe out the
unrest of 1968 President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz had cartels. Two years later, the US coughed up $1.5
18 of them closed down. The remaining colleges billion to help with the effort. When I moved to
operate on a shoestring budget. Students defend Mexico in 2009, a popular topic of conversation
the practice of commandeering buses by pointing was whether Calderón really wanted to eradicate
out that the government has starved the colleges of the gangs or whether he was in cahoots with one
resources, requiring them, for example, to attend cartel and using US money to target its rivals. When
‘observation’ courses at other schools but not a plane crash-landed in the middle of Mexico City,
providing funds for transportation. When the killing José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos and Juan
students kidnapped buses, it was to enable them to Camilo Mouriño – a former prosecutor known for
travel to other schools or to anti-government fighting the cartels and the interior minister – the
protests. The Ayotzinapa students suspected, rumour mill went wild. It was an accident, the
rightly, that they were under government government said, but many people believed –
surveillance and used nicknames: Cochiloco without evidence – that the cartels had shot the
(‘Crazy Pig’), Shaggy, Pepe, Bobby, Dormilón plane down, or that it was all a government plot to
(‘Sleepyhead’), Pato (‘Duck’), Pinky. Some didn’t rein in over-enthusiastic investigation of
know their fellow students’ real names, adding to narcotrafficking that might lead back to high
the confusion on the night of the disappearances. places.
While the practice of commandeering buses was
48
That the Mexican state apparatus is infiltrated roadblocks to stop them leaving with the new
by narcos is both rumour and fact. I remember buses, and intercepted them, along with another
hearing an anthropologist asked when it was and bus painted in similar colours, which was carrying
was not appropriate to use the word ‘narcostate’: a football team home from a game. Suddenly,
‘Well, on one research trip I interviewed some police started shooting into the buses, shattering
narcotraffickers,’ she said. ‘And the next trip I the windows. ‘You’re dead, you fuckers,’ one
interviewed one of the same informants, but now student heard them shout. The police forced the
he was the mayor.’ It is harder to cite proof at the students and football players out of the buses, and
federal level, though a witness at the recent trial of some ran into the nearby cornfields. Those who got
the drug lord El Chapo alleged that Enrique Peña away saw their schoolmates being forced into
Nieto, the PRI president at the time of Ayotzinapa, patrol cars. One student had a full-blown panic
accepted a $100 million bribe from the Sinaloa attack, and was convulsing. ‘They dragged him
cartel. We don’t know exactly who is involved with along by one hand and one foot. When they put
what, or when. Who brought down the plane, if him in the back of the squad truck, they tossed him
anyone? Who disappeared the students? Given the like an animal, like he was some sack of flour,’
predation, corruption and bad faith of the state at another student said.
all levels, many Mexicans don’t even bother calling The students had seen confrontations with the
the police when they are robbed, never mind when police before, but not like this. One said that
they witness a crime. ¿Para qué? The police will standoffs usually ended peacefully when the police
make it worse. And they might tell the criminals. saw that the students weren’t armed. The police
There had been other massacres, and many would say: ‘“Young men, you can’t grab vehicles
other disappearances, before the students went like that, you have to come to an agreement with
missing. It is estimated that 130,000 people have the bus companies and blah, blah, blah,” stuff like
been killed in the Mexican drug war, and 27,000 that. But at that moment, the police didn’t act like
people disappeared. But after the Ayotzinapa that. We said, “We’re students, we’re unarmed,”
massacre something snapped. The next day, people but the police didn’t give a shit.’
were out on the streets in Mexico City, in Guerrero, Days later, the government announced that the
all over the country, chanting: ‘Fue el estado! Fue el case was closed. The official story was that the
estado!’ It was the state. attacks had been ordered by Iguala’s mayor and his
T
wife, members of the opposition PRD (Party of the
HERE ARE many, many different Democratic Revolution). The mayor’s term was
versions of what happened that night in coming to a close, and that night a public meeting
Guerrero, the least reliable of which is the had been held at which his wife launched her own
official story. What we know is that a group of campaign to succeed him. According to this
students left the college in Ayotzinapa in the account, the students had planned to interrupt or
afternoon to commandeer buses. They were in a demonstrate at the event, and the mayor and his
festive mood. ‘We were messing around like wife had given orders for them to be intercepted
always, you see how we are, talking, fucking and handed over to a local drug gang with which
around, talking about girls,’ one of the students they were supposed to have ties. Radio, television
told Gibler. ‘The freshmen were all making jokes.’ and the newspapers enthusiastically pumped out
The students, travelling in two buses they had this story, painting the mayor’s wife as a Lady
previously secured, wanted to ‘kidnap’ more from Macbeth, the ‘First Lady of Murder’. It was her
Iguala’s bus station. When they pulled into town it misfortune that she was good-looking and
was already dark, and raining. Local police put up ambitious.
49
The only part of this story that was true was that and Peña Nieto ‘were closely co-ordinating and
the mayor’s wife’s two brothers had worked for the preparing to quickly respond to and halt the
Beltrán-Leyva cartel. Several leaders of the local students’ commandeering of buses’.
gang, Guerreros Unidos, had been gunmen for the But Hernández has a source problem. She has
same cartel. The mayor’s wife always maintained sources, of course – but she is not always as clear as
that her brothers had died long before her husband she might be about who or what they are, even
became mayor, and that she and her husband had bearing in mind her duty to protect their identities.
no connections to trafficking. But even if a The book has no footnotes or endnotes. ‘During my
connection had been proved – and it was not – the investigation’ is a phrase that recurs, often without
story made no sense. Students who survived the further detail. I am loath to write this, sitting as I
attack said they hadn’t known that a campaign am in New York City, and knowing that Hernández
launch was to take place, and in any case, by the took very real risks to produce this book. But in
time of the attack, the launch was already over. The order to persuade the reader that the attack was
mayor and his family were sitting down to tacos at a actually ordered at the very highest levels of
stand in another part of town. government, she would have had to give some
I
indication as to where her information comes from.
T WAS the state, but not that branch of the She makes much of a 2012 document that lists
state. Who, then, ordered the attack? And Ayotzinapa as a national security concern for the
why? One of Mexico’s best-known incoming administration of Peña Nieto, but this
investigative reporters, Anabel Hernández, believes document alone hardly proves intent. The question
the plot goes all the way to the top. Two months of who ordered the attack and why remains
after the massacre, she published an account in one unsolved. Gibler’s oral history, which captures the
of the country’s few reliably independent news chaos and confusion of the night, is a better guide
outlets, Proceso, based on interviews with survivors, to the actual attack – but he makes no claim to have
suggesting that the federal police and the army had solved the mystery.
been present on the streets of Iguala that night. What Hernández’s book lacks in persuasiveness
(Students told Gibler the same thing: local police about the events leading up to 26 September is
shot at them, but they saw state and federal police more than compensated for by her detailed
at the scene.) Hernández explained that there is a coverage of the government’s horrifying and often
command and control centre in Iguala called C-4 clumsy attempt at a cover-up. In January 2015 a
which co-ordinates military and police intelligence: new claim – that the 43 students had been
it was impossible for the federal government not to temporarily held by the Iguala municipal police,
be aware of events as they unfolded. who then turned them over to the Guerreros
Hernández has now published a book, A Unidos gang, who incinerated their bodies at a
Massacre in Mexico, in which she makes a bigger rubbish dump near the town of Cocula – was put
claim: the attack was ordered by the governor of forward by Jesús Murillo Karam, the then attorney
Guerrero, Angel Aguirre Rivero, and, she suggests, general. Murillo Karam described this version of
by the president himself, Enrique Peña Nieto of the events as the ‘historical truth’– a phrase that has
PRI. ‘For the government of Guerrero … as well as become as infamous in Mexico as Kellyanne
for the federal government’, the students had Conway’s ‘alternative facts’ in the US. According to
‘turned from a perpetual headache into a public the ‘historical truth’, which the government
enemy – a target they believed they could rid claimed had been derived from confessions by
themselves of with impunity’. Over the five days police and gang members, the killers had disposed
leading up to the attack, she claims, Aguirre Rivero of the burned remains in various places, including
50
a nearby river. The government produced 19 Ayotzinapa in the afternoon, the army had
charred bone fragments, which were sent to an monitored the students’ movements from the
Austrian laboratory that produced one positive Iguala command and control centre. The
DNA match: Alexander Mora Venancio, who was 19 Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts
years old. (GIEI) also found that, despite rumours in the
There was one problem. The families of the press, there was no evidence that any of the
disappeared had called in the Argentine Forensic students had ties to drug-trafficking gangs. The
Anthropology Team, internationally respected for confessions supporting the ‘historical truth’ had
their investigations into dirty war crimes. The been extracted through extensively documented
organisation found that Mora Venancio’s bone was torture of 80 per cent of the suspects held in the
different from the other charred remains. It was a case, confirming Hernández’s account. One fire
larger fragment and not as severely burned. What’s forensics expert found that it was ‘scientifically
more, the ‘chain of custody’ of the evidence impossible’ for 43 human bodies to have been
couldn’t be vouched for – the implication being incinerated in the Cocula dump in the way claimed
that the government had planted the evidence at by the attorney general’s office. The charred bone
the river. Meanwhile, Hernández and other found in the river wasn’t evidence of anything other
independent reporters were publishing stories than a cover-up. The ‘historical truth’ was a lie.
suggesting that the ‘historical truth’ was based on The report did not resolve who exactly was
confessions extracted through torture. The parts of responsible for the disappearance of the students,
Hernández’s book that detail this torture, including or where they were taken. But it recommended that
repeated rapes, are based on interviews with some the federal police and army be investigated as well
of the suspects the police rounded up and their as the local police. At this point, as a way of
families – here her sources are clear and responding to the torture allegations, the
convincing. Accounts of the attorney general government opened a series of investigations into
casually sending orders to destroy the lives of its own investigators, creating a peculiarly Mexican
people he must have known had nothing to do with hall of mirrors. They refused, however, to allow the
the crime make for excruciating reading. Even if the independent experts to complete a second
planning of the attack didn’t go all the way up, the investigation, denying them interviews with
cover-up certainly did. military officials and federal police and engaging in
Uproar over the forensic science and forced what the GIEI described as a campaign of
confessions spilled over into massive protests that harassment and intimidation.
looked, for a time, like they might bring down the The team left Mexico early in 2016. But on 16
government. Eventually, Peña Nieto agreed to April that year they published another report,
permit the Inter-American Commission on Human putting forward new evidence to support what they
Rights to appoint a group of five legal experts from called the ‘theory of the fifth bus’. The students
different countries to investigate the case. Their said that they travelled to Iguala on two buses, and
first report landed like a bomb on 6 September managed to commandeer three more there. The
2015. It confirmed what the survivors had always attacks occurred when they had five buses, plus the
maintained: that federal police and army officials bus full of footballers: six buses. But one of the
were present that night – a clear contradiction of three newly commandeered buses was not taken
the government’s version of events. The local into account in the original investigation. It was
police had committed the massacre, but the federal stopped by federal police as it left Iguala and
police had acted aggressively and failed to help the impounded. The federal police allowed the
wounded; from the moment the first bus left students to escape – unlike the local police, they
51
didn’t shoot. The GIEI report noted a criminal Gibler, Hernández and the independent experts’
complaint filed with the US attorney’s office in reports. Forensic Architecture acknowledges that
Illinois in 2014 alleging that members of Guerreros the ‘sheer amount of information produced by the
Unidos smuggled heroin and cocaine on case’ – the narratives and counter-narratives –
commercial buses just like the ones taken by the means that some of the five thousand data points
students. Was the attack a desperate attempt to used for their reconstruction may be inaccurate or
recover a bus carrying valuable cargo on the part of contested. Still, their project makes the scale and
a drug gang and the authorities on its payroll? In confusion of the events of the night clearer than a
her book, which came out in Spanish before the written text, which is by necessity linear, can do.
second expert report, Hernández provided a similar Forensic Architecture are continuing to update the
scenario. ‘A high-level drug trafficker with much database with new or clarified data. It is intended as
business in Guerrero’ whom she interviewed told both a visualisation and a forensic tool for the
her that the students were unknowingly travelling ongoing investigations.
B
in two buses carrying a concealed stash of at least
$2 million of heroin. The source said he called the OTH Gibler and Hernández’s books are
army to help him get the heroin back. If the local inspired by Elena Poniatowska’s famous
police were colluding with the gang, it would account of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, a
explain why they opened fire to get the bus back. Or collage of oral histories, photographs, protest
the narcostate might extend higher up, to the chants and poems by Octavio Paz and Rosario
governor’s office or further. Just because Castellanos that gave the lie to the government’s
Hernández doesn’t present sufficient evidence to version of events. The book was called La Noche de
support her account of who planned the attack Tlatelolco in Spanish and Massacre in Mexico in
doesn’t mean she’s wrong. English. (Hernández’s book is called La Verdadera
A London-based research agency called Noche de Iguala in Spanish.) Poniatowska – who on
Forensic Architecture also took on the case, in the fiftieth anniversary of Tlatelolco told the New
collaboration with Mexican human rights groups York Times that ‘it is very easy to produce cadavers in
and the Argentine forensic scientists. Forensic Mexico: it is very easy to die here’ – is still the writer
Architecture compiled security videos, witness to turn to in order to understand the meaning of
testimonies, phone logs, photographs and news what happened to the students of Ayotzinapa.
reports into an enormous database that mapped Sergio Aguayo, a leading activist and intellectual,
the massacre over time on Iguala’s streets. The made the argument in the subtitle of his book, De
group converted its database into an interactive Tlatelolco a Ayotzinapa: Las Violencias del Estado (‘From
map, which includes three-dimensional Tlatelolco to Ayotzinapa: The Violences of the
reconstructions of the attacks, and shows how the State’). A state has a legitimate monopoly on the
Mexican government mishandled and planted use of force in order to guarantee the security of its
evidence as part of the cover-up. The disappeared citizens, but when it turns its guns on its own
students appear as featureless little red dolls, face citizens it is no longer legitimate. For Aguayo, the
down in the back of police trucks. As you toggle Mexican state gave up legitimacy a long time ago.
around this map, what Forensic Architecture calls He has investigated other massacres and
the ‘high level of co-ordination and collusion’ disappearances, and concludes that ‘the state
becomes clear. neither protects us against criminals, nor does it
The interactive map resembles a much more care for us as victims. We are helpless.’
sophisticated cartographic version of a chronology New president, same state. The horror over
that I tried and failed to sketch out while reading Ayotzinapa, and the way that the missing 43 came
52
to stand in for all those who disappeared during the

drug war, helped get Andrés Manuel López
Obrador, known to everyone as AMLO, elected last
year. Since the democratic opening in 2000, AMLO
is only the third president of Mexico to belong to a
party other than the PRI. (His party, Movement for
National Renewal, is known by its acronym,
Morena, another name for Mexico’s religious icon
Our Lady of Guadalupe.) His first presidential
decree established a ‘truth commission’ to conduct
a new investigation into Ayotzinapa, and he has
promised to invite the independent experts back.
Two days after he was sworn in, he invited the
parents of the missing students to the National
Palace and promised that ‘there will be no barriers,
no obstacles to arriving at the truth.’ He also
announced that he would open the archives of the
national security intelligence service, to allow
researchers to find out how those who opposed the
PRI – including the leaders of the 1968 student
movement – were put under surveillance and
targeted. How the new Ayotzinapa investigation
unfolds will be a litmus test for many Mexicans. If
AMLO solves the case, he’s with us. If not, he’s just
another politician. No matter what he does, some
Mexicans will never trust their government again.
Other bones remain in the ground.
Rachel Nolan teaches Latin American history at

the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at
Columbia University.
53
base where hundreds of people have carved their

In Zimbabwe initials into it, or perhaps simply because a
Diana Stone thousand years is old, even for a tree.
As children, we rode through the bush, largely
B
at the mercy of borrowed horses too tall and
EFORE the cyclone, there was a drought glamorous for us, and everywhere we went there
in Zimbabwe. People prayed for rain; and was the smell of warm soil and green things
then the rain came, and it was not at all becoming. In the Chirinda Forest Reserve, life
what was wished for. It seems brutally unfair: to asserts itself in riotously named multiplicity: the
have lost so much, in so brief a time, at the forest sword-leaf and the elbow-leaf, the forest
ordinance of the sky. The rain came to Harare only num-num and the hairy manica bride’s bush (white
in drizzles and bursts. Outside a restaurant I saw a flowers, leaves like the down on a human cheek),
gang of cockerels glaring furiously up at the clouds; the forest peach and apricot vine and the forest
but chickens always look angry, and otherwise the toad-tree, with orange-pulped fruit that gape open
city was untouched by the storm. In the like the mouths of toads.
Chimanimanis, though, a catastrophic amount was The Chimanimani Hotel was built in the 1950s.
lost. It has peeling white-painted walls, vibrantly printed
The sky often sweeps low in the Chimanimani curtains looking a little nibbled at the edges, and a
District; the rainfall is high, for Zimbabwe, and profusion of flowering trees. Look up, and the
there are patches of subtropical rainforest, with mountain looks down at you. There’s a good-sized
lianas hanging low from trees and the river frog conference room and a kidney-shaped swimming
Amietia Angolensis, the most fashion-forward of pool. My brother and I spent our time turning
frogs, with leopard-print spots and a violent lime somersaults into it, occasionally smacking our
green stripe down its back. There are mutable sun heads against the bottom, luring ant lions out of
squirrels, yellow-gold against the red soil, and their traps, and digging with our hands for quartz
occasional glimpses of leopards. crystals, which come up from the ground sharp-
Time is slower in the Chimanimanis, quartzite edged and finely wrought, as if cut by a craftsman,
ridge ranges which stretch over the border into dirty and shining.
Mozambique. When last I was in Chimanimani The hotel is currently being used to shelter
town, at the foot of the mountains, there were stalls about four hundred people; not guests but refugees
selling tomatoes and oranges stacked in bowls, a from the rain. The conference room has been laid
riding stable and a store painted with the Coca- out with blankets, and the gardens are being used
Cola logo and ‘take home some real refreshment’, for open-air cooking after Cyclone Idai hit parts of
half-obscured by dust. People greet strangers, have Mozambique and Zimbabwe with windspeeds of up
time to talk. to 178 kmph, destroying everything it passed. At
We used to go often as children. Chimanimani last count, at least two hundred Zimbabweans were
has either a great deal to see, or nothing at all, dead: children have been orphaned overnight;
depending on whether or not you are immune to roads, bridges and schools have been swept away,
beauty. There is the traditional visit to Big Tree, a leaving heaps of mud. There are bodies under the
Nyasa redwood which soars at least 65 metres tall rubble, but it’s still raining, off and on, impeding
and which, at more than a thousand years old, has the rescue effort. There are fears of cholera, which
been designated a national monument. It was has torn through Zimbabwe before, and there are
recently found to be dying, its branches thinning at fears of what the year to come will look like, with
the top, perhaps because of human damage at the
54
crops destroyed in one part of the country by rain

and in the other part by the lack of it.
I don’t know if Big Tree has survived the
cyclone. I hope it did. Zimbabwe needs as much
hope, as much help and aid as it can get, and a less
hell-bent sky. It needs luck, and skill; it needs your
money, if you have any at all to give. For Zimbabwe
there has never been anything like this.
Diana Stone is an archaeologist based in

