The Nameless Horror

Behold, more reviews. Shorter this time.

No Country For Old Men (Cormac McCarthy)

A little-known book by an obscure author. McCarthy should go far! Seriously, though, this is very good. The first McCarthy I read was The Road, last year. This is obviously a very different story, touching as much on what it means to keep the peace and break the law as it does on the actual events surrounding Moss after he makes off with two million dollars from the scene of a desert drug deal gone bad.

The central good guys are well-drawn and sympathetic, and while the psychopathic villain veers perhaps towards being too villainous at times, he’s certainly convincingly menacing and holds the pursuit plot together.

My only gripe, if I had one, would be that after following him through so much, Moss’ eventual fate is settled off-camera. I’m sure there’s a reason for doing it that way, but I can’t figure it for the life of me.

Good, though. Very good. It won’t be the last McCarthy I read.

Authority (Jeff Vandermeer)

Having belatedly found out that Annihilation was the first in a trilogy, I’ve now read the second. Authority follows Control, the man sent in to the Southern Reach to sort out the mess left over from the events of the last book, and to do so while answering the peculiar demands of his faceless superior and trying to maintain his sanity in the teeth of the otherness that is Area X.

If the first book was body horror and psychological crumbling, this is full-on Cthulhoid descent into madness territory, mixed with a little Kafka. And it’s very good, Lovecraft with better characters, smoother prose, none of the writer’s weird hang-ups creeping through. Control starts off as antagonist to the Biologist from Annihilation - he’s there to interrogate her on her return - but facing dual antagonists of his own in the form of the assistant director, Grace, and the lingering insanity and obsession at the heart of the Southern Reach. By the end, he’s come around completely, and his struggle to survive an escape what threatens to consume him is one you want him to succeed at.

Great writing, thoroughly recommended. I’m already partway through the last book, Acceptance.

The Farm

Review time! Since the start of the year I’ve been trying to eke out half an hour to read each day between Aidan going to bed and me getting back to work. So far it’s mostly been successful. Consequently, I’ve finished a couple of books in the last week or two.

Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel)

A little-known book that hardly anyone has read and whose lack of press has been mystifying. I’m joking, of course; I’m also way, way late to the party on this. Nevertheless, it’s a great book. A strain of superflu wipes out most of humanity in the space of a week or so, and twenty-odd years later, a touring company of actors and musicians goes from settlement to settlement in the ruins of the Great Lakes region.

So far, so apocalypse. But this isn’t really an apocalyptic novel. It’s a character piece, following various people tied loosely together by an actor who dies onstage the night the flu breaks. One of the children in the production (the main character, such as there is), the ex-paparazzi paramedic who tries to save him, his former best friend, two of his ex-wives, and his son, and Arthur himself.

The prose is butter-smooth and quite wonderful to read, the characters are all well-drawn and suitably complex, and particularly nicely, it’s not apocalypse porn. There’s the opening section with Jeevan (the ex-pap) which largely explains the disaster, and some “here’s what happens to them” showing the flu hitting through the eyes of most of the others when their individual stories (told largely as flashback) reach that point, but of the years between zero and twenty, very little is said outside a Year Fifteen interview with Kirsten, the former child actor. The world of the Symphony and Kirsten (who never, despite a skill with knives, falls into Hunger Games fighting woman cliché come the nicely understated climax) is tough, but it’s not a case of fending off raiders and scavenging for food every three pages. Things have settled down, and while there are lawless elements, and the main antagonists, it’s just a different world, not a total ruin. And the world before it, of Arthur and those who pass through his orbit, is equally fascinating and leads you to care for all these people, even the ones who don’t make it.

