The first edition (DSM-I) was published in 1952. It was a pamphlet which listed a mere 60 disorders. At 134 pages, the 1968 second edition might have been mistaken for a novella. The third, in its revised version of 1987, had 567 pages and was longer than most novels. DSM-IV, the current dictionary of delusion, was published in 1994 and would be easier to handle if it had appeared in two volumes. It has 886 pages and even in paperback weighs 3lb 4oz. DSM-V will be out in 2011. No one is expecting a haiku.

Nick’s critique is a familiar one if you follow mental health – the idea of ‘diagnostic inflation’, that psychiatry has a tendency to medicalise everything and increasingly passes off all kinds of bad or common behaviour as some sort of clinical disorder. As he says, ‘Whether you are happy or sad, neat or messy, chaste or promiscuous, bumptious or withdrawn, fat or thin, drunk or sober, you have the symptoms of a mental disorder.’

Since Nick’s article the backlash against the DSM has grown to the extent that this weekend, the Observer reported that the Division of Clinical Psychology has attacked the concept of psychiatric diagnosis altogether, saying that ‘diagnoses such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, personality disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, conduct disorders and so on [are of] limited reliability and questionable validity’. This raised my eyebrows. I can see why concepts such as ‘disruptive mood dysregulation disorder’ could be called into question, but claiming that a diagnosis of bipolar psychosis is essentially of ‘limited reliability and questionable validity’ is a huge step.

You can see why people want to move away from the medical model. Too many service users have antidepressants thrown at them when talking therapies would be far more helpful. The DCP wants to gear treatment more towards the social factors and bad experiences that influence all of us. Dr Lucy Johnstone said that ’there is no evidence that these experiences are best understood as illnesses with biological causes. On the contrary, there is now overwhelming evidence that people break down as a result of a complex mix of social and psychological circumstances – bereavement and loss, poverty and discrimination, trauma and abuse.’ Who could argue with that, for practically no one outside of Nietzschean fantasy can be stripped of the influence of the past. Joyce wrote that ‘When the soul of man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.’ But he was dreaming. Most of us get caught in the nets at some point.

And yet I feel some scepticism about this somewhat drastic swerve in approach, for many reasons. First is that there are ingrained predispositions towards mental illness. Far sighted neurologists like Steven Pinker have spent years fighting the simple lie that we are an empty canvass and nothing else. His argument is to accept that to some extent we do have destiny coded into our skin and we have to deal with that as best we can. There is a fascinating recent piece by the neurocriminologist Adrian Raine about how brain development can affect a predisposition to criminal acts. The idea of predestination led us into some very scary places during the twentieth century. However the work of serious researchers like Raine can’t be as easily dismissed as quack phrenology.

A completely social model of mental illness also has little to say to people with normal backgrounds who nevertheless develop terrifying distress and chaotic lives. They can be all too casually derided as attention seekers. Nothing in my stable childhood explains the anxiety and depression I developed as an adult. Nor would a social model provide much insight into the lives of high born people I have known who went completely off the rails.

There is also kookiness in this view of life. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Oliver James, celebrity psychologist and author of the bestselling Affluenza, which proved that mental illness was caused by godless Western materialism. Post crash, he’s still plugging that thesis, claiming again that ‘Thirty years of Thatcher and ‘Blatcher’ turned us into a nation of ‘affluenza’-stricken, shop-till-you-drop, ‘it could be you’, credit-fuelled consumer junkies.’ The lost souls in the crisis centres of working class neighbourhoods are not distinguished by an excess of designer shopping trips and cheap easy credit. James’s theories are regarding as liberal in a liberal age, but they are animated by an old conservative-religious impulse that a shot of austerity sharpens the soul.

More useful is the response from Simon Wessely of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, who writes that while the DSM isn’t perfect, it at least tries to map the territory and many service users find diagnosis the first step to recovery or at least management. (As Terry Pratchett said of Alzheimer’s, to kill the demon you first have to speak its name.) The truth is that saying ‘it’s all society’ is as reductive as saying ‘it’s all chemicals’ – surely the key is in understanding how external influences impact on whatever predispositions we might have. That’s our best shot at fighting the nightmares that may engulf all of us. This is where science becomes an art.

There is a condescending contemporary idea that people cannot ‘get’ classics if they are not made more ‘relevant’ to people’s lives. True, great writers were creatures of their own time and their works are littered with archaic signifiers and allusions that make little sense today. Nicholas Lezard points out that Dante’s Inferno is filled with the poet’s axe-grinding and Florentine political allegiances – ‘He loathed some people so much – those who had behaved treacherously to guests – that he couldn’t even wait for them to die.’ So good translations, contextualisations and commentary are essential. But what do you make of education curricula that encourages schoolkids to recreate World War Two using Mr Men characters? And we wonder why we are turning out generations of young adults who can’t write a job application that most people would understand.