Weymouth.
55
serve an urgent public health need but because the

A Blizzard of Prescriptions patent was expiring on its most profitable drug, a
Emily Witt time-release morphine pill called MS Contin.
Pharmaceutical patents, which last twenty years,
Dopesick by Beth Macy. Head of Zeus, 376 pp, £9.99, allow pharmaceutical companies to maintain a
March monopoly on a drug and avoid competition from
American Overdose: The Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts by generic manufacturers. When a patent on a popular
Chris McGreal. Faber, 316 pp, £12.99, November drug expires, its price can drop by as much as 90
2018 per cent. To maintain monopolies, the industry
Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic by often makes small adjustments to existing
Sam Quinones. Bloomsbury, 400 pp, £12.99, June medications in order to patent and market them as
2016 new. OxyContin was one such drug.
I
OxyContin dissolves slowly in the digestive
N 1996, a company called Purdue system, titrating the oxycodone into the body.
Pharmaceutical launched a new opiate Instead of taking a conventional painkiller like
painkiller called OxyContin. At a party Vicodin or Percocet every few hours, the
celebrating its release to the public, Richard manufacturers claimed a patient could take
Sackler, a scion of the family that owns the OxyContin once in the morning and once at night
company and its senior vice president of sales, and experience long-lasting pain relief. The slower-
made exuberant predictions about its success. ‘The acting nature of OxyContin justified the
launch of OxyContin tablets will be followed by a manufacture of pills that contained much higher
blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the quantities of oxycodone than had ever been
competition,’ he said, according to a lawsuit available in a single dose: up to 80 milligrams at
recently filed against Purdue. ‘The prescription first; 160 milligrams a few years later.
blizzard will be so deep, dense, and white …’ ‘It was the cleanest drug I’d ever met,’ the artist
The active ingredient of OxyContin is Nan Goldin wrote in a column for Artforum
oxycodone, a semi-synthetic opiate (an ‘opioid’) describing the addiction she developed to
first synthesised in Germany in 1916. Prior to OxyContin after an operation. Goldin writes that
OxyContin’s launch, oxycodone had been marketed she took 40 mg doses and was addicted ‘overnight’.
as a painkiller in various pill forms for years, She went from taking three pills a day to as many as
including Percocet (where it is mixed with 18 of them. Not everyone is partial to the feeling
paracetamol), Percodan (where it is mixed with produced by morphine derivatives, but for the
aspirin) and Roxycodone (where it is dispensed people who like it, OxyContin seems to represent
pure in small doses of 15 to 30 milligrams). Other an apex. ‘Oxycodone provides the most glowing
kinds of opiate painkillers, like the hydrocodone- and rapturous high I have experienced in my very
based Vicodin, were also mixed with aspirin and thorough career as a recreational drug user,’ a
came in small doses. While people did become report on the online drug encyclopedia Erowid
addicted to these pills, the low doses of opiates begins. The writer, under the pseudonym
they contained made it hard to overdose on them, RighteousDopeFiend, describes the aftermath of
and the paracetamol and aspirin would cause liver snorting an 80 mg OxyContin tablet:
damage if the drugs were taken for a long time.
OxyContin distinguished itself from these The oxycodone experience is difficult to
medications, and received a patent, on the basis of describe to an opiate virgin. Personally, I feel as
an extended-release technology, the ‘contin’ of the if I have suddenly gained all that I want in life
drug’s suffix. Purdue developed OxyContin not to and no longer have anything to fear. I am
56
perfectly content both mentally and describes the rise of a super-efficient network of
emotionally. All the tension slips from my body dealers of Mexican black tar heroin in the US and
and I feel warm and utterly comfortable, as if I its effects on one particular town in Ohio. American
were sitting beside a roaring fire, wrapped in a Overdose, by Chris McGreal, a correspondent for the
delicate cashmere blanket, rocking gently back Guardian, offers a more detailed view of the
and forth. Communication is pleasant but corruption that enabled the spread of opiates to go
unnecessary. Under the influence of unchecked by the healthcare industry, government
oxycodone, no companionship is needed. I or law enforcement.
accept myself and the world just as we are, not Each of these books devotes chapters to the
begrudgingly, but eagerly, ecstatically even. history of OxyContin, a so-called blockbuster drug
whose lamentable success was owed to a
Since OxyContin’s arrival on the US market in
confluence of factors particular to the US. They
1996, a widespread increase in opiate use in
include, but are not limited to: the country’s
America has killed more than 400,000 people. Drug
dysfunctional privatised healthcare system, which
overdoses have been the leading cause of accidental
makes it possible for addicts to accumulate doctors
death in the United States since 2008, when they
willing to prescribe painkillers in a way they can’t in
surpassed deaths from road accidents. In 2017,
the UK; a corrupt regulatory agency beholden to
more than 49,000 Americans died of opiate-related
the industry it was tasked with regulating; a
overdoses.
punitive legal paradigm that criminalises drug
The epidemic has a narrative, divided into three
users instead of helping them; an abstinence-only
waves of molecularly similar drugs: first,
approach to treating drug addiction that impedes
OxyContin and other prescription pills; then
evidence-based medication-assisted treatment;
heroin; and now, especially since 2016, an opioid
corporate greed; a political class that takes
called fentanyl that is more potent in smaller
marching orders from the lobbyists of said
quantities, and therefore easier to smuggle and also
corporations; entrenched poverty, joblessness and
more likely to kill. There is also now an established
hopelessness; and a general epistemological failure
genre of newspaper stories that tell of overflowing
when it comes to ideas about what ‘drugs’ are,
morgues in the Rust Belt, of parents overdosing at
which psychoactive chemicals are safe and which
Little League baseball games, of once safe rural
are dangerous, and what a drug dealer is supposed
areas overtaken by criminal junkies, of open-air
to look like. These factors converged in such a way
heroin markets in homeless encampments in major
as to unleash hundreds of millions of potent pills
cities, of public librarians and Starbucks employees
out into the world in the late 1990s and 2000s,
who have learned how to revive an overdosing
which in turn prepared a consumer market for
patron with naloxone.
heroin. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been
The horror of a video showing a toddler tugging
lost, each one of them a world.
at her mother’s unconscious form in a supermarket
O
conveys more easily the horror of the corruption,
XYCONTIN arrived on the market at an
avarice, poverty and stupidity that created the
auspicious time, when doctors were re-
problem in the first place. How this happened –
examining a taboo against prescribing
how the number of deaths from opiate overdoses
opiates that had lasted for a hundred years. The
increased by a factor of six in the US between 1999
first big wave of morphine addiction in the US was
and 2017 – is the subject of several recent books.
in the 1870s, after the drug was offered as
Dopesick, by Beth Macy, describes the effects of
treatment to veterans of the Civil War.
opiate use in Appalachia, where she worked as a
Diacetylmorphine, also known as heroin, was first
newspaper reporter. Dreamland, by Sam Quinones,
57
synthesised in 1874. It was stronger than morphine study was small,’ as McGreal writes, ‘and lacked
(which itself was much stronger than opium), but the usual scientific rigour of control groups using
was initially thought to be less addictive. Doctors alternative therapies or placebos.’ A second piece
distributed heroin widely, including in cough drops of evidence was a letter by two doctors, Jane Porter
and tonics, until a wave of doctor-caused addiction and Hershel Jick, which appeared in the New
culminated in a ban in 1924. Heroin never went England Journal of Medicine in 1980. They said that of
away completely, but its use was limited to small 11,882 patients at the Boston University Medical
countercultural pockets, and deeply stigmatised. Centre treated with opiate painkillers, only four had
For decades, the heroin available in the US came become addicted. ‘All it offered was a snapshot of a
mostly from Asia. Dealers adulterated it at each particular set of patients in a hospital setting,’
step of the supply chain, so when it reached users it McGreal continues. ‘That did not stop advocates of
wasn’t especially potent, reducing the potential for looser use of opioids from doing a quick
overdose. Macy writes that while as many as 20 per calculation and pronouncing the Porter and Jick
cent of the veterans of the Vietnam War returned to letter as evidence that less than one per cent of
the US with symptoms of heroin dependence, the prescription narcotics users became addicted.’ The
lack of availability meant that most did not end up third pillar of research that would go on to justify
as lifelong addicts. By 1990, heroin use was limited the widespread prescription of opiate painkillers is
in large part to big cities. Doctors were very wary of perhaps the most ridiculous of them all. In 1989, a
addiction when prescribing morphine-derived doctor named David Haddox developed a theory
painkillers, and mostly did so only for people with about opiates he called ‘pseudoaddiction’. The
terminal illnesses. theory, which according to McGreal was based on
That changed in the 1980s and 1990s, when the the observation of a single cancer patient, said that
problem of untreated chronic pain began to be if a patient was showing signs of tolerance and
discussed in the medical profession. Some doctors craving larger doses of an opiate painkiller, it
argued for a holistic approach, but the insurance wasn’t a sign that the patient was forming a drug
companies preferred pills (the most economical habit, but rather that his pain was not being
form of treatment), and physical therapy and other sufficiently treated. ‘An idea advanced that pain
strategies soon fell out of favour. The American counteracted opiates’ euphoric effect and thus
Pain Society trademarked a slogan describing pain reduced the risk of addiction,’ Quinones writes.
as the ‘fifth vital sign’. But as Quinones points out: The American Pain Society, he continues, even
‘In fact, pain was really not a vital sign … for unlike promoted the idea that pain ‘acted against the
the four real vital signs it cannot be measured tendency of opiates to stop the lungs from
objectively and with exactitude.’ A scale was breathing’.
devised nonetheless, and pain assessment charts After OxyContin was approved by the FDA,
became part of doctors’ examinations. Purdue spent millions of dollars to promote these
Doctors also began to re-examine the stigma theories. They convinced the FDA to allow the label
surrounding the use of opiate painkillers in included with the drug to claim, without any
anything other than cases of terminal illness. Three clinical evidence, that ‘delayed absorption, as
studies, none of them at all comprehensive, were provided by OxyContin tablets, is believed to
used to bolster arguments for more access to the reduce the abuse liability of the drug.’ The FDA did
drugs. One was a paper published in 1986 which not seem bothered by how easily the drug could be
found that of 38 cancer patients treated with opiate used by people who wanted to take OxyContin for
painkillers only two developed an addiction, both pleasure instead of pain (the adulterants in
of whom already had a history of drug use. But ‘the previous iterations of oxycodone pills had made
58
this less easy to do). The warning on the label that mistaken as drug addiction’. (Fifteen years later, a
‘taking broken, chewed or crushed OxyContin newspaper tracked down the patients in the video
tablets could lead to the rapid release and and found that two had died from their opiate
absorption of a potentially toxic dose of oxycodone’ addictions and a third had lost her job and home
was a clear indication of how easily the time-release before successfully quitting the drug.)
coating could be circumvented, and the agency Purdue’s marketing campaign was very
appeared not to be aware that the drug could be successful. By 2003, more than half of the
crushed up, mixed with water and injected without prescribers of OxyContin were primary care
much trouble. (Curtis Wright, the FDA examiner doctors. In 1997, doctors wrote 670,000
who approved Purdue’s drug application for prescriptions for OxyContin; by 2002 they were
OxyContin, began to work as a consultant for the writing 6.2 million prescriptions per year.
company two years later.) Quinones writes that in 1996 Purdue paid out $1
In the late 1990s, the government also lifted million in sales bonuses to its drug reps and $40
advertising restrictions on pharmaceuticals. The million to them five years later. Salespeople in the
amount of money spent on drug ads increased from parts of the country where the first waves of
$360 million in 1995 to $1.3 billion in 1998. addiction emerged were clearing $100,000 bonuses
Following OxyContin’s approval by the FDA, every quarter. ‘The bonuses to Purdue salespeople
Purdue launched an extensive marketing effort to in these regions had little relation to those paid at
convince family physicians that the drug was most US drug companies,’ Quinones writes. ‘They
practically risk-free, and safe to prescribe for bore instead a striking similarity to the kinds of
anything from back pain to carpal tunnel syndrome profits made in the drug underworld.’
to migraine. The company purchased data that told McGreal, Macy and Quinones all document the
it which physicians prescribed the most Vicodins or rise in the late 1990s of pill mills, where in some
Percocets, and targeted them for sales. The instances doctors dispensed as many as 200,000
campaign to win over doctors included dinners, prescriptions for painkillers over the course of a
gifts and sponsored conferences at tropical resorts. few years. Complicit with the doctors were
The company’s sales representatives gave doctors pharmacies, drug distribution companies, sales
OxyContin-branded sunshades for their car representatives and, of course, Purdue itself, whose
windscreens, OxyContin bum bags, OxyContin executives knew very well they were flooding the
mugs, water bottles, pens and a compilation of big- market with a highly addictive substance. Young
band music that encouraged doctors to ‘Swing in people used to pilfering a Xanax from their parents’
the right direction with OxyContin.’ (I recently medicine cabinet or sharing out an Adderall
browsed the ‘Pharmaceutical Collectibles’ section prescription at a party were now taking a much
on eBay, where I found some OxyContin pens, a more dangerous drug. People who had occasionally
computer mouse advertising the antidepressant taken a stray Percocet or Vicodin from a friend who
Zoloft, and a stuffed toy promoting the sleeping pill had had her wisdom teeth taken out had no reason
Ambien.) Purdue distributed thousands of copies to suspect that OxyContin would affect them
of a video called ‘I got my life back: Patients in pain differently. A common theme in interviews in these
tell their story’ and coupons that gave a thirty-day books reveals how little scepticism there is towards
supply of OxyContin for free. The video repeated pills – many people had no idea what they were
the claim that the risk of addiction was less than taking until they were deep into their habit. A
one per cent, and included interviews with patients generation raised on televised ‘this is your brain on
and a doctor named Alan Spanos who describes drugs’ propaganda and pop cultural depictions of
‘pseudoaddiction’ as ‘relief-seeking behaviour addicts had no warning system in place for
59
prescription drugs. It is common in the US for coal tipples that blanket the bluffs,’ Macy writes.
people who would never dabble in cocaine or LSD But when he testified before the FDA in 2002, his
to take psychoactive pills without shame or warnings, and his person (he wore a Jerry Garcia-
suspicion. themed tie), were dismissed. ‘A lot of people
Macy describes a woman whose doctor treats discounted Art as a rabble-rouser and a kook,’ a
her for pain following gall bladder surgery with a healthcare administrator tells Macy. Purdue funded
30-day prescription of 10 mg OxyContin, followed groups of patients with chronic pain to lobby
by another 30-day prescription of 40 mg Oxy, along lawmakers for their right to treatment. The
with a supplemental prescription for Percocets for chemical illiteracy of the general public also helped
when the Oxys wore off and she experienced propagate the myth that ‘legitimate pain patients’
‘breakthrough pain’. When the prescriptions ran are a different species from ‘drug abusers’.
out, the patient began experiencing the symptoms By the early 2000s, the first lawsuits against
of withdrawal, and learned to visit emergency Purdue were being filed. Some of them were
rooms feigning acute crises before eventually wrongful death lawsuits brought by the families of
finding a more unscrupulous practitioner who people who had overdosed on OxyContin. Others
would write her opiate prescriptions on a regular were from within the company: a sales rep, for
basis. People who thought they were being treated example, who claimed she was fired for refusing to
for pain assumed their withdrawal symptoms were sell to doctors she knew were overprescribing. For
pain, failing at first to recognise their own dope the first ten years of Oxy’s existence, Purdue
sickness. ‘One way to view all that had happened,’ successfully fended off all legal challenges, though
Quinones writes, ‘was as some enormous social the company did hire Rudy Giuliani to help with its
experiment to see how many Americans had the image. It wasn’t until 2006 that a US attorney in
propensity for addiction.’ Virginia successfully prosecuted Purdue executives
Doctors, public health officials, law for misbranding OxyContin as safer than the
enforcement officers, the parents of teenagers who instant-release versions of the drug. Purdue paid a
overdosed, community activists and others who fine of $600 million.
M
objected to OxyContin early on found themselves
ignored. Macy writes about the efforts of Sue ACY is the author of another book,
Cantrell, a Virginia public health officer who tried Factory Man (2014), about the effects of
to warn state officials in the late 1990s, and Sister globalisation, automation and the
Beth Davies, an activist nun with a history of decline of coal in Virginia, which once had thriving
confronting the coal industry. She also writes about textile and furniture industries. Dopesick could be
a rural health practitioner named Art Van Zee, who read, in part, as a sequel to that book. ‘The federal
came to Appalachia in the 1970s because he wanted disability programme was becoming a de facto
to work in a medically underserved community. safety net for the formerly employed,’ she writes, ‘a
Van Zee was also the subject of a book called Pain well-intentioned but ultimately disastrous way of
Killer (2003) by a New York Times reporter named incentivising poor people to stay sick with mental
Barry Meier, a book now recognised as one of the illness and chronic pain.’ In both the Ohio towns
earliest documents of the epidemic. Quinones writes about, as well as the Appalachian
Van Zee, who ran an early campaign to get towns described by Macy, pills became currency.
OxyContin recalled, emerges as one of the most Elderly people or those on disability who received
admirable people in this story of greed and government-funded health insurance through
corruption. ‘Tales of Van Zee’s dedication are as Medicare or Medicaid would get prescriptions for
common in Virginia’s coalfields as the rusted-out pain pills that were paid for by the government. At
60
a going rate of $1 per milligram on the black understand the market opened up for them by
market, thousands of dollars could be made from a prescription opiate painkillers. Quinones was a
30-day OxyContin prescription. ‘Peddling pills was reporter for the LA Times when he first wrote about a
now the modern-day moonshining,’ Macy writes. network of heroin dealers who came from a small
In small towns where independent commerce had city in Mexico called Xalisco, in the state of Nayarit,
disappeared, addicts would shoplift goods from where a sticky kind of heroin known as black tar is
under the noses of unmotivated, underpaid made from poppies that grow in the hills. The
Walmart employees and trade them for pills. Pill Xalisco boys, as Quinones calls them, were no
dealers would keep stores of stolen goods, where Medellin cartel. They ran efficient, low-profile
pills could buy everything from stolen televisions to businesses, averse to violence and with a premium
nappies to laundry detergent – all at a discount. placed on customer service.
‘Some large though immeasurable amount of the In the late 1990s, OxyContin helped them
merchandise supporting addiction, as the opiates expand their market from California east across the
settled on heartland America, was mined from the Mississippi River, where dealers distributed free
aisles of Walmart, where Main Streets had gone to samples with their phone numbers outside
die,’ Quinones writes. ‘The opiate scourge might methadone clinics, with the help of veteran addicts.
never have spread as quickly had these rural areas The Xalisco network was comprised of a series of
where it all started possessed a diversity of small cells, each with an owner back in Mexico. The
retailers, whose owners had invested their lives in owner would hire a Mexican immigrant as a
their stores, knew the addicts personally, and stood manager, who would run the business for him in
ready to defend against them.’ Denver, Colorado, or Columbus, Ohio, or any one
In 2010, Purdue introduced an ‘abuse deterrent’ of more than a dozen other American cities.
to the drug which caused it to congeal when Quinones sets out how an informant first described
crushed, making snorting or injecting impossible. the network to a police officer in Denver:
Conveniently, this also allowed Purdue to renew
Beneath the cell manager is a telephone
OxyContin’s patent, which was on the verge of
operator, the informant said. The operator stays
expiring. (Through minor tweaks and
in an apartment all day and takes calls. The calls
reformulations, Purdue has re-patented OxyContin
come from addicts, ordering their dope. Under
13 times. Under its original patent the company
the operator are several drivers, paid a weekly
would have lost exclusive rights to the drug in
wage and given housing and food. Their job is
2013. Now it maintains them until 2030.) It was in
to drive the city with their mouths full of little
part the 2010 reformulation that provoked many
uninflated balloons of black tar heroin, 25 or 30
users of OxyContin to try heroin and realise that it
at a time in one mouth. They look like
could also sate their cravings. By 2010 most of the
chipmunks. They have a bottle of water at the
pill mills had finally been shut down. Heroin was
ready so if police pull them over, they swig the
also significantly cheaper, especially for people
water and swallow the balloons.
who had built up tolerance to Oxy and required
multiple pills a day to avoid the debilitating When a call came in, the dispatcher would send
symptoms of withdrawal. the driver, always a migrant worker from Xalisco, to
As the market for opiates expanded, heroin meet the buyer. The cells kept regular business
dealers stepped in to supplement the hours, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. The drivers didn’t carry
pharmaceutical supply. Of all the books available guns or use the product. They drove used sedans,
about the epidemic, Dreamland is by far the best and would only stay in a city for a few months
account of how heroin dealers quickly came to before being switched out and sent home. They
61
were encouraged to offer deals to loyal customers, tens of thousands of people have died of fentanyl-
such as a free bag on Sunday for someone who related overdoses, the government has also begun
bought from Monday to Saturday. They would give trials which treat heroin addicts with heroin. To
freebies to addicts who talked seriously of going to keep its addicts from buying drugs tainted with
rehab, and would welcome addicts home on their fentanyl, the city of Vancouver has begun an
return. That the heroin epidemic initially hit experiment with street vending machines that
African Americans much less hard than white dispense limited doses of hydromorphone to pre-
Americans was in part because both doctors and approved patients.
the Xalisco boys were racist: doctors were less likely The US is not culturally prepared for solutions
to prescribe painkillers to black people and the of this sort. In 2015, it took Mike Pence, then the
Xalisco boys didn’t sell heroin to them. The Xalisco governor of Indiana, two months to authorise a
dealers also avoided major cities, like New York needle exchange programme to stop a growing HIV
and Baltimore, where gangs that sold heroin were epidemic among intravenous drug users in his
already well established. state. While more than a hundred people acquired
A
the virus, Pence deliberated. He said he needed to
S GOOD as Quinones’s book is, the ‘pray on it’. Among the general population the old
world it describes is already dated. biases are still intact: one study found that support
Around the time it was published another for prescribing heroin to dependent users in the US
chemical, fentanyl, began killing heroin users in was very low, although the numbers improved
North America. Fentanyl does not require a poppy when the researchers called it ‘diamorphine’
harvest to produce and it is far more potent than instead of ‘heroin’.
heroin, which means that it can be smuggled in Over the past several years, Purdue has become
small quantities. It is also far more dangerous, and mired in lawsuits from states for its promotion of
its appearance in the drug supply has been OxyContin. Some of the evidence has implicated
accompanied by a sharp uptick in the rate of the billionaires who own the company, the Sackler
overdose. Among those being killed are older family, who have wings of museums named for
African Americans, whom researchers think might them around the world. (In March, London’s
represent a population of veteran heroin addicts National Portrait Gallery said that a planned £1
only now affected by the change in the drug supply. million donation from the Sackler family would not
The response to all of these deaths has been proceed; Tate, too, has said that it will no longer be
slow, but there has been some progress. The US accepting donations from the Sacklers.) The most
ended a ban on federal funding for needle prominent of these is a lawsuit filed in June 2018 by
exchanges. The US and Canada have made the state of Massachusetts that directly implicates
naloxone, which can reverse an opiate overdose in eight members of the Sackler family, claiming that
an emergency, available without a prescription. The from 2007 to 2016 they were among those at
US federal government has allotted some funds to Purdue who ‘engaged in a deadly and illegal
train doctors in medication-assisted treatment scheme to deceive doctors and patients’, by
options. Other countries have tried to reduce encouraging sales reps to pitch OxyContin at
deaths by distributing clean drugs to addicts. In higher doses even when its dangers were well
seven European countries, including the UK, known. During these years the family paid itself
doctors are able to prescribe medical-grade heroin more than four billion dollars in profits.
to treatment-resistant patients, offering them The Centers for Disease Control tallied that
much greater stability and safety in the more than 191 million opiate prescriptions were
maintenance of their addictions. In Canada, where dispensed in 2017, a rate of 58.7 prescriptions for
62
every hundred Americans (and the lowest rate in

