It’s easy when you know how. Here’s the technique—as demonstrated by Louis de Bernières’s forthcoming novel, A Partisan’s Daughter (which is set in the London of the 1970s, in case you have any trouble working it out).
Chapter one sets the scene:
…it was during the Winter of Discontent. The streets were heaped high with rubbish, you couldn’t buy bread or the Sunday Times, and in Liverpool no one would bury the dead.
Chapter two clinches the culture:
The place was full of do-it-yourself revolutionaries, hippies, guys who played bass with imaginary bands, scarecrows, girls in ethnic skirts, amateur dope dealers, actors adrift, 1970s orphans with troubled minds and vague big ideas, all looking for the authentic life and wishing they were really in New York, hob-nobbing with Andy Warhol and Lou Reed, or in Paris throwing cobblestones at the CRS.
And then just mix throughout a series of cunningly precise details that really nail the period:
I came by on the day that Airey Neave was killed by the IRA…
I’d just heard on my car radio that President Bhutto had been hanged in Pakistan…
The Ayatollah Khomeini was saying that there wasn’t going to be any democracy in Iran. Everyone was still on strike for preposterous wage rises, and the only good news was that Idi Amin had absconded…
The next time I saw Roza I was feeling uneasy because the Yorkshire Ripper had just killed another woman in Halifax…
Mrs Thatcher came to power, and everyone was wondering what was going to happen. I wasn’t sorry to see the end of Callaghan…
I was feeling a bit sad because I had just heard on the radio that John Wayne was dead…
“That’s the end of an era… Muhammad Ali packing it in. He’s retiring.”
I came back after Wimbledon fortnight. I remember feeling a bit sorry because Chris Evert had just been beaten by Martina Navratilova…
Instant historical atmosphere. It’s easy, really.
Barack Obama has been taking foreign policy advice from Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s. At first glance, this may seem an odd choice for the anti-war presidential candidate—after all, back then Brzezinski was known as the hawk’s hawk, supporting plans to arm the Afghan mujahedin against the Soviet invaders in 1979-80 and urging President Carter to take decisive action to protect the Shah in Iran when his position came under threat.
But almost 30 years later, Brzezinski has become one of President Bush’s harshest foreign policy critics, speaking out particularly forcefully against the war in Iraq. In the new issue of Prospect, he talks to Jonathan Power about American foreign policy, the urgency of ensuring a swift exit from Iraq, and why it is that the US always seems to get it wrong with Iran.
Our website also features a second Power interview, with Georgi Arbatov, who in the 1980s became known in the west as one of the Soviet Union’s foreign policy mouthpieces. Power describes the background to the two interviews here.
Financial turmoil and the prospect of recession loom large in current discussions of the US, and cast long shadows over much of the world. Some feel that the balance of global power has begun to shift eastwards, away from its 20th century heart. In this month’s cover story, however, Michael Lind asserts the underlying robustness of American society against three pervasive myths of decline: that ethnic rivalries are set to tear the States apart; that religious fundamentalists dangerously dominate its politics; and that the country cannot afford or sustain its social security system.
Even the traditionally pessimistic conservative magazine Commentary has something to say along these lines, and we reproduce an edited version of a recent piece by Peter Wehner and Yuval Levin which examines trends in crime, drugs and welfare statistics, and concludes that there are many reasons for cautious optimism.
Perhaps it’s time to look beyond short-term gloom, and consider whether one century of American supremacy was just the first act of a play that’s going to run and run. As always, let us know what you think here.
The new issue of Prospect features a portrait of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, one of the most significant and original thinkers writing in English today. The peg for the piece is the publication of Taylor’s new book A Secular Age, which attempts to place modern-day secularism in its contemporary context by tracing its development from the Reformation through the Enlightenment and the Romantic era to the present day—a project which, Taylor suggests, can help us better understand the relationship of contemporary secularism to the modern age.
Taylor is a practising Catholic, and his book can in some way be seen as a polemic against what he would presumably see as the dogmatic atheism of Dawkins, Hitchens et al. But the book also fits into Taylor’s broader corpus, and in particular his attempts, most clearly expressed in his 1989 book Sources of the Self, to describe the historical evolution of the self, which in a sense provides the conceptual underpinnings for the new book by showing how the idea of the self, and the self’s relationship to the outside world, both natural and supernatural, has developed over the last 500 years or so.
Taylor fans should also check out our exclusive interview with Taylor, carried out by Prospect editor David Goodhart, our official in-house philosopher AC Grayling and others.
UPDATE I’ve just been sent this:
Thank you for your attention to Charles Taylor and A Secular Age. You and the readers of your blog might find this of interest. The Immanent Frame hosts an extensive discussion of Taylor’s A Secular Age, including contributions from Talal Asad, Robert Bellah, Wendy Brown, Craig Calhoun, Jose Casanova, Charles Taylor, and many others.
Jonathan VanAntwerpen
Social Science Research Council
As noted earlier today on First Drafts, it’s 60 years to the day that Mahatma Gandhi was killed. In Prospect’s April 2004 issue, Bhikhu Parekh, the author of several books on the Indian hero, imagined what a debate between Gandhi and Osama Bin Laden might look like. How would the greatest advocate for non-violence challenge Bin Laden’s world view? More recently, Prospect published a web exclusive by the late Horace Alexander, who spent Indian independence day with Gandhi in Calcutta, and saw him broker peace between Muslims and Hindus.
I’ve been writing about Martin Amis (again) for the current issue of Prospect—a review only available online to subscribers, I’m afraid—and have once again started to feel faintly sullied and bemused by the circus of activities that surrounds his every move. What he must feel about it all I can only imagine.
He is, of course, both a brilliant talent and a big fish in the little pond of “public” British authors. For many people—myself included—writing about Amis has for around two decades been a useful way of writing about what it might mean to describe the modern world through a British lens. Recently, however, both he and we seem to have taken an unwelcome lurch into parochialism. It’s a kind of parochialism masquerading as universality, but it’s parochial nonetheless, in that it’s being conducted at a bizarre remove—in terms both of experience and expertise—from the political and social realities under discussion: the middle east, US power-politics, religious extremism, terrorism. The weightier the words in question, the larger the divide between our author and these subject seems; and the larger questions of personality and publicity loom in commentators’ chatter.
Take the recent interview between Amis and Johann Hari that was splashed all over the cover of the Independent’s “Extra.” According to Matthew D’Ancona, it’s a gem of political and literary discourse—a definitive sparring session on demography, religion, race and terrorism. Yet when I read it, I found myself digesting four sides of conversation that had almost nothing either fresh or profound to say on any of these topics, and certainly nothing Amis and Hari haven’t already commented on more eloquently elsewhere. The piece rakes carefully through the debris of Amis’s alleged “racism” (he isn’t), ponders whether generalisations about race and religion are dangerous (they are, but they may also be useful), informs us that Amis’s “hand is shaking” at points with inarticulate emotion, and that he smokes a lot, and then concludes with the insight that Hari has been watching “a boxing match in Amis’s brain”—presumably between the good Mart who agrees with Johann Hari and the bad Mart who reads Mark Steyn.
It may well be the most definitive piece yet published on the “Martin Amis controversies.” But, as these controversies are a media-storm in a teacup that have precisely no light to shed on any of the great issues wracking the world at present, this means very little.
In the new issue of Prospect, I’ve written an essay on the state of book reviewing in Britain. As I point out at the start of the piece, several articles on this topic have appeared in the US in recent months. Here, for example, is James Wolcott’s fantastic essay-review in the New Republic of Gail Pool’s book Faint Praise. And here is Steve Wasserman’s long essay in the Columbia Journalism Review.
The problem is much more extreme in the US, where most newspapers have drastically reduced their books coverage in recent years. A similar contraction hasn’t happened in Britain—but my fear is that it may well do soon. In the face of new threats such as blogging and an increasingly commercialised publishing scene, book reviewing has declined in authority and prestige, and it will have to fight if it is to survive in its current form.
Many people’s reaction, of course, will be: who cares? What does it matter if book reviews cease to exist? They’re cliquey and increasingly irrelevant anyway. My response would be: yes, it does matter. A healthy literary culture is one where books can be publicly discussed in a serious and informed way. I don’t think the blogosphere comes close to providing such a space at present, largely because it is completely unregulated, but also because blogs are so bitty. What you get is little snippets of opinion and gossip—the virtual equivalent of a conversation in a pub. That is a valuable thing, of course. But sustained critical evaluation of books is different—and to my mind it is even more valuable. I’m not saying that good criticism can’t happen on the internet. Of course it can. But it doesn’t happen very much at the moment. And that is why the destruction of the culture of book reviewing would be a bad thing.
As well as those lead articles available to all our website users, did you know that many of our shorter features can also be read online for free? Every month, you can read David Goodhart’s editorial, our letters page, our news and curiosities, Anthony Grayling’s philosophical response to a question posed by Prospect readers, and my own words column.
Currently, our news and curiosities feature Argentinian salt-farming, disestablishment in the English church, GM foods in Europe, George Steiner on Radio 3, Ken Rudd’s allegiance issues and Vladimir Nabokov’s unpublished work. Plus, Professor Grayling turns his attention to the question “If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, does this make it unimportant?” and I investigate the connections between parlyaree, polari and l33t. And there’s also our “in fact” column, which includes unmissable data on just how many more Chinese people watch premiership football than British people do, and how many bullets it takes to kill an insurgent in Iraq.
As ever, your views and contributions are welcome—whether you have bones to pick with our philosopher-in-residence, or curious words and news you’d like to see explored further in forthcoming issues.
The new issue of Prospect comes out on the 60th anniversary of the murder of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, and so it’s worth remembering the reasons why he has become a moral touchstone. His genius was to develop, during his 21-year stay in South Africa from 1893-1914, the strategy of non-violent, or passive, resistance: the confrontation of authority with masses of people who refused to work, or to move, or to obey orders—but peacefully, offering no physical resistance to the police or army. It made him the model for many of the figures of resistance in the 20th century—including Martin Luther King Jr in the US and Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma; it ensured that the mass movement against the British was largely without violence; and it offered a benign alternative to the revolutions and coups with which the last century was marked. But above all, it did what it was designed to do: it shamed the British out of India, and out of empire.
As an inspiration and a symbol, Gandhi has no peer in the 20th century; as a practical politician, he was a despair to his colleagues in the Indian national movement. His insistence on non-violence grew more extreme as he aged: during the war, he recommended to the British that they should “invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions.” And in an interview given after the war, he went so far as to say that “the Jews [in Europe] should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.” To attempt to overthrow tyranny, or even to oppose genocide, became for Gandhi an act almost as bad as tyranny or genocide itself—a view which finds an echo today in those who oppose any action of intervention to stop massacres.
Yet more than any other figure, Gandhi destroyed not just the British empire, but the very idea of empire. He did it by holding up to the British and to the world a mirror in which they could see themselves—preaching law, democracy and rights at home, while oppressing abroad. It is that vision which won out, in the latter half of the 20th century.
Despite my underlying fear that much anthropology is simply bad poetry (”And then this happened; and then this happened; and then someone did this; and then I wondered whether…”) I occasionally find myself wishing I could draw on its analytical tools and insight better. Yesterday I was struck by one of our society’s most bizarre forms of micro-social exchange. I can’t say whether it is distinctly British or middle class (although it feels both), only that it needs unravelling.
I was sitting at a table in the British Library cafe reading a book (one of the nice alcove tables that everybody wants; I’ve almost witnessed Ballardian riots over who gets to sit at them) and somebody wandered over with a tray of food, and proceeded to sit at my table. On this occasion, I was high-minded enough to let it pass without violence. Once they’d sat down, I deliberately looked up from my book, they deliberately looked up from their tray, and we exchanged that specific form of rigid smile that has as little to do with smiling as possible. The eyes remain emotionless, but the corners of the mouth are raised mechanically, as if doing a split-second impression of the Joker in Batman. It is not a facial expression as such, but a transmitter of a chunk of information (them: “I’m just going to sit here and have my lunch”; me: “Don’t worry, I’m not going to deck you”).
Erving Goffman would refer to this as an act of re-framing or “keying.” You take some primary mode of interaction—unabridged happiness spilling over into a smile—draw a line around it, and then use it within some entirely foreign and more complex situation. Both parties know that this smile isn’t actually a smile, just as people having a play-fight both know that they’re not actually trying to hurt each other. It’s a mask that is used knowingly as a mask, and in case there is a risk of this being misunderstood, the eyes become almost excessively stern, just to confirm that there is no emotion at stake. If this smile needs to convey one thing above all else, it is (to paraphrase Rene Magritte) “this is not a smile.” (Note that this is not the same smile used when someone has held a door open for you. That smile, often accompanied by “thank you,” involves smiley eyes, and conveys genuine pleasure that the world contains people who hold doors open.)
Of all the human acts to re-frame and empty out, a smile! The first piece of specifically human communication between parent and child, re-framed as a tool for strangers to avoid talking to each other! It’s like buying a beautiful piece of sculpture and using it as a doorstop. There are so many other ways for strangers to acknowledge one another. So next time you try and share an alcove table in the British Library cafe, if the guy gets up without smiling and offers you a high-five, that’ll be me.
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