Consider also the impact of set and setting on the plot. Many classical storylines are driven by customs and taboos that no longer exist. In her excellent essay on Fitzgerald, Sarah Churchwell explains that transported to a contemporary setting, no one would care where Jimmy Gatz’s money came from. He could be exposed as a Russian mafiosi and today’s London elite wouldn’t blink. As Churchwell says, ‘Today the illusion of Jay Gatsby would not have shattered like glass against Tom Buchanan’s ‘hard malice’: Gatsby’s money would have insulated him and guaranteed triumph – an outcome that Fitzgerald would have deplored more than anyone.’

There are of course contemporary dramas like The Wire and Breaking Bad that in their richness and moral complexity echo the ancient Greek tragedians and the great Russians. Don Draper is a Gatsby in his way. But David Simon, Matt Weiner and Vince Gilligan were trying to create something new whereas today’s liberal pedagogues and celebrity directors who rework classic art just end up patronising the audience and wasting everyone’s time. The scramble for timelessness is a fool’s game and good writers know this. I remember seeing Bret Easton Ellis, at a reading in Manchester, responding to a criticism that his novel American Psycho had become dated. Ellis said that (I paraphrase) ‘It was dated while it was being written.’ Like the political references of Dante, the long closed bars, restaurants and forgotten Manhattan topography of American Psycho didn’t make the novel any less fresh – in fact, it’s that very archaic nature of such references that makes the feel of the novel. You don’t achieve timelessness on purpose. You achieve it when you write a great story.

And the demand that everything be made ‘relevant’ always reminds me of the office bore who tells you, ‘There’s more to life than books, you know. Live in the real world.’ As if the world of books, stories and dreams were any less real than mortgages, barbecues and fucking pension plans?

(Image: Rigo Design)

The centrepiece of today was a new Immigration Bill designed to ’ensure that this country attracts people who will contribute and deters those who will not.’ But, says the Guardian’s home affairs editor Alan Travis, ‘the Downing Street briefing on the contents of the immigration bill is very sketchy on any actual detailed measures.’ In fact, ‘There were only two specific measures mentioned by Downing Street that will be in the new immigration bill.’ There are plans to limit immigrants’ access to JSA (which was tight anyway) and residency requirements for council properties (when local connection is prioritised by most local authorities anyway, if not all). What is new here?

The thing that really made me look up was a duty on private landlords to check migration status of their tenants. It’s news to me that private landlords in this country have a duty to do anything. As Travis points out, ‘the proposal would be unworkable without a register of private landlords’ – exactly the policy, in fact, that the coalition junked within weeks of taking office. The shocking state of the cowboy private rental market was well known in 2010 and has got worse. The Tories are the landowners’ party and they didn’t want to reform private sector housing in a way which would give ripped-off tenants a voice. Now, it appears, the agenda is a big statist HMO hunt for illegal immigrants.

Travis also says that ‘a system of migrants’ residents permits or foreigners’ ID cards is needed to police such restrictions on access to public services based on the time someone has lived in Britain. That is likely to prove unpalatable for two political parties who were elected on a pledge to scrap identity cards.’ Is there anyone left in Britain who still thinks this government knows what it’s doing?

One positive aspect of the immigration debate is that for the first time we are beginning to hear the voices of immigrants. Which brings me to a marvellous piece in the HuffPo by an Indian immigrant in Britain, Balaji Ravichandran, whose article brings the fresh keen air of perspective to this tired and bitter discourse. Highlights:

I, and many others like me, are here for reasons entirely different from the economy. I am here because I wanted to be in a country where being gay is accepted, and sexual minorities are afforded equal rights as straight people. I am here because, it meant something to me when Britain protected Salman Rushdie, after he wrote The Satanic Verses, whereas India was the first country to proscribe it altogether. I am here because my talents, such as they be, were recognised first by people in this country rather than that of my birth and childhood. I am here, most importantly, due to the cultural affinities that bind me to this country and to Western Europe as a whole.

Remember that most of what you take for granted is a privilege, a luxury for the rest of the world, and even then, not everyone wants to come here and settle down permanently. Remember that the choices you make affect the lives of thousands of others like me. Most of all, ask yourself if you’d rather live in a country of cultural monotony and uniformity, or one which welcomed, among others, Handel, Henry James, Sigmund Freud, TS Eliot, Mitsuko Uchida and VS Naipaul, and have made this the most culturally exciting country in Europe.