ten years). Purdue claims that only two per cent of
opiate prescriptions written in the year ending in
September 2018 were for OxyContin. According to
a Reuters report, sales from OxyContin were $1.7
billion in 2017, down from $2.6 billion five years
earlier. In mid-February, Nan Goldin led a protest
at the Guggenheim in New York, showering its
lobby with a deep, dense and white blizzard of fake
prescriptions that quoted an email exchange
between Robert Kaiko, the inventor of OxyContin,
and Richard Sackler. ‘If OxyContin is uncontrolled,
it is highly likely that it will eventually be abused,’
Kaiko wrote, with apparent concern. ‘How
substantially would it improve our sales?’ Sackler
replied. Purdue issued a statement describing the
lawsuit as ‘part of a continuing effort to single out
Purdue, blame it for the entire opioid crisis, and try
the case in the court of public opinion rather than
the justice system’. Even if the lawsuits succeed
they have come too late.
In 2018, a subsidiary of Purdue filed a patent for
a fast-acting version of buprenorphine, a variation
on the opiate addiction treatment drug Suboxone.
The FDA continues to approve new opiate
painkillers. The most recent, late last year, was a
drug called Dsuvia, a painkiller so potent its doses
are measured in micrograms.
Emily Witt is the author of Future Sex.
63
at present, when poetry seems to have fought itself

On Luljeta Lleshanaku to a standstill, when there are no longer any groups
or individuals, only on the one hand nonsensical,
Michael Hofmann mutually supportive groupings of individuals and,
on the other, individuals who can see no higher
goal than to serve as mouthpieces for groups, it is
indispensable. In ‘More Than a Retrospective’
L
ULJETA LLESHANAKU is an Albanian Lleshanaku writes: ‘I was born of a dead hope/like a
poet, born in Elbasan in 1968. Following sprig of grass/between sidewalk slabs.’ These are
the death of Enver Hoxha in 1985 and the poems of urgency and imagination, seemingly
end of dictatorship in Albania in 1990, she unaware of the reader and the critic, and certainly
was belatedly allowed to attend university, not playing up to them, uncluttered and for the
and has worked – multitasking, in the manner of most part unforced; they carry Lleshanaku into the
gifted people in small populations – as a teacher, proximity of the great 20th-century poets of Central
magazine editor, journalist and screenwriter. and Eastern Europe: Akhmatova, Herbert, Holub,
Currently she is research director at the Institute of Szymborska, Zagajewski.
Studies of Communist Genocide in Albania, which
one wishes for the author’s sake might be a What is the more striking about this is that it
sinecure, but almost certainly isn’t. Her eight seems to have been done largely without books, or
books of poetry have been digested into three in the without external knowledge. This fact emerges less
US, Fresco (2002), Child of Nature (2010) and the from the poems themselves, which are cool, brittle
newly appeared Negative Space; meanwhile, and uncomplaining – it’s only the West that goes
Bloodaxe give us the same poems, introduction and Wah! – than from the helpful introduction to Fresco
afterword in just two volumes, the double-strength by the panglossian Peter Constantine, who supplies
Haywire (2011) and the textidentisch Negative Space some historical and cultural background.
(Bloodaxe, £12). Earlier Lleshanaku poems were Lleshanaku’s poems have a flavour and a feeling
done by the pioneering Henry Israeli and perhaps a and a world, but they’re not such that you would
dozen other translators. The new book is translated back yourself to make her life story out of them. So
by Ani Gjika, an Albanian-born American poet, it is from Constantine that we learn of the utter
who is ideally placed to traffic between the land of political isolation of Hoxha’s Albania
her birth and her adopted homeland, the way (compounding its poverty and its geographical and
Charles Simic has done since the 1960s with Serbia linguistic and cultural remoteness), cutting itself
(see his anthology of Serbian poetry, The Horse Has off from its last ally, Mao’s China, after 1972 (when
Six Legs, and his numerous single volumes of Lalic, Nixon travelled there); consequently, the ‘almost
Tadic, Ristovic, Salamun and many more). I wish complete moratorium on the circulation of foreign
her patience, talented originals, and many decades. books, and translations of foreign literature’; the
ideological purity of what could be published, with
Lleshanaku is hardly new on the international a fantastic, alphabetical embargo on ‘abstract
scene (in 2011, in Finland, as one could read in the humanism, anarchism, bourgeois objectivism,
magazine Guernica, a Slovak poet settled in Mexico bureaucratism, conservatism, decadentism,
was hearing her praises sung by a poet from Iran – ethnologism, folklorism, formalism, imperialism,
this is how things happen in poetry), but she is new individualism, mysticism, nihilism, patriarchalism,
to me. Her combination of plain-spokenness and revisionism, or sentimentalism, to name a few’; the
intelligence would have been welcome at any time; appetite for verse in a population of less than three
64
million, to hear of which always touches the Like the best of the ‘Eastern’ poets, or the poets
Western reader (who isn’t peckish, and has other, of ‘the other Europe’ (Al Alvarez and Philip Roth)
more entertaining entertainments in mind), like or ‘the poets of survival’ (Daniel Weissbort),
being reminded of a dead nerve; and the Lleshanaku is material, then metaphorical, then
subsequent poetry ‘that came out of the hope, fear, material again:
hunger and despair of Albania’s desperate post-
Stalinist 1990s … wild and creative, reflecting the The search for unknown words
chaotic but hopeful situation in Albania’. ‘Albanian is a complete failure.
literary critics,’ Constantine writes, ‘eyed this They have all been discovered.
development with a mix of fear and ecstasy.’ They are round and soft, without mystery
little planets festering with ants too tired
This is the context Lleshanaku was born into, to mount a hobo’s shoe.
into a family that was imprisoned and tortured and
sentenced to forced labour and internal exile: ‘an Poetry to her is chiefly a mode of inquiry. ‘What
era of forbidden books’, as she puts it in a short was it like? What happened? How did it feel?’ the
afterword to Haywire, ‘books that were victims of poems ask themselves. The blandishments of the
the cultural revolution, mostly translated Russian art hardly interest her; no pleasantness, no
classics: Turgenev, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and chitchat, no amenities; she doesn’t care to
sometimes an American like Walt Whitman’. ingratiate herself with a coterie or a public. This is
Constantine again: ‘Her poetry has little not one of your box-tickers. ‘When I read poems
connection to poetic styles past or present in aloud,’ she says in her interview in Guernica,
America, Europe, or the rest of the world.’
Apparently, it isn’t even particularly Albanian people who don’t speak Albanian praise the
either. ‘We have in Lleshanaku a completely sound of the language, but I never took that as a
original poet.’ One who hymns the year of her birth compliment. In my opinion, poetry is not a
like this: ‘1968. At the dock, ships arriving from the sound and shouldn’t be perceived as musicality.
East/dumped punctured rice bags, mice/and the To me, poetry is a rational act. I never write a
delirium of the Cultural Revolution.’ A neighbour poem if I’m not sure what I am going to say or
like this: ‘She is the skeleton key, the collective what I want to communicate.
curse/on a night that reeks of sardines and
Her poems function like the old-fashioned slide
enzymes.’ And a betrayal like this: ‘Late at night, an
rule, a grid of fact pushed along another grid of
aluminium lid/above a sprig of parsley –/limp nerve
fact, then you look up and across and find your
floating in a cold lemony broth’. But perhaps there
answer under a hair-line. Physical fact and
is something in the Balkan water, or the Balkan
metaphor, metaphor and simile, are kept in
genes, because, even though it may have got there
alternation. ‘I always live in the moment/like a wet
by itself, a Lleshanaku poem will be a welcome and
piece of paper/stuck to the bumper of a truck
familiar thing to a reader of Herbert or Szymborska.
travelling down the road’ (‘The Man without
It seems almost like an experimental object, a
Land’). Lleshanaku says it with dumped punctured
child’s poem, or a poem in a state of nature; life
rice bags and mice. ‘The winds make love/in rusted
synthesised from carbon, hydrogen and oxygen; in
cans’ (‘The Moon in November’). A poem is a box
the failed political experiment of the isolated
of grim truths, or else the pursuit of a fizzing and
Albanian state, the successful counter-experiment
unpredictable thought, mostly through darkness:
of the isolated Albanian poem.
‘We turn out the lights, get ready for bed,/our
heads glowing like lemons in the dark,/sour and
65
dissatisfied’ (‘After the Evening Movie’). Just as Bismarck, the Bible, Elizabeth Bishop, classical
Herbert writes of his alter ego, Mr Cogito, ‘He mythology, Coltrane, Einstein, Freud, King Lear,
adored tautologies/explanations/idem per idem,’ so Marie Antoinette, Picasso, Puccini, Ramesses, Van
Lleshanaku tells herself: ‘Reveal certain facts and Gogh and so forth. (One of the pleasures of earlier
res ipsa loquitur, the thing speaks for itself.’ Lleshanaku, you realise wistfully, is the absence of
such things, in the way that Prague or Budapest
Over time and many books Lleshanaku has used not to be lit up at night and their streets not
perhaps lost some of her abruptness and starkness, stuffed with advertising posters and neon.)
but that shouldn’t be a surprise to us, and it wasn’t
to her; in 2010, she wrote: ‘Exposed to the wide Now there are poems about airports and hotels.
range of world literature, Albanian writers are There is a poem called ‘A Conversation with
suddenly conscious that the water we’ve been Charles Simic’ and another written in the voice of
swimming in is much deeper than we had thought.’ Menelaus (‘Menelaus’ Return’). In fact, they are
It is indeed a dismaying feeling, and beautifully both brilliant poems, two of the best in the book,
caught. She talks about a residency once in New and Menelaus’ drolly sad musing on Helen – ‘She’s
Hampshire, where she wrote several new poems, mine now, but I have no idea what to do with her’ –
but ended up discarding almost all of them: can stand beside Brodsky’s ‘My dear
Telemachus,/the Trojan War/is over now, I don’t
I felt as if I was following the wrong star, as if I recall who won it’; but the point stands. Also, the
had falsely adapted my literary sensibilities to poems seem to have been stretched, as though by
an American aesthetic. It was too easy to Herbert’s ‘Damastes (also known as Procrustes)’;
embrace the philosophy of a culture immersed apart from the three long sequences, there’s hardly
in a long tradition of individualism, one of them that doesn’t come in at around fifty
metaphysical perspectives and continuity, lines. It reminds me of my old thought, ‘One line
where artists and writers simply add a stone in a for each year of life.’ More seriously, perhaps, the
wall that has been under construction for poems have a way of running out of road or
centuries. It is a philosophy completely alien to identifying their subject too late; it is easy to
my culture. surmise at the plight of the manic 24-hour
housebuilder setting New England stones, or the
This she then goes on to describe as follows: ‘In maker of dry-stone walls now wondering where to
Albania everything happens in 24 hours. Each day lay her head. Poems like ‘January 1, Dawn’ or ‘First
you have to build a new house, a house that will Week of Retirement’ that remember and hook their
probably be destroyed that same evening.’ Clearly, beginnings are in the minority; more typical is one
it is hard to keep faith with a reality, an like ‘Night Fishing’, which is as much about
atmosphere, an imperative that have been tobacco as ‘Tobacco’ is, or ‘Almost Yesterday’,
confused, that no longer always obtain. where a memory, unasked, surfaces to disturb a
poem about strangers building a house next door.
Negative Space seems rather more conventional
than the earlier books, from its epigraph from But perhaps all this is intrusive, over-
Oscar Wilde, to the 19-part persona poem about empathetic, panicky. The new poems are full of
the Antarctic explorer Frank Wild, which just about absolutely striking passages and lines: ‘His life is
anyone might have written, and isn’t a patch on simple, made up of speed and knives’; ‘Every day
W.S. Graham’s book Malcolm Mooney’s Land or the mirror wakes up in a bad mood./An endless
Brodsky’s ‘A Polar Explorer’, to a standard-issue field of frost glistens/on the cabbages beyond the
inter-poet wadding of references to Archimedes,
66
window’; ‘You didn’t need much to feed them; just

a few crusts of insomnia and the tents’ punctured
holes’; ‘Days were never this long before./Their It has Lleshanaku’s amazing invention of the
whiteness a lactose too difficult to break down’; metaphor that works, but only posthumously, as
‘He falls asleep as fast as a book that drops from his here:
hand’; ‘His melancholy intervenes at the right
moment,/like wrapping a nude woman in a jacket’; Overnight, the dome was demolished, instantly
‘a mixture of doubt, hope and ammonia’, revealing
reminiscent of Vladimir Holub’s ‘fear on a methane a myriad of nameless stars that chased the
base’. The loss of the hácek in the American crowd
pronunciation of Charles Simic’s name throws up like flies on a dead horse
this sensational beginning (‘A Conversation with
(‘Negative Space’)
Charles Simic’):
Or here, also from ‘Negative Space’:
Las Vegas. In a bar. A hybrid light half-red, half-
orange
Some words
highlights vague parentheses on people’s faces.
were actually never uttered, like pages stuck
Wrinkles.
together
I am sitting next to Charles Simic.
in a book fresh off the press
His last name is pronounced differently
and long after it sits on a shelf.
in his new language than in his mother tongue;
the final consonants hardened along the way Or here:
like cardboard boxes drenched on the deck of a
ship That’s when we saw each other clearly.
only to dry again under another sun. Or rather, what remained of us.
Damaged like lottery numbers
I don’t know that I have ever read a droller scratched away with a blade.
description of the price of survival than this ‘hybrid
light’, these vague parentheses, this toughened (‘Via Politica’)
cardboard, this lost hácek. After all, Brodsky (in his
essay ‘Acorns Aweigh’) spoke of ‘the tragicomedy It is her discovery in these pages that ‘nothing
of exile’. Negative Space is as full of trademark- exists until its moment of absence.’
Lleshanaku violence, sickness and chemical
elements as anything before. It shades from
wisdom into folklore and back:
Michael Hofmann’s new book of poems, One
The moment you learn how to negotiate – Lark, One Horse, is out now.
five desserts for a single cigarette,
five years of life for a failed romance,
five butterfly lives for five caterpillar days in a
cocoon –
you understand
that bitterness is the key to existence.
(‘The End of Summer’)
67
producing and selling cars in more countries than

