Wednesday 18 January 2012

A Surprising Situationist Study of a Flawed 21st Century Psyche

Care-Wooden-Floors-Will-Wiles

Well, Will Wiles has certainly slapped down his calling card with great style and humour with this, his debut novel.

The premise of the book is very simple and almost like a sit-com in its staging; in fact one could very easily see this book transferred to the stage in three succinct acts.

The central character-who remains nameless throughout the book- is asked by Oskar, a successful, minimalist classical composer and an old university friend, to house sit his apartment in a nameless Eastern European city for a couple of weeks whilst he sorts out a messy divorce from his Californian wife in LA.  The would-be house sitter and narrator is a struggling copywriter producing Health and Safety literature for local councils, but of course has the usual yearnings to be a ‘proper’ writer, and so he jumps at the chance for some time and space to really write and, in a foreign city no less, what could be more perfect.

As such the book consists almost entirely of an interior monologue of this central character, punctuated only occasionally by encounters with a couple of real people, most notably Oskar’s formidable cleaner.  It is the maintaining of this interior monologue so convincingly for so long- and with such a dry, affecting humour- that is a real testament to the skill of Wiles as an author.

The apartment the central character finds himself in is as he had expected from his knowledge of Oskar as a friend; minimalist in its modernism and immaculately clean, organised and tidy, the only anomaly to its engineered perfection to our narrator’s mind, being the presence of two typically independent minded cats.  Oskar has however left detailed instructions for him even to the point of leaving notes hidden all over the place, which even at times appear to uncannily pre-empt any problems the narrator may encounter.  

There are in particular instructions given to the care of his precious, expensive and unvarnished wood flooring.    

And of course problems the narrator most certainly does encounter in an increasingly hapless- and darkly hilarious- way as the week progresses…

It would be easy to describe the unfolding of events in the flat under the narrator’s watch over this fateful week as pure farce- but the overall unfurling of the story is deeper, darker and more affecting in its human complexities than that of ‘mere’ farce, although a primary driving force of the book – and the one that refers firmly back to its sit-com premise time and again- is one that clearly, unashamedly references that form.   Wiles however pulls off a more interesting, intellectual take on the narrator’s week that gives the reader more substance to chew on rather than just groans and laughs and, cleverly, weaves in the complicated psychosis of not just the narrator, but also of a character- Oskar of course- that never actually appears in the book in person, in ‘real-time’ -apart from during a telephone call at the end- that provides an elegant denouement to the whole tale.

Actually the book is in fact a neat situationist take on the characters of the narrator and Oskar.  To my mind this makes the location- an eastern European city once subject to the rigours of authoritarianism, and now succumbing to the asymmetrical forces of free-market capitalism- a perfect foil for the inner tensions and shifting mind-sets of the two central characters.  In fact the author at certain parts of the narrative subtly draws attention to these political, economic and societal movements at work in the city’s past and present when he ventures out into the city centre-most notably when he visits a local museum, a concert then a lap-dancing club- that such a place has to be a very deliberate location on his part in which to centre his situationist explorations.
 
However despite the surprising and pleasing intellectual basis of this book, Wile’s never loses the ability of exploring human frailty, self-delusion and insecurity with the lightest of touches which, at times, are genuinely hilarious.  You can sense from the outset that the narrator is doomed to a week that is going to fall apart and that it will happen largely through events not of his making- but I personally ended up cheering him along despite his own delusions and frantic excuse-makings [all of them incidentally to himself] until he does actually emerge from the story as some unusual- and very typical and unwilling- English hero.

It has to be said there are to my mind a couple of rather weak passages that could have been edited out- the narrators musings on pornography and the displays at a lap-dancing clubs are unnecessary and trite in an awkwardly ‘teenage’ way.  They nonetheless still do not manage to detract from the overall accomplishment of this book.  It's just a shame that perfection was a whisker away, but denied because of occasional lacking in the editing department.

I do hope Will Wiles isn’t a one-trick pony; there’s the germ of a new, original, great British voice here and goodness knows when you look at the shortlists our establishment literary award panels come up with, we need as many new ones as possible these days.  I’ll be looking out for him in the future with more than a little anticipation.  So give this book a go…I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.