(Image via @AdamBienkov)

These days I try to get as much as possible every single day. I work, write, go to cultural stuff, take long walks, go for runs, socialise and still fall into bed cursing myself for not doing enough. I’ve lived a little, sure, I’ve danced in fields and quarries, flown to Europe, drank at the Groucho. But like all of us I’ve failed to step up on more than one occasion. I had a neurosis where I kept thinking I was out of the moment even while inside the moment, and couldn’t stop looking at myself from the outside. I’ve turned down interesting propositions, slept through sunshine. I have stayed in when I should have gone out.

The compensatory ultra high-functioning workaholic approach has its problems too, I know – it’s a sure way of having a heart attack before you hit forty. There’s no time, you might not get to do everything you were curious about, you might not even get to read everything you wanted to read. A byproduct of this is that other people’s lives are even more of a mystery to me. I’m completely baffled by people who commit to jobs they dislike and spend every evening in front of the box. I’m sure these guys know something I don’t, but come on, why turn your face against the night?

Of course this is all a bit middle class and ‘first world problems’. Through most of history most people haven’t had the luxuries of this pointless contemplation. And even in this country in 2013 there is still so much suffering and struggle and darkness. So does it matter that I haven’t yet got round to reading Gibbon on the decline of Rome?

Congratulations on reaching the end of what must be the most silly and pointless blog post on here to date.

I think it’s fair enough for competition organisers to charge an entrant fee given the huge admin involved in such things and the amount of submissions that will come in, many of which won’t be worth reading to the end. There’s also the probability that MMU set this up with an agenda for the national stage, maybe a few lines in the Bookseller or Guardian Review. However you cannot get past the fact that MMU has effectively priced out its own students, who are already paying substantial fees to attend the university. And don’t give me that ‘£17 is just four or five pints’ bullshit. I know students in Manchester who struggle to feed themselves.

There’s also the point that other competitions – the Bridport, the Bristol Prize, the V S Pritchett – charge around half as much as MMU, and the really prestigious contests, like the BBC National Short Story Prize and the Sunday Times EFG, do not charge at all. (For that matter, no commercial agent in the UK charges people to submit to them.) It is also the case that scam artists set up worthless contests to make money from aspiring writers (for example, if you have an online contest with a £500 purse and £10 entrant fee and you get 100 entries, that’s £500 profit) and you have to be very careful about what you enter, what goes on your CV and who gets your first rights. I’ve seen transparent stuff of this nature even distributed through the MMU alumni mailing list.

MMU is a good university with a strong creative writing programme and I have entered its contest in the past. I will probably do so again – but then, I can afford it. I appreciate that only so much can be done for free but MMU is not a workers’ co-operative. It is an established HE body that gets thousands of pounds per year per student. Its initiative could be more accessible to its own students than it is at present.

Whoah. Fucking hell. 23 per cent? And, like, 117 council seats?

UKIP have been around for years of course, but they used to be primarily an anti-EU party and did badly because they only appealed to a certain kind of EU nut. Now, Farage has realised that if he realigns UKIP into an anti immigration party he can appeal to a much larger proportion of nuts from across the political spectrum. UKIP’s local manifesto focuses almost entirely on immigration – despite the fact that immigration is something which local authorities can do little or nothing about. UKIP put a poster up in my old stomping ground of Levenshulme, saying ‘Stop open door EU immigration - enough’s enough.’ I support their right to free expression, UKIP should be able to advertise where it likes, but if you know the area, it’s a real slap in the face for Levenshulme’s Asians. Friends of mine from the locality petitioned ClearChannel. They were trolled on the internet and bullied by UKIP supporters. We’re not supposed to say that criticism of immigration is racist. But the BNP vote collapsed this week. Who could be taking all their support?

But UKIP are more than a far right party. Mainstream politicians have spent weeks grappling with the phenomenon. They set up focus groups of UKIP supporters to discover what exactly is peeling off mainstream support - sessions that, by all accounts, went like a junkercrat dinner party in late 1920s Berlin. The commentator Andrew Rawnsley has an anecdote that is worth thousands of words’ analysis:

One senior party strategist says he listened in some wonderment as his focus group of Ukip voters spent an entire 90-minute session wailing and gnashing their teeth about the state of Britain. Not a good word did they have to say about the country today. At the end of the session, he thanked them for their time, and said he had one more question. Was there anything about Britain that made them feel proud? There was a silence. Then one man leant forward and said: ‘The past.’ The rest of the group nodded in agreement.