Friendly Relations any of its competitors. Its plants in Japan need not
Edward Luttwak employ foremen or quality controllers as the
workers supervise themselves, clerical employees
Japan in the American Century by Kenneth B. Pyle. do not fear for their jobs as automation increases
Harvard, 457 pp, £25.95, October 2018 because Toyota never fires anyone except for gross
O
misconduct, and company executives sent to
NE CAN FLY to Japan from anywhere, unpleasant countries or given jobs they dislike
but from Japan one can only fly to the would never think of hopping over to the
Third World, and it hardly matters competition – it would be treason. By the same
whether one lands in Kinshasa, London, New York token, the boss cannot pay himself even a quarter
or Zurich: they are all places where one must be of Mary Barra’s salary because that would be
constantly watchful and distrustful, where one don’yoku, which might be translated as ‘greedy’, if
cannot leave a suitcase unattended even for ten the word were invested with the full opprobrium of
minutes, where women strolling home through the Japanese original. The force of public
town at 3 a.m. are deemed imprudent, where the disapproval is what allowed the Ghosn prosecutors
universal business model is not to underpromise to keep him locked up for four months.
and overdeliver but if anything the other way Japanese entities that are not exposed to
round, where city streets are clogged at rush hour international competition are free to remain even
because municipal authorities mysteriously fail to more Japanese than Toyota, whether they are the
provide ubiquitous, fast and comfortable public few remaining back country inns which still have
transport, where shops need watchful staff or mixed-sex baths with no clothing allowed, or the
cameras against thieving customers, and where one ruling Liberal Democratic Party, the Jimintō, whose
cannot even get beer and liquor from vending idiosyncratic inner workings sometimes noisily
machines that require no protection from collide with international opinion. Take the
vandalism. Japan was the world’s only really example of Yoshihide Suga, chief cabinet secretary
different country when I first visited forty years ago, and the cleverest politician in Japan, who recently
and it remains so now, despite many misguided announced that Japan was leaving the International
attempts to internationalise its ways to join the rest Whaling Commission in order to resume
of the world. commercial whaling. He added to the outrage by
Carlos Ghosn, the Brazilian-born Renault- criticising the commission for failing to develop a
Nissan-Mitsubishi super-boss long held in a Tokyo sustainable whaling industry (one of its official
cell at the mercy of prosecutors who could keep goals), even though the industry is ‘integral’ to the
him detained indefinitely by periodically advancing life and culture of Japan’s ‘whale-using’
new accusations that he made improper payments communities. The reaction of the anti-whaling
to himself, would emphatically agree. He outfit Sea Shepherd was predictably harsh: ‘With
complained that his salaries from Renault, Nissan this announcement, Japan has declared themselves
and Mitsubishi added up to a paltry $16.9 million [sic] as a pirate whaling nation.’ Australian officials
in 2017, while Mary Barra of General Motors were more restrained, because they understood the
received $22 million for running a smaller real import of Suga’s announcement: Japan would
company, and even BMW paid its boss $9.5 no longer, under the cover of scientific research,
million. That Toyota, the world’s largest conduct whaling in the Antarctic, where the 2017-
automobile company, paid its chief less than $4 18 catch came to 333 minke whales, including 122
million Ghosn would consider irrelevant, because it pregnant females, instead allowing commercial
remains a purely Japanese company, even while
68
whaling only in its own waters, where there is no the gods – the sword Kusanagi, the mirror Yata no
such abundance. Jimintō being the country’s right- Kagami and the jewel Yasakani no Magatama, all
wing party and whaling being a prominent right- still kept in secret locations – would be destroyed
wing cause, especially in the right’s stronghold in by continued fighting that finally induced Hirohito
the tsunami-ravaged north-east, the only way to to accept unconditional surrender. Had any of
stop the large-scale whaling that offended Australia them been destroyed it would have meant his
was to proclaim the start of whaling in Japanese deposition and execution or suicide – an outcome
waters, in the knowledge that with the ever that Dean Acheson, then assistant secretary of
diminishing demand for whale meat, and the ever state, and the other ‘New Dealers’ would have
more costly hunt for scarce whales, the catch would preferred (in 1969 Acheson told me that he had
not come to much – less than the Faroe, Icelandic been furious that the ‘appeasers’ had prevailed, but
and Norwegian whaling, which is scarcely noticed was soon glad he had been overruled). By contrast,
by anyone. when the former prime minister Prince Konoe
Kenneth Pyle, author of Japan in the American Fumimaro, of the ancient Fujiwara clan,
Century, would not be confused for a second by approached Hirohito on 14 February 1945 to argue
Suga’s announcement, because in a book that the case for surrender, armed with police evidence
devotes equal space to the view from Japan and the that antiwar sentiment was rising fast and turning
US, he shows equal discernment in recounting the against the imperial institution, as well as himself,
ways in which each country came to collide and Hirohito was unmoved. Konoe’s young assistant
then cohabit with the other over the last hundred and my subsequent long-time friend Tsunoda Jun
years. On each side Pyle uncovers things missed by blamed Hirohito’s courtiers, probably very unfairly,
a regiment of prior historians. On the American for the failure, and for Konoe’s subsequent suicide
side, one example is the perpetually overlooked fact – not avenged until his grandson Hosokawa
that the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki Morihiro became prime minister in 1993.
never took into account their most atrocious Pyle’s discernment does not fail him as he
effects, simply because none of the decision- reaches our own time, with the premiership of Abe
makers knew anything about radiation: all they had Shinzo, whose tenure since 2012 has been marked
in mind were the blast effects that made nuclear by important institutional changes, as well as new
bombing much more efficient than the policies both foreign and domestic, and an even
conventional kind. What they did consider was broader change in the tone of public life. The tall
(accurate) intelligence of the Japanese army’s and confident son of a foreign minister, grandson
ketsugo strategy, which involved gathering almost of one prime minister and nephew of another, Abe
three million soldiers and many more civilians to could have served out a stint as prime minister with
resist invaders with small arms, spears and suicide a bit of image-making and a slogan or two, in the
bombs for as long as it would take to induce them manner of most of his Jimintō predecessors.
to accept Japan’s conditional surrender, sans the Instead he launched a risky economic policy based
country’s occupation. This, incidentally, on monetary and fiscal laxity that would have
invalidates the later contention that Truman used caused Mario Draghi and his colleagues at the
the bomb in order to intimidate Stalin, a claim European Central Bank to commit hara-kiri,
which depends on the argument that everyone instituted a slew of structural reforms that irritated
knew Japan was heading for defeat thanks to the many of his more right-wing supporters by
sinking of its oil tankers – ketsugo required no oil. including vigorous support for female career
On the Japanese side, one example is that it was advancement (enlisting his own wife in the cause),
the danger that the sacred imperial regalia gifted by and transformed Japanese foreign policy by turning
69
passive dependence on the US into a true embassy has remained a source of misinformation,
partnership. misdirection and misunderstanding about both
With Abe that means much more than phrase- Abe himself and his government. Fixated on his
making, as Pyle explains in detail: his Japan now undoubtedly right-wing political affiliations, and
accepts real responsibilities, e.g. to repel any nostalgic for the old Japan, which happily
attempt by China to act on its fanciful claim to the professed its pacifism and was so gratifyingly
Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea instead of deferential to them individually, too many US
begging the Americans to do so, e.g. preserving a diplomats contrived to miss the often very
dialogue with Putin in order to give him a reason progressive substance of Abe’s actual policies, and
for limiting Russia’s support for China (at one their advantages from the US point of view. For
point Obama called Abe to try to persuade him to example, until he succeeded in changing an
cancel an upcoming meeting, but he didn’t budge). absurdly restrictive constitutional interpretation
It was not just a question of asserting personal made by long-retired officials (not by constitutional
leadership. To change long-settled habits of judges), Japan’s self-defence forces relied fully on
passivity, Abe established a National Security American support in the event of combat, but were
Council that is not just a gathering place for forbidden to provide any support whatever to US
representatives of the foreign, defence and forces. As I noted to some of Abe’s officials at the
intelligence bureaucracies, as in most other time, had this fact been known to the American
countries, but an actual policy-making body public it would have provoked demands to abrogate
operated by its own staff, the National Security the US-Japan security treaty.
Secretariat. It has been remarkably effective from Opposition to Abe has always made much of his
the start, formulating Japan’s first post-1945 membership of Nippon Kaigi, or ‘Japan
national security strategy and leading successful Conference’, a gathering of politicians and
negotiations with the Chinese. intellectuals who want to preserve the symbolic
E
importance of the emperor (‘the imperial
VEN after seven very active years, Abe’s institution’), traditional family values, the ‘imperial
redirection of Japan’s course remains a Shinto’ of the national shrines (as opposed to the
work in progress: he is still trying to diffused nature worship of local shrines),
implement the long-desired revision of the patriotism and patriotic education in schools, and,
constitution that would allow the armed forces above all, the emancipation of Japan from Article 9
officially to do what they are already doing, and still of the postwar constitution:
trying to get through the state-funded universal
(1) Aspiring sincerely to an international
childcare that is the only way to raise fertility, as
peace based on justice and order, the Japanese
France and Israel have shown. That policy collides
people forever renounce war as a sovereign
with another right-wing priority because it
right of the nation and the threat or use of force
necessitates letting in child-carers from other
as means of settling international disputes. (2)
countries, something Abe fully accepts, and which
In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding
is a result in part of his success in increasing female
paragraph, land, sea and air forces, as well as
participation in the labour force. This is just one of
other war potential, will never be maintained.
the ways in which his actual policies turn out to be
The right of belligerency of the state will not be
not right-wing but merely pragmatic.
recognised.
It is a tribute to the power of dogma that for
most of Abe’s premiership, even before the arrival These words make Japan the only country in the
of Obama’s ambassador, Caroline Kennedy, the US world that is legally prohibited from defending
70
itself. Three and a bit years after the new But more than their words, there is a particular
constitution came into effect on 3 May 1947, North ritual that has periodically mobilised the enemies
Korean forces invaded the South, all available US of Nippon Kaigi and the Japanese right: the visits of
occupation troops were rushed to hold a collapsing politicians to the Yasukuni shrine, which adds a
front, and in defenceless Japan the supreme tendentious Second World War museum to
supremo General MacArthur, whose men had Shinto’s normal accoutrements, as well as housing
drafted Article 9, ordered the quick build-up of an jars containing the ashes of war veterans and
army in all but name – a National Police Reserve of worthies dating back to the Meiji restoration. In
75,000 men, whose tanks were called ‘special 1966 jars containing the ashes of 14 prominent
vehicles’. A de facto navy (Coastal Safety Force) wartime generals and ministers – including Tojo
followed in 1952, and more units were added bit by Hideki, of Hitler-like fame in his day – who had all
bit until in 1954 the Self-Defence Forces Act been condemned as Class A war criminals by the
legalised a very slow rearmament that has allies, reached the Yasukuni. Nothing was said or
continued to this day, though always under very done about them until 1978, when a very right-
tight spending limits – less than 1 per cent of GDP. wing new head priest, Nagayoshi Matsudaira,
Article 9 was thus subverted by its own ‘enshrined’ the Class A war criminals in a secret
sponsors, and as the Cold War continued ceremony, in effect including them among the
successive US administrations and their Tokyo deities to be worshipped. Word soon leaked out
envoys welcomed Japan’s rearmament, and indeed and Hirohito, along with many Japanese
often wished for more. But they never supported politicians, refused to visit the shrine. But for
the rewriting of the constitution – mostly because members of Nippon Kaigi periodic public visits are
the envoys were usually liberals vehemently a must, though Abe is exempted from the
opposed to right-wing Japanese. They tended to obligation because of his broader responsibilities.
lump together three very different groups: true For the South Koreans, who 74 years after the
extremists who still defended Japan’s wars of end of the occupation still cannot forgive the
conquest and blame everything on the Americans, Japanese as the French and Russians forgave the
including Pearl Harbor (forced on Japan by the Germans, for the very good reason that most
American oil embargo, according to them); sinister Koreans collaborated (former president Park
poseurs mostly fronting for organised crime if not Chung-hee, father of Abe’s counterpart Park Geun-
criminals themselves; and Japan’s Tories, hye, was once the fervently loyal Masao Takagi of
exemplified by the courtly, highly literate Kase the Japanese army), visits to the Yasukuni shrine by
Hideaki, never a politician but a mentor to many Japanese politicians are opportunities for highly
and Abe’s friend, whose views are by no means ritualised outbursts of anti-Japanese feeling –
immoderate. (‘We are dedicated to our conservative rather a luxury for a country that depends on
cause. We are monarchists. We are for revising the Japanese bases for its defence. For the Chinese,
constitution. We are for the glory of the nation.’) who keep producing anti-Japanese war films and
Recently, one more principle has become more fake newsreels, to ward off the dangers of mass
important: the need to increase Japan’s defensive tourism to Japan, where too many friendly
strength to counterbalance China, North Korea and encounters might ruin years of indoctrination,
other hostile powers, though Nippon Kaigi’s politicians’ visits to the Yasukuni shrine offer
manifesto also includes such non-nationalist calls opportunities for retellings of the wartime story,
as ‘building friendly relations with foreign none of which need mention the fact that Mao and
countries through social and cultural exchange his minions outdid the Japanese at least three to
programmes’. one in killing Chinese.
71
Ambassador Kennedy protested in December

2013 when Abe visited the shrine to reward his
Nippon Kaigi supporters (who stood by him when
he was out of office between 2007 and 2012),
charging that Abe’s actions would ‘exacerbate
tensions’ with Japan’s neighbours. That was an
interesting observation, considering South Korea’s
non-stop hostility, and China’s frequent
provocations, including the widespread anti-
Japanese protests of 2010, which were triggered by
official media misrepresentations of the Japanese
arrest of a drunken Chinese trawler captain who
had tried to ram Japanese patrol boats. Kennedy’s
complaint hardly worsened Obama’s policies: his
administration did not even protest against China’s
devastation of vast coral reefs to build military
bases. But the US embassy’s hostility did generate
an uninterrupted flow of sceptical or outrightly
hostile stories in the US press that profoundly
misrepresented both Abe and Japan. Pyle is not in
Abe’s camp, but he is not against it either. His Abe
is the one I know, a pragmatic Japanese Tory
driving through reforms at home, while weaving an
alliance aimed at containing China, with Australia,
Vietnam and India in the lead, the Philippines,
Indonesia and Malaysia in tow, Canada looking in,
and the United States as the backstop. These
reactions to Chinese expansionism – all those
territorial claims, from Japan’s very small islands to
eighty thousand square kilometres of north-east
India – are entirely normal, the elemental logic of
strategy at work. But that Japan’s prime minister
should lead the way, instead of meekly following, is
the novelty worth pondering.
Edward Luttwak’s latest book is The Rise of China

v. the Logic of Strategy.
72
never came home.’ Surveillance footage from the

Dots and Dashes night Sabrina vanished shows her a block away
Namara Smith from her apartment in Chicago, then nothing. A
month later, her bus pass is mailed to her parents.
Sabrina by Nick Drnaso. Granta, 203 pp, £16.99, Soon copies of a videotape showing a woman who
June 2018 matches her description being killed by a man in a
T
black ski mask are sent to news stations across the
HE MOST ARRESTING SCENE in country. On the package is an Illinois return
Beverly, the first book by the American address. The landlord tells the police that his
cartoonist Nick Drnaso, arrives midway tenant, a 23-year-old called Timmy Yancey, rarely
through a story – one of six – called ‘The Lil’ King’. left the building and had few visitors besides his
A boy sits outside a locked motel room as rhythmic mother. In the bathroom, they find a set of neatly
groans emanate from the other side of the door: his folded black clothes and a black ski mask. Lying in
parents have stolen a moment alone, thinking the the bathtub, which is filled with water the colour of
kids are at the pool. It is the last family road trip blood, is the body of a young man, his mouth still
before his older sister goes away to university, and curved upward in a faint smile.
the boy, Tyler, is at the stage of puberty that makes Despite its premise, Sabrina is not a thriller in
family road trips a trial. All day, he has been any conventional sense. The identity of the killer is
dreaming of literally opening people up, focusing revealed in the first third of the book, and the crime
intently on the space between women’s thighs, itself goes mostly unrepresented. We never see the
trying to see through their clothes, imagining video or learn what kind of murder it shows.
himself carving a long slit in a man’s chest to Instead Drnaso documents the reactions of others.
expose his entrails. One strand of the novel is concerned with the
Alone in the motel room that night, Tyler spectators who consume the death from a distance.
attempts to re-create what he heard. He arranges After the story breaks, it becomes a viral sensation.
his sister’s matching bra and thong seductively on a News crews swarm around the grieving relatives,
pillow, and just as he is about to climb on, the door Sabrina’s name trends briefly on Twitter and digital
opens: it’s his sister, followed by his parents. Back voyeurs mob the internet trying to find footage
in the hallway, humiliated, he imagines himself as from the video: ‘link’; ‘I NEED to see this.’ The
a beefy adult man in a black ski mask, beheading other strand follows Sabrina’s intimates, suffering
and dismembering a group of older boys he thinks the double blow of her death and the public
are laughing at him. When his father, embarrassed, spectacle surrounding it. The main character is
assures him that his feelings are ‘nothing to be Sabrina’s boyfriend, Teddy, a Kurt Cobain
embarrassed about’, he is still surrounded by this lookalike with slumped shoulders and a ratty army
carapace. jacket. Jobless, apparently carless, he is first seen at
Drnaso’s second book, Sabrina, the first graphic the train station in Denver waiting to be picked up
novel to be nominated for the Man Booker Prize, is by his friend Calvin, a serviceman at the air force
a longer, more elaborate study of the desire for base in Colorado Springs. After Sabrina’s
initiation and the fear of exposure. The title comes disappearance, he suffered ‘some kind of nervous
from the name of the young woman who breakdown’, and, fleeing her family and the media,
disappears in its opening pages. ‘It’s one of those has gone west to start again.
horror stories you hear about,’ another character
explains as the story begins to circulate. ‘She just
73
The book’s action is set in a largely empty and greys, contribute to the impression of
landscape. After Calvin picks Teddy up at the stuckness.
station, we see the two driving wordlessly along a At a distance Drnaso’s characters, most of them
deserted stretch of highway, the sun setting in a the same pallid shade of beige, are difficult to tell
wash of pale yellow light, the Front Range of the apart. Their heads, slightly too small for their
Rocky Mountains in the distance. In the next scene, bodies, like turtles poking out of their shells, give
Calvin is showing his friend round his rented an impression of vulnerability. Their faces, drawn
condo: bare walls, window blinds, a concrete patio, with pinprick eyes and small, hard lines for
a room with a mattress on the floor for Teddy. mouths, are equally interchangeable – locked doors
Drnaso’s style is flat, deliberately restrained, with that give you no hint of what’s behind. Rather than
little variation from panel to panel. The bland acting as a sedative, the sameness produces a
settings – the apartment, the featureless military heightened alertness. You find yourself scanning
complex – seem to allow the suspicion that the faces – all dots and dashes like Morse code –
nameless horrors are lurking. Most of the scenes trying to decode the signals. The one expression
take place at night or indoors. The visual it’s impossible to misread is anger, which suddenly
monotonyand muted colours, all muddy yellows gives the faces definition, menacing lines, teeth.
74
Though the book is named for a woman, the hands. ‘This can’t be happening.’ Calvin has
central relationship is the one between the two men suffered his own more ordinary loss – his wife has
(in this, it is like Billy Wilder’s movie Sabrina). left him and taken their daughter to Florida – but it
Teddy is the rebel, Calvin, with his minivan and doesn’t seem to have sunk in yet. It’s been months,
buzz cut, the square. One of the book’s stray but the room he gives Teddy is still piled high with
moments of comedy comes when Calvin attempts brightly coloured children’s toys and he proudly
to set house rules, by solemnly informing Teddy shows off the guns he bought to protect the family
that ‘my room is the only one that’s off-limits.’ In that is no longer there. The TV is showing a
the adjoining panel, we see a featureless cube with programme about the anniversary of 9/11 (‘the big
some clothes strewn on the floor, indistinguishable 2-0’ is ‘just a few years away’, an announcer chirps),
from every other room in the apartment. On the and the baseball caps and high heels preserved
night Teddy arrives, the two men sit rigidly at under glass in the crypt-like underground museum
opposite ends of the couch eating pizza. They seem reflect their own frozen sadness. Teddy falls asleep
most comfortable in motion – driving back from on the couch, and Calvin awkwardly carries him to
the station, or walking down the hall in the bed and helps him get undressed. Later that night,
apartment. In a room together, they are guarded. Teddy screams in his sleep, and Calvin runs into his
Teddy is obviously in shock: monosyllabic, unable room, gun in hand, ready to defend them against
to keep down his food, threatening suicide. ‘I just intruders. The resulting scene – two pale,
want her to come back,’ he says, head buried in his unmuscled men together on a bare mattress in the
75
kind of underwear no one else is ever meant to see questioning the official story. It is the last of these
– is intimate, even tender, but with a suggestion of groups to which Sabrina devotes the most attention.
violence. The next morning the loaded gun is still Up to this point, about halfway through the book, it
lying in the middle of the mattress where Calvin left can be read as an indictment of technological
it. voyeurism: all those creepy lurkers greedily
In one of the stories in Beverly, set in the early consuming the pain of others. But, as Teddy
days of the War on Terror, the rumour that a becomes increasingly obsessed with a radio show
teenage girl has been raped by a sinister Middle whose host claims that Sabrina’s death was staged,
Eastern stranger spreads quickly through her the division between her grieving relatives and the
Illinois town and leads to attacks on Muslim spectators projecting their own fantasies onto her
immigrants. Sabrina’s death doesn’t provide an death blurs – and the novel becomes more
opportunity for this kind of catharsis. Timmy interesting.
Yancey was a 23-year-old white man whose sweetly ‘It used to be that the peasants would toil in
diminutive name echoes Teddy’s own. When meaningless servitude, unable to see the big
Calvin, lying in bed with a laptop on his chest, picture, without a chance to break the cycle,’ the
types Yancey’s name into the search bar, the first radio host declares. ‘Now we have computers to
image result is a boyishly smiling face against the help us do our research. Suddenly, the rhythms and
blue background of a school photograph. Who was patterns of oppression and deceit since time
Timmy Yancey? News websites, after scouring his immemorial come into startling focus.’ He
internet presence, report that he was active on cautions his listeners not to take ‘the sanitised
men’s rights forums, and interested in information’ around Sabrina’s murder at face value.
bodybuilding, organic farming and theoretical ‘I encourage all of you amateur sleuths out there to
physics. His last post, a list of his fifty favourite read through it closely, looking for the
movies, ended: ‘bye for now.’ A magazine discrepancies, inaccuracies, distortions and
publishes a six-part investigative report on ‘The outright lies that seem so easy to spot if you’ve
Man behind the Mask’, asking ‘What have we trained your cynical eye.’ When watching the video,
learned?’ and ‘Who is to blame?’ they should ‘resist’ their ‘initial reaction’ and
The crime itself is oddly anachronistic. It’s examine it dispassionately, ‘like a frog in
more than twenty years since David Foster Wallace formaldehyde’. Why does the killer seem to talk to
placed a lethally entertaining video cartridge at the someone off camera at one point? Why would he
centre of Infinite Jest. Who records a videotape these wear a mask if he sought notoriety for his crime?
days? Who sends out dozens of copies of that tape ‘Maybe forces too evil to comprehend did in fact
by mail? When the first tape surfaces, at a local news murder a woman named Sabrina Gallo. I just don’t
station in Chicago, the confused employees have to think a man named Timmy Yancey is responsible.’
dig out an old VCR in order to watch it. Drnaso When Calvin, surprised by a TV news crew in his
devotes more than a page to their fumbling driveway, is caught on camera getting Sabrina’s
attempts to make the machine work. When the name wrong (‘I didn’t even know Sandra’), digital
footage leaks online, it is downloaded, according to vigilantes pounce on the slip as evidence that he is
one excited commentator, ‘about five million times a crisis actor paid by the government. The next day,
per hour’. The virtual rubberneckers downloading he sees his own deer-in-the-headlights face made
it surreptitiously at their desks are followed by the into a meme, with arrows reading ‘liar!’ pointing at
crowds enraged by this fresh violation, the his head. Online, dozens of readers are already
commentators bemoaning the corruption of making death threats and congratulating
modern life, and the conspiracy theorists themselves on not falling for such an obvious fake.
76
The radio host’s monologues are the under the glare of the 24-hour news cycle, but
centrepiece of the book; Teddy listens on a child- perhaps it always feels as if it does.
sized boombox that must have belonged to Calvin’s Paranoia energises Teddy, restores him to
daughter. There is no obvious political orientation himself. Listening to the first broadcast, he is
to the rants beyond a vague populism (‘I don’t like curled up in the foetal position; by the third, he is
these bullies running around treating people like standing up, ready for action. As the conspiracy
dispensable cogs’), but its host, Albert Douglas, is theories around the murder spiral – Sabrina never
clearly modelled on Alex Jones, the far-right radio existed; she is living with the Sandy Hook victims at
show host known for claiming that Sandy Hook, a black site in the Pacific – Teddy’s distrust settles
9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombings were all on someone close to home. Why does Calvin act
fabricated by the US government. The broadcasts like he’s hiding something? Why does he keep
are in his paranoid style: the obsessive tabulation of telling Teddy he has to rush back to work? What
evidence, the Manichaean logic, the dark hints does he do there all night anyway? Of all forms of
about the ‘shadow government’ and the ‘order of love, Eve Sedgwick wrote, suspicion is the one that
chosen men’, the sense that time is speeding up, demands least from its object; once it has you in its
heading towards a nebulous catastrophe. Douglas sights, nothing you do or say can shake it off. It is
claims that the images on our screens are clear to the reader, if not to Teddy, that the only
manufactured by shadowy forces as a way to keep thing Calvin is hiding is his own inadequacy. The
ordinary people inactive and isolated. The air force base consists of offices lit by fluorescent
perpetrators are sometimes described as diabolical tubes and empty corridors; his work, as an IT
agents of a vast conspiracy, sometimes in more technician, is routine, and his cubicle-mates never
personal terms. ‘I don’t like feeling restrained,’ the seem to notice when he’s gone. He tells Teddy he’s
radio says as Teddy sits in his darkened room at the office and his commanding officer he’s with
staring at the snow outside. ‘It’s this feeling like Teddy, and uses that time to drive aimlessly
you want to run and play, innocent and carefree, around. When questioned, Calvin assures Teddy
and this father figure is holding you back. I don’t that ‘mine is a desk job, truly,’ but his slight smile
want any part of it.’ At the conspiracy’s core is a when he says this is impossible to read: is it a mark
sense of dispossession: the conviction that of sincerity or a cunning imitation of it?
somewhere out there is a more authentic world One of paranoia’s singular properties is its
from which the host and his listeners have been ability to turn its targets into fellow sufferers.
shut out. ‘I recall the quality of life when I was a Hearing the murmur of the radio from Teddy’s
boy. Better food, better music, greener pastures. room late one night, Calvin’s own suspicions are
Even apples don’t taste as good as they used to. roused. The tension comes to a head in a wordless
Where have we gone wrong?’ sequence: the two stand, in almost identical
For most of the book Teddy is in acute physical postures, on opposite sides of Teddy’s closed
distress, throwing up after every meal, having bedroom door. Teddy is crouching, knife in hand,
trouble getting up, dependent on Calvin’s inside the room; Calvin is hesitating, his hand on
assistance for the simplest tasks. Lying motionless the knob, in the hallway. The moment passes:
as Calvin stoically hand-feeds him a cheeseburger, Calvin takes his hand away and leaves a bag of fast
Teddy has a squinting, skinned-rabbit look. Part of food by the door. The next day, Sabrina’s murder is
grief can be a withdrawal from the world, but displaced from the TV news by a mass shooting at a
Drnaso suggests it can also be a particularly violent daycare centre in Denver by a young man the media
form of immersion in it. Not every loss takes place anoints ‘the new face of evil’. The cycle begins
again. ‘Simple pleasures no longer suffice. My
77
senses have been dulled to the few things that used