Thursday 12 January 2012

Welcome to Everytown- A Journey into the English Mind by Julian Baggini


What a great idea to get a bona fide intellectual- a ‘proper’ contemporary philosopher no less- to probe the English psyche in the early 21st century.  The first obstacle the resultant book’s publisher must jump over however is how do you market such a product?  What is your target audience? The quite awful covers of both the hard and paperback seem to fully illustrate the publisher’s problem here- although fortunately from what I gather, coming to this great book a few years after it was first published, it has been reasonably widely read and well received.

Which is all to the good and the reason I started this review on the dodgy non-literary ground of that awful subject, promotion and readership;  because to be honest, I strongly believe as many people as possible in the UK [and beyond] should be given this book to read, and read it they would, because this is an extremely accessible- but at the same time wonderfully erudite and thought provoking- piece of work.

Baggini establishes himself for six months in the most typical postcode in the country according to ACORN, and ends up in S66, which is flagged up as one of those that are the most typical in the UK. 

Baggini is unapologetic of the fact that it is in England, and makes this an ‘English Journey’ to a certain extent.  And he’s right to be so, in that England accounts for a full 85% of the UK in population terms alone, and despite what Celtic nationalists may say to the contrary, whether we like it or not England sets the agenda socially and economically these days for the wider UK as much as ever.

So the author finds himself just outside of Rotherham, eventually settled into a rented house for his summer to Christmas stint away from his metrophile lifestyle in Bristol.

It is this transition of lifestyle and urban environment that Baggini is so honest and refreshingly open about.  He neither condescends nor tries to go ‘native;’ he knows his own strengths and limitations with regard to his own place in English society and relentlessly strives to observe and be fair in his judgements, in of course true English fashion.

And I would say at all times he succeeds admirably in his aim and he reaches a broad conclusion in which of course he himself fits perfectly; England is in fact made up of ‘tribes’, we all belong to one, whether it be in a working class industrial suburb, or part of the Chipping Norton set.  We all gravitate to communities where we feel comfortable amongst people who are similar to us, and although tolerant of, rarely mix with anyone outside of that community.

This is a good over-riding consideration for many of the issues Baggini deftly covers here: multiculturalism, a national past-time of inate ‘illiberalism’, the pursuit of a comfortable Good Life, and our propensity to fall into three broad categories of social positioning- herds, hefts and individuals

In fact I found Baggini’s take on these three groups particularly profound.  Some people prefer to live in herds, allow themselves to be channelled with little thought of their own into doing and thinking as a higher authority tells them.  Others wish to be outright individuals, although as Baggini rightly points out, the current apparent rise of Individualism should not be confused with the wider process of individualisation.  It is one thing to choose your clothes, interior decoration and profession in order to enhance/reinforce your status within a wider group you wish to belong to, and another to pursue an anarchic individual existence outside of any group structure.

Which leads of course to Baggini’s idea of the heft; sheep need not be herded, they can be ‘hefted’. This means they can live within a field without fences and so have a right to roam but within limits- limits they however chose not to over-step.  This sense of unseeable but firm limits to their existence is even ‘handed-down’ from one generation of sheep to another.  It’s of course not difficult with such a concept, to then see which of the three categorisations the vast majority of us in the UK sit firmly within.

This is a rich book that even a relatively lengthy review cannot do justice to, so I would urge you to just read it.  Baggini comes quickly to the conclusion that we essentially, as a nation, is one full of conservative communitarians.  A sense of community is not dead; we still crave to live in any number of them, but we are basically conservative with a small ‘c’ in our outlook.  We apply the maxim of live and let live wherever possible regardless of class, creed or colour; we are as a nation hard-wired to be tolerant, and it is only when our own lifestyles and livelihood are directly threatened, that we become defensive and strike out.  As such we can be rather non-ideological in much of our outlook; we don’t want an ‘easy’ life, but we sure do want a comfortable one without too much awkward thought cluttering it up.

This I found to be one of the most illuminating of political observations, and something our political movements- particularly on the Left, which in these times of all times need to be revitalised and able to develop a new, coherent message- too often fail to take into account.

Clutching at straws to find a flaw in this book, I did find Baggini being a little soft on the tabloid press.  He quite rightly says that they do after all just report what the public wish to hear and read about, and they would soon go out of business if they didn’t.  The only problem is our tabloid press are not passive actors in the reporting of news; they set the agenda to a very large extