Biology of the Worst Kind

Who Gives A Fuck, Says The Home Office

A report from the parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights says that immigrants are deliberately being made destitute by the government.   BBC News Online (before the piece was replaced later in the morning) said:

The JCHR highlighted one case of a destitute Rwandan asylum-seeker who suffered bowel cancer and had a colostomy bag, but was refused treatment by a hospital and could not register with a doctor. Meanwhile, a woman had been forced to live rough for three months - sitting at crowded bus stops all night because she was terrified of being alone - but on winning her asylum appeal had been ruled entitled to immediate support.The Committee also reported how the parents of a three-week-old baby had been housed in a "filthy, bug-infested room" in Leicester.

The report said: "Many witnesses have told us that they are convinced that destitution is a deliberate tool in the operation of immigration policy.  We have been persuaded by the evidence that the government has indeed been practising a deliberate policy of destitution of this highly vulnerable group.We believe that the deliberate use of inhumane treatment is unacceptable."

If this doesn't make you fall over backwards with astonishment, perhaps the statement the Home Office put out in response to the report will make the earth tremble - if there was a God, he surely would:

"We simply do not think that it is right that those without any right to be in the UK should be given the right to work or access other services."

Let's leave to one side the illiteracy of the statement (right...right...right) because after all the people who put out the statements were educated, educated, educated doubtless in the Tony Blair system for minimal learning.  And that extraordinarily Blairite 'We simply do not think...' What is 'simply' doing there?  There is nothing simple about that thought at all.  And surely what is simply thought requires more debate rather than none at all, as the sentence seems to imply?

When did it come to be all right to state openly that there is nothing wrong with abusing human rights and allowing (actually encouraging) vulnerable individuals to sleep on the streets, and sick people to go untreated?  Oh, I remember, it was during the Thatcher years.  That was the first time I heard an official from the (privatised) gas services saying that the living conditions of people and their families was not their problem when they turned off the gas for non-payment of bills.  I recall then thinking that my world had just tipped dangerously.  Doubtless, they never cared, but when people feel it's all right to say they don't care then there are no social safeguards.  That's the upside of hypocrisy: not to allow what is most venal in us to become publicly acceptable.  People are doing vile things to others all over the world, but usually they pretend they aren't.  This at least suggests a knowledge that what they are doing is not approved of, even of some vague sense of shame.  When people respond to accusations of denying people their human rights with 'So?' then it's finished.

Remember all the talk about ethics in government when Blair got in?  Now there's an official shrug when a parliamentary committee condemns internationally unacceptable behaviour by the Home Office.  And for some reason, we are making prissy noises at Iran for their behaviour in mistreating British service personnel.

I have never felt any government in the UK to be more dangerous and shameful than this one.

Down the Rabbit Hole

I am speechlessly, bizarrely excited.  That 'something coming' feeling in the solar plexus that spring or nothing you can put your finger on at all brings on.  There is spring, of course, and the sense of everything freeing up (but I wouldn't be me if I didn't know that winter is coming back this weekend and that'll be it for the blossom and the frogspawn in the pond, probably).  But my inner buzz isn't that, it's the letter I got yesterday about my pension.  My old age pension, that is.  It used to be called that before the old became senior and even more ignorable. 

In July I will receive £86.35 a week as a prize for getting this old.  Neither the state (which holds my medical records) nor I expected me to get here.  No one I imagine believes in themselves as a pensioner.  But it's weirdly exciting.  Not just the prospect of free bus journeys and cheaper tickets to the cinema on certain rainy afternoons, but the fact of being officially old.  An old age pensioner, when I haven't really figured out what it means to be 40 yet.

I'm terribly behind myself.  I have no idea how to dress or behave and nature, as usual, is not taking care of it.  Still, I feel I'm about to be 'let off'.  A cloud of inconsequentiality will descend on me.  I'll be passing the time rather than working out how to live through it.  I'll be looking back, adding it all up, figuring out if it was worth it, and I will be living in the future not planning it.  It's arrived, and here I am with my £86.35, accounted for and free to drift into oblivion.  There might be years to come (I am not yet so old that I don't buy green bananas for fear that I won't see them ripen), but they will all be the same.  Once you're old, you can only get older which is not what people mean by change.  Nothing else will happen to me.  I've been waiting decades to make sure that will be the case, and here I am.  Floating.  Purposeless - at any rate permitted now to be purposeless.  Pointlessness has always been a dangerous hole for me to look into, but now I'm beginning to see that I might be able to sidle up to it and peer contentedly straight down into its bleak depths with no more than a heigh ho.   Or at any rate a ho hum.

Seriously Uncool

                        

At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches  by Susan Sontag ed. Paolo Dilonardo and Anne Jump · Hamish Hamilton, 235 pp, £18.99

A Photographer’s Life 1990-2005  by Annie Leibovitz · Cape, 480 pp, £60.00

Susan Sontag intended something like the book which is now published as At the Same Time to be her final collection of essays. After that, says her son, David Rieff, in his foreword, she intended to get on with what she most valued, writing fiction. Edited by her, somewhat differently no doubt, this would, then, have been her next book. As it is, published two years after her death, and put together by Rieff and her assistants with an eye on her preliminary sketch of its contents, it is her last book. Or rather, it is her first posthumous book, since Rieff plans to bring out further collections of her letters, diaries and unpublished writings.

