Sentimental Education

Quoting Orwell on children’s books, Christopher Hitchens said:

what he found (in an essay called ‘Boys’ Weeklies’) was an extraordinary level of addiction to the form of story that was set in English boarding schools. Every week, boys (and girls) from the poorer quarters of industrial towns and from the outer edges of the English-speaking Empire would invest some part of their pocket-money to keep up with the adventures of Billy Bunter, Harry Wharton, Bob Cherry, Jack Blake and the other blazer-wearing denizens of Greyfriars and St. Jim’s. As he wrote:

‘It is quite clear that there are tens and scores of thousands of people to whom every detail of life at a ‘posh’ public school is wildly thrilling and romantic. They happen to be outside that mystic world of quadrangles and house-colors, but they can yearn after it, daydream about it, live mentally in it for hours at a stretch.’

The main body of that essay is about Harry Potter, another franchise selling the dream of a magical school that whisks talented children away from dull and impoverished lives. The film director John Hughes did something similar with his string of movies in the 1980s and Laurie Nunn, creator of Netflix’s Sex Education, drew inspiration from him. 

When I was growing up everyone loved John Hughes, but I could never stay awake through any of his films except Ferris Bueller. Sex Education was a difficult intro. The first two episodes were so annoying I was holding on for dear life. None of it made sense. Everyone sounded too posh. This bright beautiful town. This bright polished fun school where everyone gets to wear their own clothes, when in real life they’d have some horrible uniform (as indeed happens in season 3 when Hope takes over). The plot was silly. There’s a sixteen year old kid called Otis who is the son of sex therapists, but is sexually repressed. Maeve, who he is secretly in love with, suggests he start up his own sexology clinic to help the teenagers with their problems. So everyone starts paying for advice from this lad who has never had a sexual experience – even with himself.

At the end of episode three they end with a scene of Maeve sitting in her trailer, not speaking, and I realised there was something there. From that point Sex Education becomes unmissable. You get hooked into the stories of the various sixth formers as they desire and plot. The characters get fleshed out. Otis’s dad is a psychologist named Remi Milburn, absent for many years. Otis finds him at an event where he is promoting his book, ‘Is Masculinity in Crisis’? to an audience of mainly uncertain-looking young men. Afterwards the two go for a drink and Otis confronts Remi about his failings. For the first time, Remi becomes both self aware and honest. He tells his son:

You know, when you’re young… you think that everybody out there really… really gets you. But, you know, actually, only a handful of them do. All the people who like you, despite your faults. And then if you discard them, they will never come back. So when you meet those people… you should just hold on them. Really, really tightly. And don’t let them go. And whatever else you do [tapping a copy of his book] never read this fucking book.

At that point one of the lost-looking young men from the audience interrupts them to ask Remi for an autograph. Remi cheerfully signs the young guy’s copy of the worthless book. 

The school based stories are still absurd, but you begin to appreciate the setting more. There are incidental characters, bizarre performances, funny teachers, and the best cover of Peaches ‘Fuck The Pain Away’ you’ve ever heard. Moordale is fun, and everybody’s welcome. Headmaster Mr Groff has a breakdown and loses his position, and is replaced by professional young educator Hope Haddon. While Michael Groff was old fashioned, but ruled with a light touch, Hope is a modern authoritarian who imposes an abstinence-only curriculum, which doesn’t go down well. Her control of the school ends in scandal and the school being closed down. 

At that point the series could, maybe should have ended. The final season was its least popular. Moordale was replaced by Cavendish, run from below by a supremely annoying trio of teenage progressives who will charge you for gossiping in front of them. We graduated from the sex school to the Sunday School of Woke, and it was a hard adjustment for many viewers. 

In a classic hatchet job the Guardian’s Lucy Mangan wrote:

If Sex Education were staying true to its early, far more radical roots, it might do more than just hint at the potential downsides of relentless positivity, but here the rule remains absolute affirmation only… Also dragging down the mood is the fact that everyone – and not just the rival sex therapist O (Thaddea Graham) who is already set up at Cavendish – use therapy speak at all times. Sex Education scripts used to be fleet and funny. Now everyone is earnest, delivering life lessons at every turn and making you long for the days when humour was still an honoured part of the human condition.

Yet the school genre has always sought to deliver moral instruction. Entertainment was almost secondary to that. When I was a kid I read everything by Enid Blyton, including the school stories, which always had a didacticism of varying subtlety. At some point one of the characters, in the afterglow of some test of her virtue, says to herself: ‘We learn more than lessons at Whytliffe School!’

Shaad D’Souza writes: ‘While the show has previously dealt with subjects such as abortion, discrimination and sexual assault, weightier than average for a teen drama, it’s darker than it’s ever been, siloing many of its core characters, such as Otis (Asa Butterfield), his mother, Jean (Gillian Anderson), his best friend, Eric (Ncuti Gatwa), and his love interest Maeve (Emma Mackey), in order to send them on their own journeys of strife and self-discovery.’ Nunn silos them off – and in many cases puts her characters through their own tests of virtue and responsibility just as Blyton did. Even Mr Groff the former headmaster is left to try and change and grow, in the wreck of his marriage and career. He cuts a sympathetic figure and is yet another lost soul in need of instruction. 

Conservatives hate stuff like Sex Education because they see it as indoctrination – and the wrong kind of indoctrination, at that. And I could never be told anything by anyone. But there was still some of that old exhilaration in the final season. There are some writers, educators, entertainers and professionals who are driven by the need to instruct and teach others – and if they sometimes get it wrong, well, this kind of education is better than it was in my day. 

As series creator Laurie Nunn said: ‘Things move so fast nowadays and there’s so much amazing TV out there. I’m always joking that my baby’s gonna get older and be like: ‘Oh no, Mum, you made that really problematic, really embarrassing sex show.”

The Artefact

In Stephen King’s The Tommyknockers there is a spaceship buried in the woods of a small New England town. The ship has been under the earth for hundreds of years, its occupants long dead. Yet as townsfolk get curious and start digging up the alien artefact, its radiation seeps out and wreaks dramatic changes on people around. Not even HG Wells, one of the diggers reflects, predicted an invasion of ghosts.

For Frank Landau in Nina Allan‘s Conquest the ghosts have been here for a long time. Frank hangs out on UFO forums. Frank believes that he is being watched by people he calls ‘the n-men’. Frank’s paranoid. He prefers the postal service to email, because to his mind it is

Like sending an email in slow motion, the slow spray of data through the fabric of space, a burgeoning of spores like the vortex of midges that swarmed the copse at twilight or after rain.

Frank’s thoughts are structured like this, measured and beautiful, but often his anxiety takes over, pressuring his words, so the prose deteriorates into panicky run-on sentences:

For Frank the anxiety of knowing he was under surveillance was less than the anxiety of being spied on in secret. You could even say there was something energising in knowing for sure, a sense of forward momentum even of power yet he knew he should be careful not so much of them as of himself the ceaseless careless spooling of his unguarded thoughts. 