to make me happy,’ the killer says in the video he
streams on Facebook before walking into a room of
children with a gun. ‘What am I supposed to do,
live an unappreciated life and be forgotten for
ever?’ It would be a start.
Namara Smith is an editor at Bookforum.
78
A Bed of Nails
Hugo Williams
Days move diagonally across town,

meet other days
travelling in the opposite direction.
Let off the leash,
I was roaming the streets after dark,
looking for a thread
among neon petals
splashing in gutters,
when the screech of brakes

heralded my destruction.
How kind of someone, I thought,
to consider de-accelerating
on my behalf, no matter
that the gesture came too late
to save my life.
The moment of truth
took me by the scruff of the neck

and hurled me through
a plate glass window made of ice.
I shot down the face
of a glassy curve
and came to rest where I am,
in a crazy place, in a bloody experience.
Danger, fear, rage,
the onset of extreme emotion

resulted in a message
being flashed down my nervous system
to two tiny glands,
one on each kidney,
which went into high speed action
pumping a charge of fear
into my bloodstream. Late,
almost too late at night,

I found myself barely alive
on a bed of nails.
I burst from the wreckage
79
with a blinding shock

of hips and hair and shoulder-blades,
streaming green light
because of something I thought.
Hugo Williams’s next collection, Lines Off, is due in June.
80
Augustine puts her down. Now baptised, Jean

I had no imagination confesses that she became pregnant on the night of
Christian Lorentzen the race. He tells her ‘they can use each day of their
married life to do small penances for their past
Tamarisk Row by Gerald Murnane. And Other mistakes and to earn treasures of grace for the
Stories, 281 pp, £10.00, February future. He plans to have a horse in training always.’
Border Districts by Gerald Murnane. And Other The baby boy is christened Clement, Augustine
Stories, 144 pp, £8.99, January gets into debt and Jean comes to see horse-racing
G
as a curse. She forbids Clement from playing with a
ERALD MURNANE was named after a racetrack he sets up in the backyard, but he persists
racehorse. His father, Reginald, was a in his imaginings, playing with a marble called
front man for Teddy Estershank, a Tamarisk Row, which in his games is also a horse
professional punter who was banned from being a and also the name of the house where its charming
licensed trainer or registered owner of horses by owners live, a couple that represents an idealisation
racecourses around Melbourne. Estershank, an of Clement’s parents or perhaps his own future.
‘evil genius’ according to Murnane, used friends Clement is too young to know what sex is,
like Reginald as dummy owners for the horses he which doesn’t stop him from thinking about it
bought, trained and bet on. The ‘equine Gerald’ constantly: sex is exposed female private parts; sex
and later a horse called Geraldo were nominally is a galloping horse; sex is a majestic vista. His
owned by Reginald and sold when, after a win or fantasies are many-layered, and the narration
two, they proved disappointments. (They became weaves between these and his mundane life in
reliable winners for their new owners.) Reginald’s thrillingly long, lyrical sentences strung together in
death, when his disappointing son was 21, was paragraphs that go on for pages. Here is the end of
liberating for Murnane, though liberation took a a section called ‘Clement loves Barbara Keenan’, in
while. Tamarisk Row, a novel about the nine-year-old which Clement’s gazing at a classmate during Mass
son of a front man for a professional punter, took yields to a vision of an idealised American
ten years to write. It appeared in Australia in 1974, landscape he knows only from National Geographic
when Murnane was 35. and songs on the radio:
A self-mythologising work of fiction, Tamarisk
Row enfolds horse-racing, Catholicism and sin into Clement sees, a few seats ahead of him,
the birth of its hero. Clement Killeaton is conceived Barbara’s white socks turned down neatly over
the evening his father’s horse Clementia wins her her ankles and, when she stands up for the last
maiden race, netting him a small fortune. Jean and hymn, Hail Queen of Heaven, part of the
Augustine aren’t yet married: a Protestant, she still gradual curves of her calves. He reminds Our
has to finish her catechism and be baptised into the Lord present on the altar that he has never tried
Catholic Church. The sex takes place in the grass by to see beneath her skirt and asks Him to protect
a horse trough behind her family’s ‘untidy’ house. her always from boys or men who may want to
It’s the first time ‘they committed that sin do impure things to her. In answer to his prayer
together’. Augustine imagines himself as a jockey he is allowed to see how the man who goes
mounting a horse, ‘thrusting his hands and knees home to the Rockies sometimes makes out
towards the noise of the crickets. He sees no more through gaps in forested cliffs and beyond
of the post as he passes than a blur of white among tenuous valleys the true country of Idaho where
a throng of his rivals. There is no one to tell him it trembles, faint and unapproachable, in the
whether or not he has got up to win.’ A few weeks last sounds of a song.
later, Clementia breaks a leg while training and
81
Murnane has called his work ‘true fiction’, not years between the stories in Emerald Blue (1995) and
for its relation to or relating of actual events – he the publication of Barley Patch (2009), the first of
disdains plot and dialogue – but rather for its fealty four books Murnane classifies not as novels or
to a personal authorial vision. ‘My fiction is a report stories but simply ‘fictions’. In these highly self-
of what takes place in the mind of a writer,’ he has conscious works he makes explicit his method of
said. In Tamarisk Row the report is a roving reporting on the takings-place in his, or his
omniscient narration that alights on various narrator’s, mind. Narrative thrust and intricate
characters, describes their actions and perceptions, invented worlds give way to twisting examinations
and reports on the activity of their minds, the of the mysteries of making fiction, the act of
minds of characters within their minds, and so on. reading fiction and the nature of imagination itself.
Murnane’s second novel, A Lifetime on Clouds, is The Plains is a bright and inviting novel, full of
centred on Adrian Sherd, a 15-year-old in a humour yet without resort to slapstick. As it
repressive Catholic boys’ school, who is given to beckons you along its secrets keep receding. The
elaborate sexual fantasies set in America. (First unnamed narrator has travelled inland from his
published in 1976, it was cut in half – ‘mutilated’, home near the coast in order to make a film called
in Murnane’s word – by its publishers; the restored The Interior. He mixes with ‘intellectuals, custodians
manuscript is to be published this year in Australia of the history and lore of the district’ in ‘enormous
under the title A Season on Earth.) With their bars’. (For all its concern with landscape, most of
autobiographical frameworks – or to put it with a The Plains takes place in bars, lounges or libraries,
precision their author might prefer, frameworks as well as within its narrator’s mind.) He reports on
with demonstrable autobiographical parallels – the region’s history, which is dominated by
these are Murnane’s most conventional novels. painters and poets locked in periodic factional
None of his later books could be mistaken, as A struggles between ‘the sea-greens’ and ‘the old-
Lifetime on Clouds was described to me, for the work golds’, or the Horizoners and the Haremen,
of an Australian Catholic Philip Roth. conflicts now transposed into day-long ritual
If that were the case, however fine Tamarisk Row games for children. The filmmaker mentions the
and its successor are (and they are), it’s unlikely classic poems of the plains – ‘The Horizon, After
you’d be reading this essay. Murnane’s All’, ‘A Parasol at Noon’ – and describes one of its
international reputation, which has grown to characteristic paintings:
speculations of a Nobel, rests on his novels and
The most impressive of many similar works,
stories of the 1980s and 1990s, especially his 1982
Decline and Fall of the Empire of Grass, seemed at
masterpiece, The Plains. These are the works that
first sight only a very detailed study of a small
have drawn comparisons to Borges and Calvino,
patch of native grasses and herbage – a few
two among the five authors (the others are Emily
square yards from any one of the countless
Brontë, Halldór Laxness and Proust) whose books
grazing paddocks on the plains. But spectators
Murnane said in a 2001 lecture were the only ones
soon began to make out of the trampled stems
the then 62-year-old wanted to reread before he
and frayed foliage and minute, severed
died. (He supplemented this list with the
blossoms the shapes of things quite
Australians Henry Handel Richardson and Martin
unconnected with the plains. Many of the
Boyd as well as the Hungarian Gyula Illyés;
shapes seemed deliberately imprecise, and even
references in his work suggest that Hardy,
those that most nearly represented architectural
Lawrence and Nabokov have also occupied his
ruins or abandoned artifacts were of no style
attention significantly. He seems to loathe Norman
known from history. But commentators could
Mailer and Peter Carey.) There was a hiatus of 14
point to a score of details that seemed to
82
comprise a scene of grandiose desolation – and licentiousness isn’t possible for his characters. But
then, stepping back, could see once again a his previous books do contain disclosures of
painting of plants and soil. The artist himself passions, if not frank discussion of them. (One
encouraged the search for shattered colonnades consequence of this for Murnane has been the
and tapestries flapping on roofless walls. But in estrangement of his uncle Louis, his father’s
his only published account of the painting (a youngest brother and his own closest horse-racing
brief statement which he tried repeatedly to pal, who in another fictional rendering disapproves
amend in later years) he claimed it was inspired of his nephew’s enthusiasm for free verse.) The
by his study of a certain small marsupial. This filmmaker is sponsored by a landowner who gives
animal had disappeared from settled areas him access to a grand library and unlimited time to
before the plainsfolk had given a common make his film about the ‘Eternal Plane’. It’s too
name to it. The artist used its unwieldy much freedom. He spends a decade leafing through
scientific name, but someone in the course of books and contemplating Time – the other plane.
debate referred to it (inaccurately) as a plains- But in the end, his film unbegun and unfinished, he
hare, and that name stuck. gives his patron what he wants, a blank screen with
the lights out, a vision of the plains covered in the
We learn that the animals, relying on their
‘Great Darkness’.
colouring to hide them in the grass of the plains, a
I
form of ‘stubborn foolishness’, had been clubbed
N The Plains, as in other books of his middle
to death by the hundreds for their ‘barely usable
phase, first-person narration predominates.
hides’. So the painting that appears to depict a
Murnane subscribes to Wayne Booth’s
simple patch of grass actually contains all of history
concept of the implied author – the person the
(though without actual historical referents), yet is
reader imagines to be behind the work. ‘The
really just about a missing animal whose absence is
ghostly outline of this personage has arisen in my
explained by a brutal joke. Such deadpan bits of
mind,’ Murnane writes, ‘as a result of my having
faux sociology are contained within the broadly
read certain details in the text.’ Since The Plains
absurd conceit of a frontier society led by a
much of the tension in his fiction has come from
vanguard of artists and writers. The plains are
this distance between the narrator, the implied
barren and pregnant, empty and full, everything
author and Murnane himself. The 1989 story
and nothing.
‘When the Mice Failed to Arrive’ mixes details that
There are numerous slant comments on
parallel Murnane’s life with material most writers
literature in The Plains. The filmmaker’s life story is
would find unspeakable. The narrator, like
comprehensible to the plainsmen because it’s
Murnane, is a married father living in a Melbourne
‘devoid of events or achievements’, like their own
suburb, a former schoolteacher and the son of a
canon (and Murnane’s books). We hear of ‘those
man who has things in common with Murnane’s
few fools who appear every decade or so urging us
father. Unlike Murnane, who has three sons, the
to set our passions free and to speak frankly before
narrator has a son and a daughter. He recalls his
our women’ and ‘the preposterous fallacy that we
bachelor days as a teacher, when he would
have lately banished from our plains: the specious
deliberately live miles away from his pupils and
argument for the artist’s concerning himself with
their families. He wanted nothing to do with them
the distribution of material wealth or the workings
because ‘I did not want my neighbours or any adult
of government or the release of men from the
passing in the street to think I was the sort of
constraints of morality in the name of a universal
solitary man who was attracted to nine-year-old
licence masking itself as Freedom’. Economics and
girls.’ Then:
politics have no place in Murnane’s world;
83
In fact, I was attracted to half a dozen of the humane, not least for allowing the narrator to resist
nine-year-old girls in my class – and to two or his attractions.
three of the boys every day. Every day I looked The process of writing fiction comes to the fore
from the sides of my eyes at the smooth skins of in this period. The 1986 story ‘Stone Quarry’ posits
the girls, at the trusting eyes of the boys. I a network of fiction workshops ‘more strict than a
would never have dared to put so much as the Trappist monastery’ that bring together half a
tip of a finger on a child in a way that might dozen writers in silence for several days, allowing
have suggested what I felt for the child. All day them to communicate only in messages encoded in
while I taught my favourite children I wanted no their fiction, which is signed with pseudonyms that
more than that they should think well of me. change every day. Those who break the silence are
But when I was safely out of their sight I often made to sit alone in a room and transcribe pages
dreamed of the children. from the works of great solitary authors. A second
I dreamed that my favourite children lived offence results in expulsion. Talk ‘drains away the
with me in a mansion surrounded by a tall wire writer’s most precious resource, which is the belief
fence in thick bushland in northeastern that he or she is the solitary witness to an
Victoria. The children were no longer children; inexhaustible profusion from which might be read
they were almost adults. They were free to live all the wisdom of the world’. The 1988 novel Inland
their own lives in the far-flung suites of my is narrated by a writer in Hungary who sends his
rambling mansion. I had never forced my manuscripts to the editor of a magazine called
company on them. I lived alone in my self- Hinterland, based in Ideal, South Dakota. Hungary
contained flat in a corner of the ground floor of and America are Murnane’s dreamlands: one a
the mansion. But the children who were no landlocked country isolated by its non-Indo-
longer children knew that they were always European tongue; the other a vast zone of
welcome to knock on my door. I was always anglophone colonisation, an alternate, purer and
pleased to take them into the room where I sat more fertile Australia. The writer in Hungary lusts
behind drawn blinds on most afternoons after his editor and grows jealous of her husband.
watching black and white and grey films of men He is sustained by visions of her reading his work
and women in far countries of the world doing on the virgin prairies. The equation of reading and
without shame or shyness what I hoped my writing with sex and landscape is just another
favourite children would never dream of doing. example of Murnane’s principle of transformation,
or imaginative multiplicity: ‘I learned that no thing
The story veers away from this secret into other
in the world is one thing; that each thing in the
strands of care and guilt. The narrator worries over
world is two things at least, and probably many
his son returning home from school. He recalls a
more than two things. I learned to find a queer
project he recently gave to his students, to write
pleasure in staring at a thing and dreaming of how
letters to exchange with counterparts in New
many things it might be.’
Zealand, letters he hasn’t sent because he has
It was rumoured in the years that preceded the
misplaced his fellow teacher’s address. He hopes
appearance of Barley Patch that Murnane had lost
the children will forget the undertaking before the
interest in publishing whatever fiction he was
end of term and burns the letters, making sure that
writing. The essays in his 2005 collection Invisible
no scrap remains to float in the air and be found by
yet Enduring Lilacs put several facts on the record:
a child who might discover that his letter was never
that Murnane has never flown in an aeroplane, left
sent and a reply will never be received. The narrator
Australia, travelled on the ocean, worn sunglasses,
may be afflicted with terrible compulsions and a
used a mobile phone or owned a TV; that he lost his
tortured dream life, but the implied author is
84
Catholic faith around the age of twenty (he briefly When I stopped writing at last, I had not for
trained to be a priest) but never stopped believing many years used the terms novel or short story in
in another world (the world of fiction); that he has connection with my writing. Several other
no sense of smell and little sense of taste; that he words I likewise avoided: create, creative, imagine,
has a rigorous ethic of organisation but fears the imaginary, and, above all, imagination. Long
organisational systems of others; that he dislikes before I stopped writing, I had come to
libraries, art galleries, cinemas, the theatre and understand that I had never created any
tourist sites; that he loves charts and diagrams, character or imagined any plot. My preferred
using them to shape his books, and can’t conceive way of summing up my deficiencies was to say
of history except as points on a timeline; that he simply that I had no imagination.
has never understood philosophy, is incapable of
Murnane says he doesn’t envy writers of
abstract thought and has read only two books of
‘imaginative’ fiction because it doesn’t seem a
literary theory, Booth’s Rhetoric of Fiction and Terry
prophylactic against ‘faulty writing’, and alludes
Eagleton’s Literary Theory; that he has no use for
dismissively to the elaborately imagined pharaonic
Freud, Jung or received mythologies; that he tried
Egypt in Mailer’s Ancient Evenings. He thinks of the
and failed to write ‘a huge book of fiction’ to be
imagination as a remnant of crude psychology, a
entitled O, Dem Golden Slippers but in 1991, aged 53,
faculty that might be located in one or another
discovered he ‘seemed to have crossed, at last, the
‘swellings’ located on a schoolboy’s anatomical
country of fiction and to have discovered on its
map of the brain, one he happens to lack.
farther side a country no less inviting’; that he
Yet Murnane persists in characterising all of his
keeps among his 19 filing cabinets filled with
fiction as a report on the images in his mind. He
manuscripts and unpublished writings a report on
describes it as a process of retrieval rather than
this discovery, awaiting a scholar of the future, who
generation but in his account even the act of
he thinks will be a woman; that he believes ‘all art,
reading involves what we’d usually call
even music, aspires to the condition of horse-
imagination: he inserts himself as a character, ‘a
racing.’ Elsewhere he writes of seeing horse races
ghostly presence’, into the novels and stories he
in his mind as a boy during the recitation of Latin
reads. He resists what we tend to call
hymns and prayers at Mass. It’s the glue of his
‘identification’ with fictional characters because he
obsessions.
can’t relate to or disapproves of many male
B
characters’ attitudes and actions towards female
ARLEY PATCH is the first of the four
characters, an exception being Angel Clare in Tess of
books Murnane has published from the far
the D’Urbervilles. The fictions since Barley Patch – A
side of the country of fiction. It is framed
History of Books, A Million Windows and Border Districts,
as a self-interview, beginning with the questions
said to be Murnane’s last book – have continued in
‘Must I write?’ and ‘Why had I written?’ He
this mode: commentary on writing and reading
proposes answers to the second question that
stitched between narrative fragments drawn from
sound both a bit silly and plausible for the author of
Murnane’s mental image-world. ‘For the sake of
a novel like The Plains: ‘Perhaps I wrote in order to
the undiscerning reader,’ he writes in A Million
provide myself with the equivalent in the invisible
Windows, disparaging the ‘self-referential fiction’
world of Tasmania and New Zealand in the visible
popular in the 1970s and 1980s,
world.’ The distance between the narrator of Barley
Patch, though it claims to be fiction, and the I shall repeat the simple fact that I am the
Murnane of the essays seems to be nil: narrator of this work and not the author. In the
matter of my fate, so to call it, I am no more
85
able to exercise choice than is any narrator of complaint of a victim of sexual abuse, then loses
any of the texts going forward in room after her faith during a funeral ceremony, walks out of
room in this wing of the house of two or, the church and never goes back. Relating his
perhaps, three storeys where this text to be is disenchantment with ‘texts intended to explain the
understood as going forward, or any character, mind’, he concludes that his own mind ‘must have
so to call him or her, in any work of fiction been a paradise by comparison with the drab sites
reported to be going forward in any of those where others located their selves or their
rooms. personalities or whatever they called their mental
territories’. Border Districts and the three fictions that
I’ve heard Murnane called an outsider artist, but
precede it are letters from this austere yet infinitely
I don’t think that’s quite right. Plenty of writers
fertile paradise.
emerge as if out of nowhere (after steeping
Interrupting this string of scrupulously tricky
themselves in canonical authors), then proceed to
fictions, in 2015 Murnane published Something for
become more and more their eccentric selves. It
the Pain, a memoir of his lifelong engagement with
might be said, however, that Murnane qualifies as
horse-racing. It is the only one of his books that can
an outsider literary theorist, taking a concept or
reasonably be called breezy. He reminisces about
two from Booth and elaborating an increasingly
jockeys, grouses about rules he doesn’t agree with
complex theory of fiction over several books. The
and tells stories about his father. We learn that he
narrator of Border Districts has moved (in an echo of
now keeps a mobile phone in the boot of his car but
The Plains) to a remote region far from the capital,
doesn’t know how to save numbers to it, that when
but the ‘image-events’ derive from his youth five
he drives he listens to horse races broadcast from
decades before, ‘the period of my life when I read
all over Australia and that he himself has never sat
book after book of fiction in the belief that I would
astride a horse. The knot that has bound religion,
learn thereby matters of much importance not to be
sex and fiction-writing in his books is loosed and
learned from any other kind of book’. He recalls
one thing is left. ‘I have never met anyone whose
losing his Catholic faith while reading a Hardy
interest in racing matched my own.’
novel and the ordeal of discarding ‘a host of mental
images that were no longer of use to me. I had
Christian Lorentzen lives in Brooklyn.
previously considered these images the nearest
available likenesses to personages by definition
invisible to me. I could never have prayed if I had
not been able to bring these images to mind.’
Murnane replaced the Holy Trinity with a new
quasi-mystical complex he’d extracted from his
reading of Booth: a tripartite Murnane, the writer
(Father), the narrator (Son), and the implied author
(Holy Ghost) holding the first two apart in the
reader’s mind. The drift away from the church was
common to Murnane’s generation, children
educated by monks who then did not fill their ranks
and put on their black soutanes and white celluloid
bibs. The monks and their bibs are one of the
striking images from the book’s opening pages,
along with a priest who urinates into holy water in
an emergency and a woman who must type up the
86
journalism. I have decided to discontinue the

Anti-Writer latter activity because the rewards here are
Clair Wills inadequate and residence abroad is essential for
a realistic intervention in the market there. I
The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien have had wide experience in statistical and
edited by Maebh Long. Dalkey Archive, 619 pp, editorial work. I am interested generally in
£20.00, April 2018 university administration and studied the
I
subject in the US.
N MARCH 1957 Brian O’Nolan – better
known under his pen names Flann O’Brien There are embellishments here – O’Nolan got
and Myles na gCopaleen – then aged 45, the sack from the civil service in 1953 because of
applied for a series of jobs at the radio broadcasting his frequent and protracted absences, and for
studios in Cork, including station supervisor, ridiculing his superiors in the newspaper column
programme assistant, and balance and control he wrote as Myles na gCopaleen; it is unlikely he
officer. The same month he announced his ever studied in the US, though he may have
candidacy for the Irish Senate. His principal travelled there in the late 1940s – but the
argument in his own favour was that he was truly biographical sketch is accurate in its essentials. It is
independent of the two main parties, which were repeated throughout this new edition of O’Nolan’s
still floundering about in the ‘detritus’ of the civil letters in scores of introductions and pitches that
war. The ‘fug of cant, hypocrisy and recrimination’ he sent to publishers; agents; provincial Irish
that blighted Irish political life was, he said, newspapers; the British press, radio and TV; and
impossible to shift while the Dáil was crowded even to firms that might be looking for someone to
‘with the immediate relatives of dead or surviving write advertising copy. He created fantastical
politicians, many of them quite unfitted for public backgrounds for himself under other names –
life’. By contrast, O’Nolan promised to ‘speak my whether as Flann O’Brien (‘As a lad I knew Ibsen …
mind without regard to the Whips and Big Brothers Swinburne and Joseph Conrad were also frequent
of Leinster House’. He received a crushingly low visitors to my grandfather’s place … At dusk,
number of votes. In May that year he tried to get Coleridge would sometimes look in on his way
references for a job as assistant lecturer in English home for a final pipe, and more than once the burly
at Trinity College Dublin. Later he applied for a shape of Lord Macaulay was known to grace the
junior lecturer post at Trinity, and then for a job in gathering’) or Myles na gCopaleen (‘Diaghilev I
the student records office: knew and liked, a strange genius of a man if ever
there was one. But Fokine was the daddy of them
I am an honours graduate and hold the all, and an exemplary family man among a crew of
degree of MA from the National University. I roués’). These letters, however, deal with the
am married. burdens of being plain Brian O’Nolan.
I entered the civil service here in 1935 and The Collected Letters span the period from 1934,
progressed to the rank of Principal Officer but when he was in his early twenties and looking
retired in 1953, mainly because of a party forward to the publication of his first novel, At
political atmosphere which made Swim-Two-Birds (1939), to his death in 1966. But
straightforward administration almost more than half of them were written in the last five
impossible. years of his life, when his health (always poor) was
I have a fair reputation internationally as a declining and he was spending more and more
writer and have also been engaged for many time in hospital, either drying out or being treated
years in this country in the better kind of for a series of intractable complaints, including, at
87
the end, throat cancer. There are wry accounts of The loss of his civil service job was a financial
illness and broken bones, and his extraordinary bad catastrophe that he attempted to mitigate by
luck with road accidents – many of the smashes freelancing – writing columns, proofreading and
were caused by his drinking, but sometimes drivers reading manuscripts for publishers – and by selling
ran into him and once he injured his spine in a bus his literary papers. Occasionally, in despair, he
accident. Although – or perhaps because – the Irish applied for low-grade administrative jobs. In May
roads were almost empty of cars in the 1950s, no 1960 he told a prospective employer that ‘I am
one appeared to know how to drive safely. There is known to most people in Dublin who are
a detailed account in the monthly reports he sent to concerned with publication and advertising work,
Timothy O’Keeffe, his publisher at MacGibbon and and have been retained for advertising and
Kee, of the writing and revising of his last novel, “prestige” projects by Messers Guinness and the
The Dalkey Archive, which focuses obsessively on the Hospitals Trust.’
question of whether Saint Augustine was black. It is tempting to argue that these job
The longest and most revealing correspondence is application letters are absent of personality because
with Niall Montgomery, a close friend from they are not personal. But they speak all too
university and later a collaborator on his newspaper eloquently of the way O’Nolan thought about
column, with whom O’Nolan liked to share in- himself. He had no stable perspective on who he
jokes, but on whom he could turn like a terrier, as was or what he amounted to. He blithely assumed
in this 1964 letter accusing him of plagiarism: ‘You that he was sufficiently well known and admired as
are known to far more than me as the pedlar of the Myles na gCopaleen to run for the Senate (under
second-hand, the inadequate, the ununderstood. his own name and without, apparently, bothering
Heretofore this has been disguised by a massive to canvas for votes) and yet applied in the same
“gentleman” charlatanry and why this has now month for a pen-pushing job in Cork. He was
been cast aside is a total mystery to me.’ convinced that The Dalkey Archive was ‘amazing stuff
But a good proportion of the letters fall into the … a fucking masterpiece’ and at the same time
category of personal administration: letters to bank thought it ‘ruinously flawed’.
managers, mortgage companies, typewriter repair The usual explanation for the split between
firms. There are a large number of letters about the O’Nolan’s all-out self-confidence and his air of
robbery of agents’ fees, and double taxation anxious insecurity – a mixture of ‘fretfulness and
arrangements. Many of the letters to Montgomery swagger’, as Maebh Long puts it – is that it was a
also deal with business affairs, as Montgomery (an consequence of his failure to find a publisher for
architect ‘distinguished by inane imitation of the The Third Policeman. By 1941, when he turned thirty,
work of others’) was pressed into the thankless O’Nolan had written three novels and published
tasks of commissioning a headstone for O’Nolan’s two: At Swim-Two-Birds (as Flann O’Brien) in 1939,
father’s grave, or organising the repairs to his and in 1941 his Irish-language masterpiece, An Béal
home, or arranging for a typist to produce a clean Bocht (as Myles na gCopaleen, later simplified to
copy of The Dalkey Archive. Gopaleen). In 1940, he began his regular column
The theme of this volume is money – how to get for the Irish Times, ‘An Cruiskeen Lawn’ (the title is
it and where it goes. There were all sorts of reasons an anglicisation of the Irish for ‘Little brimming
O’Nolan needed cash: because on his father’s jug’), as well as contributing letters to the editor
death, when he was 26, he became for some years written as from Flann O’Brien, and various others.
the sole breadwinner for a family of 12 children; In 1943 his satire on local government, Faustus
because he spent huge amounts on whiskey; Kelly, was staged at the Abbey Theatre and his
because he married in 1948 and bought a house. translation of the Capek brothers’ Insect Play at the
88
Gaiety. Things were also going well at his day job. the reader for Longmans who recommended
In 1937 he was promoted to private secretary to the publication of At Swim-Two-Birds and O’Nolan was
minister for local government and by 1948 (when ambitious for a Greene-sized readership. He sent a
he married) he was acting principal officer of the copy of his first novel to the popular novelist Ethel
planning section of the department. Mannin and when, unsurprisingly, she criticised its
At Swim-Two-Birds gained him astonishingly ‘wilful obscurity’, he defended himself on the
high-class praise, from Beckett, Joyce and Borges grounds that the novel was intended as
among others. It was always going to be hard to entertainment, not literature: ‘It is not a pale-faced
follow that, but The Third Policeman wasn’t even sincere attempt to hold the mirror up and has
given the chance. Longmans, his British nothing in the world to do with James Joyce. It is
publishers, wrote that: ‘We realise the Author’s supposed to be a lot of belching, thumb-nosing
ability but think that he should become less and belly-laughing and I honestly believe that it is
fantastic and in this new novel he is more so.’ funny in parts.’ He wanted to be a popular writer,
O’Nolan consigned the book to a drawer, and but Irish society in the 1940s and 1950s simply did
pretended he had lost the manuscript. The long not provide enough people, or enough of the right
hiatus between the publication of At Swim-Two-Birds kind of people.
in 1939 and The Hard Life in 1961 meant that, at O’Nolan was scathing about attempts by Irish
least for non-Irish readers, he had no standing as a ‘artists’ (a term of abuse in his lexicon) to
writer. He couldn’t pitch an article to the Guardian manufacture a specialist audience. In October 1938
or the Sunday Telegraph without a long explanation – in his first outing as Flann O’Brien – he
of who he was and what he had written (‘For 25 intervened in a debate between Sean O’Faolain and
years or so I have been writing a feature in the Irish Frank O’Connor on ‘Ideals for an Irish Theatre’, in
Times under the name MYLES na GOPALEEN: this the letters pages of the Irish Times. The spat was self-
has been smart and humorous stuff on the surface consciously intellectual, with O’Connor arguing for
but often with ironic and critical undertones’). a return to ‘peasant quality’ and O’Faolain in favour
Prematurely aged and alcoholic – according to his of importing European expressionism. O’Connor
friend and biographer Anthony Cronin, by his late made the mistake of complaining about people
forties O’Nolan was generally so pickled by three in laughing at the serious bits at the Abbey Theatre:
the afternoon that he retired to bed – he was never ‘Unwittingly he puts his finger on the root of the
not in the position of having to carve out a place for whole unseemly stink,’ O’Nolan wrote.
himself as a writer.
It is not the directors who are at fault, or the
The failure to find an American publisher for At
players or playwrights but the audience. Up to
Swim-Two-Birds (‘a little too odd for this market’)
fairly recent times, the audience at the Abbey
was another blow. O’Nolan had to look to London
was mainly an esoteric coterie who came to see
and New York for readers: the size of the market for
plays they saw several times before merely
his writing in Ireland was tiny. But even when he
because they regarded themselves as ‘inveterate
was successful in getting published abroad (not
Abbey-goers’ … People who go to the Abbey
very often), he tended to attract readers who
nowadays simply go for entertainment, and
praised his novels for having an ‘Irish’ quality, or,
laugh outright when something on the stage
even worse, for being ‘Joycean’. He didn’t want to
seems funny or ridiculous, notwithstanding the
be a specialist cultural export or attract the sort of
fury of a thousand red-face art-stuffed boys in
readers that had embraced Joyce. He thought of
the wings. God forgive them! The obvious
himself as a popular novelist, writing for a well-
remedy is to exclude the loutish audiences and
educated but broad audience. Graham Greene was
add to the cast of each play 500 ‘extra’ peasants,
89
accommodating them in the stalls. The at the Abbey Theatre, by WAAMA, or worst of all by
producer can then get his laugh when he wants the American academy.
it, and can see that it’s a real laugh. Early in 1963 O’Nolan began to plunder the
typescript of The Third Policeman for his new book
The problem with the real audience, or actual
The Dalkey Archive, in which both Saint Augustine
readers (O’Nolan calls them ‘anti-writers’), is that
and James Joyce appear. In the novel, Joyce is living
they refuse to have their taste decided for them. In
incognito, pulling pints in a pub in the Dublin
an early letter, intervening in an Irish Times debate
suburb of Dalkey and thinking about joining the
about ‘literary criticism’, O’Nolan notes that
Jesuits. O’Nolan insisted to his publishers that his
writers and anti-writers were accusing each other
portrait of the artist as an old man was meant as an
with equal venom of being ‘sewer-minded’:
attack on the Joyce industry, rather than on Joyce
one would imagine that anybody who can himself. ‘The intention here is not to make Joyce
read or write in modern Ireland asked for himself ridiculous but to say something funny
nothing better than an idle evening down a about the preposterous image of him that emerges
sewer, moving a quiet oar down the dark from the treatment he has received at the hands of
streams, browsing in quiet backwater with a many commentators and exegetists (mostly, alas,
drowsy angler’s eye on the plunging rats, ‘wine- American.)’ But to Montgomery he admitted he
bark on the wine-dark waterway’ … At this rate was trying to make Joyce ‘even a more obnoxious
any house agent who hears a prospective client prig than he is’ and criticised him for cultivating a
inquiring particularly about the plumbing and pretentious and privileged readership:
drainage of a house will know that he is dealing
I do not accept that JAJ was demolished by
with a literary bird.
failure of FW [Finnegans Wake] to resound in the
O’Nolan’s contempt for anyone he classed a BELL-fries of the world. He did expect that
pretentious arty type, and particularly anyone who result. FW was a private leisure exercise, and
joined the Writers, Artists, Actors, Musicians intended only for coteries and US slobs. Nor
Association (WAAMA), was evident in his was he dismayed by the reception of Ulysses,
‘Cruiskeen Lawn’ columns. It was also central to burning of copies at Folkstone docks etc. Ten
his love-hate relationship with Joyce. years were to pass before the book got proper
I
recognition and JAJ, knowing what was in the
N the spring of 1939, O’Nolan sent a copy of book, knew he could afford to wait. By the early
At Swim-Two-Birds to Joyce in Paris, via his twenties he had got his hooks into that wealthy
friend Niall Sheridan, who discovered that US lady and money trouble no longer bothered
Joyce had already read and enjoyed it. He was even him. His main interest in life was acting the
putting in a good word with the French papers. Yet ballocks as grd. seigneuer [grand seigneur].
most of the references to Joyce in O’Nolan’s letters
His jealousy of the patronage Joyce enjoyed is
are scornful. The more critics insisted that the
understandable, given his own financial situation.
works of Flann O’Brien were Joycean, or post-
Still, the basis of the attack seems bizarre, given
Joycean, the more he fumed. He turned against At
that so much of O’Nolan’s own writing depended
Swim-Two-Birds, describing it as ‘this dreadful book
for its effects on the existence of a tiny group of
of mine’ and ‘schoolboy juvenilia’. This was not
people in the know. For the first couple of years
simply the anxiety of influence. It went to the heart
‘Cruiskeen Lawn’ was written in Irish, and
of his ambition to be a writer of the people, rather
appeared in a paper with a small circulation and an
than an ‘artist’ propped up by an ‘esoteric coterie’
even smaller number of readers who knew Irish.
90
The running jokes and puns in his later English- publication’) and the ordinary reading public in
language columns depended on readers following Britain and the United States didn’t understand
the column every day. His novel An Béal Bocht was a him. He was a popular writer who lacked a popular
satire, in Irish, of Irish-language revivalists. It medium, though it wasn’t for want of trying.
would be hard to think of a more effective way of Throughout the late 1950s he pitched columns to
limiting your readership, and O’Nolan was well local newspapers from Skibbereen to Longford,
aware of this. In a late letter to the literary agent painstakingly reading the local news, in an attempt
Anthony Sheil (pitching for a contract to write a to match subject to audience. And in his last years
book about the Irish literary scene) he enclosed he began writing comic sketches for television.
cuttings from ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’ and gave this Irish television began broadcasting on New
summary of ‘the style of work I have been doing for Year’s Eve 1961. In 1963, when O’Nolan’s sketches
about 25 years’: for the veteran comic actor Jimmy O’Dea were
aired, there were fewer than 250,000 television sets
It should be remembered that this is special
in the country. These sketches were hardly going to
writing directed to a particular milieu and
make him a household name and the work wasn’t
perhaps not readily comprehensible to the
particularly well paid. But the weekly show was a
outside reader. Parades of erudition, recourse
natural successor to the newspaper columns,
to language of the gutter, jeering, spelling
satirising current events for a loyal audience that
foibles, other people’s mistakes and so on are
could be counted on to watch every episode, and
all genuine enough but satirically intended.
appreciate the running gags. O’Nolan talked up the
Great versatility is also shown as to subject and
show in his letters, exaggerating the viewing
treatment, and polyglot gymnastics indulged
figures. He began pitching new ideas for TV,
in.
including a pilot for an Irish version of That Was the
It is worth pausing at the ‘but’ in that Week That Was that never got off the ground. His
penultimate sentence. O’Nolan was writing satire, letters in his last years are full of ‘big money’
not caricature. It was important to him to stay certainties: a BBC serial of The Dalkey Archive was
faithful to the people he was writing about. The just around the corner and the novel he was
‘particular milieu’ was part of the joke, especially in working on when he died – Slattery’s Sago Saga, a
the columns where ‘the brother’ or ‘the plain spoof on de Valera and the Kennedys – was bound
people of Ireland’ interrupt Myles with questions, to break open the Irish-American market and rake
stories, or – most often – complaints: ‘The Plain in film options. He even cast the actors.
People of Ireland: Another day gone and no jokes. O’Nolan tried his best to hitch himself to the
Myself: Yes, curse you.’ ‘Genuine enough’ may be new commercial popular culture made possible by
another way of saying that although his readership TV – ‘Eng. Lit. is a thing of the past,’ he wrote to
was small, it was not a coterie. The response he was Timothy O’Keeffe, ‘we are now after money’ – and
looking for was the ‘really real’ laugh. He wanted to it’s tempting to wonder what sort of writer he
write for people who did not think of themselves might have been if he had gained a larger audience,
either as subjects for or consumers of art. or moved to Britain. In the summer of 1963 he
But the plain people of Ireland didn’t read him wrote to O’Keeffe that ‘this Profumo-Keeler-Ward
in the Irish Times (he told the editor that he had once syndrome is unfair competition for those who
asked for a copy of the paper ‘in a large town in the attempt to write works of imagination.’ It’s a good
north’: ‘“Naw,” the lady behind the counter said, enough joke, but it doesn’t conceal his envy of
“I’ve just sold it.” It seemed to me an inspired way conditions in Britain, where, post-Suez and in the
of saying that your newspaper is a very singular wake of the Profumo Affair, secular, leftish satire
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was nourished by the continued incompetence and

complacency of the establishment. Fifty years after
the revolution, Irish priorities were completely
different. The task of breaking postwar solidarity
and chipping away at deference was undertaken not
by satirists but by more earnest cultural
commentators such as the much despised Sean
O’Faolain, Conor Cruise O’Brien, and Gay Byrne on
The Late Late Show.
‘Writing for TV is the most attractive
proposition just now. I do work for both BBC and
ITV, using other names,’ he wrote (not necessarily
truthfully) to the editor of the Sunday Independent in
1964. ‘For some reason that’s not very clear to me,
there is a shortage of writers who can tackle the
new television technique. The funny thing is that I
detest TV so much myself that I refuse to let a set
into my own house.’ O’Nolan’s difficulty was not,
as Richard Hoggart argued of Britain in The Uses of
Literacy (1957), that the culture of the industrial
working class was being hollowed out by
commerce, but that there was no industrial
working class in Ireland to speak of. They were all
living in Birmingham and Coventry. If they had
been able to stay at home, he might have had a
larger audience. They would at least have bought
televisions.
Clair Wills is King Edward VII Professor of English

Literature at Cambridge. Her latest book is Lovers
and Strangers: An Immigrant History of Postwar Britain.
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Brussels – a hypertrophied analogue of Belgium’s

At the Towner Gallery imperial ambitions – and on the day it opened a
Brian Dillon mob invaded, tearing down statues and paintings,
pissing and shitting on the marble floors.
T
From the start, the courtrooms, corridors and
HE PALAIS DE JUSTICE in Brussels is precincts of the Palais de Justice seemed also to
a product of civic and architectural constitute a ruinous, fantastical museum of the
delirium, a Circumlocution Office building itself. Its scale, and awful mix of Egyptian,
looming over the historically working- Greek and Byzantine influences, recalls the
class Marolles district like a sinister, secular architectural reveries of Piranesi; it is said that
basilica. It’s bigger than St Peter’s in Rome, there are staircases that go nowhere, like those in
covering an area of 26,000 square metres, with his Carceri d’Invenzione. When Freud saw it two years
reputedly the largest accumulation of stone blocks after it was completed, he was put in mind of an
in Europe. Its architect, Joseph Poelaert, inspired Assyrian palace as drawn by Gustave Doré. Later
by John Martin’s scenes of apocalyptic ruin, had visitors have hardly got past the bristling columns
been fantasising about such a structure for years at the main entrance before thinking of Kafka: this
before he won the commission to design the new is where Orson Welles hoped to film his adaptation
Palais in 1861. Time passed, costs swelled from of The Trial. W.G. Sebald’s Jacques Austerlitz goes
four million to fifty million francs, Poelaert died in wandering in the depths of the Palais looking for
1879 and four years later the city received its Masonic symbols, and finds corridors piled high
monumental hilltop labyrinth – ‘a colossus, inside with ancient office furniture, chairs and lecterns
a monster’, Paul Verlaine said. Public reaction was and roll-top cupboards – as if the last, lost
hostile. The building was considered an affront to inhabitants had barricaded themselves in.
93
When the artist Carey Young first began magistrate and her clerk were murdered in court in
exploring the Palais, she was struck by the female 2010 – Young decided to work surreptitiously, with
judges and lawyers. She spotted five women in the help of an assistant, a small tripod and long
conference in a courtroom; they spotted her, and lenses. A Belgian lawyer advised her, if caught
rushed to close the door. Young’s 18-minute video pointing her camera into courtrooms, to say that
Palais de Justice, which is on show at the Towner Art judges are public figures and possess no right to
Gallery in Eastbourne (until 2 June), is a meditation privacy while at the bench. The argument worked
on authority and visibility. After her request to film on the few security guards who tried to stop her.
in the building was denied on security grounds – a
Palais de Justice is projected to fill a large gallery

wall at the Towner and at first it seems the work Next we’re looking down vertiginously into the
will address itself to the wild iconography and vast, gloomy lobby, or salle des pas perdus, where
maddening dimensions of the place. A young man lawyers meet with their clients in plush alcoves. A
in T-shirt and trainers descends a monumental set distant porter toils across the hall, pushing a trolley
of stairs, flanked by huge statues of classical full of papers. A small party of lawyers trots by
orators. (Tourists often don’t progress beyond this laden down with overstuffed folders, like
Cecil B. DeMille scenery, exhausting themselves something out of a cartoon by Daumier. But Young
trying to photograph its bizarre angles and vistas.) quickly takes us past this bureaucratic comedy, into
94
the heart of the legal process and its delicate advocates in front of them, cock their heads
performance. quizzically or stare straight ahead with what looks
The courtrooms of the Palais de Justice have like unfathomable boredom but is probably
heavy doors padded with leather and inset with strategic impassivity. They are all silent. Stuck on
round windows, and it’s through these that much the other side of soundproof doors, Young gives
of Young’s video was secretly shot. She Palais de Justice a soundtrack drawn from the muffled
concentrates at first on the faces and gestures of life of the corridor, which occasionally we see
the judges – they shuffle their papers, pause with reflected in the scratched pane of a courtroom
pen in midair, peer over their reading glasses at the porthole.
The judges dominate much of Palais de Justice, advocates are reduced to anonymous details: an
but they slowly give way to portraits of younger ear, the nape of a neck, hair that rhymes with the
women, the lawyers arguing before them. One tight pleats and loose folds of their robes. In these
woman appears early on, perfectly framed in profile shots, Young’s long lens produces a tiny depth of
by the little window: she looks like a study, in field, sharply isolating aspects of person and dress
miniature, of rhetorical gestures, attitudes of from the blurred suggestion of courtroom
appeal or even supplication. Her colleagues, who panelling, distant paintings and other faceless
come later, are more fragmented – whether by the figures. It’s as if a different gaze has intruded,
limited camera angles available to Young or her voyeuristic and fixated and very likely male.
deliberate editing out of their faces. The young
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It’s the gaze, most obviously, of some cinematic which women have taken over the institutions of
precursors. All those backs of heads, with hair justice, and perhaps much else (assuming, that is,
pinned up or loosely pulled to one side of the neck, anything exists outside of this huge self-involved
resemble certain indelible shots in Andrei system). The men who appear in Young’s video
Tarkovsky’s Solaris, Chris Marker’s La Jetée and its seem at best peripheral figures, always subject to
ur-text, Hitchcock’s Vertigo. There’s a sci-fi quality the speech and gaze of the judges, or stranded in
to Palais de Justice: from the submarine portholes to passageways and vestibules. One fretful advocate
the growing sense that the work shows a future in looks as though he has been waiting there for ever.
Young has been making art about the law for Palais de Justice comes at the subject from
some years, and in a variety of media. Report of the another direction and in a more aesthetic mood.
Legal Subcommittee (2010) is a print of an Young has made, but not shown at the Towner, a
astronomical map, accompanied by the transcript related series of eight photographs entitled, after
of a UN meeting to determine the legal definition Kafka, Before the Law, which depicts more or less
of outer space. Legal Maxims (2013) consists of the ornate courtroom doors – closed, ajar or wide open
phrases ‘wrong in itself’ and ‘nobody’s thing’ – suggesting different degrees of procedural
rendered in white neon, as if the principles of transparency or opacity. Verlaine wrote that the
malum in se and res nullius have been translated into Palais de Justice ‘wants to be as terrible as the Law,
the rhetorical register of street advertising. Her severe and sumptuously naked’. In Young’s video a
work is frequently exercised by the language of the luxurious austerity prevails, in the architecture and
law, its precision, abstraction, density. among her human subjects. The viewer watches
96
them covertly but here and there a heart-stopping

moment of connection seems to occur. A judge’s
gaze drifts or darts towards the camera. The
waiting male lawyer turns and gives the artist (and
us) a hard stare. Except it’s an illusion: Young was
too far away, or too well concealed, to be observed.
Both she and the law are getting on with their hard
work, secretly and in plain sight.
Brian Dillon is working on a novel and a book

about sentences.
97
type; and activity on Facebook, Twitter and

Stained in Red Pinterest. ZestFinance also gathers similar
Rachel O’Dwyer information from the borrower’s social circle – the
‘data shadows’ cast by friends and acquaintances.
Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and It’s unclear how having wealthy Facebook friends,
Financial Identity in America by Josh Lauer. Columbia, playing Pokémon Go or using an Android phone
352 pp, £27.00, September 2018 translates into creditworthy behaviour, but a
W
decade after the financial crash, we are being urged
HEN the Chinese e-commerce to trust the numbers.
platform Alibaba, the biggest retailer Credit is an exchange made on a promise to pay
in the world, launched an app at some future point. The provision of credit
allowing its customers to buy products and transfer depends, therefore, on an assessment of whether
money instantaneously, it understood that the or not to trust that promise. It’s a risky business.
resulting data – who buys what and who sends Josh Lauer traces the history of credit scoring – a
money to whom – could also be used to underwrite means of quantifying this risk – back to the 1840s.
credit. In a society where grandmothers use Of course, merchants had always had ways of
smartphones to pay for groceries and beggars have deciding which among their customers should be
their own barcodes to help them accept donations, given credit, and ledgers are full of accounts of
there’s plenty of data to make use of. Alibaba’s local blacksmiths who couldn’t repay their loans on
three-digit ‘Sesame score’ sets the terms of a loan time. But by the 1830s such personal assessments
according to variables such as the academic weren’t always possible. Migration and trade
degrees a customer holds, their activity on social between cities in the newly industrialised economy
media and how many video games they have had made it harder to establish the personal
purchased in the past month. A person’s score relationships in which people were willing to wait
affects their employability and likely success in to be paid or paid back, and to trust that this would
applying for a Schengen visa; it also affects how happen. Credit deals could still be made locally,
prominently their profile is displayed on Chinese but regional and national traders found it
dating sites. In Europe, meanwhile, Kreditech, a increasingly difficult to gauge the worth of trading
lending service that aims to become the ‘Amazon of partners. In 1837, Lauer writes, ‘a cascade of
consumer finance’, is mining Facebook data its defaulted debts wiped out investments, wrecked
customers voluntarily share. In the US, business, and crippled the American economy.’
ZestFinance, the brainchild of Google’s former The panic was the reflection of the changing social
chief information officer Doug Merrill, is using big order, but it manifested as a crisis of confidence in
data to rank customers whose credit rating has finance; inflated land values and wildcat banking
never recovered from the subprime mortgage had eroded trust in the system. Merchants were left
crisis. clutching worthless paper promises from virtual
To ZestFinance, ‘all data is credit data.’ It strangers. One of them, Lewis Tappan, a silk
claims to have built a system capable of gathering merchant from New York State, was bankrupted.
thousands of details about an individual on the Four years later he established the Mercantile
basis of their online activity, on the basis of which Agency, which collected detailed information about
it makes split-second decisions as to whether they businessmen in order to get a clearer picture of the
should be given credit. These details include the risk they represented.
content of text messages; online browsing By the 1870s Tappan’s agency had expanded
behaviour and purchases; education history; massively. It now also collected information about
records of online money transfers; data use; phone
98
consumers, a relatively new (and much larger) agents to dig into their customers’ lives. The details
category, and employed more than ten thousand in their reports were mostly gleaned from local
correspondents to carry out the work. Credit gossip and coloured by the speculations of the
evaluation had progressed from straightforward mainly white, middle-class professionals who put
‘blacklisting’ – the ‘little lists of names’ of poor them together. One reporter from Buffalo, New
prospects – to an ‘affirmative/negative’ system. It York believed that ‘prudence in large transactions
was no longer enough to single out the worst with all Jews should be used,’ while another in
offenders; the system now attempted to create a Georgia described a liquor store he was profiling as
ranking that ran from deadbeat to upstanding ‘a low Negro shop’. In the 1950s, Lauer writes,
citizen. Tappan was quick to defend the bureau agencies began to offer ‘welcoming services’ for
against its critics, claiming in one advertisement newcomers to their district. A hostess would visit,
that it was ‘not a system of espionage, but the same bearing gifts and promotions for local businesses
as merchants usually employ – only on an extended as well as a credit application. She also cast a
plan – to ascertain whether persons applying for trained eye over their living circumstances and
credit are worthy of the same and to what extent’. reported back to the agency. The Dallas Chilton
Lauer thinks differently. Credit scoring was, he Bureau even made a foray into babysitting services.
argues, the birth of a new form of surveillance, with Besides poor housekeeping, credit agents took
data gathered and monetised at the behest of a note of physical appearance, religious faith, marital
private organisation. problems, drinking habits and the views of
In Britain, lines of credit were largely dictated neighbours, employers and acquaintances.
by class and capital (assets, properties, wealthy Occupation was obviously significant and not only
relatives), but the new American system also because it indicated income. More important was
examined ‘capacity’ (age, experience, past success what a profession implied about a person’s class
or failure in business) and ‘character’, a nebulous and sense of social responsibility. Teachers, nurses
category that was shorthand for all kinds of things, and doctors were highly rated, while hotel
including local reputation, work ethic and personal employees, waiters, janitors and painters were
disposition. A credit assessment didn’t just riskier prospects. Shopping habits were also
establish whether you had the means to make good factored in: ‘If a man who purchased only
on your debts, but also whether you were the kind necessities suddenly begins to buy “jimcracks”
of person likely to do so. It is as if Benjamin then it was thought likely that he had fallen into a
Franklin had anticipated this intensity of scrutiny foolish courtship or taken to abusing his credit
when he wrote, in his ‘Advice to a Young privilege.’ Another key metric was geography, and
Tradesman’ in 1748: long before zip codes, credit managers had
‘detailed mental maps’ of their districts, with
The most trifling actions that affect a man’s
particular neighbourhoods and streets effectively
credit are to be regarded. The sound of your
blacklisted. ‘Nationality’, a proxy for ethnicity, was
hammer at five in the morning, or nine at night,
also seen as significant, with ‘Negroes, East
heard by the creditor, makes him easy six
Indians and Foreigners’ ranked bottom of the list.
months longer; but if he sees you at the billiard-
Gradually, the handwritten reports housed in
table, or hears your voice in a tavern, when you
vast reference books in the New York offices of
should be at work, he sends for his money the
Tappan’s agency were translated into code: ‘1 6 8
next day.
11 14 17 21 25’ after a dealer’s name stood for
As part of the shift from merchant to consumer ‘making money’, ‘economical’, ‘business not too
credit, credit agencies and department stores hired much extended’, ‘does not pay large interest’,
99
‘good moral character’, ‘credits prudently’ and ‘not scores came to be thought of as more accurate than
sued’. Shops gave colour-coded cards to human insight, so easily affected by prejudice.
customers: in one store the key was ‘red for no Numbers were impartial. Or so it seemed. In truth
credit, black for $25, blue for $50, green for $100 the practice of scoring had never been only about
and gold for $150 or more’. In the 1920s, Rand ‘economic facts’. The score took qualitative first
Visible Filing Systems were marketed with impressions – ‘effeminate gestures’, poorly kept
transparent celluloid tabs in various colours for this back yards, neighbourhood grudges – and made
purpose. In another system, all the files started out them quantitative, so that they had the appearance
white, but were permanently stained blue or red in of facts. By these means it could easily become
the event of slow or non-payment. accepted institutional knowledge that ‘coloured
From the 1950s onwards there were several ministers’ were poor credit prospects, or that
attempts to subject underwriting to mathematical certain ethnic neighbourhoods should be avoided
modelling. The most popular method was at all costs.
developed by the English statistician and eugenicist It was a few decades before these codified
Ronald Fisher. ‘Discriminant analysis’ allowed systems crossed the Atlantic. Until the 1980s, UK
researchers to boil down the information from bank managers had to give personal approval to
credit applications to a set of discrete variables, loans for customers at their branch and were
each allocated a value and weight reflecting its trained in underwriting from the start of their
statistical association with payment or default. A careers. Then, following the expansion of financial
statistician could select a random sample of ‘good’ services and banks’ customer bases, these
and ‘bad’ loans and attempt to read backwards the underwriting capacities were transferred to
significance of easily coded attributes like age, centralised credit departments.
occupation and income in predicting risk. In the Some thirty years later, credit scoring allowed
1960s, Fair, Isaac and Co., whose FICO score is the securitisation of home mortgages into risk-
now a fixture of consumer lending in the US, used structured financial instruments. The subprime
the technique to test variables – bank accounts, lending boom distributed this risk by means of
income, family size – and correlations between complex instruments such as collateralised debt
them (e.g. number of bedrooms combined with obligations and credit default swaps. But after the
family size). Income, it turned out, wasn’t a good system went into crisis in 2008, financial
predictor of anything, and neither was marital institutions went through what the economic
status, but things like room-per-child ratio and anthropologist Bill Maurer calls a period of ‘re-
having a telephone in your house were. And yet, risking’. The old scoring mechanisms had failed.
while statistics could tell credit analysts which New financial technologies emerged, claiming to
variables were significant, they were often hard put establish, once and for all, an accurate measure of
to explain why. risk.
Scholars often present these techniques as Companies like ZestFinance or Branch, a for-
having been so persuasive that they swept away all profit firm that assesses ‘people’s credit based on
trust in human judgment. Lauer shows, however, smartphone data’, use machine learning, which
that credit men were reluctant to give up on the old doesn’t merely establish the rules by which an
belief that one could rely on a ‘feeling, perhaps algorithm acts on datasets (charitable donations =
rather vague and indefinable’, that someone was a good; video games = bad), but teaches the
good or a bad bet. Many agents were suspicious of algorithm to refine and refine again the functions
any technique that strayed too far from ‘good old- that produce decisions, often in inscrutable ways.
fashioned sense’. But as time went on, statistical For example, people who fill out the ZestFinance
100
loan application in capital letters are deemed to be penalties are already being applied. Figures
riskier borrowers than those who write in a released recently by the National Public Credit
combination of upper and lower case. Doug Merrill Information Centre show that by the end of 2018,
says he doesn’t know why. Others have discovered the courts had banned 17.5 million ‘discredited’
that such categories as browser type and screen citizens from buying plane tickets, and a further 5.5
resolution play a role in determining credit scores. million from travelling by train.
Although nobody really knows how these
automated scores work, Branch, Kreditech and Rachel O’Dwyer is a lecturer in the School of
ZestFinance argue that they are not only more Visual Culture in the National College of Art and
accurate, but fairer: the algorithm ‘sees beyond’ the Design, Ireland.
prejudices that skewed access to credit in the past.
And yet, studies of machine learning algorithms
show that they mirror historical forms of racial,
economic and gender discrimination. Critics point
to the inherent biases of those who write the code,
and note that the machine learns from historical
data riddled with prejudiced inferences and old
resentments. It has been shown that having an
African American name negatively affects the new
credit scores, also that the availability of Amazon
Prime’s same-day delivery service decreases in
areas where people have tended to be excluded
from credit. Since Amazon is rumoured to be
applying for a financial licence in order to set up
bank accounts for its 300 million customers, this
automated bias could have a huge impact. And a
mathematical ‘score’ is harder to contest than a
decision made by a person.
The maths behind the assessment of our worth
is becoming harder to untangle and dispute at the
very time it is playing an increasing part in shaping
our future. Facebook is experimenting with a
‘trustworthiness score’ for its more than two billion
users. And the Chinese government is developing a
‘social credit’ system that will assign a score to each
of its 1.4 billion citizens based on an aggregation of
economic and social factors. While it remains
unclear what kinds of ‘social’ behaviour will be
rewarded or penalised (one journalist wondered
whether women would be penalised for remaining
single or not having children), the government has
made it clear that poor scores will affect people’s
access to public transport, employment and basic
social services. The pilots are up and running, and
101
Poland border, finding something appealing in

Diary setting foot in two countries, and as they walked
Joanna Biggs they played a game they’d apparently played on the
way to primary school every morning, of times-
I
table questions they would pass back and forth. (I
T TOOK ME a long time to accept my envied him in this: as the last child, he played many
mother’s brain was failing. I knew the usual such games with her, which I glimpsed when I was
pathways of her thought, the jumps she home from university.) I remember thinking it was
would make from this to that; these jumps were cruel to set Mum maths problems and then say
new. She’d always made her mind ours too. When there was something wrong when she couldn’t
we were teaching my little brother, Richard, to talk, answer them. But I’d never heard about this
to say ‘ta’ for a proffered rusk, my mother would particular game, and didn’t know it was normal for
stop me and my other brother, George, from them, and abnormal when she giggled and
speaking. We all knew what he was supposed to answered with ‘I don’t know.’
say, but if Richard was ever going to learn, we had I didn’t go with her to meet any of the doctors.
to stay silent. The brains of mother and child aren’t Not the GP who referred her for the scan that
separate. If he wanted it, he would have to say so. showed blood wasn’t getting to her brain properly.
She would incline her head, lean over and say ‘yes?’ (So there could be an operation?) Not the Austrian
as if it wasn’t clear what he wanted, as if she hadn’t specialist who broke the news to her, whom my
been giving him what he needed without him mother cried in front of, told she was ashamed of
asking for it for his whole life. letting her family down, and then begged to see the
I noticed that she was getting flustered more following year ‘just for fun’. Not the neuroscientists
easily: going through the double border control at in Queen Square in Bloomsbury who were
the Gare du Nord threw her, the getting out and the interested in her because she was under sixty but
putting away of her passport – she had been the without genetic markers for Alzheimer’s disease.
keeper of all passports, all birth certificates short Mum was 57 when she was diagnosed in 2013; the
and long. Sending me a document I’d left on the prognosis is three to nine years. I wanted to know
desktop of the family computer flummoxed her. I whether I might get Alzheimer’s early too, but they
was 25 and she was 52: I idly concurred with an say she doesn’t have the early onset gene. I don’t go
item on Woman’s Hour about the menopausal brain. and see the doctors now because I don’t see the
I helped her when she seemed to need it: it wasn’t point in talking to the doctors. They can do nothing
taxing, and I’d been doing the ironing, the for her. There is a drug that improves symptoms at
hoovering, the chopping of vegetables alongside the beginning, but otherwise there is nothing.
her my whole life. She was the mother and I was Most of what we know about Alzheimer’s
perpetually in training for something, if not comes from cutting up the brains of the dead:
motherhood itself quite yet then a certain sort of brains of people who have died from Alzheimer’s
feminine competence that I secretly disdained as are visibly shrunken, and the deep folds of the brain
retrograde while mostly going along with it. lobes have filled out so that the surface is
It was Richard who said we ought to do smoother, more ball-like. If you slice the brain and
something. She’d gone on her own to visit him in look at it through a microscope, you can see that
Berlin, where he was living, and had had trouble plaques have built up around neurons, destroying
getting her U-bahn ticket from the machine. But them, and tangles of protein have accumulated
then who doesn’t have trouble with ticket machines uncontrollably inside cells. Drugs to clear away the
in foreign countries? They’d gone to the Germany- plaques and tangles don’t seem to be able to
102
improve the symptoms of the disease. Many other multicoloured costume jewels, but when she went
conditions have been put forward as possible to pay, there was only a supermarket loyalty card in
causes: high blood pressure, lack of vitamin D, her purse. She stopped cutting her fingernails. Her
head injuries, depression, obesity, an unbalanced bullets of red lipstick, always worn to a double-
microbiome. It goes on. On the one hand, my sided curve for being applied two, three, four times
mother was never very slim after she had three a day, were now stuck in their lids, mashed and
children, and she got a whiplash injury in a car jagged. She spent time arranging her jewellery
crash in the mid-1990s, which was followed by boxes and handbags, mixing up diamonds from her
depression; on the other hand, she had low blood married life and costume pieces from when she was
pressure, was hardly ever ill, walked outside most a girl, or putting on and taking off a papier mâché
days, read thrillers by the yard, knew French, could bangle. If the thing had come from one of us
sew a fully lined and corseted ball gown, and drove children, or from my Dad – no matter if it was a
and cooked and argued and organised all three of golden-cased lipstick or supermarket slippers – it
us through our childhoods. Sometimes the only was ‘something precious’ and went in with the
cause that makes sense to me is my carelessness as diamonds. She liked zips; she liked knotting and
a daughter: the times I drove across the country to unknotting the belt of her trenchcoat; she would
visit a friend and didn’t bother to call to say I’d got grab bluebells by the handful and bring them in
there safely; the moment on my wedding day when from the garden. One day when none of her bras
she gave me a garter for luck in the loos and I didn’t could be found and we started to wonder what the
wait for her so we could go back out to the wedding new French cleaner liked to do in his spare time, we
together. There are a thousand things like this and found that she had put her best bra in a red
many days when I think them as good a reason as handbag a friend had recently given her and put
any to take a mother from a daughter. When her both under the bed. She wanted to go to the loo
illness didn’t feel like my punishment, it felt, still very often when we were out, and she needed help
feels, like a sword hanging over my future with unpredictable taps, hand dryers and flush
happiness. handles.
The diagnosis did and didn’t seem to make When I was with her, there was always
sense to her. ‘My life is in fits and starts,’ she told something happening. It would be days later, in the
me one day, and I felt too that my understanding of middle of my life in London, that I would find
what was happening to her was in fits and starts. myself crying. I started to dread the day she
One of the last emails I got from Mum was in 2011, wouldn’t recognise me. ‘Janet! Joannet! Janetta!’
when she was 55, an apology for not finishing an she would call out, not quite finding on her tongue
embroidered cushion she’d wanted to make for me. the name she had given me. Who am I if my own
‘It was so difficult to remember how to do things mother doesn’t recognise me, I wondered. Who
last year,’ she wrote. ‘I feel so ashamed for starting was I anyway? I began to question everything: did I
things for you, and not finishing them off … This want to have this sort of life, be in this sort of
are my very personal feelings throughout last year, marriage, even be this sort of writer? Did I want this
which was a bitch, look after them for me.’ We sort of mother? I went home less often. I spent my
talked less often on the phone as words became time writing and rewriting the non-fiction book
harder for her to find: I would call and if Dad wasn’t about working lives I’d taken on the year she was
there to mediate she would say things like ‘Can you diagnosed. When the book was done, I went out a
ring back when there’s sunshine?’ We went lot, and those evenings were many-Negronied. I got
shopping for clothes, and she chose an scared of her: she began having jerks which meant
uncharacteristic cardigan embellished with she would spill her coffee mid-cup; she got
103
unpredictably angry and could not be soothed; she until I started to do it. I visited in the furloughs of
would cry and no one would know why. I didn’t depression that followed my divorce, when I
enjoy my impatience in moments like these. I couldn’t see the point in getting up, but there I had
didn’t enjoy seeing her in confusion. ‘Why is it that to, because Dad was out and she couldn’t get up
anyone likes me?’ I remember her once crying out. I without me. I helped her in the shower, singing
couldn’t see the effort she was making to talk, only bad renditions of Madonna, Michael Jackson and
that I couldn’t speak to her in the way I was used to. Wham! songs when she got flustered with drying
And there were moments when I experienced this herself and putting on face cream and brushing her
loss as a kind of freedom. Freedom from criticism – teeth and pulling up her tights. (Approximate
she had once asked me if a university boyfriend had versions of 1980s pop aren’t prescribed for
left me because I didn’t wear lipstick – as well as Alzheimer’s, but music very much is.) I found new
from certain pressures: she’d cried with joy when I ways of being with her. In the summer, I read the
told her I was getting married; she was hotly Ischia scenes from the Ferrante novels to her as she
expecting a grandchild. (One of my thoughts after dozed on a lounger in our sunny back garden. And I
discovering she was so ill was that I should have the would read Camus and Beauvoir in French out loud
child I wasn’t sure I was up to having, while she to her too. (One of my first memories of my
could still be a grandmother.) But I knew the mother’s gloriousness is her arguing with a hotel
freedom to disappoint her was a cowardly one, manager in French one summer holiday.) We
because it was unearned; I wouldn’t have to defy swung side by side on the swings in the children’s
her. When I decided I did want a different life, one playground, her worrying that we would get caught.
that might have been unthinkable if she had been I put a bib around her neck, cut up her food and
more present in mine, I worried that she wouldn’t gave her a spoon instead of a fork. In the evening,
still love me, changed as I was. Sitting on the foot Dad showed me how to put her in pyjamas, brush
of her bed and not sure how much she would be her teeth, give her her tablets, and sit with her
able to understand, I told her I was going to leave while she fell asleep. She liked childish humour,
the man I married and wasn’t going to have a baby and all of my Dad’s bad jokes – ‘You’re a princess,’
with him, and she said: ‘Your book’s your baby.’ It he’d say as he helped her on with her boots, ‘you
was as if her getting ill made me forget who she get everything done for you’ – and banging the
was, and what sort of mother she had always been. table to Nina Simone’s ‘My Baby Just Cares for Me.’
I realised, or remembered, that she had always When we sat down as a family to watch a movie
wanted my happiness, even if it should take a shape during Christmas 2016 and a parental advisory
unfamiliar to her. message came on the screen, my brothers asked
No one my age had a parent with Alzheimer’s, her if it was OK if there was swearing. Her reply:
but I did have a friend whose older partner had died ‘Fuck you!’ Before a walk that same Christmas, as I
of it. She told me something I didn’t believe at the was helping her with her coat, narrating what I was
time: that I could have another relationship with doing as mothers do to children – ‘your son George
my mother, and that it would be something I would bought you this dress’ – she said: ‘Oh, that’s why
be grateful for in the future. She urged me to visit he likes me so much! That’s why he gives clothes!’
her more; so did my father. I had thrown my own and I realised she might not know who I was. I
life in London into chaos, but I started to go home don’t know why, in fact it now seems to me cruel,
to Dover every weekend. I am not proud that it took but on the walk I turned it into a game. Who am I,
me so long to return to my mother the care that she Mum? Am I your mum, Trixie? Or am I Richard’s
had unthinkingly, unstintingly, given me – but then girlfriend, Phu? ‘You’re kind and you’re pretty,’ she
I didn’t know what caring for her would bring me answered, and I laughed. In the two years since she
104
said that, I’ve often thought it good enough for me. slightly easier, as Mum has qualified for NHS
Even when she doesn’t know who I am I tell myself: continuing healthcare, which funds one-to-one
she likes me. And I remind myself that a mother is care at home from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays.
always a mystery; she has lived so much of her life And we have found carers from whom we learn.
before you were even born. There is Jackie, who has been with us almost from
The things I did at weekends were the things the beginning. There is Zowie, who has kept horses
my father did every day. He had worked long nights all her life, and has taught me about reading body
and long days when we were children, and now he language now that Mum can’t tell us how she feels
learned to take care of the house, the family and his or what she wants. Lin is patient when Mum is
wife. He and my mother had worked together in angry or upset or just pissed off. And they deal with
their own print business and he rearranged things the soiled sheets when Dad and I can’t bear it any
so he could be at home more often. She couldn’t be longer. Our family home is now a care home.
left alone for long: if she had a brain-jerk while on The family itself has changed too: Mum used to
the stairs she could fall (and did); she could walk be the hub, and my father, my brothers and I were
out of the front door and not know how to get back the spokes. Now it’s more like a cloud, or network:
(and did); unless food was put in front of her she’d my brothers and I worry about my Dad (we take
forget to eat (and did). She qualified for the him to the football, and encourage him to go to his
Personal Independence Payment of £117.05 a week Labour Party meetings, and take him on holidays);
but it didn’t cover what she needed – we all chipped my Dad worries about us; my brothers worry about
in so that Dad could pay for help with the house me. Richard married his girlfriend and they had a
and garden and concentrate on her care. On son, Josh, in September, and the network
Mondays, she went to a group for people with rearranged again: in the unfairness of Mum not
Alzheimer’s run by a local charity, where they being able to be the grandmother she wanted to be,
talked, made lunch and did puzzles together. Mum we knit around the lack, bringing memories of our
was the youngest there and the most ill; they kept childhoods to the way we look after Josh, as well as
her there beyond the point they and she could cope what we’ve learned from caring for her.
with it. I took her there one morning, and within an It is such a small, commonplace sentence, used
hour they had called me back to pick her up. When of far too many things, but it is the one that most
I arrived, she swiped at me with perfect angry often comes to mind: I miss her. I missed her the
fluency: ‘You shouldn’t have done that!’ She meant day I engaged a solicitor to conduct my divorce; I
I shouldn’t have left her. missed her when I moved into a new flat on my
Dad advertised for help in the local newsagent: own; I missed her when Josh was born. I most miss
Kent County Council had agreed to pay for twenty talking to her: she would have been deeply into Love
hours of help a week but it was up to Dad to Island; only a mother will listen to someone wonder
become an employer, get insurance, liaise with the about what denier tights she should really be
council and find the carers. Carers left when Mum buying this unseasonably cold spring. I have
had angry episodes. The Alzheimer’s drugs, the trouble letting go of things she chose for me, like
doctors thought, had reached the end of their the set of candy pink towels she sent me to
usefulness, and though we had resisted giving her university with, and I have a special new unwished-
the heavy-duty psychiatric medication prescribed to for role as Cassandra when friends moan to me
dull her symptoms (anti-spasmodics for the jerks, about their mothers. But I also miss her the way she
tranquillisers for rage and to help her sleep, anti- is now; I like to spend time with her. Our minds are
depressants for the crying), we now tried them. In more separate than they have ever been; even a
the last six months things have started to become request to raise her arms so that I can help her on
105
with a T-shirt won’t be reliably received. She nightmares of losing my mother. I stand on the
spends a lot of her day walking back and forth shore again, uncalm now, watching the losses
between a curtain in the kitchen and a curtain in mount.
the sitting room, where she will rearrange the sofa
cushions, sofa covers and curtain itself again and Joanna Biggs is an editor at the LRB.
again into an order that looks like disorder. Her
walking does not seem purposeful to us, but it
must seem so to her: if you get in her way, whether
to say hello, bring her a drink or tell her someone
has arrived, she walks straight past you to get to the
other curtain. I join in the game; I put the sofa
cushions back so that she can disarrange them
again. On other days, she’ll sleep for hours. She has
lost a great deal of weight, so we spoon dinners
into her. She will nearly bite my fingers to get at an
eclair. And there are flashes of her old self still. We
watched Four Weddings and a Funeral together
recently, and she giggled when Rowan Atkinson
called on ‘the father, the son and the holy goat’.
(That line is funny.) Last Mothers’ Day, just as I was
leaving for London, she called out ‘Joanna!’ –
which I hadn’t heard her say for months, maybe
years. John Bayley wrote of the ‘lion face’ people
with the disease can have, and this Christmas, in
her gold paper crown, Mum had it: unfathomable
yet majestic. Her laugh hasn’t changed; her smile
hasn’t changed. Her smile is best when I go to get
her up in the morning, and she’s forgotten I was
there the night before.
When I was seven or eight, Mum nearly died
one July in the South of France. She had gone out to
sea on her own in a yellow and blue inflatable
dinghy, and as my brother George and I played on
the hot sand, my dad noticed that the boat had
drifted out, so far out that he started to panic and
went to find someone who could help him get her
back. I remember seeing a yellow dot on the
horizon, very far away, and in my memory I was
calm. Maybe I didn’t believe she wouldn’t come
back; maybe I was keeping my head while the
adults were losing theirs; maybe I accepted fate.
But he did get her back, and the next memory I
have of that day is eating a coupe pêche melba as
big as my head. From that point on, I had
106
Contributors Editor: Mary-Kay Wilmers

Deputy Editor: Jean McNicol
Stephen Alford teaches early modern British
Senior Editors: Paul Myerscough, Daniel Soar
history at the University of Leeds. His most recent
Assistant Editors: Joanna Biggs, Tom Crewe,
book is London’s Triumph: Merchant Adventurers and the
Deborah Friedell, Alice Spawls
Tudor City.
Editorial Assistant: Joanne O’Leary
Joanna Biggs is an editor at the LRB.
Intern: Ben Walker
John Burnside’s latest collection is Still Life with
Contributing Editors: Jeremy Harding,
Feeding Snake.
Rosemary Hill, John Lanchester, James Meek,
Tom Crewe is an editor at the LRB.
David Runciman, Adam Shatz, Amia Srinivasan,
Jon Day’s new book, Homing, will be published in
Christopher Tayler, Colm Tóibín, Marina Warner
June.
Editor-at-Large: Andrew O’Hagan
Brian Dillon is working on a novel and a book
Blog Editor: Thomas Jones
about sentences.
Digital Editor: Sam Kinchin-Smith
Michael Hofmann’s new book of poems, One Lark,
Editorial Board: Linda Colley, Hilary Mantel,
One Horse, is out now.
Michael Neve, Steven Shapin, Inigo Thomas,
Christian Lorentzen lives in Brooklyn.
Jenny Turner, James Wood, Michael Wood
Edward Luttwak’s latest book is The Rise of China v.
Typesetting: Sue Barrett, Anna Swan
the Logic of Strategy.
Paste-Up: Bryony Dalefield
Ferdinand Mount’s most recent book is Prime
Cover: Jon McNaught
Movers: From Pericles to Gandhi.
Publisher: Nicholas Spice
Rachel Nolan teaches Latin American history at the
Associate Publishers: Margot Broderick,
Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia
Helen Jeffrey
University.
Head of Advertising: Kate Parkinson
Rachel O’Dwyer is a lecturer in the School of Visual
Advertising Managers: Natasha Chahal
Culture in the National College of Art and Design,
Senior Sales Executive: Aaron John
Ireland.
Sales Executive: Reece Tan
David Runciman teaches politics at Cambridge and
Customer Relations Manager: Chris Larkin
hosts the podcast Talking Politics. How Democracy
Product manager: Francesca Garbarini
Ends came out last year.
Head of Marketing: Renée Doegar
Namara Smith is an editor at Bookforum.
Marketing Managers: Jill Tytherleigh
Diana Stone is an archaeologist based in
Retention Managers: Laura Reeves, Flavia
Weymouth.
Collins
Adam Tooze gave the third of this year’s LRB
Marketing Executive: Cassie Gibson
Winter Lectures at the British Museum on 22
Head of Facilities: Radka Webb
February. Crashed, a history of the global financial
Facilities Manager: Andy Georgiou
crisis, came out last year.
Head of Finance: Taj Singh
Hugo Williams’s next collection, Lines Off, is due in
Finance: Manjinder Chana, Antionette Gicheva,
June.
Maria Radonjić
Clair Wills is King Edward VII Professor of English
Production: Ben Campbell
Literature at Cambridge. Her latest book is Lovers
Digital Producer: Anthony Wilks
and Strangers: An Immigrant History of Postwar Britain.
Web: Rachael Beale, Jeremy Harris
Emily Witt is the author of Future Sex.
Michael Wood is all singing, all dancing.
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РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.

At the Movies: ‘Swing Time’

The Massacre at Amritsar Who killed the 43?

Short Cuts: The Porn Ban In Zimbabwe

Chris Mullin The Pain Lobby

Poem: ‘At Notre Dame de Reims’ Luljeta Lleshanaku

Pigeon Intelligence Abe’s Japan

Poem: ‘A Bed of Nails’

Plain Brian O’Nolan

power and American political authority. Two years

American century? ever.

Letters Crisis in Venezuela

The Son, Not the Father

When will it end?

wasteland, about 150 by 200 yards. It was a

the label on the tin would give you a pretty good

W E NEED to turn back to The Butcher of

fact, Hunter made it absolutely clear that there had

Ferdinand Mount’s most recent book is Prime

found that 67 per cent approved of the basic

attacking ‘indoctrination’. Andrea Leadsom said

Tom Crewe is an editor at the LRB.

Blair and Gordon Brown were in Parliament and

Long sections of the narrative are given over to

David Runciman teaches politics at Cambridge

At Notre Dame de Reims

but the toad has a human face, in the hidden

practised their art, away from the bishops

We’ve seen this much before (in Salisbury, say,

of Christendom, a Green Man

boar; the sacred

the common wren, so

into a corner, tail

than pleasure: no-one’s

but life as such, immediate

the toad is done

and high in the highest beams,

a workman has sculpted a cat

It’s cold in here:

but just as the light

not from a god, but from a common

lost amongst the trees,

watching from the murk,

flitting back and forth

till something more familiar

escorts the wanderer home

nor any sin: a rabbit for the pot,

and nothing to confess,

and laughter in the house

under the cold facade

to someone else’s god, a stone

while the old life

mysterium that runs

a mischief in the eye,

while the stew-pot

John Burnside’s latest collection is Still Life with Feeding Snake.

comprehend a two-second delay). They are able to