The first book on the pandemic is here already

Before long we’ll have a tsunami of books about COVID-19. No surprise, perhaps, that Slavoj Žižek is first out of the blocks. But his book is oddly comforting

Right now I am sitting in the middle of Manhattan, which is kind of a stupid place to be during this epidemic. Five weeks in, daily deaths have dropped to “only” 500+ (from a peak near 800 a week or so ago). But the city remains in silence. In normal times, there is a hum of traffic from nearby Seventh Avenue; now there’s nothing, save for the odd siren. Ten minutes ago an ambulance drew up outside my brownstone just north of Central Park, and the crew wheeled a gurney into the block opposite. They’ve gone now, and there’s a police van there instead.

I see few people. It is three weeks since I have been out. My neighbour was here but has now gone upstate. Every few days a delivery will come to my door, borne on the ubiquitous e-bikes that speed pizzas around New York City. (They are illegal, but the Mayor’s decided not to ticket them for the duration.) My bellpush buzzes and I go downstairs to find a masked and gloved figure at the door with groceries, or liquor. We stand well apart; they pass me my bag at arm’s length, and at arm’s length I hand over a grubby $10 or $20 note as a tip, not much in truth for someone taking the risks that they do. They turn quickly away and speed off through the deserted city.

Now and then I clamp on my earphones and talk to someone. On Monday it was my cousin in London. A few days earlier it was my sister in rural Oxfordshire; three cases in her village. Today, Sunday, I spoke to my friend from the office. She is just a mile away on the East Side. I miss her. We talked about food. I make huge pots of meat sauce or dhal that are meant to last me a week but after two days I am sick of them. She made a huge stew of barley and collard greens and is already sick of that. We laughed; and then spoke, as one so often does, of the world after this, and how it will be changed.

*

Slavoj Žižek thinks he knows – or at least, he sees two possible scenarios: Communism or barbarism. The first would surely imply some Stalinist hell; the second, a sort of Mad Max dystopia in which we chase each other through the streets with Armalites, killing for a roll of toilet paper or a tin of beans. Actually, Žižek’s vision of both is more subtle, and more plausible. They’re set out in his new book, Pandemic! COVID-19 Shakes the World (OR Books).

I don’t know who chose the title; perhaps the sub’s desk of a Fleet Street tabloid. But my goodness, he certainly got the book out quickly. This may have seemed cynical to some. In fact, Žižek is not making money from this; he is donating his royalties to Médecins Sans Frontières, and in any case the book is modestly priced (and the publisher gave away the first 10,000 downloads for free). Still, it may be his perceived opportunism that prompted a coruscating review on Buzzfeed (The First Book About The Coronavirus Is Here, And It's Terrible, April 8 2020). Yohann Koshy in The Guardian (April 23 2020) was less harsh, but described the book as ‘forgettable’.

To be sure, the book has some of the hallmarks of Žižek’s previous book (of which more in a minute). One is that he jumps about somewhat rather than developing an ordered, linear argument – perhaps because the book’s been assembled from pieces already published in the media. Another is a tendency to quote the sort of French intellectual that inspired Sokal and Bricmont’s 1999 book Fashionable Nonsense. In fact Žižek is not jerking off; he has studied and worked in France and has genuinely been influenced by the theories of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and has brought them across to his own discipline, philosophy. But to the anglophone reader, with their pragmatic approach, it can all sound rather pretentious, for we judge a writer’s skill by their clarity and simplity of expression. Lacan or Derrida may relate to the French mind; for us, John Stuart Mill or George Orwell make more sense.

But the book is not terrible. And while Žižek may not order his argument as a logical progression, that argument is surely there. He writes of the huge bailouts, the tax relief and the millions of unemployment cheques the UK and US are using to try and protect the economy. “There is effectively something much more radical going on,” he says. “With such measures, money no longer functions in a traditional capitalist way; it becomes a voucher to allocate available resources so that society can go on functioning, outside the constraints of the law of value.” Žižek actually refers to this new corporatism as ‘Communism’. One wonders if it is really that, but he is surely right to ask whether it will become the new normal and, if it does, whether we will shift to a post-capitalist world. He believes we may. In short, COVID-19 could be a body-blow for capitalism.

Or maybe not. Maybe it will just make it nastier. In the final chapter, Žižek presents an alternative scenario. What if this is all a plot to preserve capitalism? Maybe the capitalists have understood for some time that their system is unsustainable, and have been searching for a way to reorder and preserve it – and have found in the pandemic exactly the tool they need. “What if [capital is] ruthlessly exploiting the pandemic in order to impose a new form of governance?” he asks, and goes on to paint a grim picture of what that might be; the old and the weak left to die, workers’ living standards slashed and more. It will not help that the pandemic has – according to Žižek – unleashed a tide of ideological viruses; fake news, paranoid conspiracy theories, racism. These are forces that the Right could certainly harness. Žižek regards this outcome as barbarism.

But there is an alternative: Communism. And what Žižek means by this is surprisingly mild; he certainly does not want us to return to the Gulag. Rather, states should “seek cooperation with other states. As in a military campaign, information should be shared and plans fully coordinated. This is all I mean by the “Communism” needed today.” So the essence of Pandemic! is that Žižek sees two possible outcomes to the pandemic; his rather mild form of Communism, or barbarism. And populations must organise and fight for the former. So stark is this choice, in Žižek’s view, that we should not waste time in fuzzy New Age speculation about changes to our values when all is over. We must be harshly practical.

*

It’s not the first time Žižek’s made this sort of argument. Neither is it the first time he’s trotted out a book in double-quick time in response to the news. Back in 2016 he published Against the Double Blackmail: Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbours – a meditation on Europe’s refugee crisis and what it really meant.

“Refugees,” wrote Žižek, “are the price humanity is paying for the global economy.” They are a result of global inequalities, and slamming down the drawbridge will not help, for mass-migrations are an inevitable part of the future, especially as climate change begins to bite. However, opening the floodgates and letting large numbers of refugees into Europe is an equally futile response, and can only cause trouble; in the end, we won’t like them and they won’t like us. Better to understand that this is all the result of global class struggle, and engage with it. Half-measures will get us nowhere.

Against the Double Blackmail was especially harsh on liberals and their response to the refugee crisis. Early in the book Žižek condemned the hypocrisy he thought inherent in arguing for open borders for refugees. Everyone knows it won’t happen, he said, because it would “trigger a populist revolt”, so advocating it is a self-indulgence of those who want to present themselves as “beautiful souls”. In the same vein, he argued against opening the doors to refugees on humane grounds, and insisted that there were limits to human empathy. Do not pretend we can empathise with refugees, he says. And don’t expect them to be grateful to us for being rich. He cited the New Year’s Eve 2015 disturbances in Cologne, when large numbers of women were assaulted, apparently by refugees. Žižek also drew on his links with psychoanalysis to argue that people of different cultures do not necessarily wish to live in proximity (here he was influenced by psychoanalyst Lacan’s idea of “the other”; a good example of Žižek’s ability to bring ideas across disciplines).

What all this led up to was Žižek’s central point: There is no point in pretending to like people who we don’t really want living next door to us. It’s a hypocritical liberal lie and in any case, it won’t solve the problem. The refugee crisis is a symptom of global class war. The rich world fuels conflict so that it can rob poorer countries of their natural resources, and refugees, Boko Haram and the rest are the result; what did we expect? There is no “let them in” option, and no “keep them out” choice either. There is only one answer: To engage with the class struggle. This is a profoundly Marxian analysis, imbued with a visceral loathing for a hypocritical, self-interested “liberal” class that Žižek clearly thought was at its worst on the refugee issue.

Was he wrong? Western liberals did have some thinking to do. As Žižek also suggested, the “culture wars” did, and do, represent a class struggle between liberals and their own proletariat, and the different responses to the refugee crisis – “refugees welcome” hashtags on one side, Pegida on the other – did throw this into sharp relief. And it is quite true that global instability is a result of inequality, just as air masses of different temperatures create the weather. So a “humane” response to the refugee crisis would solve nothing. At the same time, I could not help being annoyed by Žižek’s analysis. Humanity is not always a bad basis for policy, and empathy is not always the false emotion that he seemed to imply in Against the Double Blackmail. Besides, what would he do if he saw a Syrian or an Eritrean struggling in the water? Leave them to drown? I don’t suppose so.

I did not, in fact, like Against the Double Blackmail. I thought it bleak. It was a polemic that had virtually nothing optimistic or generous in its 25,000-odd words. But it did have some intriguing insights, and its central, Marxian, message of global class war made alarming sense. Against the Double Blackmail did have something to say, and liberals who were too smug about the refugee crisis should have read it. But I found it – as I said – bleak. A humane response is not always the tawdry hypocrisy that Žižek seemed, in that book, to perceive it to be. I finished the book respecting Žižek’s ruthless logic but less sure of his humanity or his sense of humour.

*

Now, reading Pandemic!, I wonder if I was wrong – if not about that earlier book, at least about the man. Against the Double Blackmail was written as a polemic and was probably always supposed to piss people off. But Žižek was not a refugee and – like all of us – could probably not imagine how it felt to be one. The COVID-19 disaster is different; even if we remain healthy, we are all involved, and he is no exception. Maybe that is why Pandemic! has a much more humane feel.

Žižek in Warsaw, 2009 (Mariusz Kubik)

For example, Žižek is, like me, not young (he is 71), and his son must limit contact him. “Only now,” he writes, “when I have to avoid many of those who are close to me ...I fully experience their presence, their importance to me.” Indeed, at the start of the book, he quotes Jesus after the Resurrection – His injunction noli me tangere, “touch me not”, and His explanation – wherever my followers love each other, I am present. I don’t think this is a sudden conversion to Christ; Žižek has been highly critical of religion in the past (see for instance this piece in the New York Times from 2006), and I doubt if he’s changed his mind. Rather, his point seems to be that human relationships will survive this and may even be strengthened. This is not the Savonarola of just four years ago.

Pandemic! Is humane in another respect: Žižek is at pains to stress that the virus has no nature of its own. It is not in any way self-aware. It is simply a self-replicating piece of DNA. It does not think, does not have it in for us, has not been sent to punish us. It is a scientific phenomenon that demands a scientific answer. To believe otherwise is to persuade oneself that we are somehow important. “Even if our very survival is threatened, there is something reassuring in the fact that we are punished, the universe (or even Somebody-out-there) is engaging with us,” says Žižek. “We matter in some profound way. The really difficult thing to accept is the fact that the ongoing epidemic is a result of natural contingency at its purest, that it just happened and hides no deeper meaning.” But we do have to accept that lack of meaning. There is, says Žižek, nothing to be gained through a mystical approach to what is happening to us.

This is a point that Žižek could have pursued much further than he does; he only really mentions it in passing, albeit at more than one point in the book. But it is important. While a distrust of the mystical clearly applies to religion, it should also constrain those environmentalists who talk of our species as a plague on the planet and would see a sort of secular divinity in the plague sent, in its turn, to punish us. Such views, whether clerical or secular, can encourage us to believe that we have no control over our fate when we do, in fact, have agency. They are, in effect, inhumane. Shut up, you are guilty, you are being punished; people will die; you must accept your fate; you deserve it; there is nothing you can do. One remembers Father Paneloux in Camus’s The Plague, preaching with force that the pestilence is a flail from the sky, sent by God to punish the sinful of Oran. But it was not. It was an accident of nature that Rieux, the doctor, and his friends had to combat, and it was in their quiet pragmatism that true compassion lay. So it is today.