Rawnsley goes on to say that ‘A Ukip vote is not mainly, if at all, about making a choice based on an assessment of policy.’ In the run up to the local elections spin doctors planted stories about the more deranged of UKIP’s candidate base. The public did not care. Mainstream politicians point out time and again that UKIP’s manifesto makes no sense. UKIP are offering free money for everyone and to clear the deficit. Any mainstream politician would be slaughtered for such unrealistic promises. The public do not care. Professional politicos need to realise that we are not dealing here with rational demands, it cannot be said enough: we are dealing with a miserable embittered shriek of self pity and unfocused rage. It’s not fair! Why doesn’t the world revolve around me? These are the questions that the nation wants answered.

Over at Telegraph Blogs, Dan Hodges writes that UKIP’s victory smashes the myth of a progressive majority in this country. He says, ‘Since 2010 Labour has moved Left, anticipating it would be inundated by people seeking sanctuary from the evils of austerity. They’re not coming. Those angered by the Coalition are knocking on Nigel Farage’s door, not Ed Miliband’s.’ In fact, there are plenty of progressives in this country. They’re just not in politics. As I’ve argued recently, British politics is not a place for reasonable people anymore. Smart progressives who want to make a difference don’t go into politics, they go into public policy or advocacy or journalism or law or the police or the Royal Marines. Because smart people are leaving politics, the field is left clear for maniacs, illiterates, thieves, neo-Nazis and toytown power merchants. This is particularly true at local level.

And it’s not true, by the way, that UKIP represent an ‘anti-politics party’. UKIP are more pro politics than anyone. They encourage huge unrealistic expectations of what politics can deliver. Vote for me and I’ll give you everything you want or need, your darkest fear, your fondest dream.

A point James Bloodworth makes is UKIP’s age profile. James points to a survey that claims UKIP’s support as 43% over 65 and just 8% from people under 35. James even says that ‘Such are the demographics of the Ukip vote that many who have supported them in this week’s local elections will actually be dead by the time the 2015 election comes around.’ Obsession with immigration, in my experience, chimes with that – it tends to be a consuming concern for people over forty. I’m not saying young people are not critical of mass immigration, but they do not obsess over it in the way of the old. Immigration is the fixation of the 1950s-1970s generation that had the world handed to them on a plate and never sacrificed anything and bankrupted the country and now have nothing to offer except self pity. ‘The world was a great place when I was young’ - that’s their battle cry. What they mean, of course, is: ‘The world was a great place because I was young.’

A significant minority of voters who hate everything about this country except the past. It’s a depressing vision – but one that we now have to confront. I used to think UKIP would tear the political right in two and the left would take advantage. That hasn’t happened. Labour’s performance in the locals was appalling compared to where they should be, while even the Cameron brand of liberal conservatism has almost completely vanished. Because the mainstream is scrambling to regain UKIP support, we could effectively be giving UKIP a rolling veto over mainstream policy. A nightmare Knesset scenario.

Government by local referenda. Will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights?

Atheism is still with us. But the movement that threatened to form has petered out. Crucially, atheism’s younger advocates are reluctant to compete for the role of Dawkins’s disciple. They are more likely to bemoan the new atheist approach and call for large injections of nuance. A good example is the pop-philosopher Julian Baggini. He is a stalwart atheist who likes a bit of a scrap with believers, but he’s also able to admit that religion has its virtues, that humanism needs to learn from it. For example, he has observed that a sense of gratitude is problematically lacking in secular culture, and suggested that humanists should consider ritual practices such as fasting. This is also the approach of the pop-philosopher king, Alain de Botton. His recent book Religion for Atheists rejects the ‘boring’ question of religion’s truth or falsity, and calls for ‘a selective reverence for religious rituals and concepts’. If you can take his faux-earnest prose style, he has some interesting insights into religion’s basis in community, practice, habit.

–

In these pages Douglas Murray recently recounted debating alongside Richard Dawkins and being embarrassed by the crudity of his approach. Murray is not one of life’s fence-sitters: it must have occurred to him that atheism has polemical possibilities that would suit him rather well. But he has the sense to turn down the role of the new Christopher Hitchens. A polemical approach to religion has swung out of fashion. In fact, admitting that religion is complicated has become a mark of sophistication. Andrew Brown of the Guardian has played a role in this shift: he’s a theologically literate agnostic who is scornful of crude atheist crusading, and who sometimes ponders his own attraction to religion. On a more academic level, the philosopher John Gray has had an influence: he is sceptical of all relics of Enlightenment optimism, including the atheist’s faith in reason.