Very, very good. If I had to split hairs - and I don’t but will because I’ve come this far - the ending reads a little uncertainly to me, as though Mandel wasn’t quite sure what point to close on (various things are tied up in summary, in turn, Return Of The King-style, that might have been left), Arthur’s final day decision to throw off his worldly riches and fame and move to be with his son just before he dies felt unnecessary and somewhat out of character - he was better, I think, as a flawed but ultimately decent sort struggling with the life he’d chosen, and I have the strong impression that the short glimpse of Jeevan’s life in Year Twenty felt like a later draft addition. I imagine an editor saying, “You can’t just leave him walking out of Toronto and never show the reader what happened to him!” What we see of his life a thousand miles away is largely without consequence - he’s happy enough, settled enough, and far from the main location of the Symphony’s orbit - and his one-step-removed passing encounter with the main antagonists read a little tacked-on.

Those are really all the hairs I can split, and they are tiny and really didn’t spoil a thing (note, too, that they’re all late-on in the book, by which point it’s built up more than enough credit to buy them off). It’s a great book and thoroughly deserves all the praise it’s had. I’ve not read any of Mandel’s other novels, but I’d do so happily on the back of this one.

Across The River And Into The Trees (Hemingway)

Another little-known author. This is famously one of Hemingway’s most criticised novels, and also the one in which he most attempted, and failed, to apply the Iceberg Theory to his writing. Colonel Cantwell, who has a bad heart and various old wounds after serving in both world wars, particularly the first in Italy, is on his way to Venice for some duck hunting. Here he meets up with the young contessa, Renata, he’s in love with, and reminisces, with her and others, and alone, about his military past. The shoot, when it finally happens, leads to him having a heart attack and dying.

Spoilers.

Seriously, there’s not much story there, but that’s not uncommon in Hemingway’s work. I’ve read a couple before, and I enjoy his style of writing. The Colonel is a great character, mostly, truculent, abrasive, but warm and caring when he wants to be, probably the best character I’ve come across in Hemingway. It’s interesting to see, too, how many of his conversations are similar in tone and approach to those in Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas (which I reread for the zillionth time earlier in the year). He’s a lot of fun to follow.

Until he starts talking about love with Renata and it all falls apart for chapter after chapter. Most of Hemingway’s dialogue is great, naturalistic and free-flowing. But as soon as a man gets emotional with the woman he loves, they both turn into infatuated, “no, I love you more” teenagers. There are elements of it in other stories, but it’s at its worst by far here, and there simply isn’t enough to justify it. Wikipedia tells me Renata was based on a real 19-year-old Hemingway was obsessed with at the time of writing, and I’d have to say it shows in buckets.

However. However. Despite there being not much of a story as such, Cantwell’s a good character, his history and its interweaving with that of the Veneto is engaging, and there’s plenty to keep you rolling along. Hemingway is never, at the very least, prone to waffle. Just skip the “I wuv oo” mid-section if you don’t want to be grating your teeth as you read.

Next up, another little-known novel by an obscure writer: I’m a little way into No Country For Old Men.

The Labour Party has many flaws and clearly needs to rebuild, both its own beliefs and its relationship with the electorate. As a thought experiment - obviously clearly based on my own decades of deep involvement with political planning and strategising; someone send this to Labour HQ pronto - I wondered how you’d go about reestablishing the party for the modern age. This lengthy essay is therefore that. It may all be wrong, and a large part of it is simply wishful thinking, but that’s the joy of thought experiments: they’re ones that will likely never, ever be put into practice.

The problems

Muddled messages: The last campaign was a flop, trying too hard to be all things to all people rather than sticking to core principles, leaving measures like an end to the bedroom tax and non-dom status to float in a sea of mediocrity.

Disconnect from voters: While this is a problem for all parties to some extent, the rise of a professional political class has affected Labour most. The concerns of the middle and upper classes are most similar to those of professional politicians, so the Tories and, to a lesser extent, Lib Dems are a closer match, albeit by accident, for their core voter demographic. Labour’s top dogs are a world apart from their traditional supporters, and this lack of connection has allowed parties like UKIP, rightly or wrongly, to sneak in.

Old Labour is disconnected too, to some extent. The working class has changed with the gutting of manufacturing and the weakening of the big industrial unions. Outside the (comparatively) few remaining industrial areas, the modern working class are self-employed, shop staff, delivery drivers, call centre workers, people on minimum-low wages, white collar as well as blue, part time or unemployed. They’re increasingly the young, too. And more and more of them are immigrants to this country.