A next book and a last book must be read in different ways, even if they are identical in content and in either case written in the shadow of a cancer that she surely knew was going to kill her sooner rather than later. None of these introductions to other people’s books, contingent newspaper articles and speeches written between 2001 and 2004 was intended as last words. Rieff is adamant about that. And to underline it he speaks of her ‘unalloyed fear of extinction – in no part of her, not even in the last agonised days of her ending, was there the slightest ambivalence, the slightest acceptance’. But it is very hard for the reader, knowing it to be her last, rather than her next book (and coming to it via Rieff’s elegiac foreword) not to see these writings as valedictory – a round-up of Sontag’s thought and work. We may know that death is always an arbitrary interruption of a life, but with us here and her not, and our narrative-hungry brains being what they are, we bind death to life by assuming a summation rather than allowing life to spill pointlessly over the edge into oblivion...

This is a new review in the latest London Review of Books of Susan Sontag essays and an Annie Leibovitz photo book, the rest you can read here.

(...Just seen that you can't read the rest at the LRB site. Sorry.  The piece is restricted to subscribers - which of course it's worth doing if you can afford it.  On the other hand there are some excellent articles in this issue available to read for free.)

Guernica and Total War

The Poet's book is out.  On the history and cultural impact of civilian bombing in the 20th century.    You can get Guernica and Total War by Ian Patterson HERE.   It's essential reading.  And elegant with it.

Don't Believe A Word I Write

  When I was in Ireland a few years ago, I found a bookshop in Bantry that had a wall of fiction divided into two.  The left section was headed BOOKS BY MEN, and I bet you can guess what the right section was.  I don't know what the expectation was here - the bookshop owner was very grumpy (a man, but he needn't have been) and I felt disinclined to ask.  Were men supposed to gravitate to the BOOKS BY MEN half and women to the other  on the grounds that each gender would find what suited them best written by their own sex?  Or was it the other way round?  That men would read books by women and women books by men, and thereby we would learn about each other and sexual harmony would be encouraged?  Or was the bookshop owner simply an obsessive compulsive who owned a bookshop because what better job is there for the ordering and categorising of its elements?  I'm very partial to Daunt Books which shelves books not according to author alphabetically, or fiction and non-fiction, or subject, but by geography.  All books on or concerning themselves with or by the French are shelved under France.  Camus and the history of the Wars of Religion live happily side by side with Escoffier and tourist maps of Paris.  It has a certain gaiety even if it sometimes it leaves you a bit baffled: where do you look for a book on the history of the footnote?  The Bantry system of book cataloguing is more troublesome.  It assumes, and I suspect that it's generally true, that men and women do read different books.  I once had to get a signature for a contract from a solicitor who, when he saw I was a novelist, asked me if his wife would have heard of me.

These thoughts are prompted by a letter from a reader telling me that his men's book group have been reading a novel of mine: Happily Ever After.  Reading groups in general strike me as a slightly strange way to read a book.  I know there is fun to be had from talking about something you've read, but I'm much more taken with the idea of the private reading of what has been privately written.  Still, reading groups are big.  There are writers who include on their websites Discussion Tips and Questions for reading groups about their latest books.  All life as a GCSE class.  I am not the world's most sociable soul, so I am no authority on group activity.  But a men's reading group is an odd thought.  It's almost daring - as if they might be uncomfortable in a mixed group - women having the upper hand in the fiction reading stakes.  Or it's a less objectionable way to get together and exclude women than joining a working men's club.  There were mixed reviews of my novel from the men's reading group.  It (partly) concerned a middle aged man, Liam, who falls sexually and passionately in love with a woman of 70.  Some of the men  didn't like the book because they didn't believe in the possibility of a sexual relationship between a man and a woman whose wrinkly old body is vividly described in terms of his desire.  The man who wrote to me said he thought it was because they were threatened by the idea of the sexuality of an old woman.  I don't doubt that.  But there's something else here that interests me that has nothing to do with gender, but with what people want and expect when they read.

In fact, many women had the same reaction.  Maybe because they too dislike the idea of an old woman's sexuality.  But always this point was made by saying that the situation and the characters were unbelievable.  Doubtless this is true, it is an unlikely scenario.  But the novel wasn't an attempt to reveal that all over the place younger men were besotted with haggard old women.  For all I know, it never happens.  None of my novels (or my non-fiction) is predicated on presenting a simple, recognisable picture of reality.  Here's the thing: it has never crossed my mind when writing a novel that it should be 'believable' to the reader.  I've always found it odd when a book is praised because its characters and their doings are 'totally believable'.  I don't think that novels have to be (and am not interested in writing novels that are) reproductions of the world.  There are novels written as realistic portraits, but by no means all and there's no reason why they should be.  It is certainly not the only task of a novelist to reproduce reality.  A novel is not good just because it looks to you like the world you know.  Nor bad because it doesn't.  There are other kinds of truth (or even untruth) that a writer might want to get  to.   Pictures they might want to paint of what is least likely.  Some of us want to play with ideas in the form of narrative.  Only the narrowest of views demands that novels must be believable and that novelists have to conform to their readers' notions of the way the world is.