–

It might sound odd to cite Alain de Botton as a critic of complacent self-regard, but this is central to his stated purpose. Attending to the religious roots of humanism can prod us out of seeing secular humanism as natural, the default position, and incite us to ponder our need for discipline, structure, community, and so on. At one point he commends the Christian perspective, that we are ‘at heart desperate, fragile, vulnerable, sinful creatures, a good deal less wise than we are knowledgeable, always on the verge of anxiety, tortured by our relationships, terrified of death — and most of all in need of God’.

Polemical atheism was never going to go down well with the intelligentsia and immediately a kind of counter movement – what one blogger called ‘The New Sophists’ - grew up to oppose it. Though it was much more about tone than content, the New Sophistry had three basic positions: that religion was a lot more complex and interesting than we godless were willing to say, that atheism was more or less the same as religious fundamentalism (not that they ever criticised actual religious fundamentalists) and, finally, that criticism of religion should in many instances be regarded as racism. With Harris discredited, Hitchens still dead and Dawkins playing out an increasingly silly Twitter presence it must seem to Hobson that his own chin-stroking cabal must have won the bitter faith wars of the 2000s.

A few points, though. The first is that the philosophers Hobson praises have not connected with the public in the way that Dawkins and Hitchens did. There are no New Sophist bestsellers and most of Hobson’s cited names are little known outside academia and the CiF Belief blog. Andrew Brown, for instance, is the kind of nonentity even close friends sometimes struggle to recognise. To this point, Hobson would say that nuance is less marketable than grand sweeping assertions. That’s one way of looking at it. Another way is that the arguments of Terry Eagleton, Karen Armstrong etcetera have not resonated because they are not particularly original or interesting. (For example, the link between medieval apocalyptist movements and the twentieth century Nazi and Communist totalitarians was explored with much more eloquence and verve by Norman Cohn in his The Pursuit of the Millennium, long before John Gray got anywhere near it.) And perhaps the New Atheists spoke to people who for some reason or another weren’t able to speak up. I think of that line from Paul Berman: ‘I wonder if bookish young Muslim women in the immigrant zones of Europe aren’t sneaking a few glances at Hirsi Ali’s writings and making brave resolutions for themselves.’

There’s also the fact that belief hasn’t moved on in the way that unbelief has. Let’s ignore the obvious examples of Islamism and the Vatican and look at Hobson’s Anglican Church. Far from the harmless caricature quoted by Hobson - ‘The idea of my late church-going mother-in-law beating homosexuals or instituting a pogrom is obviously ridiculous, although she did help with jumble sales’ – the Church of England is probably one of our most reactionary institutions. It almost derailed equal marriage. It did nothing to rein in the murderous homophobia of its Ugandan counterpart. It openly discriminates against its female employees. Liberal Christians are at the end of their rope. Here’s South Manchester Anglican blogger Rachel Mann:

I am still reeling from the most recent ‘Church of England’ statement on marriage. Much attention has rightly been focused on exactly who ‘the Church of England’ is in this statement and who thought this was a sensible statement to utter. The ‘we’referred to again and again in this statement may haunt all parts of the C of E for years to come. Even if it is the case that the government proposals for equal marriage are ill-conceived and no one in the C of E was consulted about the so-called ‘quadruple lock’, the Church House statement does little to affirm people like me – seeking to be faithful to Christ, to serve the church, but who are frankly tired being given the impression of having a place in the church on sufferance.

The awful suspicion comes that good people like Mann are actually in the minority. Julian Baggini, cited by Hobson in his article, said that the problem with this debate is ‘a lack of knowledge about what religious people, rather than the elite commentariat, really think.’ To get a better idea Baggini hung around outside various Bristol churches asking the congregation about their actual beliefs. Here’s his results:

So what is the headline finding? It is that whatever some might say about religion being more about practice than belief, more praxis than dogma, more about the moral insight of mythos than the factual claims of logos, the vast majority of churchgoing Christians appear to believe orthodox doctrine at pretty much face value. They believe that Jesus is divine, not simply an exceptional human being; that his resurrection was a real, bodily one; that he performed miracles no human being ever could; that he needed to die on the cross so that our sins could be forgiven; and that Jesus is the only way to eternal life. On many of these issues, a significant minority are uncertain but in all cases it is only a small minority who actively disagree, or even just tend to disagree. As for the main reason they go to church, it is not for reflection, spiritual guidance or to be part of a community, but overwhelmingly in order to worship God.

For substantial numbers of people it really is about flying to heaven on a winged horse. And the controversy over gay marriage drew out further evidence of a literalist mindset. In the run up to the vote MPs were deluged with furious emails. One told the Independent that ‘Quite a few of us who were considering abstaining will vote in favour of gay marriage because of the unreasonable nature of the emails we have been receiving. Some of the emails I’ve had are simply appalling and I’m fed up with it.’ All those fine words about a poetic response to human suffering and the heart of a heartless world end in the same old ugly preoccupation with what lovers do behind closed doors.

What particularly annoys me about Hobson’s brand of new sophistry is its implication that we need to admit faith into our lives to experience the transcendent. A Catholic priest criticises Richard Dawkins, saying that ‘Dawkins stands in that long – and often noble – line of zealous irreligionists whose faith-foundation is reason and science. I deeply respect that stance, which is clearly religionless faith, but can it provide the ‘trusting place’ for the immanence, transcendence and mystery which our human spirits seem to need?’ Yes it damn well can, and I speak as someone who experiences these transcendental moments on a very regular basis. I did go through a religious phase in my teens – closely related to the OCD I grappled with back then – and it was absolutely terrifying. Being out of it is a liberation. The fact is that faith has little to offer and the rest of life offers so much more. Congregations were falling way before 9/11 and those atrocities gave us the chance to break with religion for good. We blew that chance and the twenty first century is a darker time as a result.

(Image: Coupland)

Then I read of this week’s controversy – if the UK literary world can be said to generate such a thing – around the Granta 20 Under 40 lit list. It began when Granta’s US editor John Freeman remarked, of the shortlisted writer Sunjeev Sahota, that he ’had never read a novel until he was 18 – until he bought Midnight’s Children at Heathrow. He studied maths, he works in marketing and finance; he lives in Leeds, completely out of the literary world.’

Oversensitivity is not a completely southern sensibility and the bannermen of Northern literature went ballistic. The Guardian’s Northerner blog said: ‘The more I read it, the clearer it says: Leeds is un-literary, it does not register on the literary landscape, and it is remarkable that anyone from Leeds could possibly produce anything literary at all.’ A letter from an angry woman in South Milford added that ‘Some of those born in Leeds, or with strong connections to the city, include Alan Bennett, Barbara Taylor Bradford, Jack Higgins, Keith Waterhouse, Helen Fielding, Tony Harrison, Arthur Ransome, Alfred Austin, Caryl Phillips, Kay Mellor – and even JRR Tolkien conceived of The Hobbit during his five years lecturing at Leeds University… I can see that John Freeman is saying that Sahota doesn’t quite fit the stereotype of a writer, but to suggest that Leeds is out of the literary world when it is a hotbed of literary talent is clearly unfair.’ Harrumph!

It doesn’t seem to have occurred to either of these correspondents that Freeman could have simply made a throwaway comment, with no offence intended to our fair city. And like the humourless county councils who issue indignant press releases with every new edition of Crap Towns, the bristling defensiveness undermines our cause. An investment in regional identity will do that. Robert Conquest, quoting an interview with Dylan Thomas from ‘a time more verbally puritanical than ours’ reports that Thomas, when asked his views on Welsh nationalism, replied with ‘three words, two of which were ‘Welsh nationalism’.’ Irvine Welsh, although a committed anti-imperialist, regularly mocks the silliness of Scottish nationalism in his novels. And Oscar Wilde did not waste his talent in a lament for the decline of Irish identity. The problem with the North is that we have too much identity and not enough of anything else. We can’t spend fifty years exporting a comedy cloth cap Alan Bennett style of literature and then complain that we are not taken seriously.

Quoted on the Northerner blog, Kevin Duffy, founder of Hebden Bridge independent Bluemoose, criticises London gladhandling: ‘When big money advances are thrown at wunderkinds and celebrities, usually unearned, then the literary ringmasters have to keep spinning in order that those writers they’ve heavily backed keep getting their gongs and the media attention that follows.’ But I would say that kind of Tammany Hall literary politics has an analogue in the independent/underground world. The logic is: we’re independents, everyone’s against us so we need to praise and plug each other’s stuff relentlessly, regardless of quality. (For an example, the Northerner blog basically consists of a rave about Bluemoose written by Bluemoose’s online editor.) Whatever the scale, critical thinking goes out the window. The fact is that literary worlds exist because writers like anyone else are into community and tend to cluster around their own kind – although I would argue that a bolt of solitude never did anyone any harm and that it’s important to spend time with people with whom you have nothing in common.

And yet, and yet, and yet: there is a good point made here. The Granta list was indeed underwhelming, to the extent that even tame broadsheet critics could summon only customary praise. The list is so UEA lite that even the news that Granta has a US editor raised my eyebrows. Publishing like everything else that matters is congealed around North London enclaves. And there is an unspoken attitude that everywhere past the M25 is a kind of wasteland, howling with wind and ghosts. The idea that Leeds of all places can’t inspire great fiction - this beautiful city with its perfect fusion of the urban and the rural – is philistinism crystallised. The South is full of dull commuter towns and London is full of shitty boroughs with nothing going on. When I first went to university in Yorkshire I was struck by the multiplicity of upper middle class southern accents. The county was full of young people who had escaped tedious coastal suburbs to the urban north. Owen Hatherley, in his marvellous long essay on the Pulp Sheffield rock band, argues that this mass migration north happened because lonely teenagers escaped the drear of Andover or Little Holling through northern music like the Verve, Pulp and the Smiths.

All I’m saying is that sitting on the sidelines and cursing our chances gets us nowhere. It’s like politics: people complain that the North is hardest hit by the recession and hardest hit by the coalition’s voodoo austerity strategy. True. And worth saying. But self pity is not a strategy. An endless discussion of the nature of the problems doesn’t solve the problems. Accept it, deal with it, try and work it as best you can.

And remember TS Garp’s line that any place can be artistic if there’s an artist working there.

There’s an excellent post on depression by the always excellent Red Newsom. You should definitely read the whole thing but in this excerpt she nails the signs and portents of this peculiar syndrome:

• Waking up one day feeling like something is wrong, like something changed overnight
• Little Issues suddenly seeming awfully like Big Issues
• Unease which turns into paranoia. Something isn’t right. Am I happy? Why aren’t I happy? I’m in bed with my furry family watching Buffy and I am in love and on paper everything is fine but why do I feel so terrible?
• Inability to think short-term ie. ‘I don’t have a job. Why won’t my boyfriend marry me and have babies with me? I’ll never be happy ever again because my life isn’t where I want it currently. It’ll never happen. I AM SO FUCKED.’
• Inability to think long-term ie. ‘Well, I can’t see myself being around for much longer.’
• Paralysis of the body and mind; long hours in bed, staring at the ceiling and feeling nothing. Totally exhausted.
• Anxiety, panic attacks and not being able to leave the house
• Leaving the house, having a panic attack in Morissons and coming home perspiring madly
• The very real sensation of all productivity flying out of the window along with all optimism, social skills and rational thoughts
• The ‘Fuck This Shit’ approach to life where you stop caring about anything, like you’re playing a game of chicken or something. Self destructive thoughts
• How do I shift these feelings? They are invisible and intangible, I need to make them physical so I can see them
• Intense feelings of ‘There is nothing for you here. Why don’t you please go and jump in front of that nearby car so no-one has to deal with your stupid face any more?’
• Crying and hurting and WTF-do-I-do-nowing

Some people who know me will be aware that I had some, well, emotional stuff going on before I left Manchester with loads of irrational self destructive impulses and dramatic mood swings. Some of the symptoms Red talks about are still familiar to me. An anxiety so gripping that you can barely breathe. Intrusive thoughts of disappointment and self-harm that recur at random moments. A conviction that death is ultimately the way forward. Ideation and arrangements. A reckless romantic fatalism that impedes long term planning. Okay, I’ll say yes to your boring social engagement, but the joke’s on you: I’ll be dead by then.

The nightmares followed me across the Pennines. I live in a beautiful city with loads of culture and great nightlife but, as the Stephen King line has it, if you put an asshole on a plane in Boston, the same asshole gets off in New York. The temptation is to just get lost in the sadness and try to come out on the other side – to reach that magical state that Sarah Hall described as the beautiful indifference.

A secondary problem: how to write about this sort of thing without sounding self pitying or pretentious or self aggrandising? The solicitor David Allen Green touched on this in an old post, where he reflects on a life that turned out well, in a way that he never expected:

And so after a decade and a half of frustrations and obstructions, I began to enjoy myself, which I never really had done since before university.

It certainly helped my depression, which had dogged me for years, and still does.

(Depression is something else one is not supposed to talk about.)

I think that last bracketed line still sums things up.

I used to be more optimistic about how far we had come, until I realised that in ten years David is the only working professional I have met who will say in public ‘I suffer from depression’. I think there are other people who have these problems but won’t say so, for fear of redundancy or a question mark in their HR file. It’s the old paradox: if no one steps up, nothing will change.

I think the key is to accept that you deserve love and happiness – or at least live as if you do.

You read. You run. You surround yourself with culture and music and gentle things. You talk to people. You go for long rambling walks. You go out. You socialise. You challenge yourself. You get up in the morning to earn a living. You stay high functioning.

And then, potentially, you get out of the valley, scramble up the hillside, to the place where everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

The 2013 selection will be rendered all the more poignant by the death of Margaret Thatcher, who – as Robert McCrum pointed out this week – inspired many of the class of ’83. Ian McEwan, one of their number, offered an explanation for this apparent iron lady irony: ‘We liked disliking her,’ he wrote. ‘She forced us to decide what was truly important.’

In my view, there’s a lot more interesting stuff going on now and people have a lot more to write about (and get angry about) than they did in the days of the late and lamented Mrs Thatcher. But the 1980s was a time for big adventurous novels whereas the 2010s will probably be remembered as a golden age of obscurantism. As ‘degrus’ says below the line:

You’d have to think hard to come up with half a dozen names, never mind twenty. This wasn’t the case in 1983. The first Granta list wrote itself, which couldn’t be said of any of the others since then. Look at Alex Clark’s list, which will be more or less the same as Granta’s. Francesca Segal, Stephen Kelman, Rebecca Hunt, Samantha Harvey, Evie Wyld, Naomi Alderman, Owen Sheers – only if you had a very impoverished sense of fiction’s potential would you be excited by these names. It’s an important question; what happened to the UK’s literary culture in the past thirty years that Francesca Segal is now being put forward as the future of the English novel? Her book The Innocents, though it won the Costa First Novel award (as if that’s supposed to mean much; this year the judges included a middle-ranking stand up comedian and a former presenter of Blue Peter) – this book clearly wouldn’t have earned Segal a place among the first Twenty Under Forty. It’s no less a piece of trash than the famous novel by Segal’s father Erich, Love Story.

The Granta list as an indicator of talent or longevity has also been questioned. As Boyd Tonkin points out, Jonathan Coe, Irvine Welsh and Timothy Mo never made the list but Granta still found room for Adam Thirlwell. Another big change since the 1983 list is that it has become harder for young writers to get published. The country proliferates with creative writing degrees, literary scouts and festivals yet there is a sense that doors are slamming. The perception is that corporate publishing is run by the gatekeepers and cultural bureaucrats, plus Amazon will kill the novel anyway. Too many talented young writers I know are losing confidence, and turning as a first resort to self publishing or small independents with no reach.

Still, it’s easy to be negative about these things so let’s do something positive. Here’s my personal talent list. Obviously, the following are all close friends of mine, or people I owe money to, but I’d still recommend their fiction.

Jenn Ashworth – Jenn has somehow managed to write three well received books in between working full time and raising children. And she’s still in her twenties. Phenomenal. Check out A Kind of Intimacy for a masterful reworking of the domestic novel.

Zoe Lambert – She’s not a familiar name and doesn’t have a major publisher, but Zoe is an excellent writer of the short form and I think her dedication and hard work will pay off, big time. You heard it here first!

Jeremy Duns – We know him mainly for his investigations into literary frauds, but Jeremy also writes compelling Cold War fiction. Start with Free Agent and work your way through.

Chris Killen – Okay, he hasn’t published a novel since 2008, but Chris’s experimental skills plus his genuine warmth and feeling for the human condition earn his place on my list. In particular, check out the pilot of his sitcom with Socrates Adams, ‘Great Friends’. How did this show not get commissioned?

Gwendoline Riley – probably the best and most accomplished writer to come out of Manchester in the 2000s. She wrote her debut Cold Water around ten years ago when she was still slinging drinks in Northern Quarter bars, and it has stood the test of time.

Ben Myers – I haven’t read his new one, but his first novel Richard is a tragic meditation on art, fame and death. (Query: Is Ben still in his thirties? Check)

Alex Preston - for me, Alex’s Alpha cult novel The Revelations was one of the standouts of last year.

Sarah Hall – has several novels under her belt, but it’s her short story collection, The Beautiful Indifference, that blew me away and got her onto the list.

Nick Laird – makes the grade for Glover’s Mistake alone. Set in London during the mid 2000s, this tale of a poisoned love triangle is also a frightening exploration of the emptinesses that intelligent people can make of their lives. Recommended.

And that’s all I can think of. Nine names. The commenter ‘degrus’ is right. This is hard. Any ideas?

Update: Here’s the Workshy Fop’s list.