Frank’s problem is diagnosed as generalised anxiety disorder. He’s been in and out of locked psychiatric wards since the age of fourteen. Despite this great psychological drag, Frank has a lot going for him. He can code, well enough to earn a freelance living. He still lives with his mum because he is afraid of change, but there’s a lot of love there and he is an active participant in his family. He has a girlfriend, Rachel, who can get past his craziness because she loves him. Frank doesn’t have the monomania of the typical conspiracy theorist. His brother Michael describes going to a UFO conference and being struck by ‘the way the speakers seemed to take it for granted that everyone in the audience thought the same way they did, that they all knew the truth and anyone who didn’t agree with them was either an idiot sheep or part of the conspiracy.’ Frank is never like this – he doesn’t force his ideas on others, they are not at the forefront of his conversation, they are more like a quiet hum in the background. Michael also says: ‘I could never get my head round it, the way he could be perfectly normal, sitting there having a pint and laughing about some show he’d seen on TV and yet all the time he’d be having these thoughts, these beliefs that stood completely outside the way most people see the world.’

Frank’s key text is a novel called The Tower, written by an ex serviceman named John C Sylvester in the 1950s. It is an SF novel in which the Earth has concluded a war with a distant civilisation called ‘Gliese’ – concluded successfully, though at great human cost. A New York architect named Archimbaud Aspen wants to build a gigantic tower to mark Earth’s victory over the aliens. It is called the Conquest Tower and Aspen sees it as ‘a city within the city, an exclusive gated community that would function as a magnet for trade and an advertisement for its creator’s planet-sized ambition.’ Aspen’s big talking point is that he wants to build the tower from stone imported from the ruins of the defeated Gliese. This stone, unfortunately, is not ordinary stone. The artisans who build Conquest Tower ‘spoke of the malleability of the stone, or the stone ‘knowing what it was doing’, of the affinity they felt for it even’. Aspen himself is a paragon of self-confidence. His fluent vision drives the project to success. Yet once the tower is actually built and he is living in it, Aspen starts having bad dreams – and in these dreams it is New York in ruins, a burning wartime hellscape, and alien soldiers are chasing him. Aspen’s faithful PA Sidney Kruger notices a change in him: ‘an increasing propensity for small mistakes.’ Aspen is afraid to leave the building because this makes him feel like ‘whole aspects of himself were coming adrift, releasing themselves from their moorings and unspooling inside his brain.’ The problem – understated but obvious – is that the stone itself is alive. 

After twenty years of a settled life, Frank takes a trip abroad for the first time, to Paris to meet fellow enthusiasts from the UFO forum. Nine months later, he hasn’t come back, or made contact in any way. Sick with worry, Rachel hires a private detective, Robin Clay. Robin begins to unravel the mystery of Frank’s disappearance. The more conventional parts of the novel are about Robin’s investigation in the present, and her interrogation of the past. She is uncovering something huge, and so are we. Reading Conquest is to be in thrall to a evolving mystery, colossal and gorgeous. It is the kind of novel that defies analysis. In the face of Allan’s spectacular horizons the critical part of your brain just short-circuits, leaving you to enjoy the book on a deeper level. 

Disappointments? Longueurs? Sure. Allan includes lengthy essays from Frank’s friends on the UFO forum, which are beautifully written but also annoying because they make explicit the themes already so well developed in the story sequences. The precocious legend of Frank Landau gets irritating after a while – he is compared to a medieval saint near the end of the book, and by this point you agree with Robin’s advice to Rachel: ‘You have already given twenty years of your life to him. You need to think about yourself, about your future.’ Among their commonalities, the characters have a fondness for Bach, talk about him endlessly, comparing different recordings, the language of music is key, but again we already understand this, just from Frank’s early lines: ‘Words were slippery… So unlike code, or music, which had to be rendered perfectly or it wouldn’t run.’ Allan’s prose is so brilliant and well thought out you can understand the connection with music altogether, and I wonder if she actually based some of her sentences on the Goldberg Variations, as Thomas Harris was said to.

Whatever Allan was doing, it has worked. It’s rare that you read a book that makes you feel you’re a different person after finishing it.

Unserious People

(Spoilers for entire series)

Here is a passage from Terry Pratchett that comes to mind when I think about Succession.

Six Beneficent Winds suddenly remembered, as a child, playing Shibo Yangcong-san with his grandfather. The old man always won. No matter how carefully he’d assembled his strategy, he’d find Grandfather would place a tile quite innocently right in the crucial place just before he could make his big move. The ancestor had spent his whole life playing shibo. The fight was just like that. 

Logan Roy always wins. His son, Kendall, plots to take over his billion-dollar media empire, but every attempt fails. A board vote doesn’t work. A hostile takeover doesn’t work. Kendall’s bombshell press conference at the end of season two certainly rattled the old man for a while, and put him on the back foot… but it didn’t cost Logan the company, which remained his until the end of his life. As Logan likes to say: ‘I fucking win.’

Succession is a dark comedy about the failed attempts of Kendall and his brothers to take over the empire their father started. It never took a genius to see that the brothers and sister wanted Waystar but also wanted other things from their dad – his love, support and approval. But in the world of Succession love is conditional. 

Marty Byrde in the crime drama Ozark thinks of love as conditional. He resents his wife’s affair because of the sacrifices he himself made for his marriage and family – hard work, years of faithfulness, ‘Marty Byrde, putting presents under the tree since 2002.’ It’s not just entitlement that motivates him. Marty feels that he has to be constantly ‘providing’ to be worthy of love, a pathology that took hold in his own childhood, when his father died of pancreatic cancer and left Marty and his mother penniless. Whatever, the idea of not being needed (and thus loved) is unmooring for him. Marty’s uncharacteristic loss of temper in season four springs not only from his fractious marriage and perilous situation but also from the meeting with his son Jonah earlier in the episode. Jonah is by this point living in a motel, making his own money and doesn’t even need Marty to drive him to school – the kid has a bike for that. (The bicycle appears in the opening O symbol intro for that episode, just below a drawing of Marty’s clenched fist.)

Logan’s situation is less stressful. He doesn’t need love because he’s learned to live without it from an early age, and he doesn’t care about his legacy, because he can’t imagine a world in which he isn’t alive. ‘Everything is moving,’ he tells Shiv, and that’s what Logan’s life is about: movement, and momentum. He is afraid, nevertheless, that his children will steal his life’s work, or perhaps seek to end his life altogether. (When Kendall makes a meal for him Logan offers a portion of the food to Kendall’s own son, to rule out poisoning.) Day to day, Logan makes considerable effort to keep them fighting each other rather than teaming up against Logan himself.

It’s surprising how successful this strategy proves. Shiv has built a successful career outside the family, running campaigns for candidates whose politics her father abhors. Yet she junks it for a nod and a wink from Logan. (Even Shiv’s look changes dramatically once she believes she is in the running; she goes from season one’s messy hair and big jumpers to the more corporate and streamlined look almost overnight.) Kendall is the strongest threat to Logan’s position so he needs a harder line. Season two is one long demonstration of Logan’s power over Kendall. Logan makes Kendall cut his rehab short to defend his father on the news. Logan makes Kendall gut his favourite acquisition because you have to kill what you love to prove your loyalty to Logan Roy. 

