A Sri Lanka Pursuit - The Far Spent day by Nihal de Silva

The Far Spent Day by Nihal de Silva promises much. The fact that it does not deliver all it attempts should not deter anyone from exploring its world. Those interested in reading about the society and politics of contemporary Sri Lanka will find too little to justify careful scrutiny of the 100,000 word text. But they will enjoy the unexpectedly complex thriller that unfolds. People seeking a rip-roaring story will enjoy the process, but the only real suspense is that of the chase, since the identity and deeds of the protagonists, and indeed their principal roles is never in doubt.

The Far Spent Day is constructed as a film. The characters live very much in the present of the events that confront them and rarely reflect. Nihal de Silva also inserts gaps in the text whenever there’s a new scene or a change of camera angle. There is also copious dialogue, enhancing the film-like effect. The style is racy but restrained. There is much promise of sex, but Sri Lankan youth seem to be more restrained than their Western counterparts, certainly their fictional counterparts.

The novel’s Sri Lankan experience is valuable, if under-played. Ravi, a Sinhalese, and Tilak, his Tamil friend, have returned from overseas with their university degrees. They go out to celebrate and have a couple of drinks. There is a brawl and punches are thrown. Ravi and Tilak’s problem is that they have picked a fight with a political bigwig and such people don’t fight clean, or give up until they have ground all opposition into the dust, usually dead. Anyone who has driven in Sri Lanka knows about a minister’s cavalcade. It approaches from behind, comprises a number of large four-wheel-drives, and travels at speed with horns blaring and headlamps on full beam. Men in the passenger seats wave giant red and white gloved hands out of their windows to demand that all other traffic should get out of the way, immediately and without argument. They demand control, and get it, because if you don’t give way, they will run you off the road. If there were an accident, it would not be their fault.

Ravi and Tilak find themselves involved with such a character, and the minister decides to get even. How even that means only becomes clear at the end of the novel’s first section. Ravi’s life, and that of his whole family, has been utterly destroyed, ruthlessly destroyed. Every attempt he makes at securing justice results in more suffering for himself and others. Tanya, a young attracting Burgher journalist, takes up Ravi’s cause. She is in search of a scoop, but her own security is soon at risk. Ravi and Tanya are soon involved in a chase across the country in pursuit of their minister quarry, whose allies pursue the two companions. They evade capture, but not consequences.

They seek evidence, find it and a relationship develops between the Sinhalese Ravi and the Burgher Tanya to add further complication and twist. Later a young girl called Janaki becomes part of the plot. She assists Ravi in matters that only a professional woman could conduct. But it does her no good as newspaper stories backfire and scandals fail to materialise. The minister’s influence seems to stretch everywhere in Sri Lankan life. But Ravi has one final push to secure justice, to allow him to live his own life again without constantly fearing for his own safety. Eventually, when the book’s plot has worked through, the characters and the reader are all exhausted, but we got there.

The Far Spent Day would be a better novel at two thirds of its current length. It will not completely satisfy and reader, but its blend of fast-moving story with glimpses of Sri Lankan life is a rare mix, one that many readers will find compelling.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel An Artist Of The Floating World

Superficially, Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel An Artist Of The Floating World seems to present a gentle observation of manners. There’s a daughter to marry and thus associated contracts to be nurtured and negotiated. There’s a relationship with an eight-year-old grandson who in the late 1940s is growing up with American cartoons and comic book heroes as his cultural icons. And, above all, there’s the artist himself, bound up with concerns of style and expression, keen to re-examine his influences, especially those arising in the floating world.

His teacher had been instrumental in focusing his tutees on this floating world which could be found in the city’s night-time entertainment district. The artist of this world of pleasure, Masuji Ono, learned well from his master and adopted much from his style, technique and philosophy of Japanese painting.

But Ono was not satisfied to portray the floating world’s beauty for its own sake, or mere pleasure to evoke delight or diversion. No, he had other ideas, such as comment, loyalty, justice, pride, amongst others. And it is because of the direction of Masuji Ono’s developing inspiration that provides the book with its sinister, even violent thread.

An Artist Of The Floating World is set in post-war Japan. There is cleaning up and reconstruction to be done. There is much rebuilding, and not a little reconstruction, much of it not merely physical, but also cultural. A victor’s imposed norms are changing Japan’s future, perhaps to the relief of many who cannot live with their own country’s past. Masuji Ono finds himself at the centre of this transformation because of his previous success as an artist. But, as he continues to seek a future husband for his younger daughter, his personal achievements apparently divide his acquaintances, pupils and even friends into distinct camps, those for, even reluctantly, and those definitely against.

The novel seems to inhabit similar territory to Orhan Pamuk’s later book, My Name Is Red. There is a debate about culture, heritage and identity at the heart of an apparently rather narrow discussion of aesthetics and artistic influence. While Pamuk’s characters inhabit the cut-throat world of the Ottoman court, Masuji Ono lives in a country defeated in war and ravaged by it. The desire to break with the past brings as much tension to Ono as the desire to retain it does in Red. But the style employed in An Artist Of The Floating World is deceivingly gentle and belies the deep tension and conflict at its heart. Kazuo Isiguro’s prose is always silky smooth, so much so that An Artist Of The Floating World seems like a short, even simple book. Luckily for the reader it is neither.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

Initially, the form of The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid seems forced. Surely it will restrict what the author can achieve. By the end, however, the form has become a crucial part of the plot. The turnabout then works very well indeed.

Changez has returned to Pakistan from the USA, where he both studied and worked. He is in conversation with a foreign visitor to his country. Apparently they are sitting in a café. The visitor is probably an American but, surprisingly, the conversation is entirely one-sided.

Basically, Changez tells his life story, eventually relating in detail the conspiring events that led him to his current preoccupations and status. He was the child of an upper class family in Lahore. He was a bright thing from the start and when the time was right a place at Princeton beckoned. He excelled and was offered a job with a business consulting group, where he learned much more than merely contemporary jargon. He also fell head over heels in love with an American girl, herself a gifted student with a desire to write.

She wanted to tell stories, beginning perhaps with one featuring herself and describing her former boyfriend’s struggle with terminal illness. Initially at least she seems newly besotted with her new Pakistani friend, with Changez’s unexpected and wholly foreign politeness, good manners and dress sense all creating favourable impressions. The silent listener absorbs all this without comment as he and Changez await their food in a Lahore restaurant.

Everything looks rosy for our graduate and the listening tourist seems to respond to the raconteur’s story. The narrator then begins to describe a new era, an era that began on September 11 2001 and the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York. The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s tone changes abruptly as the world and the individual’s place in it seem to need reinterpretation.

As things turn out, Changez returns to Pakistan, where he takes up teaching. And still our listener absorbs the story without response. The book’s denouement is both surprising and satisfying. The form that has seemed to be a handicap suddenly contributes to the experience. We are left with an enigmatic, open ending where surely something will happen.

Mohsin Hamid perhaps allows each of us to fill in some blanks. Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist is quite a short book. It possibly just exceeds the novella form. But in a succinct and sophisticated way it addresses and comments on some complex issues. Its methods are both sympathetic and involving. Its efforts convince the reader without being didactic. It is thus a significant achievement.