It is a point that Žižek could have made much more strongly in Pandemic!; after all, a big part of the book is the argument that we face a choice. This pandemic will shape history, that much is clear – but shape it into what? An even more barbaric form of capitalism? Or a benign “Communism”, as he calls it? This is where we all have agency, and Žižek wants us to use it. 

*

It is now seven o’clock on a cold spring evening. In the afternoon thunder and heavy rain swept over New York City, but the clouds are breaking up now, there are patches of blue, and a fresh breeze is blowing through my open window. The air has felt much cleaner since the lockdown began. It has been a strange day. The death rate has been falling but it is still not clear where we stand, and the city lacks the testing kits it needs if it is to begin the long journey back to normal. On this, and much else, Governor Cuomo and President Trump do not see eye to eye. They met in Washington this afternoon. I doubt if it was cordial.

Meanwhile, on the dot of seven, there is clapping and cheering in the street. It happens every night at this time. The neighbours are expressing their thanks – love, almost – for the healthcare and other essential workers who have stayed at their posts, and sometimes died. They know what the cost has been. The transit authority alone has lost about 50 dead so far. The clapping goes on for several minutes, and some people bang pots and pans. Listening to this, I wonder if our values might be changing.

That is why Žižek’s book is important. It has been written in a hurry; the argument is not linear; there are digressions, and quotations from philosophers that most of his readers will not know, or greatly care about. But the book is not ‘terrible’, or 'forgettable’. It was worth writing, and is worth reading. Our values are changing, but Žižek knows that our world may not change to reflect them; may, in fact, change into something that is not better, but rather nastier. But we could also be on the verge of something new, more decent. It will be up to us.

Mike Robbins is the author of a number of fiction and non-fiction books. They can be ordered from bookshops, or as paperbacks or e-books from Amazon and other on-line retailers.

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America by Meteor

For a year of my childhood, a huge 1966 Meteor sedan was my window on a continent. A journey through 1960s America

It was enormous. Because North American cars were, then. Folks liked their cars big, with engines to match – great lazy V8s that would not look out of place in a small freighter. Today, many Americans are quite happy with European-size cars, and even the big ones are not really that big anymore. Fifty years ago it was different. The befinned extravaganzas of the late 1950s had gone, but many quite ordinary cars were still land yachts so vast that the driver peered out over a massive forward flight deck the size of a small African republic. The other day I passed an ancient Chrysler in the street. It startled me. 

I am surprised my father bought a land yacht. We had lived in North America before, in the late 1950s, and he had owned a quite modest Plymouth station wagon. He was unusual in this. There was the odd Beetle around, of course, and in the 1950s Americans could even buy a Morris Minor, though I don’t think many did. But most disapproved of such un-American devices. A few even had bumper stickers that read “Stamp Out Small Cars”. (A friend of my father’s, very unusually, had an Isetta bubble car. It had a sticker reading “Stamp Out Large Dogs”.) Still, the modest Plymouth had carried us from Columbus to Colorado and to Miami and back, although a wheel came off somewhere in Georgia. I do not remember that. I was only two and must have slept through it. Then in 1968 we returned to the Americas, this time to the Canadian capital, Ottawa. My father again bought a car. But this time he decided to go large.

In British Columbia (Wikimedia Commons/Colin Keigher)

His new aircraft carrier on wheels was Canadian, and was almost certainly built at the Ford plant in Oakville, Ontario. Ford had built cars in Canada since as early as 1904. It still does. The car was a two-year-old Meteor Rideau 500 Sedan, a 1966 model that had Ford Galaxie underpinnings but got its front and rear styling from the US-market Mercury S-55, also introduced that year. There were three engines, starting with a 4-litre inline six. This had 150 HP (148 BHP) – not bad for 1966, but it must still have struggled in a car that size. Most Canadians will have chosen a V8; either the 4.7-litre small-block V8 with around 200 BHP, or – at the top of the range – a completely different V8 lifted from the Ford Thunderbird, which was just over 7 litres and produced about 340 BHP. As my father intended to drive us all over North America, he will have chosen a V8. I don’t know which.

He was clear why he’d chosen a Meteor, however. US-market cars were not only enormous; they were very softly sprung, and in corners they wallowed like whales. Canadians, it seems, liked stiffer suspension and better handling. They also liked subtler colours than their southern neighbours. Ours was a discreet mid-blue metallic. The interior was blue too, and – a novelty for me – it had a radio. There was a metallic feel to the upholstery, and a metallic smell – not unpleasant. (Actually all cars have a distinctive natural scent inside. If you blindfolded me and sat me in a 1950s Morris Oxford or Minor, I would know at once from the warm smell of the carpets and upholstery. Old estate cars used to smell of wet labrador. All smelled of cigarette smoke. Modern cars have an anodyne, chemical odour.)

Within a week or two, the Meteor took us south into New York State to see the fall colours. And almost every weekend that winter, it carried us across the Ottawa River to Quebec, past the francophone city of Hull and into the Gatineau Hills, where we would ski – sometimes downhill, but more often on trails. In the week, it took my father to his office in Ottawa. At night it sat in a communal garage, partly underground, where an electric flex ran from the wall to each car to keep the engine warm. It was easy to see why. In midwinter the temperature could drop to minus 6 deg F (about minus 14 deg C). You did not want to wait for a huge 7-litre V8 to warm up before the heater started working.

Then in spring it was time to drive further.

*

That car was my window on a continent. We travelled south through New York State and Pennsylvania, the rain beating down on the huge flat hood almost all the way until we arrived in Washington DC in a burst of sunshine. We would stay for a week in Arlington, Virginia with a friend of my father’s who worked for NASA. They would go to the office together and talk endlessly of remote sensing and photogrammetry. And the rest of us would sight-see. It was April 1969. We swept past the Tidal Basin with its cherry blossoms and onto the Arlington Memorial Bridge, the entrance to Arlington Cemetery ahead. As we crossed the bridge, my father made the sort of slight grunt he made which meant he was about to say something important and we should all shut up.

“This is a country at war,” he said. He paused, then added: “It is proving hard for them, and your opinions on the war are not needed here. Do you understand?”

An identical car (Wikimedia Commons/dave_7 Lethbridge)

I suppose I did, and I know my sister, who was older, will have done. In 1969 the United States was as deeply embroiled in Vietnam as it ever would be; the bodies were coming home and the war was deeply divisive. It had already done for Lyndon Johnson, who had ended his bid for re-election the previous year after a poor showing in the New Hampshire primary. Richard Nixon had become President in January.

In that strange year of war and Woodstock, crew cuts and dope, Cold War and counterculture, a country drifted past beyond the Meteor’s windows; clapboard houses and white picket fences, small towns, great cities, country roads, Interstates. There were Holiday Inns – posh then – and quiet motels, basic but friendly; breakfast and lunch in diners bright with chrome and Formica and red plastic seating; my favourite drink (7 Up) and fries. Very rarely, a McDonald’s. My parents did not approve of McDonald’s. Aged 11, I adored them. I am sure they tasted better then, and the restaurants themselves were always classic roadside ones, complete with big Golden Arches. But the best fries we had were in Canada, in a remote roadhouse in British Columbia; a great wooden bowl of crisp fresh fries, washed down with Coke as the mist and rain cloaked the green wooded hills outside.

Near Cambridge, Massachusetts, we stopped at another friend of my father’s. (He worked closely with Americans for over 30 years. There were many such friends.) They had a 100-acre farm. We spent a wonderful day during which I was taught how to shoot a .45 that deafened me, and slammed back into my shoulder. We blasted away at Budweiser cans. The kids had a 1956 Buick Eight they had bought, as scrap, for a dollar. They let me drive it. Aged 11, I craned my neck to see over the rim of the steering wheel and bumped around a large field at 20 miles an hour.

We went to Vermont to visit the Baroness Maria von Trapp. Well, to stay at her ski lodge near Stowe. She was warm and welcoming but looked nothing like Julie Andrews, being rotund and rather jolly. My sister came in red and flushed after a day’s skiing. “My dear, you look very mountainous today,” boomed the Baroness. She found out it was my sister’s birthday and bore a big cake with 16 candles into the dining room, preceded by her sons in lederhosen. The trail skiing was wonderful. One night at dusk we skied around the Baron’s grave, a peaceful place on a forest path.

*

But the Meteor blotted its copybook. The old-fashioned automatic choke failed and my father spent some minutes in the snow outside the von Trapp lodge, holding it open with his finger so that the engine could warm up. It was not the first or last time. A week or so after he bought the car, it suffered some malady and went back to the dealer. (They gave him a rather smart new green Mercury coupe in the meantime.) One spring day as we cruised up the New Jersey Turnpike, the muffler (silencer) fell off with a nasty clatter; it was still attached at the manifold end. A New Jersey mechanic assured us he could fix it, then found that Mercury parts did not fit Meteors. “I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do; it’s Canadian,” he said mournfully. “I understand,” said my father, sounding as if he did. The muffler was tied back on with electric flex. Of course this burned through. The next garage fixed it with a wire hanger from the closet. This bodge got us back across the border. Meanwhile I had constantly to keep my legs away from the back of the front bench seat, as there was a wire that stuck out at knee level.

The Meteor’s various mechanical diseases frustrated my father. Yet it cannot have been that bad, for in early summer we hit the road again, and went further than ever – to the far west. For the first leg, the long journey across Ontario, the car was loaded onto a Canadian National train and we took berths with it, to be unloaded in Winnipeg in a warm summer midnight. The next day we drove south to the border and west into the Dakotas, across the Badlands, and tried to find a motel in a small town off the Interstate where the only option had swinging Western-style doors. The road signs on the way back to the Interstate were peppered with bullet holes; clearly target practice from a moving vehicle was the chief recreation here. On to Billings, Montana, and an overnight stay in a Holiday Inn.

The Beartooth Pass (Wikimedia Commons/Phil Armitage)

The next day was a magical one that is still in my mind over 50 years later. Billings is on the plain. Actually most of Montana is, despite the name. But as we left the town, a line of silver appeared on the horizon, and drew slowly clearer as we passed through gently rising land, the Great Plains turning to orchards and farms. In due course we reached the foot of the mountains, and started the steep climb to the 11,000ft Beartooth Pass. The ground dropped away to the right of the car, the road twisting this way and that as it reached for the sky. Some time after leaving the hot summer plain below, we came out on the summit to find people skiing in June. Then the road dropped slightly and we came into Yellowstone, and a world of bears. We stopped and sat awhile above the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, forty miles long, a thousand feet deep; a spectacle dwarfed only by the Grand Canyon itself. After that, on to the Grand Tetons, one of the most beautiful places in the Americas. Then on across Wyoming, its great grassy plains dotted by nodding donkeys; there was oil here – and finally to Boulder, Colorado, where my father had business. Then back north through nameless small towns of white fences and flags, to Glacier National Park.

Day after day the swaying of the enormous car, the burbling of the big engine, the tangy smell of the upholstery, the endless horizons beyond the bonnet and the towns and hills and plains through the window became the rhythm of my life. One day we drove north through Idaho. The towns and villages were smaller and poorer here, the houses a little unkempt; elderly cars stood in the front yards, sometimes on bricks. Then we crossed the Canadian frontier near Grand Forks, British Columbia, and suddenly there were narrow roads and high hedges and green fields and a woman in Wellington boots driving a herd of cattle to milking down a country lane, as she might in Devon – from which, indeed, she might have come. We turned left and drove for a day and reached the Pacific. Then we turned back to Penticton in the Okanagan Valley, with its semi-arid climate and its cherry orchards.

Later the Meteor carried us across the Rockies as far as Banff Springs, where we met relatives staying at the palatial Banff Springs Hotel. Some time in the afternoon of July 20, I walked through the lounge, where many people were watching TV, despite the sunshine outside. Suddenly there was a flurry of applause. A dim, ghostly figure in a space suit moved on the screen, planting the Stars and Stripes on the surface of the Moon.

*

The Meteor’s last task was to take us back to Ottawa, where my parents would arrange their affairs before returning to England; my father’s work in Canada was done. On this last, longest journey from Banff to Ottawa, we thrummed steadily for what seemed like days across the Great Plains, passing Regina and Winnipeg, stopping but briefly in roadside motels – I remember little of them. At last we left Manitoba and crossed into Ontario, leaving the plains behind for endless pines, skirting north of the Great Lakes, a long journey that made one understand what Siberia might be like. The scenery continued to move past, but now it was monotonous. We were on the Trans-Canada Highway, over 4,800 miles of road. In 1969 it was not quite all sealed yet; around Sault Ste. Marie we ran for miles over gravel, at a steady 15-20 MPH, following other cars at a wary distance to avoid the plumes of dust. Around there I remember noticing an odd Canadian habit: on a long journey, younger children would sleep on a sedan’s parcel shelf. We crossed north-east to the mining city of Sudbury, with its enormous monumental nickel coin on a plinth; and finally we arrived at Ottawa.

I do not remember when I last saw the Meteor. Some time in mid-August my sister, mother and I left for Montreal, where we boarded the Empress of England for the voyage home. My father, who hated ships, followed us a week or so later by air. During that week he must have disposed of the car; perhaps he took it back to the Mercury dealer. I can’t imagine that I expected to see it again.

The voyage home was rough and I was as sick as a dog. We tied up in Liverpool’s Gladstone Dock in the pouring rain. A few weeks later I was back at school, and there were no more turnpikes and towns, cities or shacks, mountains, plains, bears, nodding donkeys, deep gorges, huge trucks, mile-long trains or McDonald’s, all seen from a huge blue car. There was only the family Vauxhall Victor and a smaller, meaner world.

*

I suppose I had a restlessness instilled in me by those journeys; the voyages across the Atlantic (I described them here) and the long hours in the back of the great blue car watching a continent speed past me. As a young man I did a number of media jobs in London, but never really settled. I wanted to be out in the world. In 1987, aged 30, I became a development volunteer in Sudan. But this is not the place to write of that. Save, that is, for one incident.

In August 1988 I and five colleagues made the eight-hour run from our base near Gedaref to Khartoum. It was the wet season, but the rains no longer reached Khartoum. That night would prove an exception. An hour from the city it was raining so heavily that we saw cars abandoned, at least one slewed off the road completely. The beefy diesel Land Cruiser managed all right as the water reached its sills; the exhaust was routed above the driver so that it did not get blocked in mud or floods. By the time we reached Khartoum we were bumper-deep; a long bow-wave came from the few cars left moving. One came towards us on the wrong side of the road. Our driver honked angrily, then we realised there was no-one in it; it was being swept away.

We reached our destination. But over the next week or two it was hard to get around in the aftermath of the floods, which had left a million homeless. Buses were always uncertain anyway; by the time the bus to town reached my lodgings it would be so full that I had to hang on outside the door, my rear exposed to any passing lamppost that came too close. Now they were more packed than ever, and all vehicles had to skirt the enormous puddles left by the floods. The Blue Nile was rising, and it was thought it might burst its banks, causing a further disaster. Every night I would go, alone or with a friend, to the May Gardens near the confluence of the Blue and White Niles and look at the water level. Day by day a small cargo boat moored there would rise and rise, and the water was just below the bank.

One day I hitched a lift to town on the back of a small pickup, the sort that carried everything from groceries to sheep. There were many people in the open rear, and I balanced precariously on the tailgate. We hit a bump and I grasped the metal hard to steady myself. As I did so, a very large metallic blue car crossed the junction ahead of us. It seemed unmistakeable.

For a moment I was taken aback, then told myself to be silly; the Meteor would now be over 20 years old and had certainly died, in Canada, a long time ago.

The driver's office (Wikimedia Commons/dave_7 Lethbridge)

That night, after dark, we went to the May Gardens as we normally did. The air was hot and close, and there was the usual smell of dust in the air. Several cars were parked beside the park. One of them was a metallic blue Meteor Rideau 500. It was too much of a coincidence. Even in Canada, they had been rare, sold in that exact style for only a year; I could remember seeing only one other, a pale green one – it had passed us in Montana and when we saw each other’s Ontario plates, we honked and waved. I never saw another blue one. I peered inside. Was it my imagination, or was there a wire sticking out of the front seat? I think there was.

Of course I can’t be sure. The car had been rare even in Canada, but it wasn’t unique. One of the pictures I have posted here shows an identical vehicle, albeit looking a little rough. But we’d never seen another quite like it that year; and it had been sold in Ottawa, the capital, where it could perhaps have been bought by a Sudanese diplomat and brought home to Khartoum. I have always believed that it was the same car. I wonder if it still exists. I doubt it; it would be 54 years old now. But it is possible. Ten years later I lived in Aleppo, Syria, where high import duty meant that cars were almost literally never scrapped, and the streets were full of beautifully kept Buicks and Dodges and Packards from the 1950s and late 1940s. A friend had a Studebaker from 1955. So I think the Meteor might still be alive, in a hot dusty land, far from home.

At that moment, anyway, I was convinced. I stepped back. The big car stood there in the half-light, its bodywork gleaming dully. Just for a moment I remembered the billowing Great Plains, the endless pine trees of Ontario, the Tidal Basin passing to our left with its cherry blossoms, Beartooth Pass with its vertiginous road, the snowy peaks of the Grand Tetons and the journey down to the Pacific. I looked at it for a moment or two, and then turned away. I never saw the car again.

Mike Robbins is the author of a number of fiction and non-fiction books. They can be ordered from bookshops, or as paperbacks or e-books from Amazon and other on-line retailers.

Follow Mike on Twitter and Facebook.

Two fine new novels inspired by climate change

Climate change and the zeitgeist. Two stories of our time

Who is John Truthing? A charismatic figure who holds rallies at which he urges young Americans to join his movement, Eternity Began Tomorrow, to challenge a morally bankrupt establishment and defeat climate change. They flock to his rallies in identical white tracksuits, swallow a pill called Chillax that makes them feel good, and suck up his teaching. Truthing, meanwhile, lives rather well. But journalist Blazes Bolan is on his case.

That’s the premise of Kevin Brennan’s latest novel, Eternity Began Tomorrow. It sounds a little predictable; feisty young lady journalist unmasks fake guru’s crooked money-making schemes. Except that Kevin Brennan is a very good writer, and this book is not predictable. What happens in the end, not just to Truthing himself but to Bolan too, is a surprise. And as with all the best fiction, the reader doesn’t foresee it but it seems entirely logical once it happens.

Brennan is an editor as well as a writer. He lives in northern California and is the author of a number of books. I had read one of his before – it was Fascination, an unusual but compelling story of a woman whose husband has apparently committed suicide, but has probably just done a runner. She goes in search of him, and the result is a great road-movie-in-writing as she travels across the western USA with a private detective who is secretly in love with her. Fascination is bursting with picaresque characters and odd incidents, but there’s a serious theme. The book is really about searching – on the surface for some superficial thing, but actually for who you are.

Eternity Began Tomorrow is a good read too, as Blazes chases down the truth about Chillax,Truthing and his movement – a pursuit that takes her to a mad chemist in Puglia, a front company in Lichtenstein and Truthing’s palatial HQ in Taos. It’s well-paced and hard to put down, but it’s more than just a good thriller; here too there’s an undercurrent. The theme of seeking something intangible is there again, but perhaps more important, this book is  fiercely contemporary. It’s set against the background of the 2020 Democratic primaries, and is so up-to-the-minute that you realise Brennan must have finished the book just days before it went on sale. Moreover Blazes herself is very much of our time. She writes for a website, not a newspaper – something that will resonate with those of us who get our news from the Daily Beast or Huffington Post or, if we do read newspapers, read their online edition. That’s me to a T; I read the New York Times, the Daily Mirror and the Guardian, but online. I haven’t bought the papers for years.

But what really makes this book so “now” is that Brennan is confronting very immediate questions of the nature of charisma and leadership – topics that are now more important than they have been for 75 years. In a recent interview with writer and editor Susan Toy for her excellent website, Authors-Readers International, Brennan explains that Eternity Began Tomorrow is about climate change, our failure to deal with it, and the way that failure may open us up to some messianic leader such as Truthing – something of which we’d best beware.

I think Brennan is on the money. We’ve got used to seeing charismatic leaders who endanger democracy as a threat coming from the right, and so far they have. But the wave of disillusionment amongst the young could have unforeseen consequences. Eternity Began Tomorrow wins its spurs as a good story and a great read. But there is a hell of a lot going on under the surface.

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CLIMATE change is also a theme of my second book, Alison Layland’s excellent Riverflow.

Layland lives on the borders of Wales and England and is a translator as well as a writer, working with German and French – and, unusually for someone originally from England, in Welsh; in 2002 she won first prize at the National Eistedfodd for a short story in the language. She’s the author of two novels. The first, Someone Else’s Conflict (2014), was a thriller centred on the Balkan conflict and its legacy. Her second, Riverflow, came out last year. Like Brennan’s latest, it is bang up-to-date and captures the zeitgeist, and the angst over climate change, very well.

It’s set in the western part of England, sometimes known as the Marches, that is next to Wales. Layland lives in this region and knows it well. It is beautiful. In the summer of 1972 a friend and I rode across it on racing bikes and pushed on into Wales. Snowdonia was steep and exciting and yet it is not the mountains I remember, but a very long day’s right across the Marches, that great long stretch of Shropshire and other counties that most English people barely know. Half a century ago it was perhaps less crowded than it is now. We crossed a series of steep hills and deep valleys, following a tangled skein of narrow lanes, through half-forgotten villages, past farmhouses where black-and-white collies lay in wait between the gateposts, seemingly asleep but springing up as we passed and barking and chasing off the wheeled invaders. It was a soft overcast day of deep greens and greys. Even now, 48 years later, that day is somehow England in my mind. But the region is dominated by the River Severn, which rises in Wales. It floods.

It is in Shropshire that Layland has set Riverflow. The book starts with a mysterious death. Joe Sherwell’s been drowned, swept away by the river in flood. It was an accident. Or was it? So far as his nephew Bede and his partner Elin know, it was. But there’s a sense of unease. Then a year or two later strange things start happening that suggest that they too could be in danger. Could the answer lie in a long-ago family quarrel?

Riverflow works on two levels. The first is that it’s a well-planned thriller. If you like a good old-fashioned whodunnit, you’ll like this. Layland has the knack that the classic detective writers had of scattering just enough clues for the reader to stay just ahead of the narrative – but not too far, so that at some point you’ll realize who the villain really is and will kick yourself for not spotting it earlier. The second level, though, is what makes this book a bit out of the ordinary. Like Brennan, Layland has tapped into the zeitgeist – a world in which everyone is profoundly worried about climate change, but seems powerless to challenge it.

Riverflow takes place in an acutely-observed modern rural England. It’s set in a village by the Severn in which the current culture wars are very visible. Bede and Elin are environmentalists who are appalled by the rich landowner nearby who’s trying to get fracking started on his land. There are other recognizable characters too – the sustainable energy guy, the landowner’s kind but circumspect old mother, the teenage daughter of divorcees who can’t stand her mother’s new lover. This book might be put together like a classic detective story, but the characters are bang up-to-date. Meanwhile climate change and the threat of another flood are a constant background.

If I had a reservation about this book, it was Bede. His heart is in the right place but he is not as sympathetic as he could be, having super-strong views about the environment and not caring, or maybe not realising, that he can make others uncomfortable in his presence. In particular, his wife and the teenage daughter of a neighbour both show him real kindness and get a bad-tempered response. But maybe Layland knew what she was doing here. Books in which the “good ’uns” are too nice can be a bit flat. I wonder, too, if Layland is trying to tell us something here; again, she has tapped into the zeitgeist, and realises that we do not always communicate with those with whom we do not agree and who might, given time, give us a hearing.

Riverflow could hardly be more relevant. When it was published last year, the Severn hadn’t actually flooded since 2007. But in February 2020 it did. As I write this, towns and villages in Shropshire and Herefordshire are flooded and there is more to come, with flooding also in Scotland, and parts of north-west England getting more than a month’s rain in just two days. Flooding is, of course, not just about climate change; it’s also about the speed of runoff, the result of land-use patterns that we can (hopefully) change. But what is happening is more sinister than that.

Brennan and Layland have seen the threats that confront us, and understand how they are messing with our minds. Sometimes fiction has a function. These authors know that. The fact that these two books are also great reads is a bonus.

Mike Robbins is the author of a number of fiction and non-fiction books. They can be ordered from bookshops, or as paperbacks or e-books from Amazon and other on-line retailers.
Follow Mike on Twitter and Facebook.

Travelling to the war

Travel writing is mostly seen as a distinct genre. But travel, war and history can come together. Two fine books in which they do

When a book is published, it’ll be assigned a genre, and classified on Amazon and other sites as fantasy, urban fantasy, paranormal, history, travel or whatever. That’s inevitable. People need to search for what they want, and if you don’t define a book, no search engine will find it. Besides, humans have an urge to classify. But that does mean that, when a book is hard to label, it may be hard to find. This is a pity, because they can be the most intriguing books of all.

Both the books I’m looking at here defy classification, and maybe their writers do too. Tim Butcher is a journalist who covered the Balkan wars for Britain’s The Daily Telegraph, and also served as its Africa correspondent. He’s since turned to books, and carved out a place for himself as a writer who can combine travelogue, history, war and politics in an original and interesting way.

Norman Lewis is a writer from an earlier generation (he died in 2003 at the age of 95), and is now seen as one of the first real travel writers, but he too is not so easily classified; his article on the treatment of indigenous people in the Amazon basin, Genocide in Brazil, published in the The Sunday Times in 1968, led to the founding of Survival International. But he had had a long-standing interest in the security of indigenous peoples, prompted by travels in Guatemala after the Second World War. Butcher has written several books so far; Lewis wrote dozens, including fiction. But I’m looking at just one from each man here.

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First, Tim Butcher’s The Trigger – Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War is a walk through the Balkans in the footsteps of Gavrilo Princip, the assassin whose bullet killed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914, starting the crisis that led to the First World War. I wasn’t especially interested in the subject of this book, Gavrilo Princip, to begin with; I read it because I had been impressed by one of Tim Butcher’s earlier books, Blood River, an exciting and well-written account of a long and dangerous journey through Central Africa. Like Blood River,The Trigger is a mixture of history, travelogue and journalism – a format Butcher does very well. It is just as good as Blood River, and I ended up being very interested in Princip indeed.

The outline of the book is thus: In the early 1990s Butcher is a young correspondent in the Balkans, covering the conflict for theTelegraph. In Sarajevo he finds people using a small building as a toilet, and is bemused to find that it is the mausoleum of Princip. Butcher moves on but does not forget this odd sight, and in 2012 he resolves to walk across Bosnia and Serbia in Princip’s footsteps. Butcher wants to see if the journey would illuminate the chain of events that had led not only to that war but to the one he covered 80 years later.

In 1907 the 13-year-old Princip walked most of the way from his home in Western Bosnia to Sarajevo to get an education. Later, as a radicalised, political young adult, he went to Serbia and there hatched the plot to kill the Archduke; then, armed, he walked back. It is these journeys Butcher wants to recreate. He starts by enlisting Arnie, his former fixer from Bosnia, as a companion. Arnie, a Bosnian Muslim, is now living in London but, after some thought, he agrees. Meanwhile Butcher tries to track down Princip’s birthplace, Obljaj. This is hard, as it is an obscure hamlet deep in what Bosnians call the vukojebina (literally, “where the wolves f**k”). He eventually finds it on an old map in the bowels of the Royal Geographical Society. He and Arnie make for Obljaj. It’s when they get there that this narrative, a little slow to start, really takes off. The Princip home is a ruin but, quite unexpectedly, they find the Princip clan still living next door. No-one can remember Gavrilo, who died in prison in 1918. But at least one man remembers his parents in their old age, and the folk-memories of Princip are strong.

The next day Butcher and Arnie start a long walk to Sarajevo. The memories of the Princips, and Butcher’s own diligent research in Sarajevo, uncover a great deal new about the assassin. His killing of the Archduke is part of history but the man himself, locked up at 19, dead at 23, has always been a footnote. Butcher brings him very alive. He also conjures up a vivid picture of Sarajevo as Princip would have found it in 1907, and it reminds me very much of Aleppo, where I lived for several years in the 1990s.

Moreover Butcher finds that Princip’s story does provide keys to the region’s history, and to the conflict of the 1990s. One or two themes emerge strongly from the book. In Butcher’s view, Austria-Hungary, which had only occupied Bosnia in 1878, was a colonial power there, extracting resources – chiefly timber; it did give a little back, but not much. Princip’s fanaticism was rooted in a hatred of what he saw as an oppressive colonial regime that had kept his people miserably poor. (He was himself the seventh of nine children; the previous six had all died in infancy.) Moreover, according to Butcher, the people Princip saw as his were all the South Slavs, not just Serbs. He was thus not a Serbian nationalist as such (and in Butcher’s view, Serbia was not behind the assassination). Instead, Butcher sees him as an anti-colonial freedom fighter. It is not a universal view of Princip, especially in modern Bosnia. But Butcher argues the case very well.

However, one of the most interesting perspectives in this book is Arnie’s. At the time people outside Yugoslavia blamed the 1990s war on ancient primitive hatreds, rather as they spoke of Northern Ireland when I was growing up, and see Syria now. Arnie doesn’t buy it. “Those people who said, ‘These people have always hated each other’ were just being lazy,” he tells Butcher. “In my own life I saw people from different communities work together, live together, get married even. There was nothing inevitable about what happened in the 1990s. It was just that a few – the extremists, the elite, the greedy – saw nationalism as a way to grab what they wanted.”

Like Blood River, this is a thoughtful, well-written book, an absorbing read but also full of insights. Butcher’s knack of combining several roles – the historian, the travel writer and the journalist – serves him well. I look forward to seeing where he does it next. Meanwhile The Trigger is excellent, and was my non-fiction read of the year in 2014 when it came out.

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So to the second of these two writers - Norman Lewis. 

As stated earlier, I have heard Lewis referred to as the first really modern travel writer, but I am not sure he is so easily defined, and besides I wonder if he was really the first. However, the sheer volume and quality of Lewis’s work do mark him out. The Tomb in Seville: Crossing Spain on the Brink of Civil War  was his last book and was published posthumously in the autumn of 2003; he had died several months earlier at the age of 95.

Lewis was born in 1908, in London but to Welsh parents. Both were ardent spiritualists, and his upbringing (described vividly in his first volume of autobiography, Jackdaw Cake), was strange. As a young man he pursued various ventures, including the motor trade and motor racing, and was married, quite young, to the daughter of a Sicilian of noble Spanish descent, Ernesto Corvaja.

In September 1934, Corvaja sent Lewis on a mission to Seville in search of the Corvaja ancestral tomb, which he hoped would be found in the cathedral. His son, Eugene Corvaja, travelled with Lewis.The Tomb in Seville: Crossing Spain on the Brink of Civil War is the account of their journey.

There are some very odd things about this book, not least that it appeared not just posthumously but nearly 70 years after the journey it described. At the time, at least one critic expressed wonder that Lewis should still be writing so well in his 90s, but one wonders if this book was actually written much earlier. It may be that Lewis intended it as part of Jackdaw Cake, published nearly 20 years before - but then held it back for some reason, so that it remained unfinished business for decades. Certainly it has the air of something written much sooner after the event than 70 years.

Equally odd was the timing of their journey. Spain was politically very tense – so much so that October 1934 saw a brief civil war in Spain; it ended quickly, but was a savagely violent interlude, the precursor to the larger conflict that was to follow less than two years later. At one point, Lewis and the younger Corvaja have to secure a place on an armoured train that takes them to Madrid. Here they alight to find themselves in the middle of a firefight, and as they dodge bullets to leave the station, Lewis notices a poster that assures them, in English, that “Spain Attracts and Holds You. Under the Blue Skies of Spain Cares Are Forgotten.”

The book is packed with bizarre incident. As the fighting comes to an end, Lewis and Eugene Corvaja attend a bullfight, and see the rejoneador (a lead bullfighter who fights with a lance) apparently gored to death; “it was given out that he was dead”. (In fact he was not; I couldn’t resist checking). They then decide to investigate a reported mania amongst Madrileños for drinking animal blood. They visit a slaughterhouse, but are “deterred by a woman on her way out, made terrible by the smile painted by the blood on her lips.” Later, on their way through Portugal, the pair hear of a witch-burning, no less, in a small village in Porto called Marco do Canavezes. They travel there to find that the story is substantially true.

The book sometimes raises questions it does not answer. Why would Corvaja senior send his son and his son-in-law on a quixotic journey through Spain in a time of trouble? Did they really hear of a witch-burning in Portugal? (Marco do Canavezes - actually Canaveses - is real enough, and is, oddly, the birthplace of the singer Carmen Miranda; but I can find no mention of the witch-burning story although that does not make it false.)

But does that matter? Why strain at a story of witch-burning in 1934, when a much larger outbreak of atavistic savagery was just beginning? For the most part, the narrative seems heartfelt; the journey clearly left an impression on Lewis and, like Laurie Lee a few months later, he was struck by the poverty. In Andalusia, they “pass through settlements of windowless huts consisting of no more than holes dug in the ground with branch and straw coverings …to take the place of roofs.”

The book is also alive with Lewis's descriptive genius. Thus he and Corvaja, stranded by the conflict, must walk from city to city through the countryside:

…the rich gilding of summer returned to the Navarran landscape. …We moved across boundless plains of billowing rock purged of all colour by the sun. ...Behind the mountains ahead symmetrical and luminous clouds were poised without shift of position as we trudged towards them for hours on end. At our approach an anomalous yellow bloom shook itself from a single tree, transformed into a flock of singing green finches. Lizards, basking in the dust, came suddenly to life and streaked away into the undergrowth.

Therein lies this book’s great strength. It is intensely vivid. To be sure, the book's genesis is odd, and the circumstances of the journey mysterious; but it doesn't matter, for this is one of the best travel books of all time. Beautifully observed and written, it is like a trip through a wormhole – an almost covert glimpse of a world that has been forgotten. It is not perfect, but it does not have to be, for it has the freshness and warmth of a diary entry.

We should be grateful to both Butcher and to Lewis. There is nothing wrong with the conventional travelogue, but these books give us much more. The journeys they describe are 80 years apart, but they have something crucial in common; there is a sense of time as well of place.

Mike Robbins is the author of a number of fiction and non-fiction books. They can be ordered from bookshops, or as paperbacks or e-books from Amazon and other on-line retailers.