‘As a concept, ‘the family’ has worked even harder than ‘the individual’ to overshadow our ethical obligations to other people,’ writes Zoe Hu. Over the series we’ve seen what the Roys do to each other, and to the lesser one per centers in their orbit. Think of all the people who enjoy big arcs in Waystar world only to suddenly, inexplicably disappear: Roman’s girlfriend Tabitha and his former partner Grace (storms out of a Thanksgiving, never to return) Kendall’s PA Comfrey, Logan’s girlfriend Carrie, riding the subway back to her little apartment. Inflitrating the Roy Inner Ring takes effort and surviving there takes more. Small town company man Tom Wambsgans made a good move in marrying Shiv: ‘You married me for my DNA,’ she later tells him, accurately. When he realised that the marriage did not guarantee advancement or even fidelity on Shiv’s part, Tom pivoted to Logan. He became Logan’s conduit to what Shiv was thinking, and even offered to go to prison on the old man’s behalf. Unlike with Greg, who in his way is just as terrible, I never warmed to Tom Wambsgans. (Wasn’t there a character in Balzac who ‘would have paid for the pleasure of selling himself?’)

What the Roys do to ordinary people is even worse. Consider the death of Andrew Dodds, a waiter at Shiv’s wedding. Lots of people killed Dodds, and his death is foreshadowed: Shiv makes a joke about killing a stripper, and Roman demonstrates a similar failure of responsibility in his satellite launch, which detonates on a smartphone screen before his eyes. The workers on the satellite launch escape death, but Andrew Dodds was not so lucky. Logan fired him from the catering team, after he interrupted the old man at a stressful moment; Greg pointed him out to Kendall as a potential source of drugs; Kendall drove Dodds into the dark country road by the river. Dodds himself had agency in his own death because he grabbed the wheel to avoid the deer. Jeremy Strong’s acting is just fantastic in the aftermath: Kendall surfaces from the river, returns to the water in an attempt to save Dodds, then gives the waiter up for dead. He jogs back to the castle, hides behind a tree to avoid being seen from a passing car, then sneaks back into the castle in his wet clothes, fireworks going off as he struggles through an open field. Kendall wakes up the next day and you see the memory hit him. He picks up his phone, then you see him realise that searching for news on a smartphone could be incriminating, so he just turns on the radio, which plays crackly gibberish. You see every thought of Kendall’s cross the actor’s face. 

At best, Logan has a patrician fondness for ordinary people. Leaving the modest home of the Dodds family, he tells Kendall: ‘We give them a laugh, bit of telly, news that doesn’t talk down to them. Nice fucking people, decent fucking folk.’ Cross the Roys, though, and you can go from decent fucking folk to an NRPI. In the shadow logs of Waystar cruises, this nasty acronym denotes a victim who is unconnected to the Roys, or to anybody important, and is therefore of no consequence. Logan even says this himself, of Andrew Dodds: ‘No real person involved.’ This sets up a dividing line between father and son. Despite all his flaws, Kendall does feel remorse for Dodds, the people at Vaulter that he fired and the people raped and murdered on the Waystar cruises. Logan finds about Dodds because he has a Mike Ehrmantraut-style cleaner who found the evidence, connected the dots and cleared the crime scene. When Kendall invades the Waystar town hall in season 3, a woke prince in revolt against his father’s empire, the cleaner appears again and tells him: I know you. (In the final scene of the series, when Kendall wanders off, devastated, to the river, is the ‘cleaner’ the mysterious figure in the suit who follows Kendall to the dock and stands by him? You know, I think it might be.) 

In Money by Martin Amis (dead now, o Discordia) he writes that ‘London is full of short stories, long stories, epics, farces, sitcoms, sagas, soaps and squibs, walking around hand in hand.’ The protagonist, John Self, is trying to make a movie, but is stymied by the various stars, all narcissists who have a fixed idea of how they want to be seen by the world. And the drama is secretly controlled by a villain who is high on the idea of his own victimhood. You’re bound to get drama, Self reflects, when you deal with people who want to write their own lives. 

Logan has his own narrative of a self made man who started with nothing and built the gigantic Waystar corporation. His children all want to be part of that story to some degree. The siblings oppose Kendall’s hostile takeover, even though they would gain vast fortunes by going along. ‘We’re somebodies now,’ says Connor Roy. ‘Any doofus can have a few million bucks.’ It’s not just power but the idea of being part of something. The more money and power we have, the greater our chances of imprinting ourselves on the world, making the world see ourselves as we would like to be seen. That is why Kendall, among his other addictions, can’t quit the family drama. His fortieth birthday attracts the city’s biggest names but all Kendall cares about is whether his brothers and sister will be coming. Doing methamphetamine with a bunch of guys he met in a bar in New Mexico, Kendall gets along with the methheads until they start riffing on his background, and at this point Kendall gets self conscious and calls Roman to pick him up. He hates his family sometimes but ultimately feels lost without them. 

‘A rich kid kills a boy,’ Logan tells Kendall, ‘and that’s all he’ll ever be.’ He lays down the choice: Kendall can own up to what he’s done and ruin the memory of Shiv’s wedding and maybe go to prison. Alternatively, Logan sketches out a brighter scenario: ‘in which father and son are reconciled.’ Kendall is part of Logan’s story or he is nothing, just a drug addict guilty of manslaughter. Shiv has her father’s gift of persuasion. She convinces Kira, a Waystar whistleblower, that if she testifies against the company’s evil deeds, that is all she will be remembered for: ‘the first line of your obituary.’ Shiv is kinder than Logan, though, in which she leaves open a possible future for Kira outside the Waystar orbit, not just reconciliation to her place within it. 

All this is to answer a question I always had watching the show: why do they bother? With the wealth they must have as Logan’s children, which would allow them to do anything with their lives, it confounds me that Kendall, Roman and Shiv spent so much time and energy on Waystar Royco. I do not include Connor in this, the eldest son, commonly known as the stupidest Roy but also in a sense the wisest of them, because he had the sense to remove himself far from the corporate action. Connor is in Hannah Mackay’s words ‘a middle-aged libertarian drop-out’ but at least in the final season, he has a degree of independence and self-awareness the others lack. He has his place in New Mexico, a wife with some affection for him, and at least one friend, liberal counterpart Maxim Pierce – you can imagine them sitting up at nights drinking very expensive wine and arguing about Napoleon. The other Roys don’t seem to have anybody beyond their circle (Kendall at least has a family of his own, but has alienated them almost entirely by end series). Poverty is a curse but privilege too has the power to destroy us and make prisons of human lives. 

This is really brought home at the end of season three when Kendall, Roman and Shiv discover that Logan is selling the company out from under them. Kendall has the idea to persuade their mother Lady Caroline to use her board votes to block the deal. However, Logan has already learned about this gambit and blocked it: he persuades Caroline to vote his way, in exchange for a peerage to her new husband. The kids race to Logan’s villa only to find the deal all worked out without them – without sympathy, Logan informs them that he has sold their birthright. The aghast expressions on the face of his sons and daughter are truly haunting, not the faces of adults but those described by W H Auden:

Lest we should see where we are 

Lost in a haunted wood,

Children afraid of the night

Who have never been happy or good.