The Battle For Spain by Anthony Beevor

Occasionally, very rarely in fact, one comes across a thoroughly outstanding book. From beginning to end it’s authoritative, clearly written, lucid and somehow both committed and balanced. Eventually such a work will take a clear position, but it will never approach polemic. Such books are indeed rare, but Anthony Beevor’s The Battle For Spain is without doubt one of these few great works.

The Battle For Spain chronicles the Spanish Civil War, 1936-9. Anthony Beevor examines the political, economic and social background of the country prior to the war. He identifies historical context and offers explanation of why Spain found itself in a position of near-irredeemable political impasse in the 1930s. He also examines the movements, parties and associations that existed at the start of the struggle, alongside institutions such as the Church and monarchy that also played significant roles.

So well portrayed is all the in-fighting, intrigue and manoeuvring that we feel we almost get to know the characters involved. The reader constantly has to remember that this is not mere fiction. Its immediacy almost tricks us into thinking that these events might be just some thought-up plot created merely to keep us involved. 

But then the casualty figures start to stack up and we are reminded by the executions and the refugees that this is a bleak and stark reality. The story’s detail may come as a surprise to the casual reader who remains unaware of just how intense and bloody this conflict was. Anthony Beevor also provides the essential geopolitical context of the Spanish Civil War. He identifies how the rise of fascism and communism in the years preceding the war both played their perhaps inevitable roles by backing their favoured sides in the conflict.

It was inevitable in a Europe that was already unstable. Spain was a prize that would add weight to any interest. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of The Battle For Spain is its description of the role played by the northern Carlists. Much has been written about the Falange, the POUM anarchists and the communists. But little usually emerges about the religious conformists who played a significant role on the Nationalist side.

The character of Franco eventually comes to dominate proceedings. He is revealed as obviously victorious and without peer, but he also sometimes dithers, lacks judgment and seeks rather unsuccessfully to play off one side against another. He is not alone, however, in that the British and the French displayed the same skills or ineptitudes, depending on which side you take.

But where The Battle For Spain excels is in its catalogue of the horrid events of the war. The detail of Anthony Beevor’s account really brings out the confusion of conflict alongside the luck and opportunism on the one hand and incompetence and chance on the other. It’s a cocktail of these that grant both victory and defeat. Just ask the dead, the wounded and the refugeed.

None To Accompany Me by Nadine Gordimer

Life often presents an illusion of constancy or even continuity. They are illusions, of course, because ultimately we can never take anything for granted. Just ask the last friend who died. Equally, however, there are always things that we work towards, goals whose continued non-achievement gives life both meaning and direction. Surely we fear their achievement, because everything would then have to be redefined, a process that would prove at least messy.

This is the territory of Nadine Gordimer’s novel None To Accompany Me. For me the title signifies how every individual, when confronted with the necessity for change, must pursue personal, perhaps even selfish goals.

In None To Accompnay Me Nadine Gordimer presents characters in a newly-liberated, but as yet ill-defined South Africa. The struggle has been long. It has also been defining for its participants. It allowed differences to be ignored, splits to be papered over. It convinced some of a necessity to over-react, to over-compensate. 

And then, when the uniting goal is achieved, all realise that opposing is a less complicated act than supporting. We all know what we are against, but what we are for can only be argued. Like Byron’s Prisoner Of Chillon, experiencing the security of captivity can seem reassuring when the unknown of freedom is finally achieved.

Vera is as central a character as any. She’s white, married to Ben, has a daughter and has worked for liberation. She devoted just less than her life to the cause, less because she has retained an element of selfishness in her personal relations. So loosely intertwined are all of the strands of her life that change in one can apparently unravel all of them. And then there’s Dydimus and Sibongile, also lifelong devotees of the cause. Opportunity begins to divide them. So does their past. There are new positions of responsibility to be adopted, politics to be worked out, compromises to be made. But there are also deeds from the past lacked away, skeletons that can be marched out for other’s convenience.

And not all of them are personal. The major issues of the time appear in the book. Cultural and economic differences between black and white cannot be escaped. Neither, it seems, can the prevalence of violence and crime. A pressing need to redistribute land will have to engage in battle with those who own it and want to exploit it. A nation whose majority has never been asked its opinion has to learn to live with the fact that the question’s answers now promote division above the assumed unity of the past. And, if this is not already sufficient complication, those released from struggle must also come to terms with a generational shift.

Progeny do not seem to have the same values. Whereas community was demanded by struggle, freedom promotes the individual, allows personal decisions that the older generation would not have tolerated. A reader looking for a linear experience with characters wheeled on and off the set in order to assist a plot’s continued progress will truly hate None To Accompany Me. A reader with the patience to get to know people, to empathise with them and share their dilemmas will appreciate the non-linearity, non-literalness of Nadine Gordimer’s book. It is certainly a novel of its time, a period of uncertainly presenting perhaps an illusory cusp between a known past and an unknown future. Eventually we must ask if this state is anything unusual.

Deterring Democracy by Noam Chomsky

It is almost twenty years since Noam Chomsky published Deterring Democracy. Its contemporary context is an important starting point in the understanding of its position since most of the material seeks to analyse and contextualise United States foreign policy in the post-War years to the early nineties. In 1991 the United States under George Bush was embroiled in the First Gulf War. I must stress the word “first”, since this gives a clue to the book’s eventual prescience.

Also in 1991, a dim and distant past when the new millennium was not yet a talking point, a bi-polar world, whose permanence and assumed conflict provided the framework for all political analysis, was already being transformed. The Soviet Union had already ceased to be, but the years of Yeltsin’s IMF poverty lay ahead, as did those of Putin’s new pragmatic if demagogic prosperity.

Regimes of all political stances came and went in Central and South America. But all of them were classified as good or evil by the Manichean filter of the age. Occasionally, a convenience of political pragmatism offered re-branding, as in the case of Jamaica, where Michael Manley, a leader once undermined as a leftist was reinstated with eternal backing after Edward Seaga’s neo-liberal experiment predictably burnt out. Chomsky’s record of Manley’s second era being that of his violin phase is extremely succinct. He was put up by the left, but played by the right.

Descriptions of prevailing issues in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala figure large, of course. But Chomsky also visits the Dominican Republic, the Philippines and Europe to illustrate his central point. And it is a point that he makes and re-makes, a point that he still makes today. His analysis, simply put, is that an alliance of elite interests involving legislators, the powerful and those who own and control big business drives the US foreign policy agenda. The elite’s sole aim is to preserve and further its own power, influence and prosperity. The fact that it does not always speak with a consistent voice is merely evidence that within the group there remains competition. Indeed, the group is neither particularly stable nor permanent. It is rather a loose alliance of interest, perhaps heavily reliant on birthright, but not determined by it. Notions of freedom, democracy, individual or collective rights and even development are peddled, attached like advertisers’ catchlines to the same product every time it is recommended. To maintain its ascendancy, this ideology that fosters profit via power needs an enemy to provide a shield behind which it can hide its pursuit of self-advancement. The Soviet Union sufficed for most of the second half of the last century, but since then others have had to be identified to fulfil this essential role. It will not require much imagination to identify the current dark threats.

The population at large, meanwhile, has to be sold these ideas. When threat of nuclear war between super-powers loomed large, it was not difficult to fix the framework. How much easier is it now, when the current all-powerful, all-pervading enemy might just be within and among us? This low-intensity, back-burner threat continues to mask the activity that fuels an ever-increasing concentration of power and wealth. The people of the democratic, individualistic West are perfectly willing to stand by as recession bites, banks declare deposits worthless, pension funds dwindle, retirements recede and wages stagnate while those who perhaps cause these strictures luxuriate in ever-increasing, often self-granted rewards.