Reputation issues: Labour has a reputation for financial mismanagement from the crash of 2008 (ironic, given Brown’s previous reputation for steady fiscal policy in his years as Chancellor), and for lying over Iraq during the Blair years. Both have left people with the impression that the party is fundamentally untrustworthy on big issues.

Awful media relations: The British press is, in the main, openly hostile towards the party, and have a history of pulling front-page hatchet jobs and outright lies, with maybe a small, inconsequential retraction a few days later. Blair managed to swing it a little for a while, but that was as much down to the Major government’s inadequacies as anything else.

Very poor support outside the big cities: Whether as a result of a lack of engagement or wealth distribution, Labour does very badly across much of the country. Rural left-wingers in the South are more likely to vote Lib Dem than Labour and in other parts they’re turning to UKIP or nationalist parties.

Scotland: Choices made during the ’No’ campaign and failed attempts to drum up anti-SNP sentiment, not to mention a catalogue of failures, gaffes and the inability to come up with a reason why Scots might want to stick with them saw a revenge thrashing north of the border.

Boundaries: This Parliament is almost certain to see boundary changes. It’s hard to make a definite case against them in principle (though there may well be in the details) because there are clear inequities in the present system due to population shift. Changes will make it harder for Labour to win outright because the current ones make it too easy. Labour are going to have to lump this and plan accordingly, because if it comes up in the Commons, only a backbench rebellion will defeat it.

The assets

Existing support: Yes, it’s been drifting away for more than a decade, but Labour still has plenty of members, infrastructure and influence, minor or major, across most of the country. It can’t outspend the Tories and shouldn’t try, but it has some funds and plenty of manpower, in theory at least. Union backing is a double-edged sword, but it still counts for something.

Reduced Blairites: While they’re still around in patches, the last couple of defeats - and the Milliband leadership - have seen ’New Labour’, with all its post-Iraq tarnish, largely shaken off or at least shunted into the background.

Economic inequality: While the overall economy may have recovered a little from the crash, much of that recovery has been concentrated at the top and in London. A great many people are continuing to struggle with poverty, with a difficult jobs market, with the cuts to public services imposed by the last government and the massive fresh ones coming in the next. There are also likely to be another 1-2 million public sector workers sacked in the coming Parliament. These are the people Labour should be representing.

A fresh start: It’s easier to rebuild completely when everyone accepts that the old structure is rotten.

The solutions

So, you’re Labour and that’s what you’ve got to tackle and that’s what you’ve got to work with. What do you do?

Build up from the bottom: You lack grassroots connections and clear support. Get back involved with those most needing help. Start by reaching out to the new working class and the disadvantaged, rural as well as urban. Get to know what their problems and concerns are, and turn those into policy.

But to foster connection, you need to offer something concrete now; the next election is five years off. You need to show that you can - and will - give something back to those who need it most. Your union past should help here, because while the new working class aren’t heavily unionised (apart from anything else, jobs are so short-term now that it’s hard to hold a workplace together), you know what unions traditionally offer (or are supposed to offer) workers. You can do that too, ad-hoc. This should be something you’re good at. Use your network of volunteers, members and supporters to hold local drop-in sessions across as much of the country as possible, offering guidance on finding work or childcare, on dealing with paperwork, bureaucracy and local authorities, on workplace rights and finding representation, on financial assistance and management, on parenting on a pittance, on voter registration and where to find impartial political information. Forge links with your local communities by actively helping them regardless of whether or not you’ve been elected there. Follow-up, don’t forget. Make friends. Don’t push the party, don’t tout for votes, don’t involve politics at all if possible. If you do it cynically, you’ll lose voters. But you have all the resources needed to pull off this kind of operation. The old, old days of a Labour club in every town centre are gone, but there’s nothing to stop you creating a replacement for the modern era.

And listen. Use what actually concerns real people to form policies and priorities higher up. And where you can’t make something policy, be sure that there’s a pipeline by which you can explain yourselves, cleanly and clearly without wriggle words. Don’t talk down to people (something you’ve been prone to doing the last few years). Carry that all the way up to the top.

Such a move would likely initially be met with cynicism and derision, and it would eat into party funds (though probably not as much as it might; you’d probably have to cut back a couple of big PR events a year), but stick at it.

I can’t, off the top of my head, think of a better way of reconnecting with your core support on a fundamental level. It’s not enough to encourage people to vote for you; you need to show that you’re their party, not just tell.

Do the same thing online: You can’t get to everyone in person, but running advice and support online is relatively cheap and simple. Borrow from Howard Dean’s 2004 run and make proper use of the internet. Don’t push the party or for votes - we’re not the US and that won’t fly - but engage with people.

Link worker to employer: Help out too by talking with local businesses and promoting schemes to get people into work and to ensure fair conditions and good workplace relations. You’ve got union connections; use them. This connects you on a more personal level to business owners. It won’t help the wider perception of your financial skills, but it’ll dispel the notion that you’re anti-business without you having to sell out your supporters.

Soothe the middle class: You spent the Blair years avoiding ‘tax and spend’ and largely did a good job of it, so remind people of that. Protect childcare provisions, restrict tax rises to those who can afford it - and point out that that’s why you’re doing it. Carefully cost and cover every policy you introduce. Show your working out. If you need to, point to the past government’s mismanagement on this score.

Dispel misinformation, don’t employ any yourself: One of the early moves of the Obama White House was to offer their own fact-checking via the White House blog. Employ someone to correct false claims (like that Times “Labour will cost families £1,000 a year” front page they later retracted) quickly, succinctly, and with cross-linked citations. Make it shareable through social media. Make sure spokespeople follow these and can refute claims in person when needed, knowing they’re backed up by data. The flip side is to stop using refutable claims yourselves. Have cites. When you speculate, say you’re speculating. Don’t leave anyone a “gotcha”. You’ve gotten better at this in recent years, although perhaps largely by comparison. Keep getting better at it and it will help shake off the mistrust left over from Blair.

Own your mistakes: Accept past failings, show how you’ve learned from them. Point out, where your opinions have changed, that it’s madness not to change your mind if it turns out the evidence is against you; doing otherwise makes you an idealogue (as with “prosperity through austerity”). Don’t try to dodge them. Again, don’t leave a “gotcha”.

Listen, then set out your stall clearly, and back it up: Stop trying to be the Tories. They’re much better at it than you. If you reconnect with your core demographic, focus on what needs to be done to make their lives better, then work to point out how doing so will also help those beyond. Don’t try to be everything to everyone. Where you disagree, do so firmly, and back up your arguments with evidence. People will respect that more than if you try to slide around them. Claiming “we will control immigration” last time out made it obvious you were trying to keep up with the UKIPs out of fear, not out of personal belief on the subject. There were arguments to be made - and plenty of people made them, just not you.

Don’t allow other people to control the conversation: The Tories deliberately pushed you into talking about the SNP all the time. All you needed to say was: “Until the election happens it’s pointless discussing things, but if any kind of coalition is necessary then every responsible party would seek compromise and common ground where it can. Maybe it could be, maybe it couldn’t. Since the SNP are a democratically-elected party no different to any other in the Commons, why should we treat them any differently? Or are you suggesting we should ignore Scotland’s electorate?” (Not that you could, having tried to drum up anti-SNP sentiment the year before.)

Be confident in where you’re standing - and the grassroots support you have, if you have it, vitally - and you leave the opponent with nowhere to go. The Lib Dems in the 90s were quite clear that they wanted to scrap council tax and replace it with a local income tax, and to raise the top rate of income tax to 50%. Lots of people didn’t necessarily agree with them, but there was comparatively little hay to be made of those policies because they were so clear and open about them. They knew their supporters backed them, and they didn’t have to keep them a secret or fudge their commitment to them.

Sort out your Scottish arm: Frankly, it’s a mess. If Scotland remains part of the UK after this parliament - and let’s not bank on that - you need to offer something to the country that the SNP, which has already occupied much of your old socialist territory, doesn’t. Make up with the SNP as well because an unnecessary chip on your shoulder is deeply unattractive.

Ignore the press: Seriously, they’re never going to like you, so stop bothering to try. People, especially the young, will respect you more if you stand up to Murdoch and his ilk than if you keep trying to play nice. This is another reason to make sure of your ground before making claims, and be absolutely scrupulous in how you operate, because everyone but the Guardian will be looking to cut you off at the knees. Again, own it.

Forget immigration controls: Again, others are going to own this battlefield. Many immigrants - who are eligible to vote, don’t forget - are within your key demographic. Point to the plethora of evidence that in a stable economy, immigrant workers are net contributors to the economy and that they don’t reduce the job market (since they’re also spending, and spending supports further jobs). Fix the economy and keep it stable, and immigration at its normal rate ceases to be an issue. You’ll take a battering from the press again, but stick with it because you cannot win by aligning with the right on this.

Forget benefits: Benefit fraud is miniscule, “shirkers” are few and far between, after pensions most benefits are paid to those in work and not out of it, and people get off JSA not by being sanctioned or put through workfare but by the economy picking up and more jobs being made available. (Not that this will happen endlessly; ever-greater automation, centralisation (compare staff numbers in warehouse + online operations vs. warehouse + local retail outlet operations) and corporate efficiency drives mean that the jobs market in many sectors will contract over time.) Unless you’re thinking of costing a universal citizen’s income, forget getting sucked into benefits arguments and concentrate only on economic growth. Just don’t forget to explain why.

Forget the wealthy: You’ve got wealthy backers, people with cash but also an ideological inclination towards doing good for those less well off. You don’t have to court those people, and you don’t gain anything by trying to court those who don’t share those beliefs; they have nothing to gain from voting for you anyway. Don’t arbitrarily stiff them, but concentrate your efforts on the grassroots up, not vice versa.

Solve housing: This ties into the last, and it’s a big one. We all know the pressure on housing availability: soaring rents unmatched by wages, soaring prices that push ownership beyond many, low rates of building, a rising population. This really, really needs fixing, and it’s one of the few areas where the old Labour love of ‘benevolent big government’ is going to be the only way of doing it. Left to the market alone, housing will only become more of an issue. Maybe it’s rent controls (with, say, some kind of minimum income-protection provision for single-property landlords like those relying on rent for retirement). Maybe it’s a mansion tax with a protection for those who’ve simply lived in one place in London for long enough that they’ve ended up owning something worth a stupid amount of money through no real fault of their own. Maybe it’s some kind of clever mechanism for connecting a per-size price cap with local average earnings. Maybe it’s a subsidy for new, sustainable housing funded by a tax on large, old properties. I’m not an economist, but you employ plenty of them. Get cracking on this, and make absolutely sure you check your facts and figures because it’ll be controversial, you’ll take another hammering from the Mail, and you’ll have to sell it to the middle class. It’s an area where you could really set out your stall, though. Your core voters need somewhere to live, and the middle class have kids who are already struggling to earn enough to leave home.

Solve pensions: No one likes to suggest the state pension is in danger, but we all know it is. As the population lives longer, the pot has to stretch further. Again, I’m not an economist, but old people vote, and anything you can come up with that protects pensions even a little will be a massive winner.

Back the NHS: The Tories are massively weak here, and you should’ve made much more of it last time out. Very few people want to see privatisation, and there’s plenty of evidence for it happening should you want to point people at it, and not a lot the Tories can do to wiggle around it.

Couch as much as you can in terms of fairness: As a nation, we tend to think of ourselves as quite a fair bunch. It’s easier to sell - or harder to argue against - a 50% upper tax rate, say, if you point out just how many teachers such a rate rise will employ or how many public services or basic pensions it’ll fund. If you’re going to take, explain what you’re going to give in return. Don’t promise something for nothing and try to weasel around mentioning what the actual cost might be.

Have people who talk like human beings: Stop making so many of your top people those with little life outside politics, and if they are, at least allow them to relax a little in public. It makes them come across like robots carefully programmed to avoid making a promise they can’t go back on. As much as it pains me to say so, you could learn from UKIP here. Farage’s bluster and “man with a pint” image might be a load of tosh, but at least he sounds human. Humans, it turns out, respond well to humans.

Explain as much of it as possible in two sentences or less: Blair almost single-handedly popularised the policy sound bite. And say what you like about him, he knew how to get elected despite such controversial policies as introducing a minimum wage (in the teeth of opposition from both Tories and, to their discredit, Lib Dems). Two lines, what and why, and how if you’ve got space. This is the digital age, so if you’re doing it in text or in press release, have cites and links to proper explanations ready. But keep your messages tight, specific, and easy to digest.

Don’t build a sodding obelisk: Seriously, just don’t.

So what have we learned from last night?

• The Lib Dems surged in popularity last time out, riding a wave of disappointment with Labour and the bright hopes of many that they could be a new force on the left. A force which immediately jumped into bed with a soon-nakedly Thatcherite administration and allowed them to stamp all over the very people who’d elected them with no sign that they might ever do anything to stop them. Having widely disenfranchised their own electorate, and left floating centrist voters picked up from the Tories no real reason to stick with them since they were basically the same thing, regardless of what claims were made during the campaign, the resulting bloodbath shouldn’t be a surprise. Even under PR they’d have taken a hammering. The LDs should’ve learned a lesson from this and I doubt we’ll see another ConDem government in my lifetime.

• Labour crippled themselves in Scotland by Torying-up over the SNP and the referendum, and did themselves no favours in England by running a mess of a campaign that couldn’t resist borrowing from everyone else in a bid to be popular. Copying the other kids doesn’t work at school and it didn’t work here. They could’ve done their best to stamp their mark as a party of the poor and the poorly-paid, focused on the NHS, workfare, tuition fees, rising inequality and the like, but only briefly played with these in between trying desperately to get chummy with the upper middle class while keeping a finger or two in UKIP’s pocket. When you’re handing out mugs emblazoned with “Labour: # Controls on immigration” and your brightest idea is a fucking obelisk, you’re in trouble.

• They’re aren’t enough arseholes in any one place to make UKIP a valid force under the FPTP system.

• People in England, unless, like in Scotland, there’s an overriding reason to want someone out, don’t vote, often because they don’t feel informed enough - or motivated enough - to do so. When the primary concern of most media outlets is keeping corporate advertisers happy in order to stay in business (cf. the Telegraph and HSBC), and politicians clearly aware that lying about the Other Ones in as soundbite-friendly a manner as possible while making sure you never make a promise you can’t wriggle out of or forget is a successful strategy, I can’t blame them. Voters are treated like dairy cattle and weary cynicism and apathy shouldn’t be a surprise.

• The print media in the UK - a largely left-wing country by percentage - is overwhelmingly right-wing and any pretence of impartiality after this election would be laughable.

• Whoever spends, wins. See also: media, ad revenue, lying.

• With everyone bar the Greens running a negative campaign in England (I can’t speak for elsewhere), no one gave anyone a reason to vote for them rather than against someone else. When even the Guardian is running a chart of ’who to vote for if you hate these guys’ - for both Tory and Labour, we’re in trouble.

• All the hashtags in the world don’t matter. Neither does shrilly yelping at people, “We fought and died for the right to vote!”

So the Tories will go on selling off everything that’s not nailed down for the next five years and blaming the poor for being work-shy slackers, questions will go on lingering about just how long Scotland will stay in the Union without some kind of devo-max outcome (unlikely under Dave), and Labour and the LDs have five years to sort their bloody shit out. We’ll also have to hope that someone’ll come up with a way of actually reaching and informing prospective voters in that time.

And maybe I’ll have a unicorn that craps cheesecake by then as well.