Why did we love Succession? Part of it (come on) was the opulence of it, the idea of seeing how very rich and important people live. Another part of it was the vulnerability of the characters, and the sense of lives predating the show. There are so many mysteries and secrets that we never get to the bottom of, and the seamless flow of argument and conversation between the characters, their in jokes and old wounds, gave us the sense that this was a real family – not serious perhaps, but real. As set decorator Sophie Newman told The Ringer: ‘nothing is new. Everything has a personality, has a history and a provenance… That’s the key, is that it’s layered.’ Layered.

Low Light

Every man’s death diminishes us, it’s said. Narrator JJ has been diminished more than most. Their first great love, Thomas James, has died suddenly aged twenty seven. Now in Mexico City on a leap day JJ is moved to write the story of their affair. 

Here’s another cliche: beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Thomas James is energetic and handsome but still, it’s hard to work out what JJ sees in him. Thomas is a photographer’s assistant obsessed with Morrissey and Soviet brutalism. He is cruel and bigoted. I don’t recall, from the dialogue, that he has a kind word for anyone. The nastiness of his behaviour and speech makes a nice ironic contrast with the tender lyricism JJ uses to describe him. 

Perhaps it’s the attraction of opposites – a third cliche, but Martin Amis said that love makes cliches of us all. JJ as a person is everything that Thomas James is not – erudite, sensitive and politically engaged. They are by far the more interesting of the two lovers. Their narration is high camp with touches of modernism and religious grandeur – I felt at times I was reading the diaries of Teddy Thursby, Jake Arnott‘s dissolute peer of the 1960s. Wry observations end in assertions so pretentious they near make you laugh out loud. Take this: ‘SF is not a place, not really, it’s more a state of mind, an overlapping, a fault line from where you can hear the sighs of the unavenged Ohlone, Asia’s golden gates swinging open, the last startled gasp of the Viceroy.’ Or: ‘I’m sad that I’ll never get to see you in the newspapers collecting an award, and strike up a cigarette, startle my maid and mutter to myself, ‘Putain!’ with my eyes still full of desire.’ (JJ also says come as ‘cum’… transgressive, no?)

It is all in perception. Soon after Thomas has died JJ sees an artwork called Der Unfall at the Whitechapel gallery – ‘a strange turquoise black whirligig… four wagons colliding’ or ‘one wagon flying outwards in four directions’. The work’s ‘ominous logic and centrifugal force’ freaks JJ out, ‘as if the ominous white figure-eight at the centre of the accident were a void in which I was hurtling head-first.’ Near the end, a video work by Bruce Nauman provides much the same effect: ‘projectors threw the same image onto the floor and onto the wall in front of us, of two figures in black, rolling away from each other whilst reaching towards each other… They were two pairs of sirens, a quaternity, calling me into the whirlpool, like a deadly mirage composed of my own paranoiac desires.’

JJ was told by their mother that ‘I live my life like a sunbather in the park, forever moving the blanket to chase the sun’. JJ’s room in Mexico ‘never fully catches the sun’. Thomas’s bedroom has ‘a cantankerous set of vertical blinds that would never descend, so the room was never more than murky, with light spilling in from all the restaurants in the streets below.’ Falling into bed at dawn with a Californian lover, JJ wishes ‘at any point in the past three months, we had taken the time to put his bedroom curtains back up.’ There’s a word, used early on, that describes At Certain Points We Touch: crepuscular. Wherever JJ goes, the light isn’t quite clear. 

The story draws towards Thomas James and then is repelled from him like the two dancing shadows in the Nauman projection. JJ and Thomas meet up, have wild crazy sex, and argue, at which point JJ disappears across the sea to New York or San Francisco. The American passages are the best part of this story because in America JJ is always with friends. They live off booze and drugs and cheap 24 hour cafe food, off burlesque gigs and cash-in-hand jobs found on internet messageboards. JJ is trying to achieve something, get into the middle of something, but we don’t know what. The spirit of it is warm and indubitable. As JJ says, speaking simply for once: ‘We just knew we were searching for something more than the hand dealt us offered.’

JJ’s return to London is not so much fun. JJ of course has a scene there, centred around a horrible pub called the Joiners. There’s a lovely old guy called Jovian who runs an open mic night and acts as a sort of counsellor to the others (”We told people ridiculous stories, that he was my father, or that we were working together, ghost-writing the memoirs of the last great Warhol starlet, Jackie Jackie Pizza Hut.’) But worries about money and rent are never far from anybody’s mind, and in London Thomas’s dour spectre overshadows everything. JJ begins to exhaust the patience of his friends. The city seems to get smaller and harder as the novel goes on. Street harassment is a fact of life for gay and trans people, and in this book it’s always in the background, easily ignored. Until Thomas’s death, when JJ and Adam meet on a bridge. When Adam starts crying with grief, a group of passing lads laugh at him. It is an evocation of an accepted negativity suddenly really getting to you, and at that moment JJ’s horrible Lancashire childhood suddenly seems a lot closer.

Lauren John Joseph‘s narrative touches upon theoretical physics, the nature of existence and observation, and it’s all very interesting, it all relates to this story of two lovers who, no matter how close they got, could never really know each other, and clearly these lessons are not just for JJ and Thomas. Still, maybe it’s a joke, an irony, but I can’t help wanting Thomas to have been a little more interesting. What the hell, the heart wants what it wants. Unreflexive desire is shot through this novel – either the last of a certain kind of radical writing, or the beginning of something new. 

Notes on a Scandal

Until then, hypocrisy had had its moments, in politics, in religion, in commerce; it had played its part in innumerable social interactions; and it had starred in many Victorian novels, and so on… Looking back, hypocrisy might have smiled at its earlier reticence, for it soon grew accustomed to the commanding heights.

– Martin Amis, Koba the Dread

What follows is some observations, not necessarily coherent or insightful, about the Hancock affair

I know I’m late with this but it’s the kind of story that just runs on forever. Yet it’s a surprise that we are surprised. The authoritarian populist ideology on which this government is based doesn’t see the hypocrisy in the whole thing. They are democrats, as long as people elect ‘strong leaders’. The ‘strong leaders’ can do pretty much what they want while the rest of us work the fields. Scandals that erupt around the lords and ladies don’t ‘cut through’, and even if they did – it wouldn’t matter. As I’ve said before – rules are for the smallfolk to follow. Lockdowns are for the little people.

I totally get the reaction of some people who say that adultery is wrong and not morally neutral. Adultery breaks up families, causes emotional harm and social discohesion. So there is an argument for saying ‘If his wife can’t trust him, who can trust him?’ I get that. Still, you can’t prosecute Hancock for adultery and most people wouldn’t think we should be able to. These are moral judgements, not legal ones.

Until COVID-19. The pandemic has blurred the lines between legal and moral judgements. Under lockdown if you meet up with more than six people, sit in a pub without ordering a ‘substantial meal’, enter a shop without a mask, sing in a choir, hug someone (I am generalising because the rules over the last year or so have been complex and subject to arbitrary change) … you are seen as breaking the law, and worse, you are literally endangering lives. The confusion between COVID-19 laws and public health guidance makes it more difficult, and accompanying official law/guidance is the personal judgements people have made about what endangers public health – complaints about people spitting in the street, children blowing bubbles, rowdy people on trains, people sitting in beer gardens, the list is endless. I keep coming back to that essay by Regina Rini, written at the beginning of the pandemic: ‘We cease thinking about victims as persons, but instead as vectors of disease.’ Being a person in a time of COVID-19 is not easy.

Things are more relaxed now than they were in spring 2020 or winter 20-21 and indeed it’s becoming difficult to remember what the atmosphere was like in those scary febrile days. The fear, misanthropy, conformity, judgmentalism was stark. Dominic Cummings became the lightning rod for all this last year, although he wasn’t seen as a hypocrite (Cummings, probably wrongly, was characterised as laissez-faire on the virus). Until the Barnard Castle story broke, support for the government had been near uniform. There was a sense that he had broken if not the letter of the law but the spirit of the lockdown. Matt Hancock is a different person to Cummings – he was the government’s foremost public health bore and lockdown zealot who slammed SAGE advisor Neil Ferguson when the professor was himself exposed in May 2020.

When was the last time ministers screwing around became big news? You have to go back to the 1990s. Matt Hancock is big news now because the pandemic has litigated how and when people can interact with each other. Interactions can spread the virus. And what has grabbed people’s intention about the story is not the possible breach of law (or is it guidance?) the fact that Hancock’s relationship with Coladangelo (at least in some form) predated her employment for him, not the implications for public integrity or details about the COVID-19 stimulus money train. People are watching because of the kiss, the thrill and the secret of adultery, and they have a good reason to watch because what Hancock and Coladangelo did was against ‘the rules’. And we are going to have to live with this virus for a while yet. So pretty much everything about a politician’s private life is now open season.

What gets me is the fretting that people won’t ‘respect the rules’ because of Hancock’s example. Again the idea that the public’s actions can be so influenced by one disgraced minister, to the degree that it could increase COVID-19 rates. Again the idea of us as peasants watching intently the great game of thrones. Don’t get me wrong. Politicians are public servants, they are worthy of respect until they lose it. But they are not role models and people don’t think of them as role models.

People get the government they deserve. It’s said that the various political misdeeds exposed in the newspapers fail to ‘cut through’ because ordinary people are not interested in them. If you want to keep voting for a bunch of grasping, thieving, pompous bores, snobs and petty tyrants that’s fine. If hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue then it’s a backhanded compliment with the joke very much on the rest of us. Democracy depends on an informed citizen population. We have had eleven years to get to know this lot, and I think we have given them a fair hearing.

Lives of the Hollow Men

There’s an argument I used to have with women writers about how literary fiction is viewed by men and women. A woman can write a deeply profound, well realised novel about family and relationships, women writers would tell me, and it’s dismissed as chick lit or ‘domestic fiction’. But Philip Roth can turn out a dozen books about adultery and critics rave about them, each dashed-off novella is received like it’s the key to all mythologies – life, the universe and everything. This argument never convinced me – I would just say that woman writers can be just as narcissistic and self involved as their male counterparts and that anyway, I’m not interested in reading about family and relationships; I wasn’t really listening. 

Dolly Alderton’s Ghosts showed me just how ignorant I was. It’s a deep, phenomenal novel, that goes to the core of the self. The setup is ordinary. Food writer Nina Dean has changed her life. She has carefully extricated herself from a relationship that has lasted since university, and she has become successful enough at writing to make a real living from it. At thirty two she has everything worked out, but still feels the pressure to catch up.

Most of her friends from youth are now married with children, and moving out of the city. Alderton is great on how it feels when close friends make what seems from the outside like inexplicable overcommitments – marriage, kids, mortgage – and the change that comes over them: it’s like a light goes out of their eyes, they turn from Jack Kerouac’s ‘mad ones’ to hollow men of the suburbs, whispering quietly and meaninglessly about loft conversions and school fees. Nina’s one remaining single ally is the amazing Lola who is vivacious and beautiful enough to attract tons of men but none of them will commit. Lola is a veteran of the app dating world and encourages Nina to set up a profile.

This is where you start to appreciate the precision of Alderton’s prose and the thought she puts into it. Online dating has been written about so many times but Alderton writes it best because she understands the pressure on people to be original, or funny:

There were a number of effete subgenres of language employed by many of the men I spoke to. ‘Good evening to you, m’lady – doth thou pubbeth on this sunny Saturday?’ one asked. ‘If music be the food of love, play on, but if a food writing love both love and music – shall we go out dancing next week?’ another wrote in an incomprehensible riddle… It was a unique style of seduction that I hadn’t come across before – wistful and nostalgic, meaningless and strange. Humourless and impenetrable.

—

There were the hundreds of men who feigned indifference to being on Linx – some of whom said their friends made them do it and they had no idea why they were there, as if downloading a dating app, filling in a profile with copious personal information and uploading photos of yourself was as easy to do by accident as taking the wrong turning on a motorway. 

But Nina strikes gold on the app. She meets Max who appears to be the perfect gentleman – handsome, outdoorsy, solvent and kind. The two fall for each other headlong into a passionate relationship that lasts for months – until, one day, Max just stops calling. There is a chapter, painful to read, which consists entirely of DMs – Nina sending texts that grow increasingly abject and desperate while Max responds with noncommittal one liners or no response at all. He has ghosted her and the story carries on without him. A heartbroken Nina gets swept up in other lives – her best friend Katherine is having a new baby and her ex Joe is marrying another woman. And the real tragedy of Nina’s life is that her brilliant, erudite, funny father is slowly but surely losing his mind. 

Alderton is a master of pressure and tension. There are scenes where everything on the surface looks fine, but there is that crackle of difficulty between the characters so that you keep expecting something awful to happen. Joe wants Nina to be heavily involved in the wedding for some reason that doesn’t feel healthy. Nina and Lola have to get through the wedding itself plus the hen night – rigorously organised merriment, brittle with social cohesion and careful budgeting. Katherine is so overwhelmed with her toddler plus new baby that she thinks the whole world revolves around herself and her family. At one point, Nina loses her temper with this:

You couldn’t even come to my book launch when I had no family there. You’re my best and oldest friend and not only did you not want to be there, you didn’t even feel a sense of obligation to pretend to want to be there… So you thought you’d go to a party where you could talk about babies and weddings and houses all night. Because not everyone wants to talk about babies and weddings and houses at a book launch.

There is even tension in the scenes with Max – as considerate and engaged as he is, you begin to realise that it’s a curated image: when Nina takes the conversation into places he doesn’t want it to go, the man just shuts down… and you can see that in his head he’s planning his next move. Near the end of the novel, Lola finally gets what looks like a committed boyfriend – Jethro the magician, a brilliantly drawn character, charismatic and entertaining, but it’s another curated image. There is a terrific scene where Nina confronts Jethro at his flat: ‘which was filled with the essential props of a try-hard renaissance man. The exposed-brick wall and original tiles of someone interested in heritage, but only of the building he lived in. Framed Pink Floyd albums, a pasta-making machine…’ Nina asks Jethro hard questions, which he can’t answer (‘I’m just not ready to commit properly yet.’ ‘You’re thirty-six’) and it’s clear that he has no idea how to be around women.

Nina reflects that ‘These men would emerge at some point, full of all the love and care and confidence that had been bestowed upon them over the years, and they might commit to someone. Then, most certainly, another one. Then another one when that one got boring. Their greed would not be satisfied by one woman, by one life. They’d get to lead a great many lives. Life after life after life after life.’ Men like Jethro and Max aren’t just hollow men but almost vampires: they feed off people, move on, they age, but don’t grow. And plenty more of us blunder recklessly into other lives before we understand who we are or what we want. It’s a wonder any woman would give us the time of day. 

Because it’s hard to build a life for yourself, and hard to build a life with other people. The lesson of Alderton’s fine book is that both these things take time, and work, and are worth the effort.

Something Something Richard Hofstadter

Everyone talks about conspiracy theories at the moment, but they talk about conspiracy theories in old ways. This is Sarah Churchwell, writing after the US election:

In 1964 the historian Richard Hofstadter identified what he called the ‘paranoid style in American politics’, a perspective that shaped the stories Americans too often told themselves. Paranoia offers a master trope for interpreting ‘the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy’ in American political narratives, from 18th-century Illuminati paranoia to the Papist conspiracies of 19th-century nativism, to the enduring anti-communist hysterias of the 20th century. Hofstadter predicted that paranoid energies would periodically be released in America when ‘historical catastrophes or frustrations’ exacerbated the religious traditions and social structures that fostered those energies, catalysing them into ‘mass movements or political parties’.

And this is Oliver Kamm, also from November, writing about the ‘Great Reset’ COVID-19 conspiracy theory:

The historian Richard Hofstadter identified this strain of thinking in American public life in a classic essay titled ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’ in 1964. He showed that the fevered allegations of McCarthyism, which were then a recent aberration in US politics, had a historical lineage. American society, he said, ‘has served again and again as an arena for uncommonly angry minds’.

Going back a few years, here is science writer Martin Robbins, with a long essay covering Trump, the Jeremy Corbyn movement and UKIP.

Like many UKIP supporters, Corbyn occupies an anti-political ground where the traditional distinctions between left and right are less meaningful. Corbyn and his UKIP counterpart are both natural Eurosceptics, both insular and protectionist when it comes to Britain’s place in the world, both weirdly sympathetic to Putin, both aligned with the left behind working class and suspicious of political, economic or intellectual elites (Corbyn rejects scientific consensus on everything from alternative medicine to nuclear power). Both have adopted – and been adopted by – what Richard Hofstadter called ‘the paranoid style’ in his famous 1964 essay: ‘a sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy’.

Much has happened in politics since 1964. Hofstadter’s paranoid style was realised ‘when the representatives of a particular social interest — perhaps because of the very unrealistic and unrealizable nature of its demands — are shut out of the political process.’ Hofstadter wrote that ‘This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals… and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration.’ It is this picture of conspiracy theorists that has dated the most, because the impression is of unhappy, highly-strung people kept out of the conversation. Robbins says: ‘we should ask about the circumstances and decisions that created such a large group of the frustrated and ignored in the first place.’

What has changed? That today’s conspiracists walk the halls of power. Viktor Orbán parlayed the Soros myth into national leadership. Trump ruled America for four years. (Hofstadter in his day saw a successful conspiracist in ‘Tail-Gunner’ Joe McCarthy.) Your crazy uncle at the Christmas dinner table might not become prime minister any time soon. But he can set up a YouTube channel, get subscribers, leverage that into regular appearances as a ‘British expert’ on Sputnik or Press TV. Conspiracists want money. They want power. Mona Charen remembered taking National Review cruises in the 1990s where the conservative elites mingled and networked. Conspiracy theories proliferated. ‘Once, during the Clinton administration, people at my dinner table were repeating the story that Hillary had killed Vince Foster,’ Charen writes. And she noticed something else:

These people were not hard up. They hadn’t been displaced from their union jobs by outsourcing. The ladies wore designer dresses and the men sported pinky diamonds. In 2020, people earning more than $100,000 voted for Trump over Biden by 11 points, whereas Biden earned the support of those earning less than $50,000 by 15 points.

Once conspiracy theorists do become successful, the conspiracies are used to maintain power. Peter Pomerantsev writes in This Is Not Propaganda that

In a world where even the most authoritarian regimes struggle to impose censorship, one has to surround audiences with so much cynicism about anybody’s motives, persuade them that behind every seemingly benign motivation is a nefarious, if impossible-to-prove, plot, that they lose faith in the possibility of an alternative, a tactic a renowned Russian media analyst called Vasily Gatov calls ‘white jamming’.

There is a subgenre of articles that advise us ‘how to talk to conspiracy theorists’ as if you are looking at people with Asperger’s or learning difficulties who have to be carefully coaxed into engagement with reality. ‘Recognise that everyone has had their lives turned upside down, and is seeking explanations,’ says fact checker Claire Wardle in a recent BBC feature. ‘Conspiracy theories tend to be simple, powerful stories that explain the world. Reality is complex and messy, which is harder for our brains to process.’ The piece also tells us to ‘Remember that people often believe conspiracy theories because deep down, they’re worried or anxious. Try to understand those feelings – particularly in a year like the one we’ve just had.’

David Aaronovitch, in his 2009 study Voodoo Histories, realised that ‘The imagined model of an ignorant priest-ridden peasantry or proletariat, replacing religious or superstitious belief with equally far-fetched notions of how society works, turns out to be completely wrong. It has typically been the professors, the university students, the artists, the managers, the journalists and the civil servants who have concocted and disseminated the conspiracies.’ How then do you talk to someone who is professional, solvent, sound of mind, but is deeply into conspiracy theories for their own reasons? Hofstadter’s ‘paranoid style’ arises ‘when the representatives of a particular social interest — perhaps because of the very unrealistic and unrealizable nature of its demands — are shut out of the political process’ – well, they’re not shut out now. ‘This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals… and since these goals are not even remotely attainable…’ Not remotely attainable? Seriously?

Writers who have actually studied modern authoritarianism know that it has adapted well to the digital age and that old certainties no longer apply. Anne Applebaum, in Twilight of Democracy, wrote that ‘Some enjoy chaos, or seek to promote chaos, as a prelude to imposing a new kind of order.’ The National Review cruisers who support Trump and Brexit, Aaronovitch’s professors and intellectuals – they aren’t going to be stuck in burning cities or starving in lorry queues. Psychologist Jovan Byford in that BBC feature says that ‘Conspiracy theories instil in believers a sense of superiority. It’s an important generator of self-esteem.’ To quote Charen again: ‘A theme that unified these conspiracy-minded people was a sense of superiority—not inferiority. They felt that they had access to the hidden truth that the deluded masses didn’t understand.’