And, in a truly prescient passage, Chomsky describes this submissive, passive mentality perfectly. “For submissiveness to become a reliable trait,” he writes, “it must be entrenched in every realm. The public are to be observers, not participants, consumers of ideology as well as products. Eduardo Galeano writes that ‘the majority must resign itself to the consumption of fantasy. Illusions of wealth are sold to the poor, illusions of freedom to the oppressed, dreams of victory to the defeated and power to the weak.’ Nothing less will do.” In this context, is it any surprise that the average contemporary consumer knows more of celebrity gossip than political option?

Deterring Democracy is packed – perhaps over-packed – with detailed evidence. Chomsky makes his point repeatedly and forcefully. I was once privileged to co-host the author as chair of a London conference. At first hand I can vouch for the sincerity and passion that underpins these views. I can also vouch for the solidity of the evidence upon which they are based.

Noam Chomsky is not anti-American. It is the exploiters of self-seeking power and self-deferential influence who deserve that label. Noam Chomsky is a man of the people, intensely humanistic and fundamentally democratic. He seems to maintain that if people turn their backs and refuse to acknowledge the obvious, they will have foregone a real opportunity to realise something more sustainable than the current illusion. And, along the way, they will probably have said goodbye to their principles, along with their bank deposits, pensions, retirement and freedom. At least they can talk about their woes on their latest-model mobiles, if, that is, they can still pay the bill. When you read Noam Chomsky’s Deterring Democracy, give its arguments a chance to register. Then see if they ring true.

The Child In Time by Ian McEwan

Stephen Lawes appears to be pretty well-heeled. His successes seem remarkable. He is a successful writer of children’s books. He is acquainted with Charles Darke, who is apparently being groomed for a ministerial position in government. Via this connection, Stephen also sits on a Whitehall committee to examine policy options on childhood, children, education and related issues. He himself also seems to have the prime minister’s ear. He has a wife, Julie, who loves him and beautiful little three-year-old daughter, Kate, whom he worships. But then one day Kate is no longer there. On a trip to the shops with her father, there are events that take her out of her parents’ lives.

In her absence, Stephen continues to worship her, to see her walking along the street, in a school playground, perhaps everywhere he tries to look. Meanwhile life goes on, but for Stephen aspects of it begin to disintegrate. The child has stopped his time. There follows, in Ian McEwan’s novel, The Child In Time, an examination of childhood. 

In various guises, this biologically-fixed but socially-defined state is seen to influence and control the lives of the book’s characters. The fact that children are sexually and physically immature human beings whose characteristics are still developing seems pretty immutable. But what is it that demands they should eat special foods from special menus? Is it essential that the experience of childhood should be always multi-coloured, perhaps as a preparation for the unending greyness of adulthood? 

And why, in the twenty-first century is it deemed that children should not work, when in the nineteenth it was considered desirable, perhaps even essential for everyone’s greater well-being? If we are stressed in our daily lives, how much of our ability to cope, or not cope, stems from our ability to re-invent a child’s curiosity and enthusiasm, not to mention naiveté? And is this state also perhaps a place of protecting retreat? 

And how exactly did we manage to create this space? The Child In Time examines several strands of thought relating to infancy, childhood and dependency via the assumptions and reactions of adults. It is a novel with multiple parallel strands, more of a meditation on a theme than a focused, linear progression. It always plays with its ideas. But not all of them work. 

Charles Darke’s adoption of a second childhood, whether conscious or not, as a means of protecting himself from himself, is compellingly credible. But the presence of licensed beggars in a society not located in any particular time or any declared political ideology simply doesn’t wash. This science-fiction element of the book asks a sound but imagined question about our attitudes toward childhood, but jars with and detracts from the rest of the book’s recognisable landscape. 

 As ever, Ian McEwan mixes concepts of philosophy and sociology with the minutiae of daily life. Stephen Lawes does not seem to be wholly credible, however. His mix of interests and capabilities seems to be a tad too eclectic, too widely and thinly spread for him to come across as convincing in any discipline. At times, he seems even peripheral, dashing from one event to the next merely to witness what the author wanted to illustrate. But these are small criticisms of a magnificent book. Eventually the novel provides an uplifting experience. 

It takes the reader to places where the characters find themselves, places where they also want to be. Then, having reached their goal, much of what went before falls into new perspectives, and the whole process might just be ready to start again, but this time in socially-changed garb. It’s a bit like life, really... See this book on amazon The Child in Time

Coasting by Jonathan Raban

Jonathan Raban’s Coasting is a book that defies labels. It’s not a novel. It might be a travel book. It might also be an autobiography, or even a politicised journal. What it is not is dull. Back in the 1980s, Jonathan Raban decided to chill out on a boat. He found the Gosfield Maid, a hearty, old-fashioned wooden thing that could chug along at a few knots and decided to circumnavigate the circumnavigable Britain. He failed. He opted out of the northern challenge and took the easy route through the Caledonian Canal. None of this is at all relevant to the book, by the way, because it’s not a travelogue. And who cares if, on a quest to record the intricacies of an island’s coast, you miss out a bit? 

 But Jonathan Raban does travel Britain’s coast. And here and there he describes experience, recalls memories and reacts to current events, but in no particular order. He is particularly enamoured with the Isle of Man. Its insularity seems to mirror, perhaps concentrate, the insularity of the English. The Isle of Man’s microcosm occupies much of the early part of the book, so much in fact that the reader wonders how the author will manage to cover the rest. Rest assured, however, for he has no intention of doing that. 

The book might also not be an autobiography, but we learn a lot of the author’s parents and family life in the Raban household. They started as fairly conventional Church of England vicar and vicar’s wife cassocked and aproned in rural serenity. We meet them later, slightly hippied, father bearded and radicalised, both CNDed and residing alongside Pakistani grocers and amidst less salubrious activities along the Solent. The author’s school years also figure. He was unlucky enough to attend a less than prestigious public school. For Americans, for whom the label will be incomprehensible, I qualify that in England public schools are private. Don’t ask. But they are renowned for their unique, often idiosyncratic cultures. 

 Jonathan Raban regularly found himself at the fag-end of upper middle-class society, but without the personal economic base to back up his pretensions. Coasting, by the way, is not an autobiography. Neither is Coasting a memoir. But Jonathan Raban calls in at Hull on England’s east coast. He finds a largely forgotten city that once fished. By the 1980s its giant fish dock was deserted, its trawlers chased out by Britain’s defeat in the Cod war with Iceland. He went to university there and befriended one of the nation’s great poets of the century, Philip Larkin. Their meeting is precious. He had also conversed with Paul Theroux along the way. 

 Coasting is also not a political book. Jonanthan Raban, however, does record some detail of Margaret Thatcher’s conflict with the Argentine over The Falklands and with the English over coal mines. Coasting is also not a personal confession on identity, but the author clearly does not number himself amongst the victorious Tories who idolised their imperatrix. Coasting is a compelling read, a snapshot of personal and societal priorities from 1980s Britain. If you lived through the influences and references, the book presents a vibrant commentary on the period. If you didn’t, either because you are too young or not British, it’s a good way of learning how history surely does repeat itself. Coasting is a book that can become almost whatever you want it to be. It is superbly written, journalistic in places, poetic in others. It’s a travel book that goes wherever it wants. View this book on amazon Coasting (Picador Books)

The Successor by Ismail Kadare.

Things are often not what they seem. Usually when this applies something ostensibly great turns out to be merely mundane. Occasionally, however, we meet an iceberg, an apparently small presence that becomes something vast and consequential. This latter case applies to The Successor by Ismail Kadare. The Successor is apparently a small book. The cover shows a head in silhouette while a hand with a gun points from the left. “Just another predictable little thing in a predictable genre,” were my initial thoughts. The cover illustration is apposite, however, and remains so throughout the book’s short duration. But in fact The Successor then reveals itself as a vast work, despite its obvious brevity. It’s about nothing less than a whole country, its politics, its very identity in a world that is changing around it. The country is Albania and Ismail Karade is clearly born of its very soil. At least that truth is reliable. But how would we describe a successor who does not succeed, a guide who has lost the power of sight, an architect whose plans are ignored and a young woman engaged to be married who is not in love? Things are often not what they seem to be. The Successor has been shot, hence the cover. And yes, The Successor is a whodunnit, but in no way is it predictable. When a whole nation identifies with and is driven by the political choices of its leadership, how can it ever change organically from within? The figurehead has to go, even if he has already gone! And if change was the product of poor judgment, then should history record a suicide? And from whose perspective do we assess success? And who has the right to change history? In his preamble, the author humorously sets the tone by announcing that “any resemblance between characters and circumstances of this tale and real people and events is inevitable.” Thus, in a short book about a feud within an inner circle, Kadare creates a poetic world that mirrors reality, whose delicately-drawn images beautifully construct much larger ideas. The poignancy of a secret door that can only be opened from the outside is an idea that will last for a long time in a reader’s memory. The Successor is a great little book. View the book on amazon The Successor

Pop culture: popular or populist? An unpopular view.

In a recent interview Fergal Sharkey, erstwhile Northern Ireland pop singer, lamented the fact that most recording artists receive only very low royalty incomes. Now the intention behind the production and release of a pop song, one might have thought, is to achieve sales. No doubt fans and mere observers alike can trot out lists of millions sold by The Beatles, Elvis Presley, The Rolling Stones, Madonna, Britney Spears or Michael Jackson. 

To quote a figure would be to use spurious accuracy, but it is certainly true that the majority of pop music releases do not in fact create profit for either the performer or the record company. In the world of books, Jeffrey Archer, Dan Brown, J. K. Rowling, Sidney Sheldon and John Grisham might both spring to mind and also crowd out bookshop shelves. But, according to a recent assessment, amazon’s bookstore was offering several million titles, while the average bookshop stocks less than five thousand. My own two novels, Mission and A Fool’s Knot, briefly made the shelves of one retail chain but, like most books that achieve publication, my novels sell only in ones and twos, despite many hours spent promoting and marketing them via the internet. It is disappointing, but this fact neither belittles the books’ significance nor reduces my commitment to them. My motivation to write them stemmed from a desire to communicate, to examine relationships between certain social and political issues. I thus deal with subjects that would never appeal to a mass market and so I never expected sales to be high. The fact that they started low and stayed there, however, says much about what the books are not.

It was in a discussion about music that a friend asserted, without apparent doubt or question, that pop was merely an abbreviation for ‘popular’. Thus pop music is short for popular music. Pop culture similarly equates to popular culture. But this apparent platitude represents a position which, on inspection, is neither theoretically true nor even accurate. If most pop music doesn’t sell, isn’t played, certainly isn’t listened to, then the genre cannot be described as ‘popular’. If well over ninety per cent of published books never even make it into a bookshop, then again the pop culture to which they might aspire is not itself popular. Some pop music becomes popular, but very little, and most published material seems to lose money, rather than make it. 

Popularity is thus revealed to be an aspiration, not a reality or a property of so-called popular culture. This leads directly to a conclusion that using the term ‘popular’ to imply ‘widely experienced’ is a misnomer. The correct term, linguistically, would be ‘populist’. The only sense in which ‘popular’ might be accurate is to imply that popular culture is easily comprehended, suitable for common people, thus suggesting a commodity that seeks a lowest common denominator, thus eschewing both passion and commitment, a position that would surely be rejected by those who produce or consume pop culture.

If we label it populist, however, to indicate that as a commodity it is produced with an aspiration to popularity, then it adopts a position along an axis between pure commerce on the one hand and political posturing on the other. Richard Dawkins’s concept of the meme, a social virus spread by promotion, publicity and conformity then comes into play, revealing populist culture’s ability to create, assert and perpetuate normative behaviour.

A consequence of this analysis is to give the lie to any notion that equates quality or worth with popularity, or, vice-versa, uses the latter as an indicator of the former. ‘It has sold this many copies, therefore it must be good’ only holds if the song behind a Coca Cola advertisement is the best pop music ever created, Ronald MacDonald is the highest acclaimed dramatic character or a yellow scallop Shell represents mankind’s highest artistic achievement. Attempts to locate quality via achievement in the marketplace are thus undermined by their own validity. ‘I think therefore I am’ may be reinterpreted for a new age as ‘I sell therefore I excel’. Even a post-modernist who might eschew all consideration of critical worth would balk at the endpoint to which this false logic leads. 

The phenomenal recent success of Susan Boyle on the ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ television show leads to another question. Irrespective of the quality of her voice, the improbability of her television appearance and, especially, the apparent surprise at her failure to win the competition, it seems fair to ask whether, via the potential of the internet, a social virus, a Dawkins meme, can be initiated and then successfully promulgated by design. Note here that this is not in itself an artistic endeavour, a piece of music, a book, a film or indeed anything that even approaches any concept of creativity, despite advertisers’ frequently claimed self-hype about the profusion of the talent within their profession. The question thus is whether it is possible to create an advertisement that is designed to propagate like a virus via the internet.

Why did Susan Boyle, a competitor on a light entertainment talent show, generate tens of millions of internet hits, feature worldwide on television news broadcasts and occupy the front pages of countless newspapers, thus dislodging minor stories such as wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, elections in Iran, nuclear ambitions in Iran and North Korea, scandals over British MPs’ expenses or even elections to the European parliament? The interesting point here is not the phenomenon itself, but how it arose. Like other fodder fed to all-consuming pop culture, Susan Boyle will have her moment, minute or hour if she is lucky, be digested and, again if she has the good fortune, for this happens only rarely, will reappear via some future orifice to be granted nostalgia status, her achievements forgotten, her existence beatified, a state that can last only as long as the consumers of nostalgia – those who had the original experience – maintain their capacity to consume. The suggestion, obviously, is that pop culture dies with its audience.

And this is no mere side issue, no mere detail. Pop culture, because of its overtly economic and political role is, despite its apparently global presence, remarkably constrained in its penetration. It remains highly targeted, both geographically and demographically, and always wholly ephemeral. It’s the music that counts, we are often told, alongside a claim for quality on the grounds of popularity as indicated by sales. But ask an English speaker who is their favourite Russian band or what performer in Arabic comes to mind and one tends to be presented with an expression of complete incomprehension, as if the question were somehow invalid. This leads, unfortunately, to the conclusion that in fact the music is almost irrelevant, with the verses of songs, especially those relating to an inability to express personal feelings, being the most important element. 

It is thus revealed as a genre that trades in self-identification and empathy, and can thus only operate in the consumer’s own language. When, for example, was the last time that a fully instrumental piece was an international commercial success? Can today’s pop culture generate another Tornado’s Telstar, a tune on an electric organ to celebrate a communications satellite launch? When might a song about death, having no drumbeat and accompanied by string quartet, top the charts? Would Franz Schubert be a hit today? Yes, if he, like Paul McCartney, had written Eleanor Rigby, a song whose quality might undermine my entire argument, if it were not for the existence, in the same era, of successes called Remember You’re A Womble and The Birdie Song. 

This line of argument takes us into interesting territory. On the face of things, pop culture claims popularity. But most of the offerings in its genre are largely not popular, so it may only be described as populist, in that it aspires to the achievement of popularity. This renders a commodity that is already expressly designed to be commercial to adopt also an essentially political role, in that it can be a means of canalizing taste and opinion in an attempt to keep its market predictable. It also therefore must canalize its own means of expression, both in form and content. It claims universality, but all but a tiny fraction of its products are both language and culture confined. It constantly claims originality but, in both form and content, styles and themes remain narrowly defined. Exceptions, such as Eleanor Rigby, Telstar, or even Stranger On The Shore, merely confirm the general rule. Like novelty acts in a variety show, they provide variety, but they can usually happen only once, their novelty hardly outliving the show. 

Meanwhile, within the necessary repetition of both form and content, elements usually not directly related to the artistic endeavour orbit the fringes to both create and endow identity, alternative personas to which consumers voluntarily adhere. Titles come and go, such as rock’n’roll, soul, dance, techno, disco, hip hop, indie, punk, heavy metal, rap, new age, urban, R&B, blues, country even jazz. There is even something absurdly called ‘world music’, apparently to define music that is not in English, but implying that pop in English must arise on Mars, or at least not in this world. Each year or two a new label is added, apparently to allow each new subset of consumers to experience an illusory ownership of a culture they are effectively being force-fed. Then the names will disappear, perhaps to reappear briefly as nostalgia when their original consumers are old enough to lament their lost youth. 

I have concentrated my examples in the genre of pop music, but writing, drama, television and film would have worked equally well, but only if consideration is limited to those aspects which appeal to mass consumption. The consequent canalization of both form and content thus breeds a sense of social and cultural conformity which might be the exact opposite of originality, experience or artistic expression. 

A couple of years ago I was prompted to write an article on the internet’s potential to democratise access to expression. I argued specifically that the internet might democratise publishing, but the point could also be made in relation to any endeavour aiming to communicate. I, like others fired by the enthusiasm of publication, and in my case in traditional book form, not via the internet, attempted to publicise my work in cyberspace and, indeed, achieved some of my goals. 

But two years on, and even with a second book published, the project can hardly be described as a success, unlike the books themselves, of course, which remain as they began, excellent. I was never so naïve to believe that books about personal and community identity being challenged by social change and economic development in rural Africa would be overnight best sellers. Quite the contrary: I was always aware of their specialism. But I did write them hoping that they would be read, however. Now, in the light of my own failure in the very shadow of viral marketing’s obvious potential for success, I find myself questioning whether the internet might be fast degenerating into a tool to promote normative populism. 

This question is rendered more significant by recent search engine developments, where algorithms that weight connectivity and popularity claim to deliver more relevant search results. Surely this can only mean more normative and populist pressure and thus question further the internet’s claim to openness and freedom of expression. I must state here, to avoid any possible confusion, that I have no problem with democracy, no difficulty whatsoever with the idea that people should have what they want. It is force-feeding that is wrong, not the content of the feed. 

Equally, just as ‘might’ cannot automatically be right, ‘majority’ must never equate to dictatorship or domination, and ‘popularity’ must impose no norm. But perhaps this tendency has been there from the start. The internet may have grown out of an expression of academic freedom, but its origins, as ARPANET, lay in a desire to improve the efficiency of the defence and weapons research in the United States, and, at the height of the Cold War, that was a fairly normative area. So maybe there is still hope for freedom of expression as long as we retain the right to go beyond page three of our query results. Be wary of the day, however, that sees a restriction of search engine hits being justified by an increase in relevance. There may be more at stake than unread books, or unpopular pop.

Over By Christmas by William Daysh

Over By Christmas by William Daysh is a war novel. It is also a superb novel in which real events, imagined histories, human relationships and politics intertwine. These elements are combined via a beautifully paced narrative whose use of multiple forms only adds to its clarity.

While naval battles of the first half of World War One are described, we encounter some of the politics that generate their necessity. We see the in-fighting and posturing around the desire to avoid responsibility. We share the priority of a Prime Minister who, amidst the pressure of decision, remains obsessed with a young woman – and not for the first time! – a woman to whom he is compelled to write, often several times a day. There are numerous factual reports of the war. These provide the background, the context to allow us to position the experience of the book’s characters.

And central to these are the Royals, not the rulers in London, but a naval family in Gosport, Portsmouth. Jack the father and George the son are seamen, while Emily, wife and mother, is their home port. In his spare time, which seems to be quite sparse, George is a bit of a lad. He is a handsome, honest type who falls for two girls in particular, Carrie and Carla. The first is a single mother, left encumbered but compensated by a period of “service”. The latter, a minor character with a major role, is a dusky-skinned, half-Italian shop assistant.

And then there’s Bill, who takes up with Carrie, and then later with a Mr Paxman to further his growing business interests. But throughout there is the war. Throughout there is the threat of suffering alongside the daily reality of early death, the hell of battle. War, and especially this one, claims many lives and takes them arbitrarily, though never without loss for those who survive. The wounded, it seems, sometimes have to cope with more than death.

George emerges as the central character of Over By Christmas. We follow him repeatedly to and from Portsmouth. He sees The Pacific and the South Atlantic. He sails around Britain into the North Sea. He is in Malta and Gallipoli. Above all, he is in the war, perhaps not muddied in trenches, but permanently threatened by torpedo, shell and sea. He makes friends, is loyal, and gallant and is promoted. But throughout, his passion for Carrie remains. Chances to reconcile their differences, to realise their shared love are rare, but important moments. And then… And then this is the beauty of Over By Christmas. 

The narrative engages the reader in its characters’ lives. In twists and turn it surprises, but in the end we have merely the complications of human relationships. Warfare is about sparring, about conflict, imagined gains and suffered losses. Affairs of the heart may demonstrate strikingly similar qualities.

View this book on amazon Over By Christmas

Protesters - a short story

A sharp closing of the door left the two men together yet alone, strangers, introduced merely seconds before. The older, taller of the two seemed to scrutinise the stockier new arrival for a few moments, his penetrating gaze noting the military dress that remained less than a uniform alongside the almost apologetic manner he projected. They had fallen silent after their mutual acknowledgement, the elderly man’s gripped handshake accompanied by a stentorian, lengthened “Hello”, the younger man’s hesitant nod, plus a hand quickly withdrawn. During an extension of that same silence, shared at the room’s edge by its only window, they surveyed the line of protesters below. The quiet that filled the room, a quiet left after the noisy departure of the usher who had just led the younger man up from the street, soon began to fade. Sounds of chanting, angry sloganising, hardly rhythmic from this admixture of universally blue-suited, tone-deaf Englishmen, filtered through the draught cracks around the quartered frame. There were no discernible words, the shouted slogans becoming a mere murmur of unrest from their distance.

