Book Review: Rain Dogs (2015) by Adrian McKinty

This is the fifth in Adrian McKinty's series of mysteries featuring DI Sean Duffy of Northern Ireland's Royal Ulster Constabulary, and it's time to start thinking of them as historical fiction (they're set in the 1980s) and not just mysteries. I say this because one of the purposes of historical fiction is to reveal the past in ways more subtle and nuanced than can be found in history books. The bare bones history of Northern Ireland's Troubles is well known, but a writer like McKinty teases out the quotidian life of people living at the leading edge of the conflict. What makes this series have a foot in both literary genres is that in each book McKinty incorporates one or more historical figures (Gerry Adams, Margaret Thatcher, John DeLorean, etc.) who had a role, big or small, in NI's conflict. The intersection of real characters and events with the fictional Duffy has a twofold purpose: it marks the series out as an attempt to add shading, colour, and perspective to the historical record, and it's also a way of keeping the memory and significance of the Troubles alive.

There are plenty of mystery series set in the past featuring sleuthing Victorians, medieval monks, and Regency aristos, but in almost all these examples the historical setting is just dusty window dressing. McKinty is trying to draw attention to some fairly recent history that's beginning to slip from what could be called the popular historical record. The Irish (I'm including NI and Ireland in this) are in a peculiar situation where their image abroad, the myth of Irishness, is a twee amalgam of peat smoke, mad poets, green fields, gurning peasants, and well-lubricated wit. It's an image that keeps the tourist dollars flowing and warms the hearts of descendants of the great Irish diaspora. The Troubles interfered with this travel poster narrative in a big way. How could all those twinkly "Oirish" people throw bombs into crowded pubs or kneecap women? It was like finding out your favourite uncle had a stash of kiddie porn. As the Troubles have wound down to a dull murmur, the shamrock-encrusted image of the Irish has filtered back, and populist fare like Patrick Taylor's Irish Country Doctor book series and TV's Ballykissangel have brought the Irish compass needle pointing back to due leprechaun. The Duffy books are, perhaps, unique in reminding the literary public that until fairly recently a small population of white, English-speaking Christians were going at each other with the kind of ferocity we now associate with the Middle East.

This Duffy mystery may be the most polished of the bunch. It has a variation on the locked room puzzle (a locked castle!), and the set-up for it is splendidly handled. Chapters four and five should be read by any aspiring mystery writer as an example of how to establish a crime scene and lay out all the relevant clues. The death being investigated is that of Lily Bigelow, a writer for the Financial Times who seems to have killed herself  by jumping from the top of Carrick Castle. Bigelow was covering a trip to NI by a group of Finnish businessmen but as Duffy digs deeper it turns out that Bigelow was interested in uncovering something very nasty. The novel is filled with McKinty's usual wit and sharp descriptions of life in NI, and there's a bonus side trip to Finland that, visually speaking, seems to have been inspired by Billion Dollar Brain, a brilliant and unappreciated film by Ken Russell (my review). And the finale suggests that if there any more Duffy novels, his life might be headed in an interesting new direction.

Book Review: The Winshaw Legacy, or What a Carve Up! (1994) by Jonathan Coe

I'm not even going to try and fully outline the plot of this novel except to say that it's a wonderment of deviousness, coincidence, and mystery--Dickens on steroids. In a nutshell, the eponymous Winshaws are the Borgias of post-war Britain. From a family fortune founded on the slave trade, the Winshaws now have their bespoke talons securely fastened in banking, politics, the arms trade, media, and agribusiness. The central character is not a Winshaw, but one Michael Owen, a novelist with emotional baggage to spare. Owen takes a commission to write a history of the Winshaw family. The person underwriting the commission is Tabitha Winshaw, who has been confined in a mental asylum for the past twenty or so years by the other Winshaws. Tabitha is convinced that her brother Lawrence caused the death of her other brother Godfrey during World War Two. And it's Godfrey's death in the war that forms the coiled spring at the centre of a plot that encompasses tragedy, farce, acidic social and political commentary, mass murder, and some of the most polished comic writing this side of P.G. Wodehouse.

The dexterity of the plotting is breathtaking. The story has multiple narrative layers and voices, bags of characters, and sudden tonal shifts that sometimes put the story up on two wheels. It's understating matters to say that Coe is successfully juggling a lot of balls here; he's also keeping a flaming torch, a roaring chainsaw and an angry cat aloft. This is one of those rare novels that's thrilling because we're witnessing a writer making all kinds of high-risk maneuvers that could end very badly. Let me put it this way: how many writers would dare to incorporate both Sid James (star of the Carry On films) and Saddam Hussein (star of various crimes against humanity) as characters in the same novel?

The Winshaws, all nine of them, are mad or bad, and sometimes both. Some reviews that I came across have complained that the presentation of the family lacks subtlety; that the Winshaws are too starkly villainous. Some of the same reviews have also complained that Coe's depiction of political and social issues in Thatcher's Britain is similarly stark and simplistic. These reviewers are missing the point. What Thatcher unleashed in the UK was nothing less than a conservative counter-revolution against a generation of public policies aimed at creating and improving the social welfare state. Thatcher's "reforms" were as brutal and unsubtle as it's possible to be. To talk about those changes in a subtle manner would be to diminish their intent and dumb savagery. If the Winshaws are presented as posh, greedy brutes, it's because those were the foot soldiers in the war to turn back Britain's social and economic clock to somewhere in the Victorian age. And, of course, there are villains, and then there are exceptionally well-written villains. Coe has created a wonderfully diverse group of monsters in the Winshaws, and while they are all determinedly rotten, they are also very entertaining; although none of them goes so far as too stick their genitals in a pig's mouth. No one could possibly believe that...

If I've made The Winshaw Legacy sound like a polemic, believe me, it isn't. Coe is too smart a writer for that. This is first and foremost a novel filled with keenly observed characters, and some powerful episodes describing human suffering of both the physical and psychological variety. Rather amazingly, these tough elements don't jar at all with comic characters and moments that are often wildly funny. So if your taste runs to state-of-the-nation novels (UK division), make this one your choice rather than Martin Amis' Lionel Asbo, which is essentially written from the POV of a Winshaw. And remember that this novel was written in the early 1990s, long before Winshawism, to coin a term, came to fruition under David Cameron, with hearty endorsement by Britain's financial and media elites.

Less Islamophobia, More Theophobia, Please

Public Enemy number one.

The first side effect of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris has been an orgy of analysis and commentary by politicians and the press, many of whom are advancing agendas (more power to the police and secret services) or grinding axes (all Muslims are crazy mofos). After reading far too many opinion pieces and analyses over the last few days, I can no longer resist adding my two cents to the glittering mountain of coins that's already out there. So here goes.

A common theme voiced by many people is that Muslims need to be, well, less religious, or at least less fanatical. How this is to be done isn't usually defined, but one gets the sense that what people mean is that Muslims should do what most Christians do; pay nominal attention to the tenets and ceremonies of their religion but ignore all the barbaric and nonsensical stuff. Advising Muslims to dial down their religiosity is something I can get behind as long as it's part of broader theophobic movement. It seems monstrously hypocritical to ask Muslims to be chill about depictions of Mohammed when in the US creationism is being taught in schools; no US president can get elected unless they loudly proclaim that they are a practicing Christian; TV networks routinely bleep the use of "goddamn" or "Christ" when it's used as an expletive; women's reproductive rights are being eroded in the name of Christian religion; the military has become a hotbed of Christian fundamentalism; and a wide variety of pressure groups and politicians are constantly attempting to erode or end the constitutional separation of church and state. In sum, any attempts by non-Muslims to lecture Muslims on religious tolerance ring hollow unless it's matched by equal fervour in putting all religions in their place, which, in my view, is out on the street with their brethren operating the three-card monte games.

Are the Hebdo cartoons offensive? If you're looking and hoping to be offended, yes. Charlie Hebdo has a meage circulation of 60k in a nation of more than sixty million, and I doubt many French Muslims, or any one of a conservative bent, would be on their subscription list. Like the people who used to rail against Playboy magazine, Hebdo's detractors don't read the magazine themselves, but they're mortally offended that other people do. Those who argue that the cartoon images shouldn't be disseminated further because they might upset Muslims are falling into a dangerous logical trap. If a cartoon, an act of ephemeral humour, is too daunting for the sensitivities of some people, where do we draw the line in criticism and commentary? If a newspaper columnist does a piece in favour of atheism should there be a warning on the front of the paper about it lest a religious person come across the column? And why should religious sensitivities count for anything? Why should people of faith be protected from criticism or satire or a contrary opinion? We don't expect politicians, their parties, or their ideologies to be shielded from scorn or commentary (unless you're living in a totalitarian state), but somehow in the early 21st century it's not seemly to ridicule religion and its adherents.

The Paris killings have also produced the usual spate of right-wing chaff that attempts to disassociate Islamic terrorism from recent political and military history in the Middle East. The usual line taken in these arguments is that Islam is existentially committed to overthrowing the West (just read what it says in the Koran!) and what's gone on in Iraq and Israel has little or nothing to do with attacks on Western targets. Since the signing of the Sykes-Picot Agreement in 1916, the major Western powers, Israel, the USSR and, later, Russia, have terraformed, as it were, the Middle East, North Africa and AfPak into the hot messes that they are today. This does not make ISIL less of a horror show or excuse what happened in Paris, but to pretend that monsters won't arise from the toxic ecosystem that much of the Arab world has become seems ingenuous in the extreme. And if Islam is existentially obliged to attack unbelievers and spread the one faith by the sword, why wasn't the West facing Islamic terrorism in, say, the 1950s? Or the '20s? Why not the 1860s, for that matter? Nothing in the Koran has changed over the centuries, so it seems odd, unless you factor in politics and foreign policy, that the West hasn't been under siege from the Muslim world for the past thousand years.

And now for the big picture stuff. I'd argue that Islamic fundamentalism is merely one branch of a conservative counter-revolution that's been going on across the world since the late 1970s. Bear with me here. The post-war era (for argument's sake I'm going to say this extends to 1979) was marked by greater social welfare spending, the growth and influence of unions, a bigger role for government in social and industrial policies, and the political, economic and social emancipation of visible minorities and women. In simple terms, power and wealth was flowing from the top of society to the bottom. With the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 that flow began to reverse itself. The conservative counter-revolution had begun. This counter-revolution wasn't just about dollars and cents. The '60s and '70s had seen the growth of counter-cultural movements, alternative lifestyles, feminism, and gay rights. As these cultural changes gained momentum, the opposite and equal reaction was the rise of evangelical Christianity in the US and right-wing racist/nationalist parties in Europe. In broad cultural terms, what the counter-revolution was, and is, trying to do is re-establish a rigidly hierarchical, patriarchal  and mono-cultural society.

Although the West was where this struggle began, the rest of the world was not immune. The combined effects of globalization, immigration from the developing to the developed world, and the Internet have unsettled traditional societies all over world. Liberalism, in the cultural sense, has backwashed into countries and cultures that were anywhere from Victorian to medieval in their social outlook. Since the 1970s developing nations have been invaded by liberal Western values. These values have been carried there by Western businesses, immigrants returning to/communicating with their home countries, and the spread of the Internet. One sure sign of this cultural counter-revolution is the increase in misogyny just about everywhere. Women are always at the bottom of the pecking order in any kind of conservative culture, and because of this we've seen the spread of sharia law; gang sexual assaults on women in India; rampant cyber-bullying of women as seen in the Gamergate scandal; a mostly successful effort by rightists to turn the word "feminist" into a pejorative; and an epidemic of sexual abuse of women in the US military and colleges. Click here for a longer piece I did on women and religious oppression called Jim Crow is a Transvestite.

So even without the impetus of Western military incursions in the Muslim world, it's quite likely Islamic fundamentalism would have been on the rise as a reaction to liberal and progressive values arriving from the the West. But take this counter-revolution, combine with real and imagined political/religious grievances and young men who are desperate, alienated, mentally unbalanced, and you get killers like Anders Breivik in Norway and the Charlie Hebdo assassins.

Coming Soon To A Country Near You: Cruel Britannia

In one of Paul Theroux's travel books (sorry, I can't remember which) he said that some countries seem perpetually stuck in their own unique time lines: Turkey, for example, always seems twenty years behind the times; the U.S. is always in the here and now; and Britain and Japan are perpetually one week ahead of everyone else. There wasn't anything scientific in Theroux's analysis, just the feeling that in the case of Britain and Japan, the next big things in culture and technology always seem to be coming from those two countries. There's a kernel of truth in this, which is distressing news for the rest of the world if you've paid attention to British politics in the last couple of years.

In Britain, class warfare is the new black, and fashion-conscious right-wing governments and political parties around the world will be taking notice and adjusting their wardrobes accordingly. Britain's coaliton government, led by the Conservatives under David Cameron, has been aggressively pursuing a fiscal austerity agenda, and their most recent budget put the boots to the millions in the U.K. receiving various kinds of social welfare payments, everything from disability benefits to housing allowances, not to mention opening the NHS to privatization. In sum, the working poor, the unemployed and the disabled are being forced to pay for the follies of Britain's banking sector, a tax system that seems to have been designed by and for Russian oligarchs, and a military that still thinks it's guarding an empire. So Cameron's government has been passing out a lot of economic poison pills to what used to be called the working class (when there was work), but what, one wonders, have they done to put a positive spin on this program of impoverishment? Simple: justify it by tacitly claiming that the people being harmed are scum anyway, so what's the problem? They deserve it.

This past week in England a verdict of guilty was brought down against the Philpotts, a loathsome couple who burned down their own house in a bizarre scheme to emerge as heroes after they rescued their six children. All the children died in the fire. The front page of the Daily Mail is the end product of a campaign by right-wing media outlets and politicians to portray people receiving any kind of social assistance as "scroungers", "parasites" and "feral". These people don't "have" children, they, according to the Daily Mail, "breed." Taking his cue from the tabloids, George Osborne, Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, wasted no time in inferring that the Philpotts' crimes were somehow a result of social welfare spending. What we have here is no less than class warfare, albeit a war that is completely one-sided. Britain's right-wing papers are to the Conservatives what Fox News is to the Republicans in the U.S., and on behalf of the Conservatives they have been waging a propaganda war against the working class, furiously stoking resentment and fear amongst the middle class, and turning the working poor against those living on the "dole."

Papers like the Sun, Daily Mail and the Telegraph  accomplish this by acting as a media form of Predator drone, keeping a lidless eye focused on Britain's have-nots. Should any member of the underclasses engage in some kind of benefits fraud or enjoy a glitzy "lifestyle" thanks to social welfare payments, the papers authorize a launch of hyper-intensive press coverage that mocks and demonizes both the individual and the welfare state that has supposedly created this monstrous person. The gaudy Philpott case has encouraged the right-wing press and their Conservative pilot fish to come out into the open with their cynical strategy of scapegoating and punishing the underclass in order to enrich the classes above.

This kind of open class warfare hasn't yet made the jump to North America. In the U.S., politicians like to pretend there's no class system, and any attempt to vilify the mostly African-American underclasses runs the risk of being viewed as undiluted racism. What happens instead is that Fox News and the like spend most of their time attacking/smearing those advocating or defending what are perceived as left-wing causes. Here in Canada, the federal Conservative government is waging a relentless propaganda campaign (paid for by the taxpayer) that extolls the benefits of Conservative rule. In their eyes, the underclass is anyone who opposes oil sands development. This is not to say that playing the class warfare card won't happen in either country. Rightists throughout the world increasingly sing from the same hymn book, so if a winning right-wing formula emerges in one part of the world, it's sure to be copied in another.

The interesting question is why the class warfare card is being played now in Britain. The simple answer is that this is the natural next step in the capitalist counter-revolution that began with the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. In the decades after WW II most Western governments enacted wide-ranging social welfare policies and looked upon unions with favour, or at least tolerance. The main reason for this, especially in Europe, was fear of communism. Thatcher put an end to all that. Capitalism, flying under the banners of Thatcherism and Reaganomics, was determined to roll back the economic order to a state that pre-dated WW I. Using terms like globalization, rationalization, healthy competition, and meritocracy, rightists presented this counter-revolution as an exercise in scientific, logical management of the world economy. That myth dissolved in the international financial crisis of 2007-08. What to do next? In Britain, it seems the answer is to take the PR filters off and have at the underclasses with all the vitriol the tabloid press can muster. And who can blame them? The upper classes have been searching for a new blood sport ever since the ban on fox hunting in 2002. Tally ho, and see you on the barricades!

What Makes a Conservative Conservative?

Republican or Democrat?

Have you ever wondered why someone chooses to vote Republican or Conservative? Or who agrees with the stuff that comes out of the mouths of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter? Is it simply the case that some people weigh the available economic and sociological evidence and, after due consideration, decide that the right wing is the right way to go? Or is there a psychological component to being conservative, especially at the angriest, spittle-flecked end of the right-wing spectrum? It turns out there is a compelling explanation for why people work for and support right-wing political parties and causes. The answer comes in a book titled On the Psychology of Military Incompetence (1976) by Norman F. Dixon.

Dr. Dixon served ten years in the British Army from 1940-50 and, among other honours, became a Fellow of the British Psychological Society. His book is an attempt to explain why military organizations often encourage and promote people who are intellectually incompetent or psychologically unfit for the tasks they're charged with. Here's how Dixon frames his thesis:

"How, if they are so lacking in intelligence, do people become senior military commanders? And what is it about military organizations that they should attract, promote and ultimately tolerate those whose performance at the highest levels may bring opprobrium upon the organizations which they represent?"

