Death has long stalked the river. An 1858 illustration in Punch features a skeletal Silent Highway-Man rowing along the putrid river during the Great Stink, when tens of thousands died of cholera. It’s the site of innumerable suicides and murders. Though much of the violence of empire was outsourced globally, the bodies of river pirates hung in gibbets as a warning — don’t even think of stealing a piece of the grand colonial larceny. And though deindustrialization and globalization brought the naval works to a close, the Isle of Dogs became the location of a new empire of capital. The skyscrapers looming over Canary Wharf, and the City further upriver, have been busy for decades laundering the world’s blood money. Silence can be a sign of absence but also concealment, and not everything can be hidden forever.

On 29 November 2019, a 19-year-old man named Zac Brettler leapt from the fifth-floor balcony of Riverwalk in Pimlico. His last moments were captured on CCTV from the MI6 building across the river in Vauxhall: he fell, struck the embankment wall and disappeared into the murk. As with any suspected suicide, the family’s grief was compounded by endless torturous contingencies. These only deepened when they learned that their precocious son had been closely associating with violent underworld figures, and had constructed a bewildering web of lies around himself. As their image of their son was thrown into doubt, so too was their belief in British justice. Patrick Radden Keefe’s latest bestseller, London Falling, is a rigorous, thought-provoking and moving account of this unfolding tragedy. It assembles a portrait of a lost soul and through it, a damning portrait of London itself begins to emerge.

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At first, it seemed like an open and shut case of heartbreaking self-destruction. Brettler appeared, after all, to jump of his own accord. Context, however, is everything. The teenager had been living a fictional life, creating a Russian persona, altering his family tree to appear like the scion of oligarchs. In reality, he was a Jewish upper middle-class kid from West London with a father in finance and a journalist mother. But he was in way over his head, it seemed, the pressure got to him.

On the night Brettler died, however, another occupant of the Riverwalk flat — owned by “Indian Dave”, a gangland figure — had sent a text to an acquaintance: “I am not fucking playing. I have just been heating up knives and clearing up blood.” Records show the last thing Brettler typed into Google that night was “what to do with skin burns”.  The police promised the Brettler family “no unanswered questions”. They merely created more.

Radden Keefe’s account has many strengths. It contains genuine insights and he has a noble duty of care towards the Brettler family, which is often absent in nonfiction. The story is gripping from start to finish, even as you swim through someone else’s misery. But London Falling is not without flaws. A view from the outside can be enlightening but it can also lead to inaccuracies. The view of Eighties London suddenly rousing itself from monochrome post-war austerity is too convenient a simplification as it erases the Sixties. And the author’s commendable closeness and sensitivity towards the family may have dulled his critical eye. There is also an exhausting tendency to finish each subchapter with a cliffhanger, which feels like a stylistic seepage from true crime podcasts. But these are minor qualms.

A larger issue lies with Radden Keefe’s worldview. He explores the criminal underbelly, quite courageously, and he intimates throughout that “glitzy mercenary” London is far more corrupt than many care to acknowledge. He is right to present the capital as “twenty-four-hour laundromat for dirty money […] full of crooks with pretensions to legitimacy”. Yet there is something, a benevolent liberal worldview perhaps, that prevents him from fully staring into the heart of darkness. His portrait of the capital remains compelling but only partially developed because it still feels reliant on an assumption that humans are intrinsically decent and institutions are there to protect us, a view that is fading, sadly but necessarily, into extinction.

The death of Zac Brettler was a singular event, yet it is an encapsulation, rather than an aberration, of how London functions. There is a chasm between the London Zac’s parents thought they knew, and London as it actually is. This is a common understandable misconception in bourgeois circles. Respectability and lack of exposure can be blinkers. There is a sudden dawning when Zac’s parents realize that the state isn’t going to protect them or bring justice. The author is correct in noting that their earlier “unexamined confidence” was misplaced. Yet he does not fully examine whether this is how the system is actually built to function rather than some terrible mistake.

The hypocrisy of the West’s political and media class is demonstrated by how it “others” corruption. It always belongs somewhere else, usually to the east or the south. The truth is that corruption here is so endemic it is not even recognized as corruption. We threw our doors open to Russia’s oligarchs when it threw off its communist shackles; we bolstered the kleptocratic class by coercing IMF-led “shock therapy” of privatization on the nation. When the ex-KGB tough guy Putin gets into power, Britain offered these well-heeled thieves a sanctuary, further debasing itself by offering up football clubs, luxury apartments and private schools as investment vehicles. Once the autocratic world-boss, Britain was now reimagined as the sycophantic butler. Other places are merely more honest about their dishonesty. Here it has acceptable names — expenses, moonlighting, PFI, offshore entities, super-injunctions, non-doms, shell companies. Colossal wealth transfer takes place all the time from the public purse to private banks via opaque and unaccountable bureaucracies. This is not the exception but the rule. Legality is superfluous when those who make the laws are themselves confidence tricksters.

There are two layers of society that know this Darwinian or even Hobbesian truth, and give little credence to any chatter of progress or etiquette. The working class know because they face the consequences every day (consequences, like taxes, are only for the little people). The establishment know because they reap the benefits. It is those in the middle who are oblivious, their knowledge of the world not caring to extend beyond the unreliable narrator midwittery of The Rest is Politics or The News Agents, “a lot of Londoners found themselves priced out of this new version of their city, forced to relocate and commute from distant suburbs.” But in fact, it goes much further than that.

There has also been an asset-stripping hollowing-out of the city’s soul. The cockneys are gone. The old markets closed or replaced. The nightlife is being put through a slow euthanasia. London Falling implies that these are side effects or errors when actually they are the main game: profitable for the few over the many. This is suggested in the hostility the commentariat show to anyone who points out London’s very obvious decline, denying and obfuscating anything that happens outside of leafy gentrified enclaves. There is a cruelty in denying palpable concerns, especially from those upon whom the entire capital relies. There is also delusion, aided by mantras like “Greatest city in the world” or “Just the cost of living in a city” while the metropolis slowly falls apart. Crime is deemed more palatable than noticing or even experiencing crime. Multiculturalism has been abandoned in favor of exploitation and Balkanization. It is reminiscent of the scene in La Haine where a man falling from a building repeats with every passing floor, ‘So far, so good.’

What makes this a particularly terrifying book, then, especially for any parent, is the societal feeling of vertigo when they start to realize no one in authority is going to protect them or their children. Faced with their son’s lies, Zac Brettler’s parents experience “a kind of woozy vertigo, as what had previously seemed to be the solid factual underpinnings of their family’s existence began to shudder and torque”. The state is not constructed to protect its citizens. It is designed to protect a status quo or engineer a new and profitable one. There are numerous lines in London Falling that are indicative of the permitted degeneracy of our times — a business address with “no fewer than twenty-five buzzers”, a recidivist criminal serving time in 33 different prisons, no comment uttered “nearly two hundred times”. Britain is broken and it’s by design. Wealth may not trickle down but the moral expediency of grifting does, regardless of the cost to any semblance of justice or meritocracy. It is there in the high-end funds pouring in from Qatar and the Gulf States, designed successfully to influence those in power, and it is there in the cynical façade of high street candy shops and barbers, laundering money and on occasion selling drugs, at the other end of the spectrum. One is inscrutable, the other unavoidable for those with open eyes. They are however two sides of the same coin.

Radden Keefe’s admirable sensitivity towards the Brettler family means that he takes a soft approach to any question of whether their son was a pathological liar. If we are callous enough to ask the question, it deserves an answer. Zac Brettler’s lies may have spun out of control, but they were rational. They were attempts to manipulate and gain status in a system built on manipulation and status. His mistake was not being well-connected enough to be protected in high-end circles and not brutal enough to survive in the low-life.

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Young Brettler may have lost his bearings, but he did not create the maze in which he was wandering. In the end, it seems that he confused different worlds, seeking sympathy (via claims of grief and heroin addiction) from people to whom it was very dangerous to show weakness or duplicity. He mistook high-stakes life and death maneuverings for a game, and lacked the protections the establishment affords. In this London, you are either a shark or a mark.

Perhaps it was ever thus. Radden Keefe quotes Voltaire’s view of London in 1733 where people of many different creeds flocked to the city to “transact together, as though they all professed the same religion, and give the name of infidel to none but bankrupts”. We like to think garish excess and legalized profiteering are a new development, but tradition shrouds the crimes of the past. “This is what you get when you found a political system,” as Christopher Hitchens noted, “on the family values of Henry VIII.” The king was no stranger to ostentation (the Field of the Cloth of Gold for instance) or fueling his lifestyle by crippling those doing social good (the Dissolution of the Monasteries). And so it remains. Whatever the etiquette or the vestiges of tradition, power has always been a scam. Its prey, from the peasants who believed in the divine right of kings to those who went over the top in 1914 to those who vote now for their own immiseration, are always those who believe in the prevailing establishment narrative.

Radden Keefe identifies Thatcher’s deregulation of the City of London as the Big Bang, offering ambitious young men “something that looked like meritocracy” while the Tories simultaneously laid waste to trades and industries. Simply put, instead of making things, Britain would launder money and place bets. Like the empire before it, it was extractive rather than generative, parasitic rather than wealth-creating. The ingenuity of the Industrial Revolution, the visionaries who dreamed it into being and the communities that carried it have long been betrayed, decimated by a globalization initiated by a mercantile elite who have loyalty to nothing outside the financial. “To launder something – whether it is cash or a reputation – is to mingle the dirty with the clean,” Radden Keefe notes. This was true with the subprime mortgages that crashed the world in 2008. It is also true of “London’s obsequious hospitality” to the global hyper-rich, regardless of their crimes. Yet to witness Keir Starmer oozing out of No. 10 to greet decapitator-in-chief Ahmed al-Sharaa, you realize none is clean.

Again, they never were. A strange mirroring of the colonial age makes this abundantly clear as Radden Keefe notes, “In earlier eras, English aristocrats would occasionally throw Orientalist costume parties at which they dressed up as sultans, maharajas and other grand foreign types. Now, at Annabel’s rich foreigners could dress up as English aristocrats.” He reminds us that “England has a colorful history of imposters who used to turn up […] and pose as titled aristocrats,” yet it was arguably an imposture from the beginning; the “silver spoon fairy tale” was always a swindle by invaders and warlords from the Normans onwards, more interested in Faustian pacts than social contracts. And it always fed off the populace — from the Harrying of the North to the rookeries of Dickensian London.

Admitting decline, though, is anathema to those benefiting from it. And so free speech is suppressed. Inquiries bury or soften bad news. The Official Secrets Act kicks unpleasantness into the long grass. Super-injunctions abound. The Brettler family found their case simply fade away, “nobody ever told them ‘no’ explicitly, but months and eventually years went by”. When they started to question, they were treated with hostility. The police are caught between infiltration from “below” by organized crime and from “above” by the security services, with protected informants bridging both realms. The all-seeing eye of the state can turn blind when certain interests needed protection. An impaled fixer for oligarchs, a child drowned in a storm drain, a care home of horrors, a spy found in a holdall in his Pimlico flat, a few hundred thousand working class girls, a Jewish kid who cosplayed as a gangster. Maybe law and order wasn’t ever really about justice. Now it’s seemingly no longer about order either. Lady Justice is blindfolded after all. “Ultimately, it’s all transactional,” Zac’s mother sadly notes.

If you navigate through the flocks of tourists around the Tower of London, you’ll find a strange recess under Tower Bridge called Iron Gate Stairs or Dead Man’s Hole. It was here that bodies of the drowned would wash up and be displayed in a morbid form of voyeurism. Yet disappearances are worse. Unsolved crimes. Unexplained fates. Cases closed with suspect haste. Secrets still wash up by the riverside though, even if they are sent from worlds that few want to look into. The dismembered body of Zoe Parker. The chemical attacker Abdul Ezedi. The suspected ritual child killing of “Adam”. Welcome to the city of silences. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Walking through the Design Museum’s exhibition of Wes Anderson’s archive feels the same. It’s not just an extensive collection of movie ephemera. You’re entering Wesworld. Anderson’s style is unmistakable — the saturated pastel hues, the miniature dollhouse sets, the stories within stories — and there is a comforting, childlike, self-contained feel to it all. There are over 700 objects on display in what is essentially a museum of fictional things, including an ornate patisserie box (The Grand Budapest Hotel), a solar system blackboard (Asteroid City), and a pile of fictional fiction books (Moonrise Kingdom).

Some unexpectedly tug at the heartstrings — the bittersweet message “Bravo, Max! Love, Mom”, for instance, on a teenager’s typewriter case (Rushmore). The dedication to Gesamtkunstwerk or “total art” is impressive, and suggests Anderson’s heart is in an earlier age, when designers would create everything from architecture down to the cutlery.

You would think that this would all present as escapist fantasy — and indeed that is the charge that Anderson’s critics most often level at him. However, walking through the exhibition, I was struck by how much it reminded me of certain elite enclaves in London — though you can find them too in New York, Los Angeles, especially Paris, indeed, any wealthy Western city. These are the postcodes populated by young middle-class professionals and wealthy retirees. Places where the vote is Left-liberal-green, even if the actual lifestyles and backgrounds are closer to pink Tories. Places where you’ll see rainbow flags and Palestine Action stickers even if the population is overwhelmingly vanilla. There’s a cheese shop, a bagel place you must try and a French coffeehouse with macarons in the window. It’s Wesworld in 3D.

I know these enclaves well because I live in one. But I’ve never been able to suspend my disbelief, having lived for decades in less salubrious places. When I moved here, it always puzzled me how, leaving the area, literally turning a street corner, I could move from the lowest percentile of crime to the highest — from Wesworld to deprivation — and no one seemed to notice or care.  When crime did occur, it was dismissed as a kind of accepted urban tax; the omnipresent bike and phone thefts for example. If it was more grievous — a kid stabbed to death on the field where my child plays — it simply did not happen. It could not happen. After all, this is Wesworld.

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To understand the phenomenon, we must travel back to the Russia of Catherine the Great and another Wes Anderson-esque contrivance. The Empress wishes to conduct a tour of her dominion. Her courtiers have no intention of letting her see the deprivation and exploitation of peasant Russia so, the story goes, her favorite, Grigory Potemkin arranged for pretend villages to be built, lavish facades with actors playing the role of grateful serfs. The Potemkin village concealed the truth so that the imperial image could be sustained. It’s a strategy employed by many regimes since from Marie Antoinette’s fantasy rural idyll Hameau de la Reine to Hitler’s scale model of his future city Germania, which he was poring over as the Red Army approached his bunker.

It is the sound of the inside speaking to itself — denial and delusion masquerading as comfort and confidence. Angels dancing on a pin-head.

And the fantasy village survives into our time — and not only in the Potemkin postcodes of London. The camera might come to rest on the Wesworld of Davos where the World Economic Forum meets every year; a location Keir Starmer famously prefers to Westminster. For all the braying ignominy of the House of Commons, it still has some connection to the electorate. There are no such distractions in Davos. It is a paternalistic toytown, a delightful snowglobe that looks stage-managed by Wes Anderson himself with its funicular, its high railway viaduct, its baroque and art nouveau hotels and snowy peaks. Here, life is as it should be rather than as it is for the vast majority of mankind. Unaccountable billionaires and corporate monopolies can influence policy for the rest of us. A little war here, some privatization there. Here is where the fiction is written.

What all this amounts to is a curatorial approach to life, which requires, ironically, given the liberal obsession with the term, immense privilege to enjoy. It is a world in which evil cannot exist — unless it’s Hitler or Putin or Trump or whatever effigy is useful at any given time. In such a world, you can propose getting rid of police and sending in social workers (as the son of a social worker I have been privy to the burden they already carry and know this is a very very bad idea). Only someone who knows nothing of violence and crime could find this luxury belief viable. Meanwhile, struggles that do not fit the preferred narrative are magicked away — because, say, the idea of young white girls being raped, tortured and trafficked challenges the ruling administration’s fictional conception of the world. The mainstream politico-media class simply cannot countenance the existence of evil, and the struggle against it, because it would challenge the entire system from which they benefit.

This is a lot to lay at the door of a charming and gifted auteur. In a less corrupt and compromising era, Wes Anderson may not have been a Potemkin director. It’s an indecent world, after all, that cannot allow for picturebook flights of fancy — and it may just be chance that Anderson’s work illustrates the Potemkin condition more effectively than any documentary critique could. He also seems fairly at home in this world himself, at least to judge from his adverts for American Express, Prada, SoftBank and co. For though Anderson belongs to that rarefied category of filmmakers who create their own worlds, in Tarkovsky’s definition, there is a crucial difference with his peers. You find Cold War paranoia and fear in Hitchcock; there is moral and social decay in Kurosawa; Tarkovsky celebrated the radicalism of the spirit in the midst of materialist atheist Soviet Union. Though rarely directly political, these directors pulled aside society’s veils.

But Anderson is a different creature. He is an illusionist. Rather than pulling the curtain aside, he creates more veils, more tricks. It’s easy to imagine him as a theatrical genius in earlier times, designing mechanical devices or trompe-l’œil for regal masques — or Grand Guignol tableaux. His films often feel like plays but not necessarily human ones. Instead, he positions his characters as if they’re marionettes, figures to be maneuvered around diorama. They even speak that way. Anderson’s one-liners may be witty, but they are almost always the voice of the ventriloquist.

Again, this, for many, was part of the initial attraction of his films (especially for those raised on point-and-click video games). But a darker interpretation emerges if you consider these characters as, effectively, puppets, devoid of any will of their own. The charming artifice and comforting insularity make this apolitical director’s work hyper-political.

Anderson’s films do have humanity, with themes of loneliness, family, love, grief and responsibility — it is not entirely style over substance. But the form of his work, the comforting self-containment of it all, is a departure into solipsism. It’s insider art treated as outsider art. This is harmless in cinema — but disastrous in reality. It is this supposedly benevolent solipsism, sacrosanct to liberals on the Left, Right and center, that has marked the authoritarian turn in the Anglosphere.

It is always presented in the form of protection. This was evident in the relish and severity of the Covid crackdowns during Covid and when the wrong kind of riot or protest kicks off. It is there in the clampdown on free speech, in the push for ID cards, in the dismantling of trial by jury, in the creeping specter of militarism and the disturbing mantra that Europe must prepare for war and our sons and daughters must be ready to die. Policies that are anti-democratic and even tyrannical are pushed through with specious claims of the greater good.

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The conspiratorial might suggest that this is all Machiavellian and duplicitous, yet this would require untold levels of psychopathy. Instead, it appears as if the builders of our Potemkin age genuinely believe their own fiction. From the UK’s own Potemkin village, the Prime Minister Keir Starmer recently spoke of: “A Britain that is free from decline… confident about its future…” This would be in stark contrast to, say, Dame Anne Owers’s report on the dire state of the nation’s prisons, or the BMA council chair Tom Dolphin’s diagnosis of the NHS: “The whole nation knows that the health service is in deep crisis.”  There’s spin and then there’s hallucination.

Still, once you have been charmed by Wesworld it is very hard to be uncharmed by it. Working in Eastern Europe and the Baltic States, I had to resist taking every photo in his style. I periodically see buildings (the Sphinx Observatory in the Alps, the Zoroastrian fire temple in Mumbai) where Wes Anderson is my first thought. Indeed, when The Grand Budapest Hotel came out, I was staying in Paris and went to see it in an archaic cinema, with an old man selling tickets in a booth who then shuffled off to double as the projectionist. It was enchanting, like watching a Wes Anderson movie within a Wes Anderson movie. The reverie lasted until I stepped out onto the street and received a bunch of expletives to the face from a passing group of little bastards not unlike my younger self.

To visit Wesworld is a pleasure then, provided you remember to leave. Only a monster could object to a shop window full of macarons — but life is not a fucking patisserie. It requires a degree of infantilism to believe that the Potemkin village you have constructed is real. Anderson is beloved for his coming-of-age tales but they also represent the dangers of arrested development – of yearning for a prelapsarian state that’s long been squandered. Our civilization no longer even pretends to produce the beautiful everyday Art Deco objects that Anderson fetishizes.

It’s arguable that Anderson’s greatest work comes when, instead of making kids’ films for adults and instead makes kids’ films for kids (see Fantastic Mr Fox). But among his adult films, he is at his best when he lets darkness in. Anderson’s well-publicized on-set difficulties with Gene Hackman were a necessary brush with truth and the friction made The Royal Tenenbaums a better film. Still, in my opinion, the closest Anderson has come to a masterpiece is The Grand Budapest Hotel — with its startling tonal shift from knockabout comedy to historical bleakness. This is the moment when Anderson deepens Wesworld by momentarily escaping it.

Ralph Fiennes’s hotel concierge is impeccably mannered, lovably roguish but ultimately honorable. Then fascist authoritarianism comes for the fictional nation of Zubrowka — and he finds himself suddenly living in a society that has no place for any of his charms. It is the moment that real palpable evil is allowed to enter Wes Anderson’s world and it’s his best and truest moment. It shows what Anderson is capable of when he dares to take a hammer to the Fabergé egg.

And perhaps we are on the brink of such a moment too, in a world that is increasingly ignoble — but why face reality, especially when it is not profitable or ideologically sound to do so? Why spoil a beautiful thing, even if there’s the sound of riots outside?

Only, a world that cannot admit to evil, and its own complicity in it, is a world that will endlessly permit it. In The French Dispatch, Lucinda Krementz (played by Frances McDormand) deems a student manifesto to be “a luminous abstraction.” This could be a harmless description of cinema. It could also be a damning verdict of our rulers, devoid of honor, contrition, humility or perspective. The aim is not to make society better but to maintain the luminous abstraction as long as possible.

Only, now we are in that future and all their prophecies have come to pass —  the Ice Age coming, the next world war, the four-minute warning, the tanks rolling in — Radiohead seem curiously out of sync. Having been vocally political for years, they have found themselves under attack for their position, or lack thereof, on Gaza and Israel. Last year, Yorke was heckled into briefly abandoning a solo live performance in Melbourne by a pro-Palestinian protester and has recently been taken to task by Roger Waters, formerly of Pink Floyd, for daring to play in Israel. The five members of Radiohead have meanwhile revealed that their differing stances on the conflict have nearly torn the band apart. Jonny Greenwood is married to Israeli artist Sharona Katan and has performed with Israeli musician Dudu Tassa, though UK gigs were canceled after pressure from the BDS movement.

It’s possible to see the band’s determination to relive past glories as evidence of mature disagreement. But still, here’s another striking contrast. While the seemingly irreconcilable Gallagher brothers were able to put aside their differences earlier this summer, Radiohead’s lap of honor comes with rancor and sniping. As prophets of the disaffected, they have long evaded criticism. But nothing lasts forever.

It’s possible to see Radiohead’s current predicament as a mimetic crisis, to use René Girard’s term. This is when groups of people are faced with problems and contradictions that are insurmountable within the terms of their worldview. Rather than confront these realities, the group establishes consensus, catharsis and a purging of responsibility through the sacrifice of a scapegoat. Girard called this the “surrogate victim mechanism” (which already sounds like a great Radiohead B-side). Faced with apocalyptic horrors, unable to hold the perpetrators to account, we turn to surrogates to punish, which is a driving force of recent atrocities in the Middle East and the response in the West. It results in the transference of animus from the butchers onto, for example, musicians, writers and artists, complicit and supposedly equivalent in their silence. Without proportion, the lines of culpability are made to blur. Human beings operate according to mimetic desire in Girard’s view; they look to each other to find out what to believe and wish for. A generation had looked to Radiohead. Who better then to have as a scapegoat? The larger the sacrifice, the greater the coming harvest.

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When Radiohead first emerged in 1993, grunge was becoming a dead end, and a generation was searching for something more. Viewed as a one-hit wonder for their anthem “Creep”, Radiohead faced an existential crisis — but they had a crucial advantage over their American counterparts. Their focus was on disaffection rather than passive suffering or self-destruction. Disaffection was active, resistant, and could be approached with a much more complex musical palette. It could be used to create a portrait of an entire civilization rather than simply a tortured self.

The leap in quality from their underwhelming debut Pablo Honey (1993) to The Bends (1995) — via the abrasive, deliberately uncommercial My Iron Lung EP (1994) — was enormous. With The Bends, Radiohead ascended to a lofty plateau that they have occupied for almost 30 years, longer than just about any comparable rock band.

But Radiohead have never settled into a comfort zone in the manner of more well-adjusted bands, like U2 or Coldplay, say. The disaffection, which attracted hordes of No Logo-reading Gen Xers, was not a performance. The discomfort was real (see the 1998 documentary Meeting People Is Easy).

While mistrustful of the music industry, Radiohead trusted their fans to accompany them into weirder challenging territory, from OK Computer (1997), the perfect encapsulation of pre-Millennial anxiety, to the daring electronic ruptures of Kid A (2000) and the unfairly overshadowed Amnesiac (2001). These were not so much attempts to purge the normies accrued by The Bends as a conscious effort to kill the normie within. This was territory few fans expected or even knew existed.

In the years that followed, the only real musical misstep has been the curiously incomplete and claustrophobic The King of Limbs (2011). But with hindsight, it was the band’s most overtly political album, Hail to the Thief (2003), released in the shock and awe phase of the so-called War on Terror, its title an allusion to George W. Bush’s stolen election, that opened Pandora’s box.

Radiohead’s greatest lyrical strength has always been collage. While your Bonos and Bruce Springsteens were bogged down in glaringly inauthentic authenticity, hokey storytelling and self-righteous preaching, Radiohead found a way to be obliquely political, reflecting society back to itself like a fractured mirror. Collage was both the medium and the message, Yorke’s lyrical style anticipating the bombardments of disparate images and data that count now as daily life. It was also replicated in the art style Yorke developed with Stanley Donwood for Radiohead’s cover art (currently on display at the Ashmolean in Oxford).

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The use of collage meant Radiohead could avoid literalism and the moralism that often accompanies it. It also gave them a freedom to juxtapose divergent subjects and tones together. One of the clichés associated with the band is their focus on technology — the depressed airport tropes. But there are other lyrical tics that are just as prevalent. One is Yorke’s use of the archaic, whether from the religious past (“red crosses on wooden doors’” the Holy Roman Empire) or more recent ephemera (rag and bone men, toothpaste adverts). Medieval images recur, from “heads on sticks” to omens in the night skies, implying that for all our modern appearances we have not changed much from the days of the pillories and gallows. Fragments of bedtime stories and nursery rhymes are scattered throughout – the Cheshire Cat, Peter Pan, Henny Penny, the Boney King of Nowhere from Bagpuss — adding to the feeling of menace and stolen innocence. The distance from childhood dreams to “a pig in a cage on antibiotics” is damning.

Yorke is also adept at recontextualizing managerial speak to sinister effect: “Your services are not required,” “I will stop at nothing,” etc. On “Electioneering” from OK Computer, the juxtapositions of “Riot shields, voodoo economics / It’s just business, cattle prods, and the IMF” neatly encapsulate the anti-capitalism of that era. But it is still the poetic and enigmatic that truly stirs the heart, as in the anti-war anthem “Harry Patch (In Memory Of)” inspired by one of Britain’s last surviving veterans from the First World War: “I’ve seen devils coming up from the ground…”

The cut-up style gave them space to be elusive and allusive and by critiquing everything, Radiohead may have felt immune to critique themselves. But the abyss has eyes too.

From its title onwards, Hail to the Thief felt too on the nose. It was partially understandable given the social context of the time — the invasion of Iraq was being launched despite widespread public opposition in the UK. It was not a time when subtlety felt appropriate and Yorke’s writing duly took on a more direct and overt approach. This resulted in powerful moments such as the Orwellian punk of “2+2 =5” and the later solo track “Harrowdown Hill” about the hounding and untimely death of the weapons expert David Kelly.

But the album’s most haunting moments are still notably indirect. “I Will” was inspired by the horrific massacre of hundreds of women and children by the US Air Force, whose stealth bombers directed two missiles down into the Amiriyah bomb shelter during the Gulf War, searing the images of victims onto the walls. “I will lay me down / In a bunker underground / I won’t let this happen to my children.” The song ends as a lullaby, chilling partly because of what it leaves out. It is one of their most delicate and devastating tracks and proof that you must first move the listener before you can convince them.

But one of the problems of assuming a political platform is that, like the Mafia, you can’t retire. You have to be perpetually engaged and anything less than constant, dutiful service can be interpreted as signs of callous indifference towards the world’s endless atrocities. With Hail to the Thief, there was more of a sense of the lyrics being cut-up lectures, with a distancing of the evildoer as “other”. But to be convinced of one’s own benevolence is to render oneself vulnerable, to blind oneself, and Radiohead have not been the only ones rattled by attacks from their own (see also Zadie Smith and Sleaford Mods, both pilloried for being insufficiently pro-Palestinian). At some point, all of us arrive at a moment when we feel like time travelers in our own lives, thrust into a future that makes little sense, still seeing the world in parameters that changed twenty years ago.

And these backlashes against our former righteous heroes are all taking place in the discourse chambers of the West, full of status-driven grift, bad faith, in-group policing, struggle sessions and stolen valor. Meanwhile the real victims of Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza, Israel and elsewhere are buried in the earth or piecing their shattered lives back together.

Then again, in this sense, perhaps Radiohead never really did lose their ability to mirror the zeitgeist. That is both their gift and their curse. They predicted much of where we are today: the unwinnable trial of “Burn the Witch” (“if you float you burn”); the reflexive paranoia of “2+2=5” (“don’t question my authority or put me in a box”); even the mocking of the centrist in “Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box” (“I’m a reasonable man, get off my case”). The villain in Radiohead songs was always conveniently someone else. We never imagine that the problem might lie within us and those we elevate.

It is hard to imagine living through an apocalypse — but there are children in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Yemen who are afraid of the sky, and people mutilated in Cambodia, Vietnam and elsewhere, as a consequence of the decisions of our politicians. It is paralyzing to witness such obscene violence: “I have seen too much, you haven’t seen enough.”

Still, whatever knots Radiohead have tied themselves into, when I listen to “I Will”, I can hear an attempt to close the gap, however imperfect. There is a vital role for artists to speak truth to power, to advocate for those who cannot, and this is never easy. It carries a weight but equally so does not speaking. Living in exile, having fled the Third Reich, Bertolt Brecht wrote of the dark age in which he lived, when to speak of nature felt callous, even criminal. Such thoughts have not passed, nor should they while the dark ages still exist.

My own experiences as a child in Northern Ireland were slight compared to children in the 21st-century war zones of the Middle East, Sudan or Nigeria. But I did grow up surrounded by conflict, division and deprivation; I had a father who had been changed completely having been tortured as a child by the security services; and I was in an environment where “we know where you live” was not an idle threat. One of the things I sought from music was a place of escape, transcendence, sanctuary and renewal, beyond politics.

The moments I adore in Radiohead — and at times it really does feel like a secular form of worship — aren’t the most political. It’s when they transcend the rational: “Daydreaming”, “Reckoner”, “Pyramid Song”, “Lucky”, the out-of-body dissociative experience of “How to Disappear Completely”, the mothership of grief on “Decks Dark”.

For a moment, there is an existence outside politics, language, money, identity, anxiety, ego. The sound of a multitude of voices in a field in Glasgow in 2017, singing “Phew for a minute there I lost myself”. If recent concert footage is anything to go by, the O2 gigs will have such moments of transcendence. The utopian endgame of politics is an escape from politics. The rich know this and the rest of us glimpse it in moments — physical intimacy, nature, dance, silence, music, escape into something beyond the divisions of babel. A moment of communion with thousands of complete strangers instead of the orthodox path of dismantling one other. Radiohead are at an impasse, disaffected again, and it is no bad thing. If politics is the cultivation of false certainties, art is a thing built from doubt.

C.S. Lewis, the master of escapist fiction, was prophetic in warning against such noxious paternalism from authors. “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive,” he wrote. “It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.” Let’s hope Barbie director Greta Gerwig, who has been tapped up to direct the next year’s Chronicles of Narnia series, is taking note.

But in the meantime, we have the books, the first of which, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, was published 75 years ago today. When I read this to my son, it transfixed him in a way that all those morally improving Disney and Pixar movies could not — and in a way that I recognized too from my own childhood. The Narnia books are weird and archaic and they are far from comforting. But they leave unanswerable questions and imaginative territory to roam for a lifetime.

What would compel a child to climb into a claustrophobic wardrobe, full of moth-eaten coats and spiders, as apt a symbol as any for the human psyche? C.S. Lewis knew all too well. There are real and terrible things to escape from. And the land of magic, mystery and hope that Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy arrived in would soon reveal that it too was blighted. By facing up to this, conquering its climate of terror, the child would become an adult. If they didn’t pass into the dark and through it, they would remain infantilized.

This partly explains the backlash against Lewis. Two years ago, it was reported that the Government’s counter-terrorism unit, Prevent, had classified his works along with some by his friend J.R.R. Tolkien as potentially leading to “radicalisation”: the kind of wormtongue deception worthy of the villains of Narnia or Middle Earth. It demonstrates that, at its best, fantasy can be the mirror that shows us who we are and what we’ve become. But then, there is a long history of people taking leave of their senses when it comes to Narnia. The books have been banned in the US for being both too Christian and not Christian enough. One critic ranked the books (with delicious venom) as worse than 120 Days of Sodom or Mein Kampf. Being shot by all sides might indicate a writer is on the right track.

For his part, Lewis lambasted “those who do not wish children to be frightened […] Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise, you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.” He knew of the existence of shadows from early in life. There is a spine-chilling passage in his memoir, Surprised by Joy, in which he recalls waking up one night with toothache when he was ten. He called out his mother’s name and she did not come. She was dying in another room. His father was never the same and sent Lewis off to a boarding school run by a deranged sadist. “With my mother’s death, all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life.”

As a result, Lewis developed a fear and mistrust of the adult world in those years — and it was well-placed. Scarcely more than a boy, Lewis was sent to the trenches. He was seriously injured in the Battle of Arras (he would have shrapnel, from a shell that obliterated a colleague, embedded permanently in his body) and, like Tolkien, he watched many of his friends die. “One cannot help wondering why,” he wrote to his father.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe begins with war. The Pevensie children have been dispatched to the countryside, away from the Blitz and the apocalyptic madness of the grown-ups. They stay with a kindly professor in a house “full of unexpected places”. Yet the shadows have not gone. Lucy discovers a portal at the back of a wardrobe leading to another world. (Lewis dreamt this first glimpse of Narnia as a boy: a faun under a gas streetlamp in snowbound woods.) The children discover the land to be an ice-stricken police state, and they are called, reluctantly as in all heroic quests, to confront evil.

As I revisit it with my son, after more than 30 years since last reading it, the tale has an intriguingly archaic feel. A professor of Medieval and Renaissance literature, Lewis incorporated mythic and folkloric characters from various cultures — Greek, Celtic, Germanic — into his stories. At times, it’s akin to a bestiary: a hangover from a childhood spent dreaming of imaginary lands while stuck indoors. “I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstair indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.” What brings the tale to life are the extremely vivid sketches of the children, their strengths, flaws and group dynamics, as well as clever inversions: the faun, for example, is more startled by the little girl than vice versa. It is also more dystopian than I remembered: the woodland spies, the ransacked homes and forced disappearances, the guilt and responsibility the children feel.

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The most disturbing scene, though, is when the villain, the White Witch, who has cast an endless winter on the land without hope of Christmas, comes upon a festive group of animals. They claim they’ve been visited by Father Christmas. She demands they recant, but a young squirrel insists it’s true. The White Witch waves her hand — “Oh don’t don’t don’t!” cries Edmund — and turns the merry party into statues. “It seemed so pitiful to think of those little stone figures sitting there all the silent days and all the dark nights, year after year, till the moss grew on them and at last even their faces crumbled away.”

The evil White Witch steals the show, of course. She promises the insecure, egocentric child regal status, but her abusive, narcissistic nature is soon evident. She convinces her victims it is they who bring wrath on themselves. She contaminates the minds of the young and naïve while masquerading as their benefactor. Lewis is clever in introducing her not as some tyrannical psychopath but a seducer that any of us could fall for. She appeals to the best in us — curiosity and desire for instance — and feeds off, warps and stunts these qualities. It is foolhardy to believe we would be immune to her charms.

C.S Lewis’s charms were quite another matter. On a pilgrimage to his haunts in Oxford, I met an older lady who had known him when she was a child. She twinkled at the mention of Narnia and was still clearly enchanted by his books. But when I asked her what Lewis was like. “Well… I thought he was a grumpy old sod.”

I laughed. I would have been disappointed with any other description. We know that Lewis loved a drink, could start an argument in an empty room and enjoyed doing so. He smoked like a train and cursed like a sailor. For a supposed conservative, he had anarchistic tendencies, as did Tolkien. In his wife’s eyes, Lewis was “a tough Ulsterman […] with the sort of views you expect of an Orangeman”. As a Republican kid growing up in Derry, I ought to have felt him to be an enemy. But few people ever gave me a more valuable gift than the maps at the start of the Narnia books. Similarly, I owed a debt to him: not just for the respite of escapism, but because it gave me a way of understanding the fortresses and threats around us.

In another of Lewis’s masterpieces, The Screwtape Letters, a demon counsels his nephew that only amateurs try to seduce people into being directly evil. The sophisticated malefactor makes them first believe they are unquestionably good or, in other words, superior. This is how the frost is born. The White Witch creates a sparkling winter wonderland that is really a bitterly frozen steppe where nothing but fear can flourish. For an eight-year-old, Narnia is a make-believe place. By middle age it’s recognizably real.

My earliest memory of Margaret Thatcher, born a century ago today, was not a photograph or footage but graffiti on the side of Brutalist flats. It was painted rather than sprayed, in those days. Ireland being consumed by Great Britain, with the West coast of Scotland morphing into Thatcher’s face as she gnawed on Ulster with crazed eyes like Goya’s Saturn. I was scared shitless at the time but grew used to the image. And as the years passed, I would see her effigy dragged out and immolated in different places that all shared the common denominator of state callousness. Poll Tax riot sites. Post-Hillsborough Liverpool. South Yorkshire pit villages. Virtually anywhere in Scotland or Wales. Even the soundtrack had a sacrificial quality — Elvis Costello’s “Tramp the Dirt Down” or Morrissey’s “Margaret on the Guillotine”, which earned him a grilling from Special Branch for fear he’d dispatch the Prime Minister with a withering swipe of a flaccid gladioli.

There were any number of reasons for ordinary citizens to loathe Thatcher from the miners to Section 28 to the Belgrano, the third-degree burn catastrophe of deindustrialization and the slow-burn catastrophe of financial deregulation. In Northern Ireland, she somehow eclipsed even the folk memory of the Black and Tans and Cromwell, entering the mythic. Even then, supernatural figures like the banshee, dearg due, the bánánach and the abhartach seemed sympathetic by comparison.

Few would admit it then, or now, in Irish Republican circles, but Thatcher was the demon Sinn Féin needed, and she became one of their greatest benefactors. It had been very difficult, after all, to galvanize total resistance to the securocrats of the previous Labour governments and Ted Heath’s administration. Here was an archetype. In attempting to destroy them, she made them what they are now.

Thatcher’s Northern Irish debut was a horror show. A month before her election victory, her advisor on the province, Airey Neave, was assassinated leaving the House of Commons. Neave had been a war hero, escaping Colditz, personally serving Nuremberg Trial indictments to the likes of Goering, Speer and Hess in their cells, and was known as a force to be reckoned with. The Irish National Liberation Army, a Marxist splinter group and rival of the Irish Republican Army, placed a bomb underneath his driver’s seat with a mercury tilt switch, which activated as he drove his Vauxhall up the exit ramp. As a shot across the bows, it was exceptionally brutal. It would also seem immensely counter-productive if the cause of a United Ireland and/or Civil Rights for Catholics were assumed to be the aims of the Republican movement; but assume, we should not.

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Thatcher entered, with her garlands, into a bloodbath. Republican snipers and land mines had been sapping the morale and increasing the paranoia of the security services in the north. Lord Mountbatten was blown apart on his boat, along with his grandson, a fellow aristocrat and a cabin boy. This was followed by the Narrow Water Massacre, where a passing convoy of the Parachute Regiment (the perpetrators of the Bloody Sunday Massacre of civil rights protestors in Derry) was targeted by a massive roadside bomb. The Provisional IRA responded, by remote control, from across the border, with a double-tap blast, beloved of contemporary geopolitical powers, as a helicopter ferried away the injured. Eighteen soldiers were killed, as well as a civilian when survivors began to fire across the border.

If there were a time when it felt like the IRA would win, this was it. Thatcher felt it too, so she attempted to change the framing of the war into simple criminality and a law-and-order issue. “Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom,” she claimed, “as much as my constituency is”, which given Finchley at the time was not a place where civil rights activists were murdered with impunity or one section of the population had been subject to internment without trial or shoppers had their limbs blown off or daily assassinations were commonplace was a misnomer. Indeed, her insistence on normality just illustrated the abnormality of the place and situation — a colonized foothold of an island-nation effectively ruled over by a rheumatic and bellicose police force and a sash-draped organization that were Cargo Cult British. Northern Ireland, to the British and the southern Irish, was Bedlam.

In reality, the Lady was for turning. Declassified records from 1983 reveal that Thatcher raised the idea of a “tactical withdrawal” to the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Jim Prior, and it was only, seemingly, turned down because Prior argued that it would lead to all-out civil war. It is still hard for Unionists and Loyalists to accept such orphan judgments, but equally it is of cold comfort to magical thinking Republicans who are not going to conjure away a million or so Unionists/Loyalists when our day comes. At that point, escalation from an already horrific state of affairs was a likely possibility and the Republic government knew it. Yet it shows how close the IRA came to a United Ireland. At the same time, the high-profile attacks that had raised Republican morale had soured Irish American relations enough for the US to begin to stop the pipeline of support, forcing them to seek assistance from the nefarious enemies of my enemies.

This demonstrates a privately practical Thatcher, as well as the basket case of Northern Ireland. And yet she clung. Perhaps it was Airey Neave or doubts about her role in a world of old boys and hard men. But Thatcher made it personal and ultimately misjudged and lost. Her aim was not peace but unconditional surrender, with a degree of humiliation. For all the inevitable whataboutery, the British state was the only force that could have dialed down, if not turned off the violence, killing the civil rights issue with kindness for example, and yet Thatcher dialed it up.

At the same time, the comment by Sinn Féin’s Danny Morrison that she was “The biggest bastard we have ever known” was canny. There was no love lost, yet there’s a sneaking sense of  “We could do something with this”. Thatcher’s intransigence and militarism would eventually radicalize and galvanize the Irish nationalist community and ultimately spelt the decline of the moderate SDLP. She escalated the prison protests and hunger strikes into a battle of wills, locking horns with Sinn Féin, which made the latter seem totemically powerful to the Catholic community and then, because of the deaths of the hunger strikers, this spread to the international media. It also made the battle a sacred affair, with the saintly starving neo-Catholic martyrs versus the satanic Thatcher. Having made her name as the no-nonsense grocer’s daughter, she was ill-equipped for the irrationalism of Celtic eschatology.

So, Thatcher provided the devil that the faceless bureaucrats of the pre-Thatcher era could not. Her Iron Lady ego forced Northern Ireland out of multiple possible paths and into a binary where the citizenry had to pick for or against. This played into Sinn Féin’s hands, though they would never admit it, and is actually a strategy that the activist Saul Alinsky advocated in Seventies America — find or create a common enemy to centralize and radicalize opposition and push out other more ameliorative or alternative voices. I saw this in Derry where the SDLP, who had bravely had their heads cracked open on civil rights marches for years and largely came from trade union and teaching backgrounds, become overnight, thanks to Thatcher, the Stoop Down Low Party in the eyes of the community.

It all crystallized with the Hunger Strikes. Her insistence that the Troubles was criminal rather than political was self-defeating, inadvertently showing Sinn Féin, via Bobby Sands, the power of the ballot box. Their “Armalite and ballot box” strategy being an evolutionary device. She unintentionally gave them a way forward that has since proved immensely profitable. It was in both directions an exercise in cynicism. Thatcher was onto something when she said: “It would seem that dead hunger strikers, who have extinguished their own lives, are of more use to PIRA than living members.” At the same time, her insistence that the “PIRA have put the Catholic Community on the rack” during this time is abject, given everything the British state had put the Catholic community through.

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In hindsight, it seems two factors made armed struggle untenable in the long run. The first, in sort, is the role of MI5 and informers or touts. It is still unclear to what extent Sinn Féin were riddled with double agents, how high it went and how it directed policy in the long term. Thatcher can take some credit for this, if anything positive can be salvaged from it, given she increased the intelligence services’ role in the conflict (their involvement with Loyalist death squads is still a pressing but taboo issue). The second was Ulsterization, initiated not by Thatcher but by earlier governments, who sought to contain the conflict within the borders of Northern Ireland, tacitly believing the population to be expendable and accurately believing the IRA could only really make an impact on the mainland (the high-profile bombing of which — Canary Wharf, for example — ultimately intensified negotiations). Both were incredibly cynical and effective.

Though Thatcher claimed as her mentor the wily Dubliner Edmund Burke, her ego meant she failed to pay heed to his wisdom, “It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.” Her opponents suffered from the same hubris as she did, dining out still on how close they came to taking her out in Brighton, endlessly repeating “Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once — you will have to be lucky always”, a quote that ultimately proved untrue and indulgent. Had they succeeded, there is every chance their actions would have resulted in martial law and more suffering for northern Catholics, along with more bolstering of their positioning. One more boost to the ascendancy of Sinn Féin, perhaps the true aim rather than a United Ireland or civil rights equity.

Today Sinn Féin are adjacent to the blob, and more equivalent to Sturgeon-era SNP — albeit with concrete-filled weapons bunkers and piles of bodies as unavoidable as the Brits’ or the Loyalists’. They talk of a United Ireland, only one under their tutelage and for their benefit. If it happens, and almost a million Unionists will require accommodating, it will, given the dire state of the south and the north, be an unrecognizable Ireland to that which we dreamed and to the one we must start dreaming afresh, with a knowledge of yesterday’s victims and without yesterday’s ghouls. Their day has come, and, like Thatcher’s, it has passed.

It’s a suitably nautical setting for today’s soundtrack: Rum Sodomy & the Lash. Released 40 years ago by London Irish legends the Pogues, the album is named not after a decent night in old Soho, as the title would suggest, but an apocryphal quote of Churchill’s. “Don’t talk to me about naval tradition,” he’s purported to have said. “It’s nothing but rum, sodomy, and the lash.” For many years, listening to the album while writing and drinking in this adopted riverside local, I’d no idea it was recorded a stone’s throw away in Elephant Studio in the basement of Metropolitan Wharf. Or that the pubs of the area, such as this one, were frequented by Pogues musicians: their frontman and chief songwriter Shane MacGowan and the album’s producer Elvis Costello.

The album was even launched on the river, upstream, on board HMS Belfast with the band wearing Nelson-era naval regalia. They’d been ferried to the moored cruiser from Traitor’s Gate, arriving to find the assembled journalists (one of whom ended up, temporarily, in the Thames) already tearing into the drink. After the gig, MacGowan’s admiral’s hat vanished; in one story settling onto the riverbed with all that other historical debris. At the time, the album felt like a raucous act of vandalism. Now, it’s viewed almost universally as a stone-cold classic.

The cover, a remade version of Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, where the band themselves are among the wretched shipwrecked crew, acts as a framing device. What Rum Sodomy & the Lash does is allow erased, abandoned or sidelined histories, and other selves, to erupt — the piratical and pressganged, the adventurous and the damned — in a way that gracefully, modestly hides the band’s self-taught virtuosity and the lyricist’s songwriting genius. It was an album that, at that time, socially and politically, shouldn’t have existed, but through courage and sheer force of nature had to.

The Thames may not forget, but society is all too willing to. There are, alas, few signs of gratitude or even recognition of the colossal impact the Irish have had on London. A statue of Oliver Cromwell, the Butcher of Drogheda, stands pride of place outside the House of Commons, but there’s scarce trace of his Hibernian victims. It took the London Irish Centre to erect a plaque in Camden Square in 2017 to the “Forgotten Irish”, “who left their homes, counties and country… to work and rebuild this city and country, ravaged and destroyed by war… Many would never return to Ireland.”

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Calls by Professor Jeremy Black, and others, for an Overground line to be named after the Irish navvies, the “tunnel tigers” who were crucial to building the Tube, were ignored. The vital role of Irish builders in constructing the modern City and Canary Wharf, among other locations, has been explored in the short film We Built this City — yet you’ll struggle to see much acknowledgement in those actual places. A mural in Archway’s Navigator Square, honoring thousands of Irish nurses and navvies, among others, is welcome, but insufficient in countering historical erasure and rewriting. Blue plaques memorializing Irish luminaries tell uneasy stories. Wilde was effectively ruined here; Michael Collins signed his own death warrant here; James Joyce left because of the eerie coldness he felt from neighbors he called “mummies”; Samuel Beckett after the tedium of being continually undermined and dismissed as “Paddy” and “Mick”.

Even the hardships have been erased. “No blacks, no dogs, no Irish” signs no longer remembered. Little remnant of the brutal St Giles Rookery, regarded as the worst ever residential conditions seen in London. Perhaps the most impactful trace are the lines carved into a wall in the Tower of London, reputedly by the Irish rebel Thomas Miagh, “By torture strange my trouth was tried yet of my libertie denied…”

Yet there are other legacies beyond the architectural. One is music. In 1979, Dexys Midnight Runners released their debut single “Dance Stance”, a fine example of agit-prop soil music that pushed against the dumb “Paddy Irishman” jokes that laid the groundwork for so much discrimination and harassment in Britain. Written by second generation Irishman Kevin Rowland, it was punchy and admirable. Its chorus referred to a litany of great Irish writers, “Oscar Wilde, Brendan Behan, Seán O’Casey, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Eugene O’Neill, Edna O’Brien and Laurence Sterne”. Its effectiveness, though, was tempered by its “tell, don’t show” approach, one that was dismissed by bad faith snobs who claimed the examples were exceptions to the rule or not even Irish at all.

The Pogues offered a different approach — not just “show, don’t tell”, but embody. The result was one of the greatest Irish and greatest London albums. The combination, and difference, of the two was important. Aside from The Pogues’ Dubliner guitarist Phil Chevron, MacGowan and bassist Cait O’Riordan were, or are, second-generation Irish, and were made to feel it growing up in England. It was still not an easy time to be Irish in England in the 1980s; the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven were all still in jail in a series of miscarriages of justice. 1985 was generally grim in England, encompassing the Broadwater Farm and Brixton riots, the Bradford City fire, the aftermath of Heysel and so on. In Ireland, blighted by economic recession and stifling politics, the highlight of the year was a wave of “miraculous” moving statues.

Being treated as an outsider, as being both and neither, would have been difficult, even dangerous. But it also had advantages. One was never entirely trapped within a singular culture. There was always another place to remember, identify with, explore, dream of and draw from for inspiration. You can hear the freedom, fascination and yearning of the émigré in Rum Sodomy & the Lash, and also the sense of belonging to a city, on intimate terms with its underworld, yet being seen as an outsider. This was a troubling quandary for a citizen but a useful position for an artist. A source of animus, alienation and material.

Costello had produced the Specials and there was overlap with the Pogues in terms of alienation, social issues and rebellious energy. Yet the Irish component was integral here, and evident from the opening track, “The Sick Bed of Cúchulainn”. The song starts cautiously, as if winding up the whirlwind to come. It captures a great deal of the chaotic gigs the band had been blazing through. And, equally, it evokes their hyper-literate quality, garnered from voracious reading. Horslips, an earlier, proggier Irish band, had made the spirited concept album The Táin about the adventures of the mythic hero Cú Chulainn. The Pogues, however, were the product of punk, and the more exploratory post-punk.

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MacGowan’s vision in this opening track is hallucinatory, and peopled with figures as lost or fallen as they are heroic. It’s a wild ride of a song, in such that its erudition could be skipped over by snobs, or thrown away entirely by more puritan punks. Yet, however much of a splendid racket it becomes, it drinks from deep roots: not just on the relatively well-known heroic Celtic myths beloved by Gaelic revivalists and Irish revolutionaries, but by a stranger more obscure tale, “Serglige Con Culainn”, in which the hero is cursed with a fever for trying to kill two birds from the Otherworld.

Rather than the comforting certainties and glorious defeats of rebel songs, to which MacGowan was elsewhere partial, weirder, truer, more nebulous versions of Irish culture and history are demonstrated here. The result is expansive, rather than constrictive, more life-affirming and less fixed in stone or bronze; less like the statue of the dying Cú Chulainn at the site of the Easter Rising in Dublin’s GPO, and more a still-unfolding dream of a living person.

Such ingenuity could not go unpunished. With a sideshow goading, the English press soon zoomed in on MacGowan’s appearance, especially the state of his teeth, or his alcoholism: rather than his talents or the group’s. One music critic wit claimed MacGowan could “floss with rope”, while many others speculated, with varying degrees of faux concern and prurience, how long he’d continue to live. It was with some satisfaction that he survived to pension age, partly to spite them). The jibes fit drearily with a long, disgraceful history (see Punch magazine) of anti-Irish grotesquerie. But the album is full of erudition, even when the music is ferocious and aiming for the metamorphic “battle frenzy” of the mythic Cú Chulainn.

The Pogues had already mastered this combination of frenzy and learning on “Boys from the County Hell”, on their debut Red Roses for Me. There’s a deliberate feral quality that plays with false colonial dichotomies — the unrefined natives and the “civilizing” empire — of which an example is Spenser writing The Faerie Queene while helping to eradicate the Irish. Without saying so, the song serves as a declaration of the right to be contradictory and the necessity of being transgressive. It is written, as many are on the album, with the kind of unreconstructed street language and uncouth Battle of Cable Street-style solidarity, which might get you a visit from the “Be Kind” police these days.

These same police pop up in the next track “The Old Main Drag”, putting many a London punk and Irish migrant through the wringer (“I was picked up by the coppers and kicked in the balls / Between the metal doors at Vine Street I was beaten and mauled…”). Beginning in a drone, the song is a tale of damnation though, unlike Dante, it is one of poetic injustice. It is sung, with immense sympathy and bleak realism, from the perspective of a homeless rentboy, a voice of the underclass, who’d come to the capital full of romance and is now adrift. It is all the more moving for taking place at the time of the AIDS epidemic, the erection of Cardboard City, the closure of residential mental health units, and the rise of heroin. It’s punk in the etymological sense of rotten wood used as kindling, which was then applied to sex workers, then juvenile delinquents, then musicians. The used, the disregarded and the thrown away but also the unsilenced.

This poignant humanism continues throughout the album, from MacGowan’s exceptional poetic yet visceral waltz “A Pair of Brown Eyes” to a hypnotic cover of the Gallipoli bloodbath dirge “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda”. The former shows MacGowan’s talent for writing songs of striking immediacy, yet that still sound as if they’d existed as folk standards for hundreds of years. Again, the language would immediately collide with our contemporary hypocrisies, where speaking of violence and horror is policed and punished more than committing it.

Even at the time of the album, in fact, the Pogues ran into opposition, and not just among musical snobs and gatekeepers in England. In Ireland, their adversaries were two-fold — traditionalist embalmers of folk music, who mistook obstructing change for conversation, and from culture cringe-beset “cosmopolitans” who treated European culture as sacrosanct menu dégustation and were mortified with anything too Irish, too plebian, too diasporan. Ironically, it turned out that the Pogues were far more effective custodians of Irish traditional music, and more authentic examples of cosmopolitan hybrid-culture, than their adversaries, exemplifying the maxim that, “Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.”

At the heart of Rum Sodomy & the Lash’s success and legacy is this refusal to concede to oppositions, but instead to combine them and see what alchemy or chaos resulted — high and low culture, Ireland and England, city and rural, home and exile, intellect and soul, sacred and profane, debauchery and dignity, stars and gutter. So you get “Navigator”, a tribute to the Irish workers who built the railways, and MacGowan’s rowdy “Sally MacLennane”, a tribute to his uncle’s Irish pub in Dagenham, the Irish car-making workforce it served and the real-life characters he encountered, some less than salubrious. There’s also a fierce and atmospheric instrumental, “The Wild Cats of Kilkenny”, inspired by Spaghetti Westerns, or else the industrial hangover of Ewan MacColl’s “Dirty Old Town”, especially poignant at a time of deindustrialization.

The true legacy of the Pogues exists not in print, of course, but in music. Their inheritors include the drone and conscience of Lankum, the otherworldly transformations of the past in Lisa O’Neill and John Francis Flynn, and the pulse of the new in Fontaines D.C. Yet it goes further than genres overlapping and artists playing together, as important as these affinities are. It is there in the need for voices and songs to articulate discontent, defy the rot, preserve the fire, to genuinely transgress, to face reality in surreal or raw terms, to lament and howl not in the transience of placards or social media, but in an art form that hits far deeper, and lasts longer even than rusting plaques. It’s all out there, more than ever, out of sight, below decks or at the bottom of the river, waiting for the right wave to escape.

It’s hard to quantify what a bad book is but you know one when you read it. Frey was smart enough to avoid some of the self-pitying clichés of the form but not the swamp of sentimental gloop that underlies every fallen tough-guy act on the page. The book is histrionic to the point where the only enjoyment I could salvage was to hear the clipped portentous sentences (“I am blinded by blackness. I am gone […] My eyelids fall”) in the voice of Charlton Heston’s incarnation of Moses in The Ten Commandments. It is resplendent in self-absorption yet bereft of self-awareness. Above all, there is something about the tone, or the voice that doesn’t ring true, especially if you have some knowledge of those junk-sick netherworlds. The implausibilities begin from the first paragraph with Frey, confused and clattered in various bodily fluids, making it through the check-in queue with no knowledge of doing so, only to awake on the flight with this suspect peach of an opener, “How did I get here?” It’s all too neat, convenient, theatrical, and reads like how someone would imagine a drug story to be. The publishers fell for it, maybe because this is how, from a safe and insulated distance, they imagine that lifestyle to be.

The Smoking Gun had suspicions and published the article “A Million Little Lies”, claiming a great deal of the fearlessly verité nonfiction account was fabricated. Having been exalted on Oprah’s show, Frey was all of a sudden rumbled a la Eyes Wide Shut and ominously summoned back, a different kind of gaze now upon him. “I have to say it is difficult for me to talk to you,” Oprah began, “because I feel really duped. But more importantly, I feel that you betrayed millions of readers.” Much of what follows is painful to watch, though also far more compelling and hilarious than A Million Little Pieces.

The most astonishing comments, though, came not from the author but his publisher Nan A. Talese, who cited the book’s “authenticity” as the reason she bought the manuscript. Authenticity was the very quality that it lacked. However, its phoniness went undetected. Another revelatory line came courtesy of Oprah who was aghast that the collapse in ethics might facilitate, god forbid, the dystopian scenario that “anybody can just walk in off the street with whatever story they have and say this is my story”. The reality is that stories from the edges of obliteration are by their nature chaotic, compromised, and rife with lies and indignities, all of which would be infinitely more “authentic” than the abject display of false virtue witnessed on The Oprah Winfrey Show and in the performative book it first championed and later denounced.

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“This is my truth,” Nye Bevan used to say, “tell me yours.” This points to the crucial subjectivity of memory, the very basis of memoir, but also demonstrates an openness and unwillingness to police others, acknowledging the ambiguities and contradictions with which we each imbue our real stories of the past, frailties that we do not afford others. Interviewing two of my aunts while researching an event they experienced during the Irish Troubles, I watched a spirited conversation erupt about the veracity of a tiny, seemingly insignificant detail, a detail so slight I cannot recall what it was. Each swore her version was true. And at no point did I believe either was lying. This kind of honest ambivalence is normally unwelcome in literary circles, where authenticity is not something you embody; instead, it is something you sell. What is required by the industry (for it is more industry now than art) is agony followed by redemption. The deeper and more salacious the turmoil experienced, the greater the pleasure aroused in a voyeuristic reader.

The Salt Path by Raynor Winn might seem to be at the other end of the spectrum from the detumescent machismo of A Million Little Pieces. Yet they share more than the disgrace in which they are mired. The Salt Path is a more agreeable elegiac read, mainly because nature is an endless repository of poetry and can be leaned on when talent or vision is wanting. The book about a middle-aged couple, one with a terminal diagnosis, who are evicted from their Arcadian home and then take to the road, sold over two million copies and has recently been adapted as a movie.

Again, success brought unwanted attention. Self-regard and an inclination towards pomposity are not unusual to memoirs, but using the opening lines of The Odyssey as an epigraph is inviting trouble. The book is touching at times but cloying at others. It wobbles in its encounters with others that feel unlikely, the language and sentiments unnatural. As in Frey’s book, there’s a lot of occasionally ludicrous self-mythologizing. Where his was mock-infernal, hers is mock-Edenic. Its arc, like Frey’s, is one of formulaic redemption, despite both feigning to deny it. Is this the message required by a publishing industry whose design is to entertainingly soothe or even sedate, rather than genuinely illuminate?

A newspaper investigation, by Chloe Hadjimatheou for The Observer, has questioned numerous aspects of Winn’s story, from their financial conduct to the gravity of Moth’s illness. Winn has denied the accusations, and defended the veracity of the “physical and spiritual journey Moth and I shared, an experience that transformed us completely and altered the course of our lives”. We may never know what is true and false. Intriguing, though, is the sense of betrayal currently reverberating through the literary establishment, a grievance that perhaps tells us more about the aggrieved than anything else.

The affront Frey and Winn seem to have caused among the literati is not merely that they may have told half-truths. On the surface, there are genuine and well-placed concerns that nonfiction must be objective and verifiable. Memoir is, however, reliant on memory, which is subjective and unreliable. And they have exposed the whole misery memoir genre for what it is: a money-spinning opportunity and an exercise in trauma porn. The outrage is partly down to the fact publishers paid for the tender delicacy of suffering and were cheated out of it. The gladiatorial battle they were baying for was only a rigged wrestling match. The authors in question will be treated as aberrations, in order that the publishing industry, which has courted and encouraged tall tales, continue to appear noble. Yet the adage “don’t hate the player, hate the game” remains evergreen. There will be PR motivated calls for due diligence, of course. But will there be any calls for a vampiric industry to examine its own motives?

I know the publishing game fairly well, having written a memoir several years ago about growing up during the Troubles. It was based around an Oulipo idea of Georges Perec, whereby stories are told via objects. I called the book Inventory after the list of objects that made up my chapters — a deliberate double meaning, an admission that there was always going to be some degree of invention to the creative process. I would be an unreliable narrator, even to myself. Objective facts were sacrosanct, especially the dead, but interpretations and recollections inevitably varied. Leaning into this uncertain complexity felt more truly representative of the political and social fabrications that surround us. A memoir does not and cannot recreate the past but instead creates a simulacrum of it. “Memory,” Walter Benjamin wrote, “is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre.”

In writing about Northern Ireland, I was quite aware of what I was undertaking. There is a cultural omertà there (“the tight gag of place,” as Seamus Heaney called it); writers are regarded as something between a spokesperson, a thief, a liar and a snitch. And every time I tried to approach the topics of conflict, division, poverty etc, people (including family members) would become understandably protective, territorial and evasive. So I braced myself for the inevitable backlash after it was published, which of course occurred. The last lines of “24 Hours from Tulsa” regularly replay in my head: “I can never, never, never go home again.” And it was my own fault for stirring up what had been laid to rest stirred and for piercing coping mechanisms. After a year of barely speaking to my father because of my book, no sooner had I helped to place his coffin in the hearse than I felt a tap on the shoulder from someone who wanted to discuss something I’d written in it. And it struck me how unprepared most writers are, how little counsel the industry gives, and how many of my writer friends have been encouraged to tell a certain exposing type of story, to publish and be damned. And, sure enough, they have been damned.

It fits with a wider trend whereby working-class, ethnic minority, gay, trans, disabled, and neurodivergent writers are expected to write (and sometimes only permitted to write) about those “issues”, while those higher up the social hierarchy are allowed free rein to write about anything. Marginalized identity and trauma are currency. In my case, I’d ended up writing Inventory after my previous book Imaginary Cities had caught the attention of mainstream publishers. Many were keen to listen to my ideas for half a dozen books in that spirit. Nevertheless, virtually all came to the conclusion that the Troubles were all I was fit to write about. It didn’t matter if I had an audience or a voice for something entirely different. I had to stay in the box assigned to me. My compromise was to try and expand the box as much as possible — hence the Oulipo approach — but the box remains and has ever since. So long as the desires for comfort, virtue, redemption, consolation and the status quo prevail, actual authenticity will always be of secondary importance. This is primarily because truth isn’t pretty or palatable. Orwell was onto something when he wrote, “Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”

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No one has done more to establish that redemption-fixated literature which clogs up the bestseller lists than Oprah Winfrey. How appropriate to see her at the wedding of Jeff Bezos, whose company has caused the extinction of countless independent bookshops. It made me realize that the televised struggle session between Oprah and Frey had not been about justice. It was a humiliation ritual, and a cleansing on behalf of an exploitative cultural establishment.

For it’s one thing to lie in a book, it’s quite another to sustain an industry on untruths. And the deception reaches all the way down the food chain to the bookshops Amazon hasn’t yet managed to wipe out. Having worked at a succession of them over the years, I know that the more corporate and mainstream they are, the more corrupt they tend to be. Only one example of this is handselling, whereby a customer would ask booksellers for personalized recommendations. At stores across the nation, there were tally sheets hidden below the counter, encouraging us to sell one of a handful of preordained titles from on high. Deals had been struck with publishers for discounts and favorable terms, if we pushed these orchestrated “word-of-mouth” successes: targets had to be hit.

All of the chosen books were on characteristically middlebrow themes, to the point it felt like social engineering. Each store competed with others to sell the most and managers would drag booksellers over the coals for not hitting quotas. In this way, aided by a cliquish literary criticism industry, the success of certain books has been astroturfed, and an orthodoxy is implanted where characters are always good at heart, life is some centrist fantasy, and narrators find the flattering lessons they want to find — with some quarantined space set aside for the more uncouth writers to flog their trauma and identities. This is what the audience wants, publishers claim, despite the fact that the entire scenario has been covertly manufactured and readers have been duped.

In such an environment you will always get grifters and the sloppy ones will be scapegoated to legitimize it all. Pearls will be clutched over deceptive practices but the appetite and the grift will remain, for as long as publishing remains so unrepresentative of how most people live in this country. Until that hermetically sealed publishing world democratizes, fictional nonfiction will always be incentivized and will always reappear. And readers will be forced to be voyeurs and then jurors rather than being allowed the freedom of reading writers who are allowed to be writers.

Part of the attraction of Pope Francis, even to professional literal communists online, comes from negative space. He was all the more impressive because of what he wasn’t. He wasn’t a corrupt power-hungry operator like the Borgia and Medici popes, nor was he a stern conservative patriarch like Pope Pius IX.  But this was also part of the problem, one that cuts through to the heart of the Church and its very survival in the West at least, where its attendances and number of churches are in general decline. This was the Pope as a progressively tinged statesman, and the Church a kind of spiritualized NGO. There’s nothing that indicates an organization in peril or doubt more than when it feels the need to justify its existence. It did help that Pope Francis followed Pope Benedict XVI who, in public image terms, had the bedside manner of Darth Sidious and was seen as a heavyweight conservative theologian upholding tradition against the evils of modernity.

By contrast, Pope Francis represented a break from the past and a swing to the Left. He named himself after St Francis of Assisi, champion of the poor and patron saint of animals and adopted the motto Miserando Atque Eligendo meaning “Lowly but Chosen”. Clad in white, Pope Francis rejected the regal pomp Popes had long adopted, placing themselves aristocratically above their flock. This, along with his preferred acts of humility — the kissing of feet, the embracing of the marginalized, advocacy for those brutalized by poverty and war, begging on his knees for peace — resonated with recovering Catholics like myself who had come, via the Church’s many sins and cover-ups, to see it not as something noble and exalted, and more akin to the hellish screaming popes of Francis Bacon.

All this symbolism was key to Pope Francis’s image as a radical. He certainly appeared to be a reformer. He was a vocal critic of the worst excesses of neoliberalism, and materialism generally. He advocated continually for the developing world, the poor, migrants, prisoners and interfaith dialogue. He highlighted the brutalities inflicted upon children, and civilians and advocated for peace at times and places against the mainstream narrative. He even stated, during a hastily backtracked interview, that “a hell doesn’t exist, the disappearance of sinning souls exists”. At every juncture, he was met with opposition from the Church’s more reactionary elements.

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The actual meaningful impact he made upon the Church itself, structurally or theologically, is questionable. This is partly due to the intransigent Byzantine bureaucracy within the Vatican. But also a large part of it is because, beyond symbolism, Pope Francis was not the radical pope he is often touted as. On the majority of topics, he ultimately toed the line with established Church orthodoxy. They were often presented with the gloss of “love the sinner, hate the sin” but there was still little doubt sin was involved. Take the issue of contraception. The Catholic Church’s opposition to condoms has been ruinous, even callous, especially in AIDS-stricken parts of the developing world. Pope Francis changed little.

The closest predecessor to Pope Francis, in spirit, was the “Good Pope” (“Il Papa Buono”) John XXIII. They shared a similar temperament, charismatic, modest, with an affable ease with the public and an intellectual openness. Yet their differences are illustrative. The “Good Pope” set off major liberalizing changes in the church by calling the Second Vatican Council. He had previously wielded his influence and the apparatus at his disposal as nuncio to help save thousands of Jews from the Holocaust. These were remarkable actions at an abyssal time, and comparisons may be partly unfair. Pope Francis’s efforts to highlight the cruelties and injustices inflicted in today’s world are undoubtedly noble. Whether they represent the maximum use of the Vatican’s diplomatic and economic power is more debatable. Man shall not live on symbolism alone. The world has little need of a patron saint for the increasingly grim and ineffectual spectacle of “raising awareness”.

Much was initially made of his being the first Jesuit to become Pope — it was a controversial appointment, as they are often seen as rebellious troublemakers, frequently clashing with the Vatican to the point of once being banned. But for all his professed dedication and pastoral ministry to the poor, Bergoglio was an unusual Jesuit. He came to prominence during the Argentinian dictatorship, when it was a dangerous time to be an advocate of the dispossessed. The military junta was paranoid and sadistic towards anyone they suspected or could frame as being communist. It was a time of massacres, death flights, rape and torture chambers, murder squads and disappearances.

At the time, Liberation Theology had emerged as a truly radical strain of Christianity, focusing not just on poverty but those who created and profited from it. And the authorities, either in Buenos Aires or Rome, saw them as heretical pseudo-Marxists. The Argentinian form of Liberation Theology soon had the junta’s attention, and the murder of clergy commenced.

The future Pope Francis, though, was critical of Liberation Theology. He initially seemed to think that the Church should address poverty apolitically, as if poverty were not political. The Jesuits did not look favorably upon his opposition to radicalism, and he was gradually alienated within the order. There have been signs that the era weighed heavily on his mind; in one address, he spoke of “the complicit silence of most of society and of the Church”, a tacit acknowledgement of his own wilful ignorance of the crimes taking place then perhaps. It could have been something even worse, with accusations being leveled by a journalist Horacio Verbitsky that Bergoglio effectively threw two Jesuit priests Fathers Yorio and Jalics to the wolves by denying them the protection of their order (Jalics later reconciled with the Pope and said he had not denounced them). In this light, his move towards a more radical position later in life could be contrition, an admission of guilt that he failed to rise when it mattered. Or it could be seen as a rebranding exercise for the Church, a victory of style over substance, a purging not of the Vatican’s sins but their public image, and an appropriation and dilution of radicalism in the process. In either case, Pope Francis was far more of a survivor than a rebel.

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Where does that leave the Church now with his passing? Despite the lack of substantive change, Pope Francis has shown there is renewed popular appetite for socially conscious religion. His message resounded especially in the developing world where Catholicism is on the rise. Intentionally or otherwise, he has cleared a viable path through the thickets that a genuinely radical pope might be able to move through, by standing up to intransigent Vatican authorities, in principle at least, and showing a relative outsider could preach with greater global impact than a more cloistered insider could. There is an important role for a force of the Vatican’s size and influence to challenge global capital, especially given “the Left” has collapsed into internecine civil warfare of identity politics. Even if you’re pro-choice or in favor of euthanasia, it would be in bad faith to deny there is a vital role for an organization advocating for the rights of unborn children and for those vulnerable towards the end of life, especially given our neoliberal drift to extremes, moral relativism and the abstraction of human lives.

Faced with the contemporary world, there is a temptation for the Church either to retreat into tradition and veer Rightwards (as seems likely), or to dilute itself into abject meaninglessness as Anglicanism has. Both would be a grave existential error. There are paths off the forked road of tradition and modernity, that take stranger more enlightening routes through ethics, technology, vernacular, ecology, the numinous, the syncretic, the gutter and the stars. The Church’s survival depends on deeply engaging with the world, especially at its worst, but also offering a sanctuary from it.

The very fact that the Catholic Church does not fit today is one of its strongest reasons it should exist. This is a place, one of the very few, that is not solely driven by the profit principle, where you can go without spending money, where you can meditate or confess your failings. To sit in a Gothic cathedral is to experience something beyond just the wonder of architecture and craftsmanship. It is an anachronism but not necessarily a retrograde one. Through it, ideas of pilgrimage, ritual, redemption and grace have survived into an age that scorns any practice without monetary value or not beholden to ego. It is one of the few realms where good and evil are still recognized as existing, let alone the divine. “A religion without mystics,” as Francis recognized, “is a philosophy”.

Rather than becoming an obsolete fossil or following relativism into nihilism, the Catholic Church could embrace its innate weirdness. It is completely out of place and thus, at its best, it could be a refuge from late capitalism and a bulwark against it, existing both outside of the world and in its darkest places. It was this that originally gave us the church of the catacombs and the outer fringes, from the Stylites to Celtic Christianity to Santería, which brought light to hard lives in ways both intensely local and cosmic. There is a myriad of alternatives to the centralized vision of the Vatican City, as the Jesuits and others have shown.

What the Church can offer is the precise qualities for which it is dismissed or mocked. Karl Marx wrote that religion was “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions”. The assumption was that these were dishonest or impossible things. Yet imagine a world that will not allow these to exist or aspire to creating them, even if impossible. If the Church turns away from its surreal miraculous fantasies and supra-modern position, it will be on the same decline as political parties now, beholden to a world that makes everything the same, that deconstructs all loyalties and meaning, where everyone is out for themselves and everything is for sale. “Whenever material things, money, worldliness, become the center of our lives,” Francis warned “they take hold of us, they possess us; we lose our very identity as human beings.” As it is for individuals, so too is it for religious institutions.

C.S. Lewis, who Pope Francis read and quoted, wrote, “the doors of Hell are locked on the inside”. The Church has still not truly faced its past, nor the inequities of the present. Added to this is Christ’s calling to his apostles to give up everything they own and follow him. If the Church ever did these things, they would open that door and exit Hell. Some of us might even be tempted to follow them.

For now, though, there is a battle at the heart of the Church. This did not begin with Pope Francis, nor even the tidal shifts back and forth since the Industrial Revolution. It has always been here. The history of the Church is one of schisms, heresies, dialectics, synods and competing factions. It is not between Left and Right, the past and the present. There is a battle because that is the nature of conscience and guilt and what it is to be human. The Church will have to wrestle with its soul as Pope Francis, a flawed but decent man in indecent times, clearly did. We all must, if we are to remind ourselves that we even have souls. Until the Church rises to the challenge of its own calling, it will have to dwell here with the rest of us in the Inferno, a broken institution in a broken world, with the knowledge there is no one stopping us leaving but ourselves.

The outrage was immediate. Flaubert was hauled before the courts on grounds of obscenity. His crime was rejecting idealism, showing life in its inglorious and alluring undress. But he was acquitted because the society he captured so perceptively was more guilty than he.

Post-Flaubert, many novels were written with righteous social purpose. Some, such as Zola’s Germinal and much of Dickens, brought about political change. Yet this movement, realism, was still an “ism” with the distortions and biases those prisms are susceptible to. It is still fiction. At its best, fiction is indeed the telling of lies to reveal deeper truths. What happens though if the intention to reveal a deeper truth is not present at all? What happens when we are swamped by fictions? In excess, any medicine becomes a poison.

The realm of politics is one beset by fictions — sycophancy, propaganda, spin, solipsism, the colossal distance between rarified worlds and street life. It has been ever thus. Yet the recent swerve of politicians into an infantilized Lalaland has felt particularly jarring. It now feels as if they actually believe the fictions they evoke and certainly expect us to. Earlier this year, the Labour MP Stella Creasy opposed changes to Home Office guidance on refugees, claiming, “Frankly, this process would deny Paddington Bear — he did the same thing, he came by an irregular route, but we gave him sanctuary.”

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In the US, this lapse into sentimental fabulism has been taking place for some time. For years, Democrats have clung hubristically to The West Wing, particularly Martin Sheen’s fictional President Jed Bartlet, like some alternative universe where Trump didn’t happen. There was more than a hint of the Kennedys to Bartlet, bolstering the “what could have been” Camelot myth that haunts American liberals. Once, there may have been a nobility to such legends, but The West Wing obsession merely revealed the smugness, complacency, denial, and callous aloofness of the Democrats that helped spawn President Trump. For when fiction becomes delusion, the comfort blanket becomes a straitjacket.

What’s needed then is a hefty dose of gritty uncompromising realism. A cultural reset by telling it like it is. The Netflix knife-crime drama Adolescence appears to be such a moment. It is well-shot, acted, the subject — in which a child is radicalized on the internet — is devastating, and it is generally superior by, admittedly low, mainstream standards.

Yet there is something off from the beginning, with the 13-year-old protagonist appearing more like the cherubic Pears Soap bubble boy than a murderous incel. Of course, physiognomy is deceptive, but the intention was clear from the beginning — our sympathies were being purchased on questionable terms. The implication is clearly, how could such an innocent doe-eyed boy do such a thing? This appeals to white liberal middle-class viewers, cracking open a bottle of white and penitentially subjecting themselves to an “important” series. It does so by chastising them, one of the bourgeois’ prevailing kinks, but also by terrifying them into a moral panic, and by providing a pat answer to a quagmire of a problem.

The response to the show has revealed how far we — and our leaders — have fallen down the fictional rabbit hole. It has been treated as if it were a documentary. In a more innocent time, this could be forgiven, but not now.

From behind the curve, Keir Starmer led the way, placing this work of fiction at the heart of the Government’s attention and proposed future policy. He has encouraged the series to be shown in schools and parliament, and voiced concerns of “a problem with boys and young men”. There has been no shortage of actual violence in society, its unpalatable realities demanding urgent attention. The figures for knife crime in the UK make for grim reading. Knife Crime Statistics | The Ben Kinsella Trust – over 15,000 in London alone in 2023/24. Yet Starmer and his administration have only been shocked into action by a fictional miniseries. As a result, they are now campaigning not against gang culture, Islamist radicalization, the collapse of the extended and nuclear family, the blight of fatherlessness, the economic deprivation that fuels crime, drugs and violence, the ghettoization of communities — but against the spectre of the online Manosphere. They have found a conveniently hateful hate figure in the guise of Andrew Tate, and a convenient stooge in the alienated white working-class boy, one of the few demographics it is now acceptable to deride and exclude.

There’s a cyclopean simplicity to Adolescence and its ilk: one explanation, one solution, one villain. This chimes with the wave of articles that fuel this moral panic. This is, accordingly, an apocalypse of young boys and smartphones, as if girls aren’t susceptible to social contagion. Regardless of the undoubted impact of being terminally online on young boys (or any of us), this stands as a monumental example of concern trolling. We know from previous moral panics (comic books, Mortal Kombat, gangsta rap, video nasties, satanic panic), it leads nowhere. Indeed, some (stranger danger, paedogeddon) have led us to our current dire situation: kids stuck indoors, stuck on parent simulator tablets and devices, with the added development gap of lockdown warping their pliant minds. Self-declared progressives now find themselves the inheritors of censorious “won’t somebody please think of the children” pearl-clutching. All of which is predicated on them hearing what they want to hear, rather than what they need.

The subtitle of Madame Bovary — “Provincial Manners” — is rarely mentioned but it is apt. For all their metropolitanism, elite liberals often live in villages within cities, celebrating multi-ethnic culture the way a visiting diplomat or an aloof travel writer might — the food, the music, the color. G.K. Chesterton shrewdly pointed out that this was a clique far more parochial than anyone from the “provinces”, where you are forced to be with people who are different. In wealthy parts of a city, you can choose circles of friends who think the same way, with the threat of exile for anyone who deviates from in-group conformity, which, unsurprisingly, is a collection of compelling fictions.

The other reason for the primacy of fiction is more insidious — control. The damage to free speech under specious weaponized hate-speech legislation is overtaken only by that done to equality under the law by the new sentencing guidelines in favor of ethnic, cultural or faith minorities. Those of us concerned about the Overton window crawling endlessly Right should recognize it is not some rebirth of fascism but rather the collapse of the liberal-Left into illiberalism.

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The three tribes of MAGA men

By Poppy Soweby

Few among us would lament Andrew Tate being ushered from the stage and therein lies the danger. Who is next after that fails to solve anything? The truth is such campaigns don’t solve anything but simply obfuscate and misdirect. Their quick-fix solutions will do nothing about the underlying factors, the soil of despair, alienation, rage. So, others will step in — Islamist mullahs, gang leaders, misogynists, groomers and grifters of various types. Andrew Tate is not the creator of the alienation and debasement, he, and his kind, are the exploiters of political and social failures. The red pill only works when boys are already feeling disenfranchised. Where the damage began, and who profited from it, will remain obscured and unchallenged.

For them, nothing will change because the political class will not change. It does not care that generations of working-class boys will emerge into a world that has no place for them, even as it relies on them materially. They face economic precarity, the dismantling of industries and trades, and are effectively locked out of creative industries monopolized by the rich. If non-white, their marginalization will be co-opted or treated as the sum of their existence. If white, there is the bonus of being discriminated against for their “privilege”. It is arguably even worse for girls, if grooming gangs and their cover-up is anything to go by. The aloofness of the powerful, snug in their own fictional world, sows a whirlwind for others, with the victims, and their stories, vanishing like the murdered girl Katie in Adolescence.

It’s scarcely a surprise, then, that those in whom society has no investment tend to reciprocate. And there is little to suggest that Labor will address any of the underlying economic causes of alienation, crime and violence. Taking phones away just isn’t going to cut it. Meanwhile, we are like Bovary, believing untruths. Until we face the true stories we do not want to hear and set aside our comforting fictions, others will remain locked in tragedies of our making.

In recent decades, there has been a backlash against the Great Man theory embodied in that Ancient Greek icon of Helios. Thomas Carlyle summed up this once prevailing view, claiming in a lecture on heroics, “The History of the world is but the Biography of great men.” The idea that societies are driven by the will, and virility, of exceptional (overwhelmingly male) individuals, rather than complex societal forces, is seen not just as reductive but anathema. The legend of the lone wolf genius has long been both a cloak and a cudgel. It has been employed to steal ideas, deny provenance, and bury the achievements of others. It has exploited women, under the guise of the muse, and justified the capricious venal desires of coddled elitist men. The built environment has been no exception, with the Shitty Architecture Men list being only the tip of the iceberg in terms of sexual misconduct, dubious morality, and toxic work culture.

If the discourse is anything to go by, then, the colossal Great Man has been toppled. A multitude of online articles say so, each a fragment of that fallen colossus. The only real differences are the vocabulary wielded against the heroic view of history and whether it’s casually disdainful or wildly alarmist. Yet just as there was hubris in the raising of such a statue on unstable foundations, there is, too, in celebrating its destruction. It has long been rumored that the Berlin Wall pieces sold to tourists are mostly manufactured. With a ripple of lamentations that Brady Corbet’s Oscar-nominated film The Brutalist, which tells the tale of a visionary architect, resurrects that idea of the Great Man, a thought recurred — what if these fragments were similar forgeries? What if the colossus never fell?

In 2012, I found myself in a godless tiki bar on the Gulf of Thailand shore. It was quiet, aside from one backpacking Patrick Bateman droning interminably on his phone. Suddenly, there was a commotion, and the bartenders vanished. Word spread there had been a massive earthquake off the Indonesian coast. Tsunami warnings were issued. Memories of the 2004 tsunami were raw. Lacking the wisdom of the locals, I took the idiot route and got hammered. All the while, facing mortality, that oblivious voice was babbling on the phone. He had been reading Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead — the hero of which was an egotistic young architect. The book, now deemed synonymous with The Brutalist, had changed his life, he repeatedly insisted. This was to be the soundtrack to our impending deaths, the last words filling my ears before the flood.

We both lived, but I carried the grudge. Rand was, of course, persona non grata in nice liberal book circles, a petulant right-libertarian dogmatist who extolled excellence if only we could free ourselves from the shackles of ethics. She was fanatical in her zeal for laissez-faire capitalism, individualism and reason, collecting a cult following who were enthralled to at least two thirds of her formula. I was, though, eventually relieved of my anti-Rand bias by Slavoj Žižek. It was, he suggested, counter-revolutionary to throw her away. He compared her to Pascal, Kleist, Brecht… figures who are “over-orthodox”, who “spell out the secret premises of the ruling ideology in such [a] clear radical way that it’s unacceptable and embarrassing for the ruling ideology itself”. She is the paradigm of “enlightened egotism… no compassion for others… pure individualist brutal capitalism”. Rand, then, in his view, reveals not so much the inner workings of the elite but their internal mythos — the way they want to see themselves, as opposed to what they are (bankrolled by the state or asset-strippers of the High Street), something all too evident in the Musks and Bezos of the world. But while Rand’s The Fountainhead claims to be a portrait of an architect-genius Howard Roark and his adversaries, whether spiteful mediocrities or disingenuous ideologues, it inadvertently does something critics of the Great Men theory also do. It misattributes responsibility. The colossus it erects is as false as the one the critics decry.

The real colossus remains untoppled. For the architect was not the colossus. It was the client. It has always been the client. And they, whether market or state, have all the power, influence and money. The architects may receive the credit and blame but it is corporations who commission skyline monstrosities. It is institutions that block the advancement of female architects. It is board room meetings and government departments that bulldoze neighborhoods and vernacular architecture. Yet, partly due to the anonymity of the former, it is architects who pick up the check, in both senses.

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The Oracle of Delphi wisely forbade the rebuilding of the Colossus of Rhodes. Her view prevails today with The Brutalist coming in for flak for piecing together a “dangerous” archetype, comparisons with Rand’s egomaniac Roark abounding.

Beyond the vagaries of the discourse, The Brutalist offers truths or truisms. Conformity can be stifling, brilliance can be traumatized, vocation can mean sacrifice, and power can be sadistically cruel, raising the slippery question of who the Brutalist of the title actually is. The film certainly has elements of the unintentional mock heroism of The Fountainhead but the humanity it displays, at its best, is instructive. The main character László Tóth (an exceptional turn by Adrien Brody) is, however, fictional; a Hungarian-Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, Bauhaus alumni, émigré to the US, and visionary architect. Tóth initially, superficially, seems based on Marcel Breuer but the differences between the cool-headed gregarious Breuer and the (forgivably) histrionic Tóth outweigh similarities.

The character, then, seems to be a composite, except none of the parts fits. The Brutalist is like The Fountainhead in the sense that their disjuncture between fiction and reality is as illuminating as their closeness. Tóth survives Buchenwald concentration camp. In our world, countless architects such as Alfred Grotte, Diana Reiter and Harry Elte never returned from the camps. Ignjat Fischer’s health was broken in a Fascist prison, and he died not long thereafter. The eccentric outsider architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser survived under an assumed identity for the war’s duration. Marcel Janco only got out when friends were butchered, while Oskar Kaufmann watched his wife die while trapped as refugees.

Life after escaping the Nazis could be relentless. Exiles were treated with suspicion as “enemy aliens”. Some, like the once-revered Bruno Ahrends, were interned. Many more like Pierre Chareau, creator of the innovative House of Glass, slid into destitution. The genuinely visionary Erich Mendelsohn ended up constructing replica German housing for the US air force to firebomb, as practice for the real thing. Last act coronations were rare, if they existed at all.

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How the BBC betrayed EastEnders

By Darran Anderson

Few of these lives embody the Great Man legend, except in the sense that greatness lies in resilience against hardships and the odds, the most redeeming aspect of The Brutalist, a quality hardly restricted to men. There were, after all, numerous female architect exiles. And there were success stories of architects who fled the Nazis — the Bauhaus maestro Gropius for instance became well-established and helped many émigrés — often as teachers rather than superstars. If anyone came close to the Great Man trope, it was Mies Van Der Rohe, who was not Jewish and who had been courted by the Nazis before migrating. Yet even he had masters, as well as essential collaborators — whether property developers, the government, or multinationals like Seagram and Bacardi. Even Rand’s inspiration, Frank Lloyd Wright, hid financial calamities (his unbuilt designs remain tantalizing) and personal tragedy (the Taliesin massacre) behind his egotism. Life is not as simple as constructing a colossus or obliterating one.

The Brutalist is raw and intense, for Hollywood at least, but suffers from many of that realm’s ills — for a film that so hysterically cares, it extends little consideration to the architectural schools, styles and eras it misrepresents and throws into disorder. Its script is a convoluted shambles which would be admirably refreshing, if it did not somehow belie the complexity of reality. Its knots are too neat, its loose ends too ragged.

Impressive in cinematography and acting, The Brutalist, like its more politicized critics, relies on historical inaccuracies, cliched dialogue, and character simplifications. This makes it more now than then. Whether superhuman or disgraced, individuals are forced into molds, so that our worldviews can be substantiated. It’s one thing to examine how factual a movie is, and another to consider how fictional our perspective is. Within architecture, professional concerns are legitimate. No one should work under the tyranny of an egotist. Yet wider societal control does not begin or end with such figures. For all the talk of the collective, there is a staggering inability to see how insidiously powerful the corporate has become. Instead, everything becomes an atomized morality tale, where rotten fruit is picked off while the rotten tree is ignored.

It is not the shattered face, then, of the overthrown egocentric colossus that’s the architectural symbol of our times or the fates of our cities. It’s something far harder but essential to rail against — the acronyms, the monopolies, the faceless. The colossus, then, is more of an effigy than a statue. Who commissioned it and why, The Brutalist suggests, is the real story.

Audiences invest passionately in soap operas. While film stars are Olympian gods or aristocrats, soap characters are family. So much so, the woman careering towards Kemp was greeting his onscreen alter ego in the hugely successful EastEnders. Yet as the London-set soap celebrates its 40th anniversary, the primacy of such drama is no more. Its decline is the result not only of shifts in our media appetites but also tectonic changes in society, and the dread hand of politics shaping who we are and how we see ourselves.

Soap operas are — or, rather, were — one of the great working-class cultural forms: a result of untapped creative experience, authenticity and imagination finally allowed to flourish unobstructed. They came into being alongside rock music, Mod culture, the Angry Young Men and kitchen-sink realism. The cultural roots of these soaps run deep — radio plays, whodunnits, yellow-back novels, and penny dreadfuls. There were echoes of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Victorian serial cliffhangers were the doof doof endings of their day.

But what separates soap from other proletarian culture is that it was always deemed unworthy of serious critical attention. This was not just myopic snobbery but also misogyny, given that the core audience for soaps has always been women — the name coming from demographic-targeting adverts that ran alongside early radio plays by the “Queen of the Soaps”, Irna Phillips.

Essentially, soaps weren’t taken seriously because working-class life wasn’t. Snobbery meant that accents, fashion, and even honesty were regarded as weaknesses rather than strengths. Accusations of philistinism usually amounted to projection or petty moralism. After all, it’s worth remembering which class stood in the pit directly in front of Shakespeare’s plays. And it’s also worth remembering the burst of energy and ideas theatre received when the likes of Joan Littlewood and Stella Linden helped bring the working-class voices of Shelagh Delaney, Brendan Behan and John Osborne to the stage. Their honesty may have been provocatively uncouth for the time, but it was revitalizing and re-established theatre’s relevance in the modern age.

When George Orwell wrote “If there is hope, it lies in the proles”, he wasn’t pointing to the innate virtue of the working classes, but instead their lack of insulation from reality and its consequences — meaning they couldn’t afford to be as delusional as the chattering classes. Rather than the passive-aggressive choreographies of the elite, there’s a different form of nobility and a liberating disreputable vérité in lines such as “Get out of my pub… you cheap peroxide old bag!”

Thanks to its head start in 1960, Coronation Street had long mastered wit, camp, and glamour (more effective in feminist terms than any academic tract). EastEnders, playing catch-up, needed a USP. It went for edge, set up as an authentic slice of East End life, rooted in the simultaneously grounded and turbulent Beale/Fowler family. Without the commercial imperative, and with the ghost of Lord Reith whispering, EastEnders could sell reality.

Knowing authenticity can rarely be staged or imposed, the programme’s creators Julia Smith and Tony Holland had trawled the East End to find characters and stories. Gretchen Franklin played Ethel Skinner — the pug-wielding, gin-drinking, flirtatious widow whose family had been wiped out by a V-1 rocket. Peter Dean, who played market trader Pete Beale, had himself been a market trader. Meanwhile, Bill Treacher, who played Arthur Fowler, had worked at sea saving money to put himself through acting school.

Considering the punishing production demands, it’s forgivable if some episodes are lackluster. Yet the finest episodes are worthy of comparison with high-end theatre. Tropes abound — necessarily as soap is partly routine, domesticity and comfort — but they also add to the camp appeal, especially the regularity of “Thought I was dead, did’ya?” resurrection. Characters walk off brain injuries; others end up as statistics in a murder rate more akin to a low-level civil war.

Soap may be life turned up to 11, realism rendered as melodrama, but it has to be recognizably lifelike. If that’s lost, so is its credibility. It should be close enough to relate to, but all that’s restrained must be cathartically unleashed — revenge, affairs, schadenfreude, feuds and, above all, secrets. There’s recognizable dysfunction in Pete Beale’s statement, “Family? We’re not family, Gran. We’re a bunch of misfits that’s sharing DNA.” And there are few among us holy enough never to have thought: “I have had it with you, you cheap little slapper!” Not least about ourselves.

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Say Nothing's empty empathy

By Darran Anderson

There are few things less acceptable than reality, and nothing more vital. Social conscience was always a factor in soaps, and EastEnders managed this subtly but profoundly. Screened at the time of the AIDS crisis and Section 28, the first gay kiss on a British soap exposed those engaged in moral panic as cruel, fragile, hysterical puritans. Mary Whitehouse, a persistent mosquito at the time, specifically called out “its atmosphere of physical violence, its homosexuals, its blackmailing pimp and its prostitute, its lies and deceits and its bad language”.

But when watched cross-generationally in the past, issues such as AIDS could be approached empathetically. This ameliorating approach put soaps at odds with tabloid culture, which thrived on polarized extremes. Both now struggle because there’s no longer the monoculture that once existed, where large swathes of the population watched the same thing.

Back in 1996, when Peggy Mitchell publicly ostracized Mark Fowler for being HIV-positive, the sympathy it aroused for real-life sufferers of the illness was pivotal in changing attitudes. Such an approach feels unthinkable now, ironically given the constraints of political correctness. Yet it’s also a problem with the eclipse of fiction by nonfiction and the all-round fucked-upness of the world. Any reproduction of, say, gangs which falls short of actual drill videos will appear absurd, cringeworthy and alienating to even remotely streetwise viewers.

At the heart of the problem, though, is the BBC itself. Talking to producers who’ve worked there, the same complaint arises: “the BBC wash”. Fresh, dynamic ideas from hungry writers come in, pass through the bureaucratic machinery, and emerge an anemic mockery of what could have been. Class is central to this problem. Any truthful depiction of the contemporary East End is difficult, if not impossible, because it would evade or conflict with the paternalistic pseudo-liberalism that permeates the institution. It very effectively robs places and people of their voices, and is closer to Mary Whitehouse’s sanitized view of the world than they’d ever admit.

The East End and EastEnders have long been multicultural, being connected to the docks and waves of migrants, yet the scale of change there — through gentrification, development and population change — has been transformative since the show’s heyday. Throughout London, markets have closed or been corporatized. Pubs and clubs have been shuttered. But watching EastEnders, you’d think nothing much had altered, because it’s now a depiction of how the BBC nostalgically imagines the East End to be.

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Transformation should be a gift for storytellers to explore, yet today they are either terrified of change or terrified of admitting that it’s happening, depending on where they place themselves on the political spectrum. Meanwhile, outside their echo chambers, reality flows on like the river. Deprivation and the cost of living, shadow economies, capsizing services, drugs, people-trafficking and sexual abuse are underrepresented or unconvincing. Any depictions of homelessness and addiction are bathetic to the point of becoming online comic memes. Crime is depicted as if the Krays are still walking the streets. It’s no longer a mirror but a mirage.

Two factors are at work here which illustrate wider problems. The first is that the valve that was opened between the Fifties and the late-Nineties, allowing the brilliance of working-class culture to have a fair shot, has been firmly welded shut. The result has been a moribund mainstream culture across the arts, dominated by the 7% of the population who went to private school and the less than 1% who went to Oxbridge. In television, only 8% of the workforce are working class.

The second is that in its place, culture, even depictions of working-class life, has become tepid, cliched bourgeois fantasy. The actor Stephen Graham recently pointed out the “condescending” humorless, greyscale scenes which pass for depictions of working-class life. It goes beyond the hoarding of opportunities into a callous misrepresentation of reality, burying or distorting the issues that impact lives. In this sense, perhaps, the BBC does reflect contemporary Britain, which feels increasingly like China Miéville’s 2009 novel The City & the City, in which the citizens of two overlapping metropolises live without acknowledging the other’s existence. If they notice, they’re punished. Once science fiction, now the book is practically documentary.

There is a solution. Return to the roots to understand why the soaps exist in the first place, and renew it. In the case of EastEnders, go, as the first producers did, and find out what the East End is now. Allow those from the area to write and act their own stories. Set aside ideology, and opt for unflinching honesty. The Queen Vic might be transformed, filled with hipsters or boarded up. Half the Cockneys might’ve moved to Essex, fortunate enough to be early on the London property Ponzi scheme. Truths can be inconvenient, but that’s why they’re truths, especially when facing issues such as poverty, crime, violence, intra-community tensions and state neglect. The everyday resistance and transcendence of all of these is evident on street-level.

The pride and realities of the East End have been continually asserted, from the Battle of Cable Street to the campaign after the murder of Altab Ali. Yet, every day, the deficit grows between the way London presents to the world and to itself, and the way London actually is for those of us who live here.

For now, though, the show, like the political class, seems no longer concerned with or worthy of recognizable social realism. This is a betrayal of storytelling itself. Drama needs friction and adversity, doubt and conflict rather than false hectoring certainty, to have catharsis or resolution. Without this, EastEnders exists as a pantomime whose detachment from reality is increasingly difficult to stomach. It will only continue to drift further and further away from the actual East End, and the lives lived there.

In Australian indigenous societies, there remains a taboo against broadcasting footage of the dead. There are specific cultural reasons for this, but it also points to wider moral concerns. You only need to glance at celebrity, or pornography, or social media, to realise something monstrous happens when people are reduced to images, and that the Native Americans who reputedly believed cameras stole portions of the soul may have been aware of something we weren’t. Except, of course, it’s not necessarily the camera that is to blame, but rather those who profit from the images — who are rarely the subjects themselves.

This mistrust reaches its apotheosis in the disillusioned war photographer, who wrestles with the ethics of what they’re showing the world and why; those who see horror repackaged for public consumption until platitudes about “raising awareness” or “bearing witness” erode, leaving only troubling unanswerable questions of exploitation, voyeurism and theft.

Adapted from Patrick Radden Keefe’s award-winning book, Say Nothing is the latest dramatic recreation of the Northern Irish Troubles. Both book and show are centred around the abduction of Jean McConville, kidnapped and murdered by the IRA in 1972, after spuriously being accused of being an informer. Yet if the snatching itself, poignant and chilling, haunts the series from early on, it’s the voiceover that really grasps the programme’s ethos. “The thing about Irish people,” says a female voice, “we’ve been arguing over the same shite for 800 years.” It’s a cliché so squalid, so reductive of a 850-year-long colonial nightmare squeezed into a mere domestic squabble, that it perfectly encapsulates Say Nothing’s flaws.

Alienation is key. If you can make an individual, or a people, seem alien, savage, other, you can do all manner of things to them. This was a cornerstone of imperial policy and Northern Ireland, being one of its final remnants, is no exception. Catholics bore the brunt of “our wee apartheid state” as a character notes, and the resulting conflict affected every aspect of life. There are innumerable tales worth telling therein, and many voices who have longed to be heard. Say Nothing, despite appearances, is not one of those stories. It’s certainly about that place and those people but it’s immediately evident the camera’s eye is doing something else.

At its heart, in fact, this is a series very much like the Native American’s conception of the camera: it turns people into tropes, stealing their souls for entertainment and cash. Not, of course, that Say Nothing is alone here. On the contrary, the programme’s failures speak to a far wider malaise. We’re so wrapped up in contemporary worries, in our own way of seeing the universe, that we find it increasingly hard to burrow into the minds of others. So much that is claimed as “empathetic”, the boom in literary autofiction for instance, is indistinguishable from navel-gazing. So much political grandstanding is for our personal status, projected within our tribes, that when we do venture out into that vast wilderness called history, it’s all too easy for true crime to focus on perpetrators, on those strange men and women with a willingness to hurt. It doesn’t matter if the depictions condone or condemn. It’s theatre, provided you’re watching from the luxury of a safe distance. If these stories are engaging, they also do the courage and suffering of victims, who may be quiet and stoical, an unforgivable disservice.

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Say Nothing dovetails the McConville saga with the story of one of her killers: Dolours Price. It follows the girl’s move towards the “armed struggle” with the attack on the civil rights march at Burntollet Bridge, which did a fine job of proving JFK’s dictum that those “who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable”. It’s well-portrayed in Say Nothing, tense and gut-wrenchingly unfair; such instances (to say nothing of internment without trial or the mass murder of protesters during Bloody Sunday and the Ballymurphy Massacre) were crucial steps in the radicalisation of a young generation.

Certain qualities ring true: the glamour of working-class Northern Irish women is recognisable, as is the perpetual appealing, if exhausting, banter of the place. The brutality of nocturnal home invasions, courtesy of the police and army, is painfully accurate and atmospheric. As are the chase scenes, the inner-city bleakness, the casual torture sessions. The general dystopian feel is both true and an indictment of the successive Labour and Tory governments who imposed it upon their own citizens. But if the programme’s portrayal of grubby terraces and casual violence is plausible, the script slips almost instantly into heavy-handed schlock. After being assaulted by Unionist thugs at Burntollet, Dolours returns home to her parents. But rather than fear for their daughter, they instead launch into a facile political tirade. “Girls,” they ask, “why did you not fight back?”

The historically empty-headed opening line, in short, is how Say Nothing means to go on, with the whole programme suffused with a thick grime of anachronism. Just consider Dolours herself, gifted with pseudo-feminist slay queen moments totally implausible in the brutal and sexist Ulster of the Seventies. As befits the patronising orthodoxies of our time, she outwits uncouth lunkheaded men at every turn, every inch the IRA girl boss. When she’s finally accepted, it’s with the same dynamics as a coach spotting a wayward brilliant kid. As Dolours herself puts it: “We wanted to be doing what the boys were doing.”

And if that says something about Price herself, who was doubtless naïve in her early days as a paramilitary, it surely reveals much more about our infantilised platitudes about the past. The projection of one world onto the other results in a grotesque misalignment: follow your dreams, Say Nothing seems to suggest, and someday you too may lead someone to an unmarked grave or blow off the limbs of innocents.

In a sense, that gentle reflection of a bloodstained reality is both Say Nothing’s blessing and its curse. The cinematography, the music, the acting, the accents — it’s all gripping, rich, entertaining. And that’s precisely the problem. The medium is the message, and all the intricacies of the Troubles are condensed and transformed to attract and sustain a Disney+ streaming audience.

While Price is framed less as Countess Markievicz and more as rifle-wielding Mary Sue, the show is also careful to include something for fans of romance. Brendan “The Dark” Hughes, a leading IRA member and one of the architects of the Bloody Friday atrocity, is introduced in a gasp-inducing, fan-fluttering glimpse you’d expect of Mr Darcy — albeit in a Belfast riot not a ballroom. There are enough flirtations and sexual tensions here to hoover up Sally Rooney fans, as is obviously the point. Similarly, while it never descends to McDonagh-levels of paddywhackery, Say Nothing occasionally flirts with it — their greenhorn version of the once very real Kevin McKee, the early depictions of Dolours as a red-headed colleen in her Aran sweater handing out civil rights leaflets, the bank robbery dressed in nuns’ habits. The fact that “the nun with the gun” image was foregrounded and dominated the publicity around the series (alongside much more menacing images of women in balaclavas) shows how the North is viewed from outside and what it’s allowed to be. The primary Stage Irish modes have always been farce or wakes, buffoonery (hence the laboured “humanising” stories here of pet dogs and spud guns) or abject morbidity. That’s your choice. There’s little of the vast shifting territory in-between, where Northern Irish people exist most of the time, even during the Troubles. What a delight, though, to know that the Troubles were sexy after all.

Despite being viscerally nonfiction, with many characters still alive and the wounds still raw, everyone in Say Nothing is reduced to a kind of sanitised fiction. This is not Emily In Par-amilitaries, exactly, but feels far less distant than it should. That’s especially true when you factor in the programme’s tone. At times, Say Nothing felt uncomfortably like an adult Derry Girls. And while that show could slip movingly from comedy into pathos, it’s much harder to move the opposite way, and the scenes played for laughs feel cheap and jarring. At one point, Dolours is asked how much explosive she’s carrying. “Not much,” she quips. “About a car bomb’s worth.”

Then there’s what Say Nothing doesn’t mention. Of course, it’s impossible to cover everything in a conflict as complex as the Troubles. Yet there are so many moments, of human drama, that are treated as mere exposition dumps or ignored entirely: Bloody Sunday is one obvious example. Even worse is how so many pivotal figures — McGuinness and Thatcher, Stakeknife and Sands — are largely conspicuous by their absence. The British authorities are presented as stiff-upper-lip parodies, with only cursory suggestions of personality or family life. The irony is had they been presented in a more humanised and less automaton form, their use of state terror and coercion would have been all the more disturbing. Their gradual vanishing from the story is telling, however, especially given the immense power and damage MI5/Special Branch increasingly wielded over the Republican movement (and how little they protected their sources), a significant factor in the push towards the peace process.

MI5’s infiltration of the upper echelons of Sinn Fein has long been a rumour on Belfast and Derry streets but remains suspiciously taboo in the media. It calls into question the intentions of the original author, an ex-Pentagon staffer and thus no stranger to the security and intelligence services. This issue should be at the heart of this story — it’s one of the chief reasons there’s no truth and reconciliation process in Northern Ireland, given the shared secrets of this dirty war. More relevantly for Say Nothing, it has had a knock-on effect leading to the seizure of the Boston Tapes (a central plot device in the series) and the resulting chilling on any journalist seeking to uncover the bitter truths of the conflict and risking ruin in the process.

Say Nothing is eager to humanise people like Price, with Dolours given ample space to self-pityingly regret her violent life. And yet there’s one key person whose voice we never truly hear: Jean McConville. “You can say anything, Dolours,” the protagonist is told, and largely she gets to. But who was that other woman, that mother, the one treated like a largely wordless widow? What was her past, her dreams? We scarcely find out, probably because they assumed they wouldn’t have been entertaining to hear, even if quietly raising 10 kids in a Belfast tower block is the very definition of feminist heroism.

It hardly helps, of course, that McConville’s relatives have been so thoughtlessly treated by the show. The programme may claim it cares about ethics: “There’s a responsibility. I think that’s the price of admission, the price of trespassing into someone else’s world, be that an American writing about people in Belfast or a guy writing about young women. You have to get it right,” Radden Keefe said. “You have to earn the right to tell that story.” However the dead woman’s son-in-law says Disney never bothered contacting the family. The abduction scene, Seamus McKendry, argues, was “poorly portrayed…it should have shown the full horror of what happened. It didn’t and it left you to guess what had happened.” Michael McConville, Jean’s son, agrees. He refuses to accept the idea that it can be played as entertainment. “The portrayal of the execution and secret burial of my mother is horrendous,” Michael has stated, “and unless you have lived through it, you will never understand just how cruel it is.”

While McConville’s children are depicted in the series, they’ve been shockingly simplified to confirm the programme’s preconceptions. First, they’re portrayed as Rockwellian scamps. Then, in later life, they’re depicted as broken mourners. Both are one-dimensional caricatures, and the camera is careful to forget them during the troubled years they survived in care. To put it differently, then, the McConvilles are denied individuality and depth, reduced instead to passive bystanders in their own lives. They are emphatically, defiantly not, but watch Say Nothing and you come away with the sense that the only characters with any real identity are Dolours Price and the other killers.

It might be tempting, at this point, to look for someone to blame: the writers or producers or even Radden Keefe himself. The truth, though, is that Say Nothing is simply a symptom of a sickness in our culture. We, the audience, are complicit too. Over recent years, there’s been a pushback against the traditional “sexy dead woman on a mortuary slab” style of crime drama: think Twin Peaks or The Fall. In their place have come superlative works such as The Five by Hallie Rubenhold, books that nobly seek to restore the dignity and voices of female murder victims.

Yet these, in turn, are increasingly overshadowed by a new boom: of “true crime”, in podcasts and literature. A number of them (Dark Downeast, In the Dark, The Red Note, Bone Valley, Hands Off My Podcast: True Crime etc) have been commended for being appropriately weighty, victim-centred and justice-seeking. They remain exceptions, and even many of the superior true crime podcasts over-use suspenseful soundtracks and gothically overwrought retellings, all the tricks of fiction essentially undermining their moral force. Others, such as My Favourite Murder and Crime Junkie, seem to wallow in the salacious, speaking of terrible things in seemingly frivolous tones and operating merch stores on the side. Instead, they do us a favour by revealing that deep down, the primary function of the true crime industry is not empathy with victims. True crime’s obsession with compassion is a self-flattering falsehood, born of cynicism and therapy-speak. Nor is this surprising. The true crime industry, after all, is just that: an industry.

At the same time, it’s one focused on the intoxicating idea of trespass, of illicitly examining the psyche of murderers. That’s clear when you consider the attention given to perpetrators, their beliefs and motivations, compared with those of victims. Similarly, the Price sisters and Brendan Hughes are given plentiful space to express themselves and justify their crimes. They could have scarcely imagined this would one day be broadcast for public pleasure.

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And what of the victims? They’re treated as nobodies, as mere ciphers in favour of murky and charismatic criminals. That unnatural distancing was needed to turn their trauma into entertainment for us, in the same way we watch horror films  for comfort. As the harrowing story of the McConville children so vividly shows, this approach nonetheless leaves behind the wreckage of trauma, soon conveniently forgotten.

There are, to be fair, more sensitive paths to tread. If, after all, a writer acknowledges that there’s an inevitable parasitic and sensationalist element to non-fiction, and refuses to fool themselves that they’re empaths burdened with haloes, they may be able to mitigate its worst effects. More to the point, there are documentary filmmakers who consult those involved, cultivate ethical relations with those who are in the know, and crucially listen, a fraught process but a necessary one to even begin conveying the truth and avoid retraumatising generations. Without this, empathy is a pretext, even an alibi, carelessness wrapped in the language of care. What is really happening is that sordid crimes are being made palatable and commercial.

In that sense, at least, Say Nothing succeeds in portraying the Troubles as they actually occurred. The truth, unstated by the show and by Northern Irish society at large, is that the Good Friday Agreement was facilitated by ignoring victims and their families. They paid the price for our peace, with killers released early or heralded as peacemakers, the atrocities of all parties filed away and forgotten. And now, all that’s left is entertainment. “It’s just a lot of theatre,” the Gerry Adams character agrees: except for those who do not have the luxury of being casual spectators. Say Nothing says many things, the most important of which it says despite itself. The moment for us to address these questions, these cruelties, has long since passed — if not the suffering. Until we face these difficult questions and realities, we will always be vulnerable to the soul-stealing that follows.

There are, of course, books the church once condemned. The Vatican’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum contained some of the cornerstones of modern thought — Descartes, Pascal, Hobbes, Milton, Locke, Voltaire, Hume, Kant and so on, right down to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949). In Ireland, there was even a Committee on Evil Literature, which led to a Censorship of Publications Board that prohibited some of the nation’s finest writers, including Edna O’Brien and Brendan Behan, as well as material from abroad.

There were books so heinous that their authors were regarded as being agents of the devil. Cardinal Pole wrote of The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli, the earliest author to appear on the Vatican’s list in 1559: “Though it bore the name and pen of a man, I hardly began to read it without recognizing that it was written by the finger of Satan.” The Irish philosopher John Toland, reputedly the first figure to be called a “freethinker”, was accused of selling his soul to the devil on a Donegal hillside. Similarly, Spinoza’s pioneering Tractatus Theologico-Politicus was slandered as being “Forged in hell by the apostate Jew working together with the devil”. 

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What these all had in common was that they exposed humanity as it is — rather than what it claims or desires to be. Exposing the hypocrisies of their times, they threatened the existing order. Where would we find such characters and texts today? For all the onanistic claims of progressivism, these are starkly conservative times in publishing. Yet if there’s one contemporary writer who could be studied at Scholomance, it’s Michel Houellebecq.    

Provocateur, professional controversialist, literary enfant terrible, patron saint of trolls — the image is as cultivated by the author as it is inflicted upon him. Far better, though, is to think of him as the smoke of literature’s guttering candle. Alternately reviled and lauded, there’s always been more than a hint of brimstone to Houellebecq. The reasons why are worth exploring; they result not necessarily in a portrait of the writer, who’s both exposed and enigmatic, but of us, his readers, inquisitors and targets. 

It’s difficult to imagine the Anglosphere producing or permitting a homegrown Houellebecq. For one thing, the bar for “daring” literature is ridiculously low here, where endless writings about the breakup of marriages or relationships at university are hailed as radical or edgy. The bar for heresy is exceptionally low too. Though many feign to question our orthodoxies, as every great writer should, the penalties for dissent are severe — the Crucible-like puritanical witch-hunt of Mark Fisher only proved the accuracy of his warnings. 

It’s tempting to contrast France and applaud its history of transgressive writing: Rabelais, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mirbeau, Colette... Some parallels do exist in English literature, but they’re relatively scant. The Earl of Rochester was no Marquis de Sade. And when Oscar Wilde was destroyed by the British establishment, and partly himself, where did he go but Paris? In France, the “liberty” part of their revolutionary inheritance remains strong. The French tradition demonstrates it’s often only on the outer reaches of decorum, only when we are brutally honest about our deepest desires and worst impulses, that we can truly know ourselves. There’s a nobility in such aims, even if the means appear ignoble, or even diabolical. And this is Houellebecq’s realm. 

The demonic power of Houellebecq’s writing comes primarily not from what he’s creating, but rather what he’s feeding off: the hypocrisy of Western neoliberal society. He’s not, however, a moralist. Houellebecq makes little attempt to rise above the fray. If there is a ship of fools, as medieval artists used to portray the corruption of civilisation, the author is on board, smoking below deck. Houellebecq’s references to himself in his prose and interviews are fairly disreputable. The fact he sees himself among the wretched and the doomed is telling.  

It’s a shame that controversy clouds how we view him. It obscures his scope, from studies of sex to political thrillers, via ruminations on desire, parenthood and the spectre of terrorism. It misses the fact that he’s a funny writer, reminiscent of Beckett; sometimes conditions are so grim and melodramatic that his writing circles back into amusement. “Look at the little creatures moving in the distance; look. They are humans. In the fading light, I witness without regret the disappearance of the species.” This is not to say that there is a soft-centred optimist within the demon imp caricature waiting to get out. Like Beckett, beneath layers of pessimism, there is a rich seam of humour — yet beneath the humour is an endless fall to oblivion. “Irony won’t save you from anything,” one of his characters claims, “humour doesn’t do anything at all.” 

Houellebecq sees and writes the world without the blinkers that more “civilised” authors possess. He obsessively studies people in all his novels, like an ape turned anthropologist. He notices the things — petty, distasteful, criminal, insulting, exploited, decadent — that we can afford to ignore, and which in-group policing would forbid if ever seen. His talent for prophecy — incels; the rise of nativism; the anti-immigrant reaction; the resurgence of the right; psychoanalysis becoming a tool for narcissists; the commodification of sex — makes him foolish to ignore and difficult to dismiss as a Right-wing troll. He’s much more problematic than that. 

In elite Western cultural circles, there has been such a successful commodification of the self that anything conferring status and credentials, anything that might give an edge over a competitor, is fair game. Ideally, this involves exploiting real and deep things but ones that are conveniently unverifiable (queerness, neurodivergence, that sort of thing). Marxism is one such device. By Marxism, I don’t mean the economic theory and movement for societal transformation but rather the imposter that bears its name and wears its face in Western cultural circles. I mean an identity politics performed online by a cultural elite, and espoused by discreet landlords, trust-fund nepo-babies, deconstructionist Ivy League professors, and multimillionaire “creatives”. I mean an identity politics that gives an edge and an alibi to those reaping the benefits of luxury capitalism, one that steals the valour of the poor and profits by obstructing meaningful change. For all the Right’s panic that the Left have been undertaking ‘a long march through the institutions’, there’s very little attention paid to how the Left has effectively been body-snatched by wealthy pseudo-liberal entryists in the past few decades.  

Rereading Houellebecq, I wondered if he might be one of the last genuine Marxists. Not in terms of solutions or idealism — we’re much too lost for that — but rather in diagnosis. The author has admitted to nostalgia for the old faith; he was raised by his Communist grandmother, after his hippy parents moved on. Houellebecq has insisted he does not write in attack, like a polemicist, but rather in defence. From what? One answer is neoliberalism. “To increase desires to an unbearable level,” he writes, “whilst making the fulfilment of them more and more inaccessible: this was the single principle upon which Western society was based.” 

This leads to an estrangement from ourselves, each other, and the world, and brings the author under the shadow of Marx, especially his theory of alienation. The following passage from The Communist Manifesto fits Houellebecq’s work, and our current conditions, to a shocking degree: “Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” 

Just like with Marx, every aspect of life becomes debased in Houellebecq. For both the Frenchman and the German, the market must always keep growing, keep metastasising, into every aspect of existence. As Marx put it, capitalism must “nestle everywhere, settle everywhere” — and so too in Houellebecq’s world, almost everything ends up for sale, including love, innocence, the soul. Almost every promise is betrayed. Almost every effort ends in squalid disappointment, as the cheap thrill fades or the cash disappears. In Platform, it’s the promise of sex, adventure, exoticism, travel. In Annihilation, it’s the promise of the internet, politics, family, optimism. 

Yet Houellebecq shows we rarely face up to this grim reality, at least not initially. Instead, consumerism keeps the truth at bay: we procure younger faces or partners, covering up how everything is sourced. Denial is big business. There are no costs or consequences, indeed no end, until all collapses. People continually become ill in Houellebecq; Annihilation is no exception. All the artifice we conjure to convince ourselves of our own invulnerability cannot keep the truth at bay forever. Our society may be rich, but exploitation, decline and death all remain the same. It’s often right at the end of his novels that an epiphany finally comes, too late but not too little. These are small Ivan Ilyich moments that make you question everything you’ve previously read and thought of him. 

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Indeed if you actually listen to Houellebecq, rather than reactively dismiss him, he’s insightful. Forget capitalism for a moment — he also redirects our attention to political correctness as a tool of evasion and/or destruction. He is strong, too, on the theme of ageing, and on the loss of innocence. Part of his callousness, perhaps, is a survival mechanism; he switches off his emotions. How to remain romantic when faced with entire industries dedicated to debasing all that is good? 

“Those who love life do not read,” Houellebecq claims. “No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with the world.” Elsewhere, he has asserted, with more than a hint of gallows’ humour, that writing is “like cultivating parasites in your brain.” This is immensely refreshing to hear, as the contemporary literary world often congratulates itself that literature is a saintly act of empathy. The implication is that writers are innately good, indeed better, people. Writers are good, it naturally follows, because “good” is what you declare — not what you actually do. Anyone who points out the falsity of this joins the list of the forbidden. There’s no greater sign of goodness, after all, than the occasional necessary witch-hunt or search for the devil’s mark, sifting through the digital dirt, on the accused. Houellebecq has no such delusions. “We are both rather contemptible individuals,” is how he opens his dialogue with Bernard-Henri Lévy in Public Enemies. He prefers to be a circling vulture than a cuckoo in the nest.  

The word “Satan” comes from the Hebrew for “adversary”; “devil” from the Latin for “slanderer”. Lucifer is different. The name of the rebellious angel, the morning star, comes from the Latin for “light-bringer”. Surveying the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the Committee on Evil Literature, and their present-day equivalents, it’s clear their opposition was not to sinful texts per se — but rather those that enlightened. The light cast by some illuminates extraordinary things, liberating things. In Houellebecq’s case, what it reveals is painful, wretched, disgraceful, with only occasional joy. There have always been those who oppose diabolical writers. But whether they know it or not, what they’re seeking is not the purging of evil but the extinguishing of light. 

Despite themselves, censors point out which books are worth reading. The Soviet Union created a banned reading list that was second to none — Pasternak, Bulgakov, Akhmatova, Nabokov, even Orwell. The very first book condemned by the state’s own Ministry of Truth Glavlit was written by one of their own, the naval engineer and communist veteran Yevgeny Zamyatin. 

The author had impeccable radical credentials. He was a shipbuilder, behind what would become the Lenin icebreaker. He’d taken part in the “whirlwind” 1905 Revolution and made it back from overseas at great risk to the very heart of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Before that, he’d been imprisoned and exiled several times by the Tsarist regime, an experience that had made him a writer rather than breaking him. “If I have any place in Russian literature,” he admitted, “I owe it entirely to the Saint Petersburg Department of Secret Police”

The problem with Zamyatin, for the new regime, was twofold: he was a natural rebel and a mathematician. He had chosen his occupation through sheer belligerence, dedicating himself to the subject he had struggled with at school. And he knew enough of his trade to know that applying mathematical criteria and machine analogies — the abstraction of suffering, the delusion of perfectibility, utopian expediency — to humanity would have horrific consequences.

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It might be thought that Zamyatin would have been free to speak and protected by his Old Bolshevik history. Yet Lenin’s communists showed early on they had little inhibitions about repressing those who’d built the revolution and in whose name the party supposedly ruled. They’d also no aversion to killing troublesome writers, executing the poet Nikolai Gumilev, for instance, under the fictitious guise of the Tagantsev conspiracy.

In such a climate, science fiction offered a tangential way of telling the truth, of demonstrating where the regime was heading, with a degree of plausible deniability. Though it would become an effective tool in the post-Stalin years, with the Brothers Strugatsky smuggling messianic questions past the censors in their astonishing alien visitation tale Roadside Picnic, it was an exceptionally dangerous gamble. Even the Bolshevik hero Mayakovsky found the sky came crashing down on him for tangentially criticising the new order in his futuristic plays The Bedbug and The Bathhouse. Zamyatin, however, was as headstrong as he was prescient. And so, a century ago, the novel We was born, a book that went on to directly or indirectly influence almost every dystopian book and film of the century to follow.

Set in 30th century AD, We takes place in a society that has aimed at and supposedly achieved perfection. This has occurred after the apocalyptic trauma of the Two Hundred Years War, which killed all but 0.2% of the population. In order to prevent conflict, any conflict — anything that differentiates or divides — has been minimised or excised, including identity, excellence, idiosyncrasy, even personality. The society is revealed to us via a curious ruse — part-diary and part-message to future extraterrestrials “to save them by force and teach them happiness”. It’s written by D503, a scientist who is leading the construction, not of an icebreaker but, a spaceship called Integral. He’s a kind of anti-Zamyatin who’s done well under the system and has little friction with it, until he meets the rebellious I-330. His emerging feelings for her threaten everything he believes in. Via the disruptive nature of love, he’s introduced to insurgents dedicated to overthrowing the One State, a chaotic world beyond the Green Wall, and the vertigo of freedom. 

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While dystopian novels such as The Iron Heel and The Sleeper Awakes pre-date We, as do the utopian texts they were upturning, so many dystopian tropes, from Logan’s Run to the Hunger Games, would first emerge here in then-innovative forms. Zamyatin noticed early on the Bolshevik obsession with “modernising” everything, in appearance, and satirised it throughout We. Russian institutions had their formerly archaic titles and heraldry discarded, to be replaced by acronyms, abbreviations and portmanteau (Gosplan, NKVD, Comintern, GULAG etc), which suggested dynamism. There was an ominous obsession too with productivity, alluded to in We with its 24-hour clock, “inspiring” 1984’s opening line: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” 

Indeed, many aspects of We made it into 1984, albeit through the grimy prism of post-Blitz London. Surveillance is everywhere, though Zamyatin’s comes from glass buildings and listening devices rather than telescreens. While Orwell did draw attention to the novel in an essay for The Tribune, it’s telling that he covered his tracks by damning it with faint praise, labelling the novel as: “one of the literary curiosities of this book-burning age” and having the brass balls to imply that Brave New World plagiarised the book. Where We and 1984 differ is in mood and format. We has a strange avant-garde style that is reminiscent of the not-yet-annihilated Russian Futurist world of Vertov, Tatlin and co, whereas Orwell is more ashtrays and spam. One soars into oblivion, and one sinks.

All great dystopias of the future, the truism goes, are really about the now. Reversing 1948 to 1984, Orwell simply followed the threads of duplicity in contemporary rhetoric and the press, the horrors of ends justify the means in politics, the grotesque moral acrobatics required by any corruptible yet infallible orthodoxy. These things were all too evident after Stalin’s purges. How did Zamyatin know what would come to pass before it happened? Well, for one thing, he was not the first. The anarchist Mikhail Bakunin was scathing in his exchanges with Karl Marx  — “the instinct of liberty is lacking in him; he remains from head to foot, an authoritarian” — and correctly foreboding as to where his gospel would lead. Zamyatin had the extra dimension of being an engineer and it might be surmised, in the tenor of our times, that he wrote of how technology corrupts us. But instead he showed how we corrupt technology and wield it against each other. He knew physics for sure, but he knew human nature even more. 

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The portents are dark in We. In Soviet terms, “the war between town and country” in the Two Hundred Years War prophecises the inferno of collectivisation and the Holodomor. The unease we might feel today reading We, however, is one of creeping recognition. He writes of the cult of productivity of Taylorism and how “he didn’t think of extending his method to the whole of life, to every step, to the entire day”, which predicts the unending hustle of today, wherein everything from sexuality to trauma is monetised and branded. In Zamyatin’s characters’ speech, we might see a particular contemporary condition; they continually preface what they are saying with ritualistic explanations and the performance of self-denunciation, which we see today in identitarian catechisms and, for example, land acknowledgements that do nothing to address injustice or land theft. Familiar mantras, internal censors, and in-group signalling is evident throughout the dialogue of We, despite being written a century ago.

We shows us that contemporary phenomena like cry-bullying, purity spirals and safe spaces are not uniquely contemporary, partly because they are simply secularised symptoms of faith. As JS Carr has noted, “The ideal of absolute mathematical order has become so ingrained in the mind of the protagonist… that he now feels actual oppression from that which stands in contrast to the One State’s teachings.” It might offer some comfort to know that the craven have always been with us. Zamyatin rightly points out that the victory of dogma over free expression results in “the entropy of thought”, and he rails against the overt politicisation of literature, which always ends in convention, if not outright servitude. 

It takes love, or rather desire, to fuck up this wretched fabrication of utopia. In a world where everything is problematic and everyone, bar the administrators, is paralysed, the impulse to lust, to have, to possess becomes not just disruptive but revolutionary. Here we find another borrowing by Orwell. In both books, love is transgression and must be defiled and betrayed as it is a threat to the system. In the case of We: “Every number has the right to any other number as a sexual product”, and satisfaction is ticketed and approved by the state. It’s hard to read of this systemisation of sex without thinking of how it’s been commodified in our broken time by dating apps and deluges of porn, resulting not in mass libertinage, but younger generations having less sex than their predecessors.

One notable difference between We and 1984 comes with the fact that, in Orwell’s vision, tyranny is imposed whereas in Zamyatin’s vision it comes as a kind of relief. In this, the latter was more accurate. Zamyatin returns to the Matrix-like choice of Eden: “To live without illusion is to live without comfort, not all cut out for it, few can bear it, but great are those who can.” A wise judge of character, Zamyatin recognised that society was not cynical but infantilised, and most of us are not dissidents-in-waiting but rather responsibility dodgers. When he writes of “unfreedom” being “happiness”, Zamyatin is foreshadowing Orwell, but he is always looking back too, to the supposed Fall of Man from Paradise. His characters touch on this, damning Satan as the “bringer of dissonance, the teacher of doubt”, while his state develops an operation to surgically extract the imagination when it is scarcely necessary. He knows resistance is always a minority position, and yet everything depends on it. 

What of those who ruled and benefited from this warped state of affairs? The abiding feeling by the end of We is fear and neurosis. We know enough about totalitarian history that any attempt to perfect human beings — the Übermensch or the Stakhanovite Homo Sovieticus — ends with inhuman monsters. Yet, the urge to perfect nevertheless continues, from our execrable managerial revolution, the misuse of AI, and the puritan deconstruction of all that’s historically and culturally flawed. Fear is rife in We and it trickles down from above.

Zamyatin would eventually escape the Soviet Union into exile, with the help of Maxim Gorky, and by sending a suicidally confrontational letter to Stalin, who, ever the capricious tyrant, let him go. He would find no peace in Paris, among the fallen aristocratic White émigré he despised. He remained a true rebel and therefore an exile even among the exiled. His imperfection was his making and undoing. 

“To err is human” is not an excuse — it’s a foundation stone. Zamyatin, constructor of ships, knew that humans could not and should not be constructed: “Let the answers be wrong, let the philosophy be mistaken — errors are more valuable than truths: truth is of the machine, error is alive; truth reassures, error disturbs.” Disturbance keeps us real and honest, while certainty is deadening and antithetical to the human psyche. 

Zamyatin pushes beyond the claustrophobia of dogma into panoramas, a writer who sees that our messiness, clamour, indignities and imperfections are the qualities that save us from ourselves as much as ethics and integrity. In a paradoxical sense, Zamyatin was that most despised and persecuted of Soviet figures, the wrecker, and he absolutely excelled in it. Consider all ideologies as echo-chambers or gated communities, where most of the work goes into maintaining the wall between belief and the encroaching reality outside. In We, the authorities admit “with that Wall we isolated the mechanical, perfect world from the irrational shapeless world of trees, birds, animals”. And there’s Zamyatin, 100 years later, prising open gaps in those walls, chipping away to let the chaos of truth in, like everything depends on it because everything does.

In the opening seconds of Kneecap’s new film, the old cliches we all carry about Northern Ireland are swiftly dispensed. Car bombs, graffiti on gable walls, checkpoints, border signs, Molotov cocktails, barely pubescent British army cannon fodder, hoovered up from Brixton to the Gorbals, kneeling with their rifles on street corners while ragged kids gather round them. If they were following the prevailing models of film in the North of Ireland, as they put it, the movie would be more dewy-eyed trauma porn. People don’t live like that though, not all the time, and even when they are forced to, innate resistances begin.

Kneecap is an inventive, picaresque, often hilarious, fictionalised origin story of the Irish hip-hop trio. It’s defiant in subject and form, rejecting the kitchen-sink misery or Stage Oirish paddywhackery usually demanded of the Irish, while simultaneously flirting with and subverting these modes. The irreverence itself is political, given Northern Ireland was a place where false piety was weaponised by every side to damn the other and whitewash themselves. But the band, and film, embrace the farcical nature of the post-Troubles North with a playful defiance. When the Belfast writer Louis MacNeice wrote of “being various”, it didn’t just mean virtuous things. It is our best and worst sides, and this film shows them, taking place in a contemporary world of dead-end jobs, k-holes and breakbeats rather than newsreels from the Seventies and Eighties.

They go for all the sacred cows of Norn Iron — the PSNI and the British State, philistine Unionists, Republicans who abandon their familial responsibilities and switch to new-age beliefs, anti-drug vigilantes who end up with drug dealers working for them, all the petty lords of their particular fiefdoms. Even tedious Gaelic teachers come in for a bruising, particularly as there’s no excuse for making such a mercurial language boring (“May the lowest stone in the sea be on top of your head” is one memorable line in a film bursting with them). Full of healthy self-ridicule, the irreverence is radical because reverence, as Northern Ireland has shown, is the first step on the road to solipsism, corruption, essentialism and eventually hell.

More than anything, Kneecap the film and the band are concerned with the present, which has long been squandered in the North of Ireland. People chose or were forced to live anywhere but the present. Republicans, for example, were obsessed with the future. Their favourite slogan was/is Tiocfaidh ár lá meaning “Our day will come”. After the Brighton bomb killed five people, the IRA released a statement: “Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once — you will have to be lucky always.” There was always a suitably opaque sense of the utopia of a future United Ireland, which untested could become any fantasy the imagination could conjure, rather than what it would and will be — the end of one set of colonial troubles and, after the inevitable sesh, the beginning of a new self-inflicted set of troubles.

Meanwhile, both sides of the divide remain obsessed with the past — King Billy, the Hunger Strikers, the Apprentice Boys, the Easter Rebels… One side trapped and deluded in triumphalism, the other in martyrdom and magical thinking. Catholics could console themselves that the future belonged to them via demographic replacement, something Unionists such as Paisley (“they breed like rabbits and multiply like vermin”) obsessed over. On the other side, Loyalist siege mentality gave way to paranoia and a zero-sum game, whereby a job or house for “one of them” is “one less for us”. This mentality has fuelled a race to the bottom, with the main difference in their deprived neighbourhoods being the colour of the kerbstones and bunting. It is this betrayal of the present, the neurosis of trying to exist in the past and future, that Kneecap reject with a film and discography that are manifestly about the only place we ever inhabit — the now.

What is the present that Kneecap and their generation face in Northern Ireland? Back home this month, I found mixed signals. There’s lots of talk of (parts of) Belfast buzzing with young professionals drinking London-priced drinks and the inflated cost of property. Beyond this bubble, things are different. Poverty and disaffection flourish in inverse proportion to opportunity. Escape comes mostly in the form of criminality, drink, hard drug use and abuse. Communities are beset by paramilitaries turned gangsters and the police are mistrusted by both sides. Minimum wage jobs and food banks are standard. In many places, someone who’d be an entrepreneur somewhere else, somewhere more functional, ends up a dealer. The communities are still largely segregated, beginning at primary school.

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My day with the Belfast rioters

By Alexander Poots

All along the north coast, there are endless paramilitary flags, a tent revival, a drive-in gospel service, even a fence upon which a man was crucified by loyalist paramilitaries a few months ago. There are few signs of any post-Troubles Enlightenment and, in working-class areas where I grew up, few signs of there being a post-Troubles. Even the great symbol of Belfast, the Samson and Goliath shipyard cranes, is one of post-industrial decline. It’s certainly better to live in farce rather than tragedy, and the Peace Process was hard-earned and vital, however flawed, but worryingly it feels like suspended animation. The idea that tourism and investment would save us was always suspect because it’s not capitalism’s primary purpose to do so. The idea that integration, economic justice and eventually real peace could occur is hamstrung by the many politicians and religious figures who benefit from division, paralysis and bad faith.

No wonder, there is such an anarchic element to the likes of Kneecap. Who could blame them for wanting more? “A free Ireland,” one of Kneecap’s heroes, James Connolly, claimed, “will control its own destiny from the plough to the stars.” By contrast, the least one could hope for is some agency over their own life.

It takes a movie this intentionally juvenile to signal a newfound maturity in Northern Irish film. Kneecap takes the tropes and ciphers and turns them inside out, it deflects the gaze back at itself. Cheap moralism and sentimentality are dispensed with, in favour of something more reflexive. There’s little doubt where the trio’s allegiances lie, with the “Northern” scored out on signs of “Northern Ireland”.

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By Aris Roussinos

Yet the fact that they are scathing about so many things, in an impish way, the fact that they arouse the ire of so many — including the UK government, the DUP, the UUP and even the mild-mannered Alliance Party — is a sign they are treading where the sanctimonious rarely dare. And their attitude of “show, don’t tell” is remarkably effective, as exemplified by their use of the Irish language. With an indigenous language vanishing at a pace of almost two a month, there’s the temptation to give in to sanctimony and lecture the world about “To hell or Connacht”, hedge schools, the Famine and the real reason so many people speak English around the world. Kneecap choose instead to help Irish survive by simply allowing it to breathe or, as they put it, letting the dodo out of the glass. The film is also a testament to working-class DIY culture, which because of the state of mainstream culture here, now a playground for the vacuous progeny of the rich, may be our only source of hope.

There are those who have taken umbrage with the band. The trio has been condemned by politicians and the media, many of whom have profited from how dysfunctional the North has been while denouncing those who dare to speak the truth. If Kneecap represent disorder, indecency, abnormality, it might be worth considering what order, decency and normality have looked like for the hundred years of Northern Ireland’s existence. Rejecting the archetypes one by one, refusing to migrate to survive, insisting on creating something organically from the ground up themselves, Kneecap have found a path where they were told there was none. They have made their own hope and it’s a raucous but exciting thing. They convincingly demonstrate that laughter is never a singular thing. It can mean and contain multitudes — joy, mockery, self-deprecation, relief, even the crazed elation of having nothing to lose.

According to apocrypha and Christian folklore, the Roman centurion Longinus pierced Christ in the side with his spear during the Crucifixion. There are several versions of this. In almost all, he’s punished for his crime. In one, he is sentenced to eternal life, fated to wander the earth, reborn over and over, stuck in a helical loop, a universal soldier condemned to die in successive wars. This reincarnation myth made its way subliminally into fiction (Barry Sadler’s Casca series), music (Jimmy Webb’s “Highwayman”) and cinema, in the form of Nick Cave’s script for his lamentably unfilmed sequel to Gladiator.

I first encountered Nick Cave through the medium of terror. At a young age my impressionable brain was inundated by orc metal, the sound of industrial accidents, and electronic plague dances. Most were too theatrical to be truly menacing but some got under the skin, to the extent I was compelled to hear them again.

Chief among them was “Tupelo” by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. I listened to it disturbed: a glorious moment of lightning-struck damnation. Describing the birth of Elvis Aaron Presley, alongside his still-born identical brother Jesse Garon Presley, it was an unholy chasm through which the night poured. I could barely piss straight with fear, and I’ve not stopped listening since.

Following the parting of Mick Harvey in 2009, the group changed their sound, embracing the absence. You can hear the space that had suddenly appeared and the unlikely influences that helped to fill it — electronic music, ambient drone.

“Well, if I were to use that threadbare metaphor of albums being like children,” Cave noted at the time, “then Push The Sky Away is the ghost-baby in the incubator and Warren’s loops are its tiny, trembling heart-beat.” And these claims were not hyperbole. It required a different kind of listening, and there were fans who were left behind, preferring, to continue the threadbare metaphor, the feral street urchins of their earlier work.

The four albums that followed feel like a sequence or an era; cinematic, measured, atmospheric. Yet as Cave and Ellis continued, and the cruelties of fate took the heaviest of tolls, they changed again. The boundaries of songs began to blur into one another, verse/chorus/verse dissolved. The music felt more and more like painting. The moonless nocturne of Skeleton Tree. Or the vast Turneresque swirls and washes of Ghosteen.

Now Wild God, the new album, marks a new phase. It’s lush, built from vast walls of sound and sudden explosive choral crescendos. An album of the most extraordinary joy, it’s not a complete abandonment of the new or the old. Traces of both can be found throughout (the horses, myths, meta lyricism, Jubilee Street, an eye for the debauched) but the synthesis has resulted in a different creature, an album that feels blissfully out of time. The choirs, bells, crashing of cymbals, the hard-earned euphoria, feel antithetical to these days of lamentation and the gnashing of teeth.

The imagery of the title track feels like something bursting out of one of William Blake’s illuminated manuscripts. ‘Final Rescue Attempt’ has an astonishingly wistful feel. At the other end of the spectrum, the finale of ‘Conversion’ is the band’s most intense climax since ‘There She Goes, My Beautiful World’. ‘O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is)’ is a tribute to the late Anita Lane — once Cave’s partner in love and song — with lyrics free of piety but showing signs of the cloven-hooved Old Nick, proving the sacred and profane are never opposites but rather are wound around each other. ‘Frogs’ is open-hearted uplifting, filled with the sheer intoxication of life when faced with the smallest moments, a frog in a puddle “leaping to God, amazed of love, amazed of pain, amazed to be back in the water again.” A triumphant cloudburst of a song.

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The production throughout feels like something beloved that’s been long-lost and recovered; Leonard Cohen Death of a Ladies’ Man with MDMA instead of barbiturates. The mood is one of escape but to escape you first need to recognise you’re confined.

The Bad Seeds have had their fair share of critical acclaim, yet in recent years an interesting development has taken place in the way Nick Cave is perceived and depicted. It centres around the idea that Cave has changed, become conservative, a God-botherer, betraying his earlier self. There’s a vague sense of disgrace in the air, quite different from the now-fashionable disgrace he cultivated as a young, shock-headed degenerate in Berlin in the early Eighties. The reasons can be guessed at — a typical sneering attitude towards success, a disdain for artists who are prolific or even just visible, a reaction against his role as agony uncle/psychopomp/semi-reluctant oracle of the internet in his stoical Red Hand Files. Yet there’s another deeper more reflective reason for the sense of casual disdain and it’s encapsulated in the album’s title.

Let’s consider that perhaps Nick Cave hasn’t changed at all, or at least not in the ways we’d like to think. A superficial reading of this would be to say that he has stayed still and the whole world has moved or slid. It’s a familiar claim, often voiced by tech bros claiming the Overton Window forced them to the Right when they’ve always been Liberal. The argument usually continues along the lines that all the pearl-clutching censorious Mary Whitehouse types on the Right, whom artists have had to battle for free expression are now to be found on the Left. The pendulum swings too far and if only we could get it to settle in the middle where the reasonable apolitical people are then everything would be hunky dory. Which of course is palpable bullshit.

Set aside the overly convenient dichotomy of Right and Left, and the comforting illusion of the Centre, and think instead in terms of orthodox and heterodox. The former always conforms, whatever the climate, however shameless. The latter didn’t fit then, doesn’t fit now and will never fit.

But the idea that Nick Cave’s religiosity is suddenly a problem or even a recent conversion is belied by most of his discography. In fact, it was those looming biblical shadows that first attracted me to his work and at times alienated me from it. Now a recovering Catholic, I was educated in schools run by nuns and priests and repeatedly locked horns with them. At the time, the church was infallible, hardly bothering to conceal its horrendous crimes against women and children in Ireland and beyond. It wasn’t just taboo to raise issues of abuse, homophobia, hypocrisy etc. It was forbidden to ask questions. I would ask the priests questions about the strange, puzzling details I’d chanced upon in the stories and language of the King James Bible and was completely unprepared for the hostility such enquiries would ignite. I realise now it was simply a case of orthodoxy. Questions, any sign of curiosity, were a threat to dogma. The Christian flock was not supposed to bleat, even if some had got wind of the slaughterhouse.

From the beginning, the Bad Seeds lyrics were steeped in that misty Jacobean version of the Bible. It was there in their album titles — Kicking Against the Pricks, The Good Son — and in countless songs. For every murder ballad, a spiritual. It’s even there in their name, with the Bad Seeds originating in the Good Book. This was a rich mine, and what was salvaged could be adapted in surprising subversive ways. When he used Jesus or God, at times he might just as well be singing about drugs, sex, pain, or love and its catastrophes. The themes allowed for the illumination of life at its most wretched and beautiful. It’s almost animist at heart but fed through Christian iconography – the thorns and the waves and the errant stars.

Witnessing the unfolding church scandals and how those who’d spoken out publicly like Sinéad O’Connor were made into scapegoats or sineaters, I gradually transformed into a righteous little bastard or to put it another way an evangelising atheist. Twenty years ago, I saw the Bad Seeds on their incendiary Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus and left in a state of shock, such was their energy and charisma. Yet I felt a nagging reluctance in my heart. Cave’s brilliant, frenzied tent revivalist/snake handler/faith healer performance set off alarm bells. Having escaped one cult, albeit a very powerful 2,000-year-old one, I was overly cautious about signing up for another.

Eventually, I realised there was a reactionary mirroring quality to atheism, where you could become as self-righteous and rigid as your enemy, defined and controlled by a form of negation. Mainly, I was turned off by the joyless tiresomeness of some of its primary advocates. I also had not suffered quite enough to be relieved of certain egocentric illusions. I had not yet come to know the things you don’t want are the things that give your life real knowledge — grief, heartbreak, illness, estrangement and exile. But where do you go when you begin to doubt your own doubt?

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It turns out Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds were already there. The religiosity in the songs was built from doubt, suffering, absurdity, closer to Dostoevsky or existentialism than tele-evangelism. We are in the eternal, the songs tell us, every little moment, and life and death are in here with us. Wild God feels like an opening and a radical one, given the constriction we’re increasingly subject to. How narrow, for instance, to think that writing about religious themes shackles you to the moribund, slowly sinking religious establishment, discarding the realms that Cave has tapped into.

Certainty is a curse, damaging for activists, and fatal for artists. Cave gets it. There are wry lines, wrapped in enigmas in Wild God, “Who are these gods that you now defend? / And what purpose do they serve now at the end of time?” He replies not with apologetic laments or millenarian doom but with perfect inarguable euphoria. With the ecstatic doubt evident in the title track, whether the lead character is a soaring deity or just an old man in a retirement village propelling through his memory.

I still don’t believe in God, and I loathe the Church, and though I may be dumb, I am not dumb enough to deny I’m a Catholic writer. Whether the heavens are empty or not, I was permanently moulded by Jesuits. The hints were there, though it took me a while to recognise the compulsions. The countless pilgrimages. The need for rituals. The love for iconography and disdain for those who know only how to dismantle and not how to build. Listening to this cathartic album, it started to occur to me that maybe I’d got Longinus wrong. Maybe he shouldn’t have been a soldier after all. Maybe this cursed fallen figure should have been an artist. One who wanders, not smug and privileged in their certainty, not wielding belief or unbelief in order to judge or cudgel others, not resolving anything except for the small but significant consolation that some other poor wild bastard is out in the storm-beaten night with us all, bearing a lantern and somehow singing a song of joy.

What fools we were. 

Though Generation X were the last of the analogue humans, we had grown up with computers. But the internet was vast, exponentially so, and would impact every aspect of life. It was, to my young mind, an ecumenopolis, a colossal world city, incandescent with possibility. My first visit to an internet café was mind-blowing, as jerry-built as it was in retrospect. Long-used to relatives heading off to Boston and beyond and vanishing, it was astonishing to communicate with complete strangers in real-time, with ease and at little expense, on the other side of Earth. 

It was an intoxicating force. But the rapturous delirium could not last.

The internet was to cause a rupture even deeper than the printing press, manned flight or mass electrification. And yet my feeling is that the real divide was not before and after the internet; but rather before and after its transformation from an ever-expanding cosmos of potential and its contraction into the global village where we’re now trapped. An expansionist universe collapsing into neo-feudalism. This is the story of how the market eats everything including our wildest dreams — and it does so because of a language trick that we cannot resist. 

In pre-modern times, charlatans preyed upon superstitions, reading portents in comets or flogging bones. With the emergence of modern science came alchemists promising elixirs of youth or the transmutation of lead into gold. The Industrial Revolution gave rise to all manner of swindlers boasting mechanical and medical cure-alls. Oscilloclasts would cure any malady through radiowaves. Daffy’s Elixir could ease everything from the Vapours to King’s Evil. Coca-Cola was enough to dispel morphine addiction. Some innovators believed in their products, even when the costs were severe — the quietening syrups that sent Victorian babies into permanent sleep or revitalising Radium cures that caused jaws to crumble. Medicine shows are seen as the high-water mark of this tendency: travelling fairs of confidence tricksters who would alleviate locals of their money and naivety. Then they disappeared, absorbed into the unholy pan-global entity of 21st-century advertising.   

It is difficult to accept, gazing down from the lofty heights of progress on the sinners and dupes of the past, that we reside in the Golden Age of charlatanism. We like to think we’ve developed a thick skin towards commerce — but objects are the least of our worries. It’s no longer a question of being sold dubious products. 

Today’s corporations now deal in intangibles: lifestyles, philosophies, diets, self-image and ambition have all become marketable assets. They are promising us shortcuts to status, vital in an age of precarious hustling, as well as quick fixes to our innumerable economic, political and spiritual deficits. They’re selling the grift — or rather the prospect of escape from it. They’re delivered to us not by the outdatedly gauche media of billboards and television, but directly injected into social media, attuned via algorithms to our tastes and inadequacies. 

I open Instagram stories and am instantly bombarded with snake-oil salespeople hawking life-changing tonics, none of which come in a bottle. I’m told my life is unfulfilled, and I believe it, as life inevitably is, and they’ve the solitary answer. And so, they arrive, following earlier errant clicks, the desire lines of my own self-betrayals. One pitch tells me I need to manifest my desires. Another to embrace moderation. A third that I need to protect my child from mobile phones. Another that I should confront my toxic masculinity. Magnesium will save me. Masturbation will steal my life-force. Today’s episode is brought to you by the letter “M”. Each is a rabbit hole of TED talks “Smart Thinking” replicants, Faustian apps and Kafkaesque subscriptions, which will relieve me of my time and debit card details. 

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Britain is haunted by Dickensian ghosts

By Darran Anderson

Every good liar knows the best lies are wrapped around a nugget of truth. If we combined and enacted all the advice of social media, then perhaps physical excellence, sound mental health, enlightenment, happiness, even, might well await. Yet professional liars know the greatest lure is the unattainable and immeasurable. It’s these seductive delusions, cascading on the infinite scroll of social media, that have collapsed the internet. How did this happen?

The answer lies in the constants of the medieval village, which our global village now mimics. Festivities are periodic. Tyrants come and go. The function of the town square is to sell, regardless. Post-Reformation, the market is all. The new faith. There are many fallacies in terms of sales (cost bias, appeal to closure, sales puff, Dunning–Kruger effect etc). These might be seen as positive, at least for the hucksters, but the real profit and damage is to be made in the shadow-side. Consider what constitutes the medieval village and our own version of it.

We still have the feudal lords — CEOs, politicians etc — along with the town criers and priests of the chattering class, in thrall to the establishment while feigning to critique it. Crucially, ambitions and dreams are not the only exploited fare. All our natural fears, neurosis, envy and malice, exacerbated by living in a time when everything feels like it’s in (mis)managed decline, can be directed not to their source or solution but to the promise of temporary catharsis. This is exacted upon whoever happens to be languishing in the stocks of the global village square at any given moment, for anything from a semantic to a sexual infraction. Whatever justice, retribution or cleansing this does or does not bring, it changes nothing in the larger scheme of things. It is designed to change nothing, other than venting very real pressures through successive social media moral panics and individualised punishments.

How could we be so sophisticated and yet so susceptible? Leon Trotsky wrote of Germany mutating into the Third Reich: “Not only in peasant homes, but also in city skyscrapers, there lives alongside the 20th century the 13th.” I know this quote not directly but from its inclusion in one of the great overlooked prophetic texts of our time — Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World (1995).

The book is a jeremiad for science and against ignorance. According to Sagan, rigorous enquiry is the best way to begin to understand existence and gain a foothold in our own destiny. Science, he argues, is too important to be left to scientists and that a population which abandons it will be doomed. Though he’s most scathing towards monetised pseudoscience and organised religion (“We can pray over the cholera victim, or we can give her 500 milligrams of tetracycline every 12 hours”), he also warns that science is never absolutely certain or settled, and to suggest so is unscientific. It’s not a series of sacred precepts but rather a constantly developing and self-critical way of seeing the world. Even Isaac Newton, sacrosanct for centuries, was proved inaccurate by Albert Einstein. 

When scientists believe, dogmatically or egotistically, they become priests. But science is, or should be, a “built in error-correcting machine” requiring constant maintenance and good faith. The rust that devours and endangers the machine is the same plague that has made the internet feel, paradoxically, smaller than it was; it is the plague of fallacies.

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The fallacies of the internet are legion. Sagan makes it through around a dozen, but all are rife now. Ad hominem. No True Scotsman. Arguments from authority. Sunken cost. Straw men. Whataboutery. Scapegoat. The law of the excluded middle. Motte-and-bailey. Like most evils, they’re exceptionally tempting, somewhere between a language game and a mind-hack to deceive and distract your opponent. Victory ensues but at the cost of an accruing deficit with reality. It’s the refuge of every debating scoundrel and it is an epidemic online. 

Today, the market encourages weaponised fallacies in their most pernicious and dangerous forms, aided by the architecture of social media: deliberate brevity that prevents nuance, complexity or contextualisation; biased, monetised algorithms; the deliberate stirring of controversy for the metrics; the reliance on dopamine surges and adrenaline rushes; the manufacture of hyper-partisan echo-chambers; the raising of discourse to a hysterical pitch. In a neoliberal age when substantive political change seems unachievable, the battlefields are almost entirely in the realm of linguistics and signifiers. The more ineffectual in actual life, the more heated, brutal, righteous and unforgiving online. 

The problem might be an inability to adapt to a mercantile age. Though Sagan alludes to the source of our animus, he has a blind spot regarding the influence of the market. He realises that “spurious accounts that snare the gullible are readily available”, while “scepticism does not sell well”. And he argues against the “dumbing down of America” through “the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media”. He laments the world of “30-second sound bites”. And yet he fails to see that the market is not only the primary beneficiary of “entrepreneurial” panaceas but also the pillories and gallows of the global village, as distraction, catharsis and deterrent. 

It was this that made the online world claustrophobic, this that betrayed the initial spirit of what the internet could have been. While we tear each apart in false dichotomies, purity spirals, cosplay, and the narcissism of small differences, a deeper tectonic division goes overlooked. The meaningful chasm is between those who use the internet (and are in turn used by it in data harvesting, social engineering, surveillance), and those who profit from and stir the “culture wars” for our engagement and their profit. The Forbes’ list of billionaires is one place to begin. 

How, then, to escape? The answer lies not in answers but the antithesis. For we’re drowning in answers, and almost all of them are merely adverts. Freedom begins instead in endless questioning, uncertainty, beginning again with the scepticism and wonder of children. We must remember that there’s an entire universe out there, even if the stars are hidden by the jaundiced skyglow of the village.

After a week of controversial and, at times, cringeworthy leaks from his book, Spare, Prince Harry’s interview with ITV came as an anti-climax. His host, Tom Bradby, gamely tried to stir up trouble while seeming to step back from it, suggesting to the Prince, about his relationship with the Royal Family, “you haven’t so much burnt your bridges as taken a flame thrower to them”. Harry’s response was arguably the closest he came in the interview to the disarming candour of his book, claiming “They’ve shown absolutely no willingness to reconcile. And I’m not sure how honesty is burning bridges. You know, silence only allows the abuser to abuse.” Yet throughout the interview, there is a sense of damage limitation, if not outright back-pedalling, that chimes with the generally scathing response his book has received critically.

As confessionals go, it’s a particularly evasive one. In contrast to the salacious, or salaciously reported, leaks from his book, of frostbitten appendages and so forth, there are few revelations here. There are references to leaked conversations with Camilla, troubling and melancholic remembrances of his mother’s death and the aftermath, acknowledgements that the Cambridges and Sussexes never entirely got on from the beginning, his entirely brotherly relationship with his brother, and so on. Little is surprising and there is much that is conciliatory. In the interview, he concedes “there are two sides to every story” and gives a mature and tender assessment of how difficult Princess Diana’s death must have been for Prince Charles, reflecting as a father himself, “Only now… did I really think about how many hours he’d been awake. And the compassion that I have for him as a parent, having to sit with that for many, many hours, ringing up friends of his, trying to work out, ‘How the hell do I break this to my two sons?’”

Throughout there is the suggestion of vertigo in speaking publicly about the issues compared with how emboldened print can make one feel; his book, by contrast, does not lack boldness and feels, occasionally like it could have been ghostwritten by a republican. Many autobiographical writers are plagued with a feeling they have betrayed and even sabotaged relationships with loved ones, simply by writing about them — “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished” Czeslaw Milosz has been quoted as saying —and there’s a sense with Prince Harry of at least wanting to heal the divisions, while, tragically, perhaps deepening them.

The most telling line, which reaches towards the heart of the matter, comes back to the Faustian nature of fame and particularly the media’s gaze and how that can distort, “After many, many years of lies being told about me and my family, there comes a point where, going back to the relationship between, certain members of the family and the tabloid press, those certain members have decided to get in the bed with the devil.” This reiterated the accusation Harry made against Camilla in his 60 Minutes interview with Anderson Cooper, where he claimed, she was “dangerous because of the connections that she was forging within the British press. And there was open willingness on both sides to trade of information. And with a family built on hierarchy, and with her on the way to being queen consort, there was going to be people or bodies left in the street because of that.” Again and again, in his recollections in interviews and writing, Prince Harry comes back to the media as a baleful destructive force in his life.

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It is evident that, seeking sanctuary from these pressures, Harry often found cold detachment or rejection from his family. There has been much made of Meghan Markle’s apparent reluctance to play the game expected of a royal, but the reticence has been there in her husband for much longer.

What is particularly illustrative and sympathetic about Prince Harry’s relationship with fame is that it was not chosen. In the traditional Faustian transaction, the would-be genius or celebrity sells their soul, knowing that the cost is damnation and believing that the gains will be worth it. With the royals, fame is hereditary, which is as much of a curse as a blessing. The transaction is one-sided. No deal is made and yet the individual assumes precisely the same debt. In a world, even a country, where children are born into horrendous poverty and deprivation, it’s difficult to have sympathy for someone born into immense privilege. Yet it is warranted, given that child we watched walking along forlorn at his mother’s funeral did not choose any of this.

The problem is that Prince Harry is now a man and no longer a lost boy. Though he has chosen an arguably noble route of walking away from an environment that had shunned him, and he has the right to speak his mind and tell his own story, he has not walked away from fame. Sympathy, like any resource, is finite. It is entirely reasonable to wish to escape the stilted environment expected of the royals, the stiff upper lipped omerta that hides a multitude of pain and sins, the expectations to be a well-turned-out blind eye-turning mannequin (some years ago, I found myself in the unlikely company of a drunken lord who informed me that the royals were pitied by the rest of the aristocracy).

It is even more understandable to wish to escape the glare of the lens that played a part in the death of a beloved parent. Having chosen Meghan and America, Prince Harry had the chance to transcend fame and to effectively defeat the presence that has seemingly haunted his life. He could go semi-privately into any number of ventures. Harry was not, after all, a signatory to the Faustian pact. One of the most tragic aspects to what has been unfolding is not just the painful reality of a family schism, but rather that at the brink of escape, Harry decided to return to the table to sign the contract.

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A cursory scan over Twitter will show that there are those who dislike the Sussexes for petty vindictive reasons, casually firing around racist and sexist tropes in the process. Yet there are far more who have sympathy and are interested because it is a human story that resonates, especially those who have been through grief, familial rifts, childhood rejection and so on. The royals are just like us, it suggests. Who knew? The point where sympathy dissipates is with this issue of fame, the courting of it rather than the walking away. This is where the public’s role in the Faustian bargain comes in. This is what differentiates celebrities from the rest of us, the point of departure, and the judgement can and may well be merciless. By aiming for the echo chamber of the terminally online and the patronage of the American establishment, the wider sympathy is lost. It is especially frustrating as the prince had a chance to get out.

Harry’s case is not helped by a mixed tone of grievance and sanctimony. One moment, he is referring to the killing of Afghan militants as a game of chess, the next he is engaging in flagellation about his previous lack of social consciousness. At its worst, it seems distasteful and condescending, the opposite of a spiritual confessional. It undoes the undoubtedly brave work of speaking about trauma, autonomy, or even his right to speak. As George Orwell put it, “Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful”, but here even the disgrace feels performative. It feels grubby and out of touch, both too intimate and too remote. It feels, in other words, like fame.

Here lies the deeper issue. Whatever you think of Harry and Meghan or the Royal Family, you are expected to think something — whether acolyte or tormentor. The public are the essential piece of the Faustian contract, as much as the media. We are its creditors. When it is signed, what might begin as human sympathy becomes a detached form of judgement. The figures we gaze at become dehumanised, either as saints or demons. The weight of having to play these roles or simply being perceived as such is no small thing, though we can always say they are well renumerated for their troubles. It is worth considering what the gaze of the media does to such figures, and Prince Harry’s life is an ongoing example, but it is also worth considering what it is doing to those of us who watch.

Even in our supposedly rationalist secular era, we find one of these thin places or times in the unlikely guise of Christmas and its rich repository of ghost stories. The supernatural was not banished by the developments of modernity but rather it evolved and adapted, moving from enchanted woods to gothic houses to the streets and rooms of Victorian cities. Just as in earlier times, they found their place where it is dark, in the dead of winter, when the nights close in and fireside stories cause the mind to play tricks and shadows to seemingly change their forms.

Among the many writers who have tried their hand at yuletide ghost stories, none loom larger than Charles Dickens who, with A Christmas Carol (subtitled Being a Ghost Story of Christmas), fundamentally influenced the way we perceive and celebrate the festivity. To fully understand how and why Christmas became a thin place and remains so, we have to delve into a scourge at the very heart of Dickens’s story and our society still — loneliness.

Christmas is one of those times when, as a much earlier writer, Dante, put it: “There is no greater sorrow than to recall in misery the time when we were happy.” And what time is happier, or more melancholic when irretrievable, than a childhood Christmas? Victorian writers knew that when we are alone at Christmas, a time that seems intrinsically meant for loved ones congregating (the perpetual renewal of the Nativity scene), our ghosts, borne by memory, absence and regret, would instead arrive.

Dickens knew the power of myth, and how the beautiful lie might reveal the hidden truth. Determined to speak out about the horrors of child labour and poverty he had directly experienced and witnessed, Dickens first toyed with writing a strident but fairly unwieldly political jeremiad until he realised, correctly, that there was a much more seductive approach available, through the Trojan Horse of storytelling. It was all too easy to turn away from a lecture or respond with platitudes and fallacies, but a heart-stirring tale had the ability to get under one’s skin. His characters and settings were constructed not just from satirical observations of the powerful but from encounters Dickens had had with the powerless, during his lengthy night walks around London. He was also deeply inspired, and haunted, by macabre tales that his cockney nursemaid Mary Weller used to delight in telling him as a child — full of Faustian pacts, treacherous innkeepers, poisons “distilled from toads’ eyes and spiders’ knees”, the Black Cat and Captain Murderer. To add to the unease, Weller would claim the horrors were true and she had witnessed them herself or had heard them from relatives who were eyewitnesses. As Dickens later recounted, in The Uncommercial Traveller, she “took a fiendish enjoyment of my terrors, and used to begin, I remember — as a sort of introductory overture — by clawing the air with both hands, and uttering a long low hollow groan”.

A Christmas Carol has this oral tradition feel, albeit delivered in a short, and affordable, novella form. It also rebalances Dickens’s heavy lean towards sentimentality (the pitiable figure of Tiny Tim, for instance) with the resolutely unsentimental tactic of terrifying child readers. This was necessary for reasons of veracity — existence was unsentimental in those days — but also as a myth-making technique. There are few lessons that stay with us longer and deeper than those which strike mortal fear in us and then propose a way out.

At the heart of the story and its extraordinary legacy is loneliness. Rereading A Christmas Carol, its power initially comes from its status as a social tract and a fable. What is crucial, however, is its existential quality. It shows that the system then in place, and perhaps still, not only oppresses and squanders but it also alienates. Dickens takes the traditional Christmas theme of visitation (the announcing angel, the wandering star leading to the Christ child, the shepherds, the Magi) and makes it sinister. Salvation can come only through the painful process of facing the truth (“Without their visits,” said the Ghost, “you cannot hope to shun the path I tread”). It can only emerge from Scrooge seeing that he has betrayed and marginalised not only his fellow human beings but himself, acknowledging that he belongs to the Malthusian “surplus population” he castigates, that he is alone and bereft (“Will you not speak to me?” he begs the final phantom), and the only precious hope he has left is to be found through gratitude and selfless communion with others.

There are many reasons why A Christmas Carol still resonates so much in the 21st century, not least Dickens’s vivid scene-setting and skill at characterisation, but one overlooked factor is that, although times are very different, we are still beholden to its curse. In 2017, the cross-party Jo Cox Commission stated that nine million people in the UK were stricken by loneliness, with all manner of health and societal issues emanating from this (depression, obesity, alcoholism, drug use and so on).

Loneliness can also have a horrifically brutal side to its tragedy. Before she was murdered by a radicalised recluse, a man who according to the police “never held down a job, never had a girlfriend, never any friends to speak of”, Jo Cox declared: “I will not live in a country where thousands of people are living lonely lives forgotten by the rest of us.” The reality, however, is that we do live in such a country.

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Claire Keegan's faithless Christmas Carol

By Boyd Tonkin

Scrooge’s damnation (and redemption) is a personal one, but it is also societal. He cuts himself off partly because he cannot deal with the ethical complications and emotional demands of the world. He becomes impervious to weather and humane interaction. His is the reason of the counting house. He knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing. “Bah humbug” becomes a device to shut down any intrusive altruistic or life-affirming thoughts. His self-diminishment reaches a strange kind of perfection. He is the creation of an entire society that has been moving, in dedicated even pious fashion, in entirely the wrong direction and at great cost. Yet there must be great profit to be made in maintaining such a miserable situation. One of the most chilling scenes in A Christmas Carol, one I had entirely forgotten until rereading, is when Scrooge looks out over London and finds: “The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. Every one of them wore chains like Marley’s Ghost; some few (they might be guilty governments) were linked together; none were free.”

The story feels evergreen because, like Christmas, it renews. And it calls on us to look again at our times, as Dickens did his, and see that Scrooge, though wretched, is a product of his age. What are the ghosts of our current Christmas? Well, chief among them remains loneliness, adding to the unseen miseries of food banks, child poverty, domestic abuse, heating, and housing crises. A consumerist and media-driven cult of youth encourages us to, hubristically, treat the neglected old as redundant. Simultaneously, the young are betrayed with the atomisation that comes with a life of screens, increasingly devoid of extended family, subject to risk-averse short-termism and apocalyptic anxieties in the long-term, all compounded by the as-yet-unquantified impact of lockdown upon child development.

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How illiteracy silenced my father

By Darran Anderson

Adults hardly fare much better. A 2019 YouGov survey showed that 18% men did not have a close friend, with 32% having no one they regarded as a best friend. Women fared better, but still enough for concern, with 12% and 24% respectively. Despite, or because, of the proponderence of dating apps, there are a plethora of studies showing each successive generation of adults is having less sex than the last (in hetereosexual circles at least). Urbanisation has also played a significant role in this with the “Lonely in a crowd…” study, published last year in Nature, finding that “being in overcrowded environments increased loneliness by up to 38%”. While it’s important to acknowledge the benefits of voluntary solitude and the underrated qualities of introversion, the study sets out what might be a definitive summation of the problem: “Loneliness, defined as the ‘perceived sense of disconnection from others’, refers to the subjective emotional experience of not having one’s social need for relationships adequately met.” It is arguable that the needs contemporary society focuses on are not those we actually need.

Throughout his books, Dickens returned to the theme of loneliness and many of his passages feel prescient. In A Tale of Two Cities, he observes “a multitude of people, and yet a solitude!” In Great Expectations, he touches upon a scene that chimes with our current crisis of homelessness: “I looked at the stars, and considered how awful it would be for a man to turn his face up to them as he froze to death, and see no help or pity in all the glittering multitude.” So much has changed and yet so little.

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The curse of Northern stereotypes

By Graham Robb

We have more ways than ever to communicate, except the tangible ones that actually matter. We may have moved on from old-fashioned firesides and pan-generational environments, banquets and carol services, midnight masses and midnight toasts, for the sophistication of empty rooms filled with nothing but technological phantoms. Scrooge the miser does not seem a contemporary figure in our age of profligacy, but this would be a misreading, for it is the solipsism of his ego that leads Scrooge to where he’d languished and transcending that is what redeems him in the end and helps him find his place. Solipsism takes many different forms but there’s only one path out of it. This is the nature of the true thin place, a portal through which we leave our echo-chambers and egos and meet in one another’s worlds. We must reach and wander outside of ourselves, lest we diminish into shades of ourselves. As it is put in A Christmas Carol: “It is required of every man,” the ghost returned, “that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide; and, if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death.”

The beauty and grace of Christmas comes because it is a temporary reprieve from hardship and the rebirth of hope in the depths of winter. It is an island, full of lights, cheer, charity and togetherness, in a sea of darkness. Or, at least, it could be. The more we forget this as an individual or a society, the more we risk finding ourselves out there in the dark, shut off from the world, like ghosts of what we could have been.

While little is achieved without hard work and personal responsibility, the narrative around idleness has been cursed since the Eighties, largely because the conditions of the post-war consensus (partly established by Beveridge) have been dismantled from above. The poor are expected to honour their side of a social contract that no longer exists and was destroyed without their consultation for the great profit of others.

The Tory rhetoric of “get on your bike” did not just fail to motivate but seemed designed to demoralise, as any gaslighting would. Here was a form of magical thinking that we might now call “manifestation”, but this was a particularly unholy form of magic, given it was being proposed by many of those who had presided over the de-industrialisation of the areas and populations they were now hectoring for their “idleness”.

This attitude persisted longer than might be expected, with the tabloids providing salacious moral panics around single mothers and benefits cheats. These were designed to enrage anyone striving to work through increasingly precarious conditions. The problem was that, unlike money, moral lessons do trickle down. In place of the now-dishonoured social contract came a society run by and for rentiers and lenders, a place where tax evasion and asset-stripping were not as rare as they may or should have been.

What incentive is left for those struggling to patch together a living wage from what had once been side-hustles, who have little job security in the age of zero-hour contracts, where the differentiation between work and life has been obliterated, where effective unions and collective bargaining are for most industries ancient history, where savings will be eaten away by inflation, where there is a chasm between wages and affording a home, where an accident or sickness might spell financial ruin, and having a child is an unaffordable luxury? What moral instruction about idleness and hard work are they expected to believe in?

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The betrayal of Britain's seaside towns

By Madeline Bunting

Again, Beveridge is instructive here. For all his paternalism, he was right in identifying that one of the primary ills of his time was not just unemployment but casual employment, which trapped many people in an inescapable cycle of poverty. Worryingly, this trend of “flexibility” appears to have returned, and even when there is relatively secure employment, the results can be disastrous, calling to mind Mr Micawber’s sterling advice in Dickens’s David Copperfield: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”

According to the Department for Work and Pensions, there were 3.9 million children living in poverty in the UK in 2020-21. The same study states that “75% of children growing up in poverty live in a household where at least one person works”. This was the environment I grew up in, watching my parents work hard and with great dignity only to be punished at each turn. This was echoed in the pride and resilience of our town in Northern Ireland, which was not so much left behind as scuttled. One of the major factors was institutionalised sectarianism, against Catholics, in almost every aspect of that society as well as the murderous bloodshed of the Troubles that had erupted. Having to listen to lectures, full of callous piety, about the idle poor from the idle rich added insult to injury. Across the UK, the situation remains, with condescending talk of “populism” from elites, who switch around their seating arrangements periodically.

Many politicians and commentators have the luxury of ignoring how most people live, never mind those who live below the poverty line. There are, however, groups of people paying to the poor, which brings us to the reason why the Giant of Idleness is so destructive. When the best prospects for young people in a city or town are stagnation through unemployment or badly paid jobs with no prospects of career or life advancement, the mind turns to other routes of betterment. Fringe groups such as gangs and drug-dealers fill the vacuum, offering a way out and a way up, as corrosive as they are. When society fails to utilise talent and drive, more nefarious entrepreneurial agents will take advantage.

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Britain's squalid housing crisis

By Mary Harrington

In the town where I grew up, paramilitaries served this role. Initially, recruitment was organic. There was a low-level though bloody civil war, which affected every aspect of life, and harassment, discrimination and the massacre of civilians sent many into the arms of Republicans and Loyalists. Now in deprived areas of Northern Ireland, even maintaining the pretence of a cause has largely fallen away for these groups, who to varying degrees have embraced gangsterism. I was watching the Northern Irish news one evening with a friend when a well-known paramilitary and “community spokesman” appeared and gave a talk on “the plague” of drugs in Loyalist neighbourhoods. My friend burst out laughing and informed me that the gentleman was their first point of contact when procuring substances.

The Troubles may have abated, or rather been placed in a medically induced coma, but power-sharing is paralysed, the communities are still largely segregated, and the fundamental economic and social issues go unacknowledged and unsolved. Poverty is endemic in many areas of Northern Ireland. In a sense, the conflict and division continue in an even more degenerated form. First as tragedy, then as farce.

In the Nineties, I saw this process first-hand. Many of my childhood friends were bright, sometimes brilliant, young men who had few legitimate paths open to them. The paths they chose, while they were underage admittedly, were an abomination. One of them killed a man, a father of four, outside a Chinese restaurant one night. Another was exiled from the city for drug-dealing. I lost count of how many ended up damaged by seeking escape through drink and drugs. With all of Beveridge’s Giants, there’s a haunting sense of contingency. My suspicion as to why Idleness is placed last is that it’s the one ill where, at its worst, one conspires in the ruin of oneself and those around them.

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The workers were never ignorant

By Terry Eagleton

Northern Ireland is a place that has been continually othered for decades by the rest of the UK and the Republic of Ireland. While it is a unique province in many ways, it is not quite as distant as people would like to believe. I see similar dynamics at work in London gangs and with Islamist extremists in terms of how and who they recruit or groom. In county lines cases, I’ve witnessed a familiar pattern, not just in the incentivising of drug-dealing and evasion of the police, but in the use of drugs as a temporary “escape” from places where there is little to do.

We were those kids and the devil made plenty of work for us. If we’d been approached then with sanctimonious lectures, or panaceas like a community centre, or “just talk to your friends about your feelings” platitudes, we’d have replied with laughter and scorn because even as children, we knew that, for things to change, there had to be a fundamental reassessment of the way the entire society had been stacked and who was benefiting. In our inarticulate way, we knew that it wasn’t a question of work or idleness but the right work and the right idleness, and that, ultimately, though we didn’t then know its name, it was decadence that we had to avoid, by which I mean, doing that which is harmful even catastrophic to oneself, either as an individual or a society. And this is why Idleness will be the last, and not the first, Giant to go. Only when we have begun to confront all the other Giants will this final one begin to collapse.

Some of the signs seem obvious now. A heartfelt but garbled message he’d chalked for my mother’s birthday before he left for work. How he would hover around, very slowly and subtly, trying to get us, his primary school-age children, to fill in forms he needed. In terms of boundless curiosity and the vastness of his references, from the intricacies of Brehon Law to the Latin names for plants to obscure battles of the Second World War, he was perhaps the smartest man I’ve ever met. And yet he carried the burden of illiteracy, silently, since he was a boy. Were I not his son in terms of unsentimental temperament, it would break my heart to think about.

In the end, there was no space to hide it any longer, no room left to evade or disguise. It was silence itself that revealed the condition. Unexpectedly and brutally stricken with Covid, my father ended up critically ill in ICU. Breathing via a ventilator and tracheostomy, it was impossible for him to talk. When the nurses approached him with pen and paper, and then an alphabet chart to point at in order to communicate, he waved them away. At first, they thought it was intransigence, but it soon became clear what the real issue was. Though an avid reader, he could not spell even the simplest of words.

For the next six months, they tried their best to understand him at his bedside, as did we; attempting, on glitching video calls, to read his lips. Due to the facial necrosis he suffered when they had laid him in the prone position to initially save his life, there wasn’t a great deal to read. In my weaker moments now, waking in the blue hours of night for instance, I feel haunted by the one word he mouthed that I could unmistakably make out — “home”, a place to which he never managed to return.

Since then, I have sought to understand the origin of my father’s illiteracy, which has led me deeper and deeper into the issue itself. Though I have worked in schools and witnessed, first-hand, children who struggled or were left behind, I hadn’t fully appreciated the immense scale of the issue. In global terms, according to UNICEF: “Nearly a billion people entered the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their names.” The OECD has found that one in six adults in England, over seven million people, “have very poor literacy skills”. Though studies differ in measuring terms, they do point to literacy difficulties being even more prevalent in Scotland (one in four people) and Northern Ireland (one in five). The Treasury’s Leitch Review of Skills in 2006 aired on the conservative estimate that “one seventh (five million) are not functionally literate”. In truth, the numbers vary and are frequently contested but all the studies suggest that millions of lives are profoundly impacted.

Why, then, is there such silence on the issue? One reason is the marginalisation of those who are affected; chief among whom are children, a group who can’t advocate for themselves, and, in particular, poor children. According to the Department of Education in 2019, 65% of children leave primary school having achieved the expected standard in reading, writing and mathematics, meaning that 35% will not.

Poverty plays a massive part in this, coupled with lack of resourcing, social exclusion, familial cycles of deprivation and so on. In 2019, End Child Poverty claimed there were 4.3 million children (30%) living in poverty in Britain. The correlation between poverty and illiteracy comes up again and again, both additionally linked to mortality. The National Literacy Trust’s findings in their Literacy and life expectancy study are staggering and scandalous: “A boy born in Stockton Town Centre (which has some of the most serious literacy challenges in the country) has a life expectancy 26.1 years shorter than a boy born in North Oxford (which has some of the fewest literacy challenges).” The issue casts a shadow over entire, foreshortened lifespans.

Economics go a long way in terms of explanation, but aren’t the only factor. Instead, we face a complex tapestry of failings and unmet needs that suggest negligence at best and, at worst, the wilful discarding of swathes of the population in terms of class, geography, demographics and so on. End Child Poverty has pointed out that “46% of children from black and minority ethnic families are growing up in poverty, compared with 26% of children in white British families”. Meanwhile, a 2018 government study of Year One pupils in England who have met the expected standards in phonics, one of the building blocks of literacy, found attainment by children from Roma and Irish Traveller backgrounds to be around half that of every other demographic (roughly 40% compared to 80%+). Between the groups are disadvantaged/working-class white boys, with 62% meeting the standard. Many groups are being let down in different though related ways. A society can be judged by how it treats its young. Children do not fail but rather are failed.

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We are not all Salman Rushdie

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There are always outcomes to consider. In 2009, KPMG declared that: “Low levels of literacy undermine the UK’s economic competitiveness, costing the taxpayer [up to] £2.5 billion every year.” In some ways, the possibilities are even worse than they were in my father’s day. At least he had the refuge of almost-entirely manual labour to move into. Most jobs now require a degree of literacy, with the digital revolution spreading into every aspect of life. The DCMS No Longer Optional report claimed digital skills were essential for two thirds of occupations, including 77% of so-called “low-skill jobs”. The WEF indicate the issue will only get worse, with many at risk of being left behind: “In the future, nine out of ten jobs will require digital skills, yet today 44% of Europeans aged 16-74 lack even basic digital abilities.” Employers are already feeling the deficit. In 2013, the CBI’s Changing the pace study found 32% of employers were dissatisfied with the literacy levels of young people, while a BIS report in 2016 found that “one in eight (12%) workplaces in England report a literacy and/or numeracy gap whereby at least one member of staff is unable to perform certain literacy… tasks to the level required in their day-to-day job”. While enlightening, statistics and particularly the managerial approach to society may be part of the problem, however. We need, instead, to look at the cost from a human level.

The issue is exponential and cyclical, something akin to a phenomenon called “the Drowning Machine”, which requires some explanation. My father worked for the council and though his role as a gardener-groundsman was a largely peaceful horticultural one, it involved the use of heavy machinery; equipment that could, if one were not careful, result in the loss of an eye or a finger, the permanent damaging of one’s back, and so on. One of the methods employed by managers, to underline the need for health, safety and endless vigilance, was to show the crew footage that would sear into their minds. My father would come home, take off his Hi Vis vest and boots, shake his head and say to my mother: “Christ, you wouldn’t believe what we watched in work today.” Then, thinking he was out of earshot of his kids, he would relate the real-life video horrors they’d witnessed of the Bradford City stadium fire, footage of some poor factory worker being sucked into a machine or sinking into a silo. I was a curious child, of a slightly morbid disposition, so my ears pricked up at each pitiful and graphic description.

One account became rich material for my nightmares for years to come. My father had to cut grass and tend plants on all manner of landscapes from hills to ditches to the edges of waterways. Given that his parents had both drowned in the local river, I imagine he would have been somewhat cautious — but to drive home the point, he and his colleagues were shown a video on the dangers of canals, rivers, reservoirs and other waterways. One of the most perilous were low head dams, which look fairly innocuous; a slowly drifting river that pours over a small weir with apparently minimal turbulence. Yet in certain cases, a “submerged jump” forms near the base of the dam, creating a loop of circulating water pushing downwards, back towards the dam, upwards and downwards again, in a spinning cycle. If a swimmer or kayaker is unlucky enough to be pulled down into a particularly strong version of this — and the force of water can be immense — they can find themselves stuck in a loop or maelstrom known as a “keeper”. Warning signs of this phenomena show a pirouetting figure under the water, trapped in “the drowning machine”, unable to extricate themselves and endangering the lives of would-be rescuers, who make up around a quarter of its victims.

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Scotland's poor are left to die

By Darren 'Loki' McGarvey

During my father’s six months of silence, my mind kept returning to the image of the stricken figure spinning over and over in the water, and no matter how strong they were and how bravely they fought, each time they tried to surface, another wave would hit them and successive cycles would weaken them until there was nothing left. It reminded me of the cycles of poverty I’d witnessed to which I’d lost loved ones. When someone’s life begins to fail in already difficult circumstances, there’s a tendency for problems to multiply. Disaster is effectively intersectional: spiralling finances, deteriorating psychological and physical health, social alienation, dependencies, legal issues and so on. Self-extrication is rare.

Those who leave school functionally illiterate have often been trapped in the drowning machine since childhood. Life goes wrong early — whether its poverty, abuse, neglect — and if intervention is not early, it is much harder to extricate. The “Every Child A Reader” programme notes that “70% of pupils permanently excluded from school have difficulties in basic literacy skills”. This flows, demonstrably though not inevitably, into adulthood with the Social Exclusion Unit reporting: “80% of prisoners have writing skills at or below the level expected of an 11-year-old child; the equivalent figure for reading is 50%.” The Ministry of Justice found in 2021 that 57% of prisoners had literacy levels below those expected of an 11-year-old, with the Skills Funding Agency reporting in 2018, over a third of prisoners reported that they have “a learning disability or difficulty”. This hampers the abilities of prisoners to keep in contact with the outside world and reintegrate into it, especially through employment, with the Shannon Trust emphasising the importance of literacy in terms of reducing recidivism.

Many problems emerge from illiteracy. Some pose as solutions. If education or family cannot or will not offer a lifeline, others will step up, preying on frustration, lack of legitimate options for betterment and low self-esteem. It provides a hunting ground for exploitation by older predatory “rescuers”, in the form of gang leaders, sex traffickers, drug dealers and extremist groups. These routes seem a way out of the drowning machine but are merely a deepening of the cycle. Chances of real escape decline once you have a criminal record, are identified on the Gang Matrix or by MI5, or end up with a drug addiction.

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Poverty is not inevitable

By Terry Eagleton

Here we find another troubling element to the silence surrounding illiteracy. Many of the most shameful scandals in recent decades have been to do with the abandonment and betrayal of children — paedophilia in the Catholic Church, Savile and the BBC, rape gangs in numerous English towns preying on young working-class girls, the death toll of young people through knife crime, and the epidemic of childhood poverty. All of these have faced a wall of silence, effectively disappearing the victims, for a number of reasons — deference towards powerful institutions, ideological inconvenience, callous indifference masquerading elsewhere as compassion. One overlooked factor is the gentrification of journalism away from the local and investigative, increasingly into cloistered upper-middle-class lifestyle commentaries, hot takes on passing fads and clickbait distractions. Without addressing this silence and the noise that disguises it, little will change.

All my life, I had thought that my father had escaped the drowning machine. I believed he had extricated himself from a youth of deprivation, violence, and prison. He had done so by choosing his family, his trade, his camaraderie with his workmates, his music, his bodybuilding, his love of nature, his stoicism. He was a proud man, who showed me how to live and how to die with bravery and nobility. He would never have claimed to have been a victim.

Yet I saw in those last months that he hadn’t escaped the drowning machine. As a little boy with undiagnosed dyslexia (a condition 10% of the population share), my father had been failed and, though he did the best he could to get out, it caught up with him at the end. He never made it out entirely. There are children right now in this country who are forced to carry and hide the same burden. The shame they feel has been given to them. It belongs to us.

The lines were added by Orson Welles to the script of what would be his final onscreen performance, Someone to Love (1987). The more one dwells on the quote, the more troubling it becomes. It does not belong in the realm of self-help. Instead, it is more akin to Joseph Conrad’s words in Heart of Darkness, “We live as we dream – alone”, words from a scene in which one character cannot convey to others the depths of his experience. He cannot reach them, and, in that moment, a terrible chill can be felt, a vertigo even, that perhaps we are all in the same position, or one day will be and the illusion will no longer hold.

There are few moments where the solitary nature of life appears more inescapable than when one is clinging to it. The author Salman Rushdie lies recovering in an unknown location. His agent, Andrew Wylie, recently outlined the severity of the wounds Rushdie suffered after being attacked at the Chautauqua Institution in August. He has lost his sight in one eye and the use of one of his hands. He has “three serious wounds in his neck” and 15 in his chest. It is astonishing, if not miraculous, that he has survived.

Despite initial media activity around the attempt on his life, attention coursed on to “the next thing”. People seemed to assume that, once stabilised, Rushdie would quietly recover. Even in the presence of medical professionals and loved ones, Salman Rushdie is now, as he has always been, in this struggle alone. He alone will have to endure the aftermath. He has been doing so for decades.

The tendency to adopt him as a cipher for political interests has been lamentable. Rushdie is a fiction writer, albeit a remarkably curious and brave one. The Satanic Verses was rendered prophetic by the unfolding response and wider geopolitical contexts. The influence of the Ayatollahs was significant enough to warrant the author going into hiding, yet their reach had limits for as long as Western democracies held firm on protecting their citizens and enshrining rights, such as freedom of thought and speech, rights obtained through centuries of struggle and protest. Alas that was not the case.

When the fundamentalist Supreme Leader of Iran issued essentially a warrant for Salman Rushdie’s killing, and all who published him, it served as a colossal stress test of rights and protections in Western societies. In places, it began to buckle, with politicians, intellectuals and even fellow writers prevaricating, isolating and even condemning the writer for, in their minds, bringing murder upon himself. In a sense, Rushdie was doing what writers of note have always done — he was venturing out and testing, whether intentionally or not, how sturdy the ice was underfoot. As it turned out, it was more fragile than anyone had admitted, and soon cynics within the West would notice.

Looking back on the War on Terror and its human cost, it may be hard to conceive of the hostility experienced by those who spoke out against it. Millions protested and were effectively ignored. The seeds of an essentialism by which we are increasingly bound (“You are for us or against us”) took root. After the atrocities of September 11, emergency laws to restrict rights were introduced on a temporary basis — we were assured. Questions and debate, the basis of all scientific, philosophical and political enquiry and progress, provoked accusations of treason; we saw this, again, when questions arose over issues like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the origins of Covid-19 and so on. The seeds were planted when Rushdie was forced into hiding.

Writing and publishing may seem insignificant compared to the loss and mutilation of life that has transpired since the fatwa was declared against Rushdie. Yet the world of literature has some impact on the climate in which we all live, think and speak. Two damaging and interconnected developments have emerged — one very quiet and the other very loud.

Even while claiming to address political, social and cultural issues, the publishing industry (risk-averse at the best of times) has drifted more towards the uncontroversial, the orthodox and the solipsistic. With the exception of indie presses, which do much of the talent-spotting and grass roots development for the industry, and the occasional adventurous imprint, publishers have largely pursued a path of acquiescence, rendering themselves increasingly detached from a world that has more stories to tell, issues to face and places to explore than ever. There is certainly the illusion of controversy — the perpetual discovery of sex for instance, the wheeling out of straw men to attack or the time-travelling liberal interventionist attitude towards the complexities of the admittedly brutal historical past.

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The infidels will not be silenced

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Periodically, articles will wonder why fewer and fewer people are reading. But little attention is paid to the echo-chamber of the industry and its remove from how most people actually live. What we can write, even speak of, as authors has, after a century of advancement, demonstrably narrowed. And the first gatekeepers, keeping inconvenient truths or contrary speculative fictions at bay, may well be our publishers.

It is difficult to transplant works from the past into the present day, given our present day has been partly shaped by those works but it is clear however that in terms of the impact it made, the bravery it took, and the freedom it assumed, there will not be another Satanic Verses. There may not be another Victor Hugo or a Nabokov. There may not be the equivalent of any of the books whose court victories broadened what it is we are able to publicly express, giving honest articulation to private thoughts — no Tropic of Cancer, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Ulysses. Puritanism now comes couched in the language of protection, which, in fact, was always part of the excuse for shutting down certain thoughts and marking certain lives as obscene. It was always a component of the political tool of erasure; we see this daily with reported bans on all manner of books from Ellison’s Invisible Man to Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

There is no denying the fear of crazed fanatics is real and understandable. Long before Rushdie was attacked, his Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, was stabbed to death, his Italian translator, Ettore Capriolo, was stabbed but survived, as did his Norwegian publisher, William Nygaard, who was shot in an assassination attempt. Thirty seven people died when a mob seeking to murder Rushdie’s Turkish translator, Aziz Mesin, set fire to the Madimak Hotel.

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By Will Lloyd

Naturally these crimes had a chilling effect. Yet there is something profoundly dispiriting to see an industry that was in the avant-garde for most of the 20^th century volunteering to become its own censor. Some warned at the time, not least Rushdie’s loyal friend Christopher Hitchens, that submitting to theocratic fascists, the same ones that dissenting women are now courageously facing down in Iran, would only embolden and encourage them. After the Charlie Hebdo attacks, Rushdie was quoted in The Guardian, “Both John F. Kennedy and Nelson Mandela use the same three-word phrase which in my mind says it all, which is, ‘Freedom is indivisible. You can’t slice it up otherwise it ceases to be freedom.’” By seeking safety, the danger is that publishers have been moving increasingly towards irrelevance and vulnerability.

On the other hand, we have the noisy theatre of political engagement, especially on social media. This appears to be thriving until you realise how performative it is and how centred around the narcissism of small differences. Genuine unorthodox views are increasingly censored, and what it takes to be permanently suspended from Twitter or receive a call to your door from the police under disturbingly broad hate crime grounds appears ever-expanding. While there were notable cases of gloating online, the wave of sympathy for Rushdie was a sign that decency and empathy prevail. Yet, just as with the Je suis Charlie trend, some of the lamentations come from those who have pushed, even legislated, for restriction of speech; those who have applauded writers and academics losing their jobs or being no-platformed for the slightest deviation; those who have recreated an atmosphere of heresy that writers had, one day and not long ago, worked to dismantle.

Salman Rushdie was stabbed as he was about to give a speech, on America as a sanctuary for writers. In 1991, he gave a talk at Columbia University entitled “1,000 Days ‘Trapped Inside a Metaphor'”. In it, he tells us what is at stake, as a warning but also ultimately a statement of wonder, “I have learned the hard way that when you permit anyone else’s description of reality to supplant your own — and such descriptions have been raining down on me, from security advisers, governments, journalists, Archbishops, friends, enemies, mullahs — then you might as well be dead. Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I’ve always carried about is rather more vulnerable. Yet I must cling with all my might to… my own soul; must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic, out-of-step clown-instincts, no matter how great the storm. And if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox, so be it; I’ve lived in that messy ocean all my life. I’ve fished in it for my art. This turbulent sea was the sea outside my bedroom window in Bombay. It is the sea by which I was born, and which I carry within me wherever I go.”

There will be pity now for Salman Rushdie, as there should be. And there should be support and solidarity for him. Yet what is also necessary is rage and shame that this obscenity was allowed to happen, and that Rushdie faced it ultimately alone, just as writers across the world do in the face of persecution and violence to callously indifferent silence. All of this, Rushdie, and his earlier treatment, warned of. Perhaps it could have been avoided if we all possessed Rushdie’s courage of convictions. Or perhaps safety in numbers is not always successful. Yet it is worth trying, not least because it helps to make the illusion that Welles spoke of more tangible. “Our love and friendship” are not meek passive things. They are a bond that requires courage and, on occasion in their defence, pain, integrity and risk.

Those who wished to shut down freedom of thought and speech have won to an extent but only with the assistance of those who claimed to be its advocates and guardians. If Salman Rushdie and what he is suffering means anything, that squalid victory must be reversed. It may be that Welles and Conrad were right and we are truly unreachable to each other — but, at the same time, we are not alone. For within us, we have as company, like the little cricket of Collodi’s Pinocchio, our conscience. Rushdie deserves, at the very least, rest. The rest of us have not yet earned that right.