Almost in unison, their joint gaze lifted from the side street below the high window, a side street that they had both needed to lean into the recess to view, so that now they looked across the great square, great not in size, but perhaps in claimed significance. Ahead was the mother of parliaments, a mock-Gothic imitation of the grandiose, a pretender to an assumed aesthetic, re-invented as fashion demanded. Before it, almost insignificant, set down below pavement level, they could both visualize from memory the statue of the great protector, stolid in defiance, solid in his defence of the right to speak within those walls, a right too often challenged by those who lay as corpses in the opulence opposite. For there, to the right of the two observers lay the confessor’s church, the abbey of royalty that a true perpetrator of terror adorned with a fan vault to decorate his own death, a chapel that seemed to thrust threateningly towards the palace of speech it faced, an older palace of speech, long destroyed, long superseded.

“In its present, history is always a lie,” said the older, taller of the two men.

The other maintained his silence for a while. He turned to face his companion, to look him up and down, to note the establishment feel of his blue three-piece suit with its pronounced watch-chain presenting almost a seal of office across the midriff. He was tall, this writer, stately, even dignified, his eighty years now generating a slight stoop when he moved, just a hint of roundness in the spine, whose imagined rigidity suggested the stance of a once proud young man. The smaller man seemed uncomfortable in the writer’s presence, as if he knew what to say, but not where to start. There was a sense of both deference and discomfort, a respect tinged with something less trusting. The older man’s reputation and achievement preceded him and, in later years, he had learned how to inhabit and dominate the respected space this inevitably generated.

“I would guess that you have brought no written speech,” said the younger man, the non-sequitur not itself worthy of remark. “But then I would have expected that. After all, you are a writer.”

The old man smiled a little, without averting his gaze, which still apparently concentrated on the beauty of the abbey’s spires, the grandeur of its tower, the power of its glory. “No,” he said, pausing again, as if wishing to perpetuate an ambiguity as to whether he had no speech or whether he was denying that he was ever a writer. For several seconds the older man rocked gently from side to side, transferred his weight from one foot to the other in the manner that a recently consulted nurse had suggested as a means of keeping his aging legs supple. She realised, an hour later, that she had no cause to worry about the state of the old man’s plumbing, which by then she had experienced in full working order. But still the writer took her advice and hopped, just a little. He then turned to face the younger man, the slight downward attitude of the head inevitably suggesting condescension.

“I have to work to my notes,” said the smaller man, averting his eyes just enough to attain an independent angle. “In my position I cannot ad lib, even if I feel I’m capable of doing it. I always have to make doubly sure that every word plays a calculated part in the whole message. One cannot be too careful. I cannot risk a single word being misinterpreted.” He patted the left breast of his military-style camouflage jacket and then flicked the lapel aside with his right hand so that he could retrieve a folded sheaf of hand-written sheets from the inside pocket. He began to read. “Muchas gracias por su solidaridad…”

“You will speak in Spanish?”

“Yes. And with an interpreter. As I said, we have to ensure that our words are clear, unambiguous, saying precisely what we mean and only what we mean. There is no room for error. There are those waiting to gather ammunition against us.”

“No pasaran!” said the old man as he gave the other’s upper arm a firm squeeze with his out-turned left hand. It was a strange gesture, a reverse, backhand expression of support, firm in its conviction, ambiguous in its sincerity. The younger man smiled, suddenly and obviously more at ease, less in awe of this great name’s perceived distance. “But your English is perfect, fluent”, continued the writer. “Why not speak to us directly in our own tongue?”

The younger man only shrugged, as if to imply that a question with an obvious answer need not be asked. “As a writer,” he said at last, “you know that language must be precise…”

“...and so a problem, should it arise, can always be put down to poor translation?” A silence from the other signified agreement. “And so the politician can retain deniability, even if that was in fact what you meant to say? A side exit from the trap of duplicity?”

“It would never be my intention to deceive…”

“But if the charge arose, you could sidestep it without confronting it? Shall we say that you could find an avenue of convenience?”

The younger man kept his silence for a minute or more, during which time he stared again at the thin but noisy line of blue-suited protesters in the road below. He noted for the first time that they all seemed to be in their early or mid-twenties. They were so similar in appearance they might all have been selected for the role. Wanted: official agitators, he mused. Blue suit, aged twenty to thirty, head shaven to at least a number two.

He then turned back into the room to face the writer. “But then words are your tools, your stock in trade - I think that is the correct English idiom – so you know perfectly well how important it is to have exactly the right word in the right place. You would never make a mistake.”

The writer laughed. “My dear man,” he began, now turning to pace towards the room’s centrally placed, heavy walnut but dull-topped table, “You invest in me credibility, talent and invention beyond my worth. I am but a story teller, a literary fraud whose imaginings occasionally, and for just an hour or two, might light up the dull lives of blighters like those down below. I churn out the literary equivalent of B-movies for residents of suburban semis. Words? I’ve spawned millions of them, drivelled them out like torrents of wanked sperm, onanised only on the stony ground of the popular imagination – an oxymoron for sure.” His pause was pure theatre, calculated to maintain his hold of the flow and, at the same time, to add emphasis to his words and retain control, measured to keep the other silent. With apparent impatience, he retrieved the cigarettes and lighter he had previously tossed carelessly onto the table-top from a hand that had been summoned to shake its greeting with the newly arrived president of the republic. The old writer’s right hand had fiddled a cigarette from the pack, his left hand had lit it and he had already taken a long, deep, settling drag before the instant elapsed. When he spoke again, it was as if there had never been a break in his flow, his words now animated by loose clouds of smoke, particles that clipped the edge off his voice. “These people just do as they are told. They see us as we are sold to them. Today a performing monkey that writes books and an ogre who threatens their freedom. Tomorrow performing monkeys are cast as illiterate and the ogre is a partner in trade. Joe Soap does what Joe Soap is told to do. A whim is less fickle than popular consciousness.”

“So is your support for our cause such a whim? Will you oppose tomorrow what you support today?” The younger man’s voice was harder, more forthright in its continued deference.

“It rather depends on you and your people – your phrase, by the way,” replied the writer. Here the word ‘people’ clearly did not refer to an agglomerated populace, but a clique whose existence the writer was keen to suggest. “We all know whom we oppose. We know what we are against. It’s what we are for that perennially confuses us, especially when we are confronted with the complications of interpreting a reality that we only imagine.”

The younger man now moved away from the window. Stepping slowly, thoughtfully, his face downcast, he began to amble a wide arc around the table, the old writer at its centre, a stalking of sorts. He pressed his fingertips together, forming a cat’s cradle across a stomach that the other judged would fill out in a few years, thus transforming the current stocky athleticism into a portly middle age that would no longer be flattered by the military fatigues he currently wore.

When the younger man stopped and turned, he looked up to see that the old man still faced the window, stood erect, taking staccato drags from his cigarette, each accompanied by an audible suck of the lips. It’s ironic that I should address his back, he thought. “And exactly whom do you oppose? Or should I more precisely ask whom do you currently oppose, since in the past your allegiance to any cause has been – let’s say – variable…?”

“My dear man, Mr President,” said the writer, smiling, as he turned to face his inquisitor, “every man has his price. Take Joe Soap in the street down there, for instance” he said, nodding towards the window, now behind him, “You don’t think that any of those snotty nosed Johns of city clerks actually believe the rhetoric about your regime? Do you think that a twenty-two year old moron who spends all day wheeling trays of punched cards around the bowels of a bank’s computer centre for subsistence pay goes home of an evening to read and analyse Heritage Foundation reports on the communist take-over of Central America? He doesn’t do that any more than he comparatively tests all available brands of soap powder before buying his Omo – except on reflection he probably wouldn’t buy that one on the grounds of being embarrassed by associations with its name. No, he gets led by the nose to the Daz and he buys it. He goes along with the tide, we might say. The trick of manipulating the popular imagination, oxymoronically, of course, is to cover all the options, to back all sides. The trick is to convince Joe Soap that he needs washing powder and then to cartelise the shelves with an agreed and shared presence. Whatever brand decisions he makes are utterly irrelevant because the big guys who run his brain have the market carved up between them. Politically, his brain space, albeit quite small, is fully occupied with propagandistic threats to his lifestyle, threats that might restrict his right to detergent choice, a human right worth fighting for.”

“And it is your view that your books are just more soap powder?”

“Precisely, dear fellow. Precisely.” The writer turned away again, puffing to pursue the production of ash.

The younger man ambled forward again as the writer turned his back. Legally trained, the young president of the republic found himself thrust back into the profession to which he had aspired, but had never practised, his studies having been interrupted by what a respectful obituary might describe as brushes with the authorities. He was stalking his witness, here a writer confined within a dock of his own invention, perhaps imagination. It was to become a cross-examination. “But I’ve read your work - almost all of it, though I admit that most was in Spanish translation. Maybe something was gained in translation, but I always felt that your so-called, self-professed mere stories, entertainments, always had their deeper side, another level no less, where the characters and the situations in which you placed them epitomised moral conflict, ideological questions which they always at least tried to address. Indeed you, the writer, the creator, always seemed to want a moralistic resolution to your characters’ dilemmas.” The president paused to look the writer in the eye, but the taller man’s gaze was fixed ahead, above his level, blankly concentrated on the mechanics of drawing smoke. “So you would deny,” he continued, “that what I read into your work was ever intended? It was a mere figment of my furtive, youthful imagination?”

“Leading question. Counsel should not put words into the mouths of the witness,” said the old man, choosing his words with intricate care whilst fixing a stare at his inquisitor in time with the very end of the phrase.

“Ah”, interrupted the other, uncharacteristically immediate in his interjection. “So not only do you know detail of my education, you want to play judge as well! Is that it? Is that the key? You want to claim the status of inconsequence, the mere story teller, whilst, somewhere in your unwritten estimation, you believe you hold the ultimate truth, the end point, the last word, the judgment?” A smile began to lift the curves of the black moustache that dominated his face, his rimless spectacles lifting a little on flexed cheek muscles.

“Judge?” replied the old writer. “Judgment? You sound like a Christian.”

“I am.”

“Well I’m not.”

“You are a Roman Catholic. You converted. Everyone knows that”.

“Pragmatism, my dear boy. Pure pragmatism. The old girl demanded it. It was the only way I could get my end away with her… a state I yearned for so much I would have topped myself if I hadn’t succeeded. Not that it did me a whole lot of good in the end. She turned out to be stretched frigid with guilt, a guilt I could not penetrate, a need to appease the wrath of a loving God she knew hated her, her alone.”

“And so you looked elsewhere?”

“Well documented. Well known, as you might say.” The old man fumbled for another cigarette, lit it and tossed the pack and lighter carelessly back onto the table. “You don’t smoke, of course.”

It was an intended diversion, a plea for the re-establishment of shallow politeness. The ploy was ignored. “I approach the problem in entirely the opposite sense”, said the other. “I was a Catholic, a devout believer, and I’m happily married to a woman I hope will live for ever. But we are shunned by our church, shunned because of my politics, shunned because of the ideology I have espoused, a philosophy the bishops call godless.”

“In the words of a famous economist,” began the writer, his manner beginning to approach the patronizing as he paused for a moment to signify the unearthing of an aphorism, “in the long term we are all dead. Gods, godlessness, ideology, alienation, they all become as significant as a flake of this”. He tapped his cigarette, causing a tip of ash to fall and disintegrate on the carpet.

“So what motivates you?” asked the former trainee lawyer, pursuing again his original point.

“A quick fuck. A good bottle. Dope. And then another fuck. The here and now is all we have…”

“Even though sometimes you try to bring even that to an end?” The lawyer’s question was fast, calculated and completely disarming, delivered with a politician’s panache for locating a weakness and exploiting it.

“You have done your research well. I suppose one of your ‘people’ read all the sordid biographies just to prepare you for this evening?”

“No. I knew already. As I said, I’ve read much of your work. I have the ultimate respect…”

“Ultimate? A good word for a head of state to use.”

“I have no intention to pull rank, sir,” replied the younger man. “What I say will always be true, always honest.”

“Yes, It’s common knowledge, if any form of knowledge can be described as common.” The old writer took a long noisy drag on his cigarette and ambled back towards the window. “It’s a conundrum the hoi polloi never face. The worker ant stays in line. The experience, therefore, is always one of perceived unimpeded progress, of unblocked pathways to repeat the humdrum of existence and its duties. The fact that the way is cleared in the first place and kept free by the work of the soldiers, those with the duty to explore, to remove the danger, to clear the way, this is never known, let alone understood by the Joe Soap workers. They assume the mundaneness of their lives is a norm, not an achievement created by the efforts of others.”

“Or a conspiracy …..”

“A process of management, let’s call it, to use the vocabulary of the market age. Our protestors chant their slogans; their leaders feed them with more; they learn to regurgitate.”

“And what about our supporters? Those hundreds filling the hall below?”

The old writer turned a little and cocked his head, as if feeling the air for sound. He realised that the chants of “No pasaran! No pasaran!” that filtered along the maze of corridors to their waiting room must be deafening inside the auditorium. “I apologise for the crudity of my sweeping logic. But even you, Mr President, even you would acknowledge that the supporters are a minority, dwarfed by the opposition, a piss in the ocean compared to the torrents that oppose you?”

“Today, maybe. Tomorrow, who knows? That’s why we are both here. We both know what we oppose. And I, at least, know what I support.”

“Today….”

“No. Much longer than that. Just as I know a little about you, then I’m sure that you know something of me. My politics are not the clothes I put on yesterday. I’ve been committed to the work for justice and human rights for over twenty years. I am also a patriot – not a nationalist, a patriot. I want to achieve progress for my people, my country, but not at the expense of suffering for others. You know my history.”

Both men knew they had reached a critical juncture. There was a sense of threat on the edge of these last words, a malice that the professedly libertarian old writer sensed the more keenly. Ill at ease, he tried to divert. “When we’re on the podium, old boy, then we will know the shape of things. I don’t doubt that there are many out there who passionately support your cause. But there are others who are with you only to oppose a shared enemy. And there are others, perhaps many of them, who aren’t members of your audience at all.”

“I don’t understand,” said the other, though he did.

“I’m sorry. I forget that it’s your first time in our green and pleasant land. You will see. Watch them when you speak. There will be many who stand and cheer. But for every three or four doing that, there will be a man – always a man – still in his seat, apparently a spectator, apparently indifferent. Except, of course, he won’t be looking at you. He knows who you are. It’s the identity of those in the audience that interests him. Ostensibly, he is in the audience to protect you. Like the gazelle he probably isn’t, it’s his job to leap onto anyone who looks like they are about to shoot you. After all, you are a head of state.”

“Policemen. Secret Service men.”

“Precisely. The place will be packed with them.”

“It’s a pity,” said the young president, “that there weren’t more of them down there when I arrived. There’s sixty or seventy of those thugs...”

“In Britain they are called Young Conservatives by the way,” said the old writer with a punctuating guffaw.

“...and there was only a handful of policemen. They were throwing things, tomatoes, bags of flour... Is that the way visiting heads of state are greeted?”

“It depends on who invited you, old bean.”

“Also on what I represent?”

“No, only who invited you.”

“So what do you recommend? Should I start my speech by inviting all the spooks to stand up and take a bow? Should I invite all of our supporters to applaud them in a show of magnanimity and humility? Should I call for a vote of thanks in recognition of their protection of my safety and with it the integrity of our revolution?”

“Waste of time. Nice gesture, but it would be taken as a sign of weakness.”

The old writer paused, his tone indicating that he remained in mid-flow, that second thoughts about what was to follow had stayed his tongue.

“And you, of course,” said the younger man, his voice expressing an assumed continuation of the other’s perceived meaning, “ought to know, because you used to be one of them. That was when, presumably, you also knew what you opposed.”

“They paid my bills. It was a job. I was a worker ant.”

“And throughout you were a conscientious and loyal employee. You did what was asked, opposed those who opposed. And, I suppose, you did what you did because of your own patriotism, a noble cause and supreme motivation for an Englishman, I understand.”

“Wherever did you hear that? I merely did what I was told. Patriotism is something the English, in particular, despise amongst themselves. Abroad, or in the company of foreigners – a term that includes everyone who does not think like oneself – the English become fiercely patriotic, but it is always motivated by profit. If the returns aren’t there, the retreat can be swift, indeed.” The tall old man looked his partner in the eye, pausing as if to assess the merit of continuing, as if to assess the impact of the words that might follow before he dare speak them. The young leader thought that this might be the pose that the nation would choose to immortalise the man in bronze after his death. “Your revolution is a privileged state…”

“We are threatened from every side…”

The old man turned away, held up the palm of his right hand to stay the other’s words. “It’s privileged because you know where you stand. And that’s a luxury. You will be defeated, of course, but only temporarily. Your cause will triumph in the long term…”

“…when we are all dead…”

“Indeed. But your cause has integrity. It will be resurrected, maybe many times, and each time it will forge progress towards its goal. In Britain, we still continue to stuff ourselves with the illusion that our total defeat in the war was, in fact, a victory. The fact that we were not invaded convinces people that we won. We were on the winning side, but we lost the war. Ask them why the true victor demanded the complete dismantling of the British Empire, the ceding of our oil-rich territories in the Middle East, the adoption of an independent nuclear deterrent that we never had the right to use, and the requirement that we always send troops, always under the empire command, to any conflict that the empire chooses to pursue, and they will look at you blank-faced in ignorance. Our cause, our patriotism you might say, is corrupt. It’s a false consciousness, as false as people’s conviction that their consumer choices really exist. So when I worked for the services, we did the empire’s job. We had no choice. We knew who our real master was, and we knew we worked to further that interest, which had subsumed anything that we might call our own. Patriotism was not even on the agenda, because we could no longer identify what it was. So we did what we were told.”

“Plus a little more, on occasions.” It was a lawyer’s insistence, coupled with the politician’s opportunism that rendered this statement a question that demanded immediate response.

“I was not born rich,” said the old man, now leaning forward a tad more, his stoop an assertion. “Like any other human being I took a job. It paid the rent. A steelworker doesn’t necessarily believe in the ingot he is forging. A miner does not dig ideologically to supply the furnaces of capitalism.”

“But a man does not join an intelligence service devoted to fighting communism in order to dig coal.”

“It paid the rent. And I did other things on the side – for reasons of ….”

“Integrity? Truth? Conscience?”

“Lord, no! Pragmatism, as ever.”

The younger man held fire for a while. It was the right time to introduce the point, but the language was difficult to find. “So this would explain your current status. Patriotism, that which an outsider might presume you pursued when you worked for your government, was always a purely business arrangement. They paid you and you served them. And now they no longer pay you, so the patriotism evaporates and you become a tax exile. So you have no country apart from the self.”

“e e cummings, I believe?”

The younger man was silent, taken aback. A look of gentle confusion spread across his face. The tack he had planned had been undermined by this unexpected turn.

The older man sensed the other’s vulnerability and laughed. Intellect had once again granted an upper hand that was his to exploit, but he chose not to use his knowledge to control. “An American poet,” he said, calmly, “who broke all the rules, broke them so completely he recast what he did as a new system, a new set of rules. The artist’s only inevitable country is himself. You, Mr President, will never be an artist. You do not have the qualifications. For one, you have integrity, and lack the selfishness required.”

“So for you selfishness is publicly excused as pragmatism?”

“Each of us has a relationship to capitalism and pragmatism pays the rent. In your situation, where you are pushed outside of the ring, you don’t even have the choice to cooperate. For you, for your regime and for your people, pragmatism is not an option.”

“And was it pragmatism that led you to organize the infiltration of the student movements I later joined or the labour movement my friends organized? Was it your pragmatism that successfully placed spies in all the organizations that opposed the cynical old son of a bitch we called a dictator in our country but whom you and your imperial allies befriended because he was your son of a bitch? And is it not true that some of those people you placed, especially the less important ones in the student movement, did not they report to your office? And through that to our enemies? And was it pragmatism that led eventually to the arrest of activists, arrests that led to the imprisonment and exile of many truly honest and committed people? And was it also pragmatism that created the trumped up charges and rigged hearings that convicted them? And was it this pragmatism that led, in my own case, to years in jail and then exile – and eventually to my excommunication from a Church I love, that was my very life? Did you do that? Was all this the consequence of your pragmatism? Did you perpetrate such things to pay your rent?”

“I did what was required of me…”

“The defence of an officer in a death camp. I was acting under orders … … and doing a little on the side, making a small fortune from the market in gold teeth.” The young man’s scorn quickened the words to a tirade, the silence they demanded deep and uncomfortable. A politician who ought to have employed circumspection had lost control. A writer with a command of words had been cornered, rendered speechless and left without defence.

The president stood again at the window. He again retrieved the papers from his inside pocket and began to read. The old man, now looking every one of his eighty years, took the four steps needed to be at the other’s side. Over ignored papers and smouldering cigarette, their joint gaze again fell on the smartly dressed right wing thugs in the street below. “We know what we oppose,” said the president.

“At least today,” said the old writer.

There was a knock on the door, a sharp single perfunctory tap that signalled immediate entry. It was the old writer’s turn to speak to the assembled rally. Again, as he turned, he offered a back-turned left hand, a slight grasp of the other’s upper arm a gesture of solidarity. But this time the words were without passion, without animation and perhaps more sincere for their whisper.  “No pasaran. I’m with you.”

“Today,” repeated the other quickly, the slight pause obviously inserted as a prelude to continuation, “and every day I have found your work inspirational.”

The old man smiled a little and gripped again.