One of the main reasons for this situation, as Dixon explains, is that the military tends to attract people with low self-esteem, weak egos, and/or severe anxieties about disorder. A military environment gives strength and value to those who see themselves as weak or outsiders, and order and structure to those who fear freedom and disorder. Here's how Dixon explains it:

"...displayed behaviour symptomatic of extremely weak egos. In this light, their behaviour typifies the neurotic paradox in which the individual's need to be loved breeds, on the one hand, an insatiable desire for admiration with avoidance of criticism, and, on the other, an equally devouring urge for power and positions of dominance. The paradox is that those needs inevitably result in behaviour so unrealistic as to earn for the victim the very criticism which he has been striving so hard to avoid."


And:


"Incompetent commanders, it has been suggested, are often those who were attracted to the military because it promised gratification of certain neurotic needs. These include a reduction of anxiety regarding real or imagined lack of virility/potency/masculinity; defences against anal tendencies; boosts for sagging self-esteem; the discovering of loving mother-figures and strong father-figures; power, dominance and public acclaim; the finding of relatively powerless out-groups on to whom the individual can project those aspects of himself  which he finds distasteful; and legitimate outlets for, and adequate control of, his own aggression."

It's at this point that I want to extrapolate from Dixon's book the idea that what he says about the military mind and character applies equally to the right-wing mind. The two are not far apart. In fact, it would be hard to find a party or person of the right that doesn't offer vociferous support for the military or marital virtues. The most extreme form of this is fascism, in which politics becomes blended with militarism. Right-wing parties, whether it's the Republicans in the U.S. or the Conservatives in Canada and the U.K. are uniformly pro-military. These parties are quick, even eager, to undertake or urge military action, and military spending almost inevitably increases when they're in power. Dixon goes on to show that, unsurprisingly, the military also attracts authoritarian personalities:

"In the place of free-ranging, creative and inventive thought, an authoritarian's thinking is confined to rigid formulae and inflexible attitudes. He is intolerant of unusual ideas and unable to cope with contradictions...the authoritarian personality is intolerant of  ambivalence and ambiguity. Just as he cannot harbour negative and positive feeling for the same person but must dichotomize reality into loved people versus hated people, white versus black and Jew versus Gentile, so also he cannot tolerate ambiguous situations or conflicting issues. To put it bluntly, he constructs of the world an image as simplistic as it is at variance with reality."

If the above passage was creatively rephrased it could stand as an oath of allegiance for Tea Party members. The desire to reduce politics and the world to the most simplistic terms has been a hallmark of rightist politicians from the local to the international level. George W. Bush's "Axis of Evil" was one example, of many, of his attempts to turn the world into an Us versus Them situation. And the current crop of GOP presidential candidates go out of their way to boil all issues down to whether something is American (capitalist, Christian, pro-family, patriotic) or un-American (socialist, godless, liberal, elitist). Sarah Palin's success amongst the rightist demographic is based largely on her simple-mindedness; they can rest assured that she has no complex or contradictory thoughts, and her opinions proceed from a simplistic and unalterable set of values.

It would also seem that politicians who are, to put it scientifically, dumber than a bag of hammers, are invariably working for the right. It's a perfect environment for them; they have self-esteem issues from knowing that they're dunces, and right-wing parties keep things simple for them with policies and slogans a sixth grader can understand. Examples of dim bulb rightists are almost too numerous to mention. But I will: the previously mentioned Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle, Ronald Reagan, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum and George W. All of these people have been the butt of late-night TV humour precisely because they are stupid. Finding an equal number of high-profile left-wing politicians this dumb is almost impossible. There are leftists who promote policies or causes that could be described as flawed, futile, inefficient or wrong-headed, but it's difficult to find a lefty who's transparently a slack-jawed yokel in the way that Dubya was. This isn't to say that the left can't attract wingnuts, which it can and does, but those wingnuts usually did very well in school.

I'm not arguing that all rightists are dimwits or psychological misfits. Some could be categorized as members of the patrician class, who feel that it's the right and duty of the upper-classes to control the levers of power. George H. Bush and Nelson Rockefeller would be examples of patricians, and British political history is stuffed with this type of politician. An even larger category of rightists consists of careerists. These rightists have chosen their political path because it seems to be a quick and easy route to the top of the political ladder. Even though Barack Obama isn't a rightist (at least by American definitions), his political life story provides a fine example of a careerist at work, constantly moving onward and upward without taking a strong stand on anything in particular on the way up.

I'd love to toss out more quotes from Dixon's book but then this post would run on forever. The conclusion that can certainly be drawn from it is that one's political preference is often determined by psychological traits. On the Psychology of Military Incompetence is not as dry a read as I may have made it sound. Dixon is a witty writer, and his stories of military ineptitude through the ages are fascinating and often jaw-dropping. I don't think it's still in print, but Amazon has it in Kindle format, and a good-sized library system probably has a copy or two.