For Critical Quarterly - 'Brexit in fact and fiction: a few first drafts of history'

Nice to be back in the pages of Critical Quarterly – Volume 60, Issue2, July 2018, to be precise – with my essay on Brexit and fiction first presented at the University of Northampton in 2017. I set the scene like so:

“The EU referendum result split the nation near enough in half; defenestrated a Tory Prime Minister; confounded the ambitions of more than one of David Cameron’s putative successors; and, within a year, had created the conditions whereby a pension-aged Trotskyist with a career-long disdain for the European ‘project’ could entertain a real hope of leading the largely pro-Remain Labour party into government. As dramatic material this is worthy of Sophocles or Shakespeare. The challenge for writers of fiction, a perennial one, is whether or not they can improve on the facts already known by way of an imaginative treatment; or whether the facts are simply richer, stranger and more compelling when simply recorded in plain words…”

Writers & Intellectuals on Britain & Europe, 1918-2018: A conference at Northumbria University

M.G. Sanchez, Kristian Shaw & Your Correspondent

Always a pleasure to be in Newcastle, especially so for me a couple of weeks ago when I attended the Northumbria University conference 'Writers and Intellectuals on Britain and Europe, 1918-2018,' convened by Dr Ann-Marie Einhaus. 

I had a couple of speaking functions to perform: first on a panel called ‘Writers on Britain and Europe now,’ chaired by Bob Eaglestone from Royal Holloway University, where I exchanged views with Fiona Shaw, Mark (‘M.G.’) Sanchez and Kristian Shaw;  and then in a session entitled ‘Novelists on Brexit’ (chaired by Barbara Korte of Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg, alongside Mark once more, plus Ina Habermann of the University of Basel, and this time I delivered my paper: ‘“We must suffer them all again”: Political fictions and their debt to “past experiments”’; I took my texts from Auden, Brecht and Anthony Wedgwood-Benn.

A fascinating day in all; I met some terrifically smart people; I hope to publish my paper in due course; and some of my contributions to the first panel session were captured pretty faithfully on Twitter as below.

Highballs for Breakfast: "I'm going to do it again!"

Back in 2016 I spent some delightful months carpentering an anthology of Wodehouse's best stuff on booze. On publication the thing seemed to slip down well enough. 'Splendid,' said the Times. 'Enjoyable,' said the TLS, and it ought to know. Two happy years later, this tonic-like volume is now in paperback, £8.99, and I call that a gift.

A common problem with authors who wrote well about alcohol – Scott Fitzgerald, say, or Charles Bukowski – is that often they were alcoholics, with all the misery that entails. Wodehouse, though, flies breezily free of such gloom. One of the great tonics of his famous comic writing is its sense that happiness may be reliably found through the ‘life-restoring fluid’ contained in ‘the magic bottle.’ Here are three of my favourite such moments:

Gregory Parsloe (in Pigs Have Wings) suffers romantic rejection yet is consoled by a tankard of beer that appears before him in the manner of an old pal: ‘A woman is only a woman, he seemed to be saying, but a frothing pint is a drink.’

Stanley Ukridge (in Nothing Serious), reduced to rummaging the drinks cupboard in dire need, finds only a crusty port; yet consoles himself with the thought that, often, ‘a good go in at the port at a critical moment has made all the difference to me as a thinking force.’

Motty (in Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest), having gotten disgracefully drunk while lodging with a friend, is offered by his host the chance to plead food poisoning as the cause, but defiantly refuses: ‘‘No!’ he replied firmly. ‘I didn’t do anything of the kind. I drank too much! Much too much. Lots and lots too much! And, what’s more, I’m going to do it again!’

The Ministry of Intractable Problems

Amber Rudd MP, now the former Home Secretary

The BBC News Channel kindly had me on yesterday afternoon to talk about the job of Home Secretary and my fictional rendering of it in The Knives. Amber Rudd’s regrettable exit from the front line was the pretext; and the sixth of my novel’s seven parts does indeed describe a ministerial crisis wrought by cascading malfunctions arising from immigration policy, during which my made-up Home Sec David Blaylock must fight for his political survival or else by propelled out of the door – by events, unintended consequences, angry bystanders, assorted ill-wishers etc. 

(Spoiler alert: Blaylock wins the aforementioned battle, partly by outmanoeuvring a broadsheet newspaper determined to oust him, and by physically confronting a leaker within his department. Both of these dramatic turns are, I admit, a novelist’s fancy rather than the products of research.)

Anyhow, this (approximately) is what I told the BBC. 

David Blunkett rightly described it as a job consumed by 'intractable problems'. The job of Home Secretary - whoever’s doing it, of whatever political stripe - seems to me beset by three challenges that tower above all.

1) Because of the huge and burning responsibilities of borders, police and counter-terror, a great swathe of the public have an opinion on how the Home Secretary’s doing, even if they don't know his/her name or indeed anything else about them; and a goodly few are so insistent about what should be done to ‘sort out’ any given mess that you could almost believe they imagine they could do the job better - freelance, as it were, without training or experience.

2) Unlike in the other great offices, at the Home Office your ‘customers’ include a substantive number of individuals who don’t see you as acting for their interests – they don’t want you to succeed in your job (for instance, people who are very well aware that they are in the UK illegally; or people plotting terrorist acts of wickedness against the civilian populace.)

3) The cliché of ‘Events, dear boy’ is truer at the Home Office than anywhere else in politics. As Jack Straw’s ‘Sir Humphrey’, Richard Wilson, told him on the day he took up the post, he needed to enjoy the blue sky outside his window while he could, because an Exocet missile would be headed his way soon enough.

Straw – in his fine 2012 memoir – also stresses that the Home Secretary wrestles with four very distinct factions in order to force through policy, or even just get through the working week: there is the Public, there is the Press, there is the Party – and then there is the Department itself, which has a long history of taking a different view to the Minister, subtly or otherwise, as well as some strange collective sense of its own amour propre. (David Blaylock, while clashing with his own Permanent Secretary, feels a dispiriting perception afloat of ‘successive ministers as mere fly-by-nights passing through a far more solidly entrenched world.’)

I take from Straw that no-one can hope to survive long as Home Secretary unless they have more or less squared away all four of those forces: Public, Press, Party, Department. It’s a truly nerve-straining proposition, and small wonder the job has undone so many gifted, smart and seemingly durable performers. But, the knives are always out for you: you need eyes in the back of your head.

Aickman at the British Library: A Symposium

Our panel of 6, plus the 7th who moved unseen among us. (Photo: Chris Power)

Our Aickman evening at the British Library was, I believe, something of a success. At least, I like to imagine the man himself was with us in spirit, wearing the smile that a ghost would wear while we sang his praises. To be a ‘neglected’, ‘cult’ author is of course to be a bit of a phantomic presence, a perpetual ghost at the feast of English letters, maybe doomed to walk the earth forever unwelcomed. But Aickman is now a kind of fixture in the nation’s great library, and that’s not nothing, as they say in showbiz.

We tried to summon him right from the start of the night by playing a small audio clip of him reading, very characteristically, from ‘Bind Your Hair.’ (In a letter to Ramsey Campbell of June 1978, now lodged in the BL archive, Aickman writes: ‘I always read each story aloud to a [certain] selected person... There is nothing like reading aloud for the tidying up of stylistic shortcomings.’)

Then Ramsey himself spoke, reading from the memoir The Attempted Rescue in which Aickman praises the mountain-film era Leni Riefenstahl at vivid length and makes a tortuously felt effort to exonerate Riefenstahl of her later closeness to the Nazis. It was an astute way for Ramsey to open a window on Aickman’s unbending opinions – mostly of an artistic nature, some of them expressed in political conservatism. He was – to put it mildly, though it was put so on several occasions during our evening – a man out of time, who felt himself born in the wrong age.

Reece Shearsmith’s reading from ‘The Hospice’ could have lasted all night, such was the pleasure it stirred; and Jeremy Dyson’s turn with ‘Wood’, a superb if less-celebrated story replete with a secluded village and some sinister corn dollies, showed very well why The League of Gentlemen, as well as the contemporary turns both in English nature writing and supernatural writing, are really rather Aickman-esque.

In the end I had to ask the panel: here is a superb writer, a writer’s writer, writing (whether he disdained it or not) in one of the world’s most popular genres – why, then, is he still not better known? One reason, perhaps, is now to be found in the BL archive: a letter to a literary agent in which Aickman distinguishes between ‘entertainers’ who ‘write for a specific market’ and ‘artists’ who ‘write in response to a voice inside them.’ Aickman refused to sell out, whether or not anyone was buying. His friend Jean Richardson told me that he steadfastly refused to inject his stories with ‘more subtle sadism’ of a sort that might have served to ring the mainstream bell. No tears, then – for Aickman did what he wanted to do, and the outcomes earned him undying respect, that elusive immortality that many an artist will dream of.