Chaos is good – as long as it happens to others. Smash the world and there’s a chance you’ll get to rule over the ruins. This is, of course, the point of Trump’s ‘Stop the Steal’ movement. His challenges to the 2020 election have been thrown out of every court in the land, but that’s not the point – the point is to create a ‘stab in the back’ myth and delegitimise Biden, in preparation for a 2024 run either by Trump himself or one of his proxies. A cognitive neuroscientist told Five Thirty-Eight that ‘I think the current situation is going to be much, much worse than birtherism in terms of people believing it, and believing it for the long run.’

Conspiracy theorists know what they are doing. They have changed. Our arguments against them need to change too.

Fair is Foul, Foul is Fair

In a chapter called ‘Pharmakon’ the narrator of Hex analyses the word.

In Ancient Greek pharmakon meant poison and cure and scapegoat. It also meant potion and spell and charm. It could mean artificial color or dye, even paint. It came from roots that meant cut and throat. The pharmakon doesn’t change its name whether it’s noxious or healing, whether it destroys or repairs. We assign human value to these results. Go ahead and employ a drug either in measure, toward health, or in excess, towards oblivion. The pharmakon has no intentions; it cooperates.

Potions that kill or cure fascinate authors. When Roland Deschain walks into a New York pharmacy, he expects ‘a dim, candle-lit room full of bitter fumes, jars of unknown powders and liquids and philters, many covered with a thick layer of dust or spun about with a century’s cobwebs.’ The mundanity of the drugstore blunts him: ‘Here was a salve that was supposed to restore fallen hair but would not; there a cream which promised to erase unsightly spots on the hands and arms but lied.’ The psycho genius of The Secret History (to which Hex has been compared) boasts that ‘The woods will soon be full of foxglove and monkshood. I could get all the arsenic I need from flypaper. And even herbs that aren’t common here – good God, the Borgias would have wept to see the health-food store I found in Brattleboro last week.’ In her marvellous study A is for Arsenic, the author (and chemist) Kathryn Harkup explores the use of poisons in Agatha Christie’s novels, derived from Christie’s years working as a nurse and then an apothecary’s assistant – apothecary, now there’s a fantastic literary word. This stuff even comes up in children’s fiction. Professor Snape is denied Hogwarts’s Defence Against the Dark Arts job, but he does get to be Potions Master, with a creepy dungeon classroom that matches his sinister demeanour.

Rebecca Dinerstein Knight’s novel is conventional only in its use of toxins. Nell Barber is a PhD scientist who has been expelled from Columbia after one of her colleagues dies of thallium poisoning. Exiled from the campus and working in a Brooklyn bar, Nell collects poisonous plants and hangs around the university in adoration of her mentor, Joan Kallas. Her obsession with Joan is reminiscent of Patricia Highsmith’s crush on an older woman who Highsmith glimpsed while working at a department store: her biographer Joan Schenkar articulates it as ‘On one side of the Bloomingdale’s counter was the young, poor, seemingly subservient salesgirl; on the other side, the older, wealthy, apparently dominant Venus in furs.’ Nell is very much the salesgirl in this equation – the young Midwesterner to Joan’s cosmopolitan authority. The novel is presented as Nell’s notebooks, in which she writes about Joan quite as much as she writes about plants. ‘It’s acceptable to admire you,’ Nell writes to Joan. ‘Admiration is the acceptable starting point and I did start there.’

There’s a lot going on in Hex, relationship wise. Nell has split up with her boyfriend Tom, a medievalist who specialises in unicorn myths. Tom then starts having an affair with Joan, who is married to campus HR man Barry, who is having an affair with younger postgraduate Mishti, who is supposed to be with business student Carlo. Knight says that ‘it was a pleasure to design six characters from scratch and put them in maximum exposure to each other. It was like a math problem.’

With all this intrigue going on Nell herself seems like the wan narrator who records everything but doesn’t achieve anything, mooncalfing about and scribbling her cahiers. But Knight loves the character: ‘She has very low vanity, and she’s willing to suffer the indignity of her own indulgence in return for the pleasure of her indulgence. In an environment where everyone is striving for more health and more productivity and more success, it was refreshing to write a character who is really not trying to prove anything or impress anyone.’ And indeed Nell grew on me, certainly by the scene when she chases Barry down the street shouting ‘I’M A VERY GOOD WITCH BARRY… AND HERE IS MY PROPHECY…. YOU WILL BUILD A SHIP OF ROTTEN WOOD AND BLOAT IT AND IT WILL GET VERY BIG… AND YOU WILL SOAK IT IN ROTTEN WATERS AND IT WILL FAIL BARRY… IT WILL FAIL.’

Hex is a very contemporary novel, with characters that talk in riddles and non sequiturs. It’s a hell of a strange read, but also strangely exhilarating – a spooky wood of a book, full of flowers and nightshade alike.

The Hungry Ghost Festival

‘My dislike of the city was almost violent, something I had never encountered elsewhere,’ writes Felicia Nay about Hong Kong. ‘If somebody had predicted that one day I would write a novel born out of nostalgia for it, I would have doubted the person’s sanity.’

Nay’s experiences seem remote from what would eventually become Red Affairs, White Affairs. ‘My room had no windows, the door was secured by an immense gate, the TV ads consisted of warnings against violent crime and HIV infections, and I had no bottled water.’ This is a way off her narrator Reini’s journey in the novel. Reini’s Hong Kong is about staggering views, sensual meals, long conversations, splendid ritual, tours of gorgeous landscapes – truly ‘Fragrant Harbour, Incense Port, Pearl of the South China Sea.’

Still, the happiness of the city is tempered by Reini’s knowledge of its delineations. Her role as an aid worker is very well defined by the faith based charity that employs her. When Reini gives a talk at an upscale women’s function her listeners only want to know ‘So, do you have a maid?… Why don’t you want one?… My helper feeds seven persons in the Philippines with her salary. She puts her children through school with my money.’

Reini loses patience with this, and says:

You think you’re good employers? Maybe you are. Maybe you are, maybe you’re not. According to our surveys, seventy-five percent of domestic workers work fourteen hours day. And all of them have to play by the rules of the system…. A system where losing your job means losing your visa and losing your home. And these are the good moments. The post-colonial, no, the proto-colonial moments…. The moments when the air conditioning is turned on for the master’s dog but never the maid… In the bad moments—and I get to work with the bad moments, remember—it’s modern slavery…. It starts with withheld wages and confiscated passports, wrongful promises by employment agencies and employers.

Reini can’t help break the rules. The novel takes its title from a traditional delineation. ‘White is the colour of death. Red, on the other hand, is auspicious, the glaze of happiness, the hue of protection. Red affairs are weddings, that lucky joining of two individuals, two families.’ Reini (or ‘Kim’) blurs the divisions without meaning to. She has lost her previous post in Khartoum for an act of altruism that her employers found inappropriate. Her best friend in the city is Virginia, a lonely woman who teaches her Cantonese. She has inherited her family’s disappointment by remaining unmarried, and her passages are some of the saddest in the book. Reini sees how a rule bound life has let Virginia down. Assigned back to casework after her angry speech at the woman’s function, Reini befriends Ronda, one of Hong Kong’s unseen army of domestic workers, and tries to fix the two women up. The transgressions feel vague but they are there.

As Isabel Costello says, Reini is ‘intense company, occasionally at the expense of narrative drive’. Her feelings, drives, sensations dominate the novel, whenever she’s eating, exercising, or blushing, you feel it. Reini also has a habit of reading strange portents into everyday occurrences: she’s forever quoting Emily Dickinson (so much like Chinese dynastic poetry, now that I think of it, with its blunt sensuality) and while this is clunky sometimes, maybe it’s the sort of thing you’d have to know Hong Kong at that period to understand. (The time frame is another vague thing, there’s no mention of the civil unrest of 2019.)

The book also gives terrific insight into Cantonese views of life and death: dying unmarried and childless is a sin for women because there will be no one to look after them in the afterlife, when people die they can become ancestors, but that’s the best case scenario – those who die of accidents or suicide haunt the earth as ghosts. Virginia has a neighbour who keeps a live chicken in her flat. She theorises that the rooster is her ‘ghost husband… Maybe they were engaged and then he died.’

Red Affairs, White Affairs is a strange, sometimes maddening novel, but in its way it’s a masterwork of sense and sensuality. There’s not a story there in the linear way I understand it, but a vivid, seamless rush of impressions and images like the view from some fast-flowing river, in high current.

Liberals in Lockdown

It’s not made the papers, but there’s been a lot of noise and merriment about the anti lockdown protests happening this weekend. Social media echoed with images of mad old men holding enormous placards and Piers Corbyn being dragged away in handcuffs. The derision is understandable – the London Hyde Park demo drew only dozens, rather than hundreds, of people, which makes it more successful at least than the ‘mass gathering’ planned for Leeds Hyde Park, which attracted no protestors at all. The LS6ers don’t much like conspirazoids. And on a Saturday, they don’t get up before noon.

There have been small periodic protests since beginning of lockdown and they have come to represent the silly and toxic opposition to lockdown – Spiked Online, the increasingly deranged comment pages of the Daily Telegraph, Nigel Farage patrolling Dover beaches looking for immigrants, the idiots who tear down 5G poles, the President telling us to drink bleach and the rowdy yokels of certain American states. The worst people in politics gather in opposition to lockdown.

And yet, part of me’s with the yodellers in pickup trucks.

We’re used to the slow-witted David Icke and his pathetic followers shouting and grifting on the internet – they’ve been doing it for years. These weekend proved they are in the minority. But what of the stalwart supporters of the corona lockdown?

It’s a truism to say that the pandemic has brought out the best in us. Chaos tells you who people are. Hundreds of thousands signed up to the NHS volunteering scheme. Colonel Moore raised millions padding around his garden. Neighbours help each other out with food and medication deliveries. And every Thursday sundown rings with applause and pots and pans.

But there has also been a darkness to this time, and not all of it has come from the conspirazoids.

Toronto philosopher Regina Rini wrote on the ethics of disease control at the beginning of the pandemic when cases were first beginning to appear in her country.

What is so ethically troubling about epidemic disease is that it pushes us toward the objective attitude. We cease thinking about victims as persons, but instead as vectors of disease or ambling contaminated surfaces. Thinking of people as systems to be brought under orderly control helps us tamp down our own fear, even as it erases their humanity. When this disconnected attitude joins itself to underlying social prejudice – against Jews in medieval Europe or gay men with HIV in the 1980s – our response goes beyond the merely crass to the harmful and threatening. In all but the most extreme cases, the disease itself ends up being less dangerous to human wellbeing than the panicked, bigoted attitude.

In her piece Rini accepted the need for social distancing. Brute virology doesn’t care about our feelings. But she also urged ‘moral caution’ – we need still to look at people as people, not just ‘vectors of disease’.

The weekend before Boris declared lockdown, people were outraged at the numbers of city dwellers hanging out in parks and rushing out for a last pint on Friday evening. Walking through East London on March 19, NS editor George Eaton complained that he had ‘seen pubs and restaurants still half full – ‘nudging’ doesn’t appear to be working.’

But it takes time for awareness of threat to filter down. Once it did, we got the message – loud and clear.

In mid April, poet Salena Godden wrote:

I saw Goody Proctor
and John Proctor
walking side-by-side
holding hands
two-abreast
with devils breath

I saw Goody Proctor
clapping for the NHS
she were too very close
to her neighbour
and both
without bra or manners

Godden’s satire of public lockdown attitudes was close but didn’t cover half of it. Under the local kindness and volunteering was a drive of enthusiastic conformism that couldn’t stop hunting heresies. Neighbours shopped neighbours for jogging too much, shopped carers for visited loved ones, shopped people for sitting in their back gardens. Northampton police chief Nick Adderly told the BBC that ‘We are getting calls from people who say ‘I think my neighbour is going out on a second run – I want you to come and arrest them’.’ I’ve heard of forces having to set up new COVID-19 reporting mechanisms to divert the surges of reports that overwhelmed 101 and 999 dispatch centres. That’s a hyperbolic comparison – Britain in lockdown is not Soviet Russia! – but I couldn’t help being reminded of Robert Conquest’s line from The Great Terror: ‘Nevertheless, just as Nazism provided an institutionalised outlet for the sadist, Stalinist totalitarianism on the whole automatically encouraged the mean and malicious. The carriers of personal and office feuds, the poison-pen letter writers, who are a minor nuisance in any society, flourished and increased.’

Like Conquest says – the enthusiastic citizen rule enforcers are a part of any society at any time. It’s a part of human nature to follow The Rules and judge others by how well they can follow the Rules, in what strength of fidelity and detail. What has annoyed me is the atmosphere of enthusiastic conformity among the commentariat. It was not just the strength of their support for national emergency legislation – what David Allen Green called The Clamour – but a refusal to admit or even entertain potential adverse consequences of policy – and in a national emergency that’s any policy. A bemused Marie le Conte remarked that ‘I’ve been feeling so out of step with most of Twitter recently; it should be possible to talk about how tough the lockdown is’.

Not on Gov.UK Twitter, it wasn’t. Liberal Remainers who were up in arms, and rightly so, when Boris suspended Parliament last year, said nothing when it shut itself down for COVID-19. Unprecedented authoritarian legislation? Dead silence from the progressives. The questions of inequality, class and privilege that run through Britain under lockdown like the lettering in a stick of rock did not interest them either. Nothing on the people trapped in substandard housing or abusive relationships, the asylum seekers dispossessed because their informal networks have been shut down. Nothing on the surge in mental illness or the thousands of non-COVID deaths at home. Where there was criticism of the government, it was that emergency measures were not passed soon enough, or did not go far enough. Follow gov.uk guidelines, and listen to the experts (not that gov.UK Twitter’s own lack of expertise in infectious diseases did not prevent it lecturing us at length).

Of course what liberals say on social media is a minor issue and probably doesn’t affect anything but it represents, I think, an embarrassing failure of intellect. It will become more embarrassing for them as other countries begin to open borders and public spaces (dumping on every country that eases restrictions reveals the insecurity of our own intelligentsia’s position on this issue.) Chaos tells you who people are. Most people are wary of the COVID-19 conspiracy theorists – no one wants to be associated with them. But I am also looking around at my fellow liberals. And I’m afraid to say I am a little wary of them, too.

(Image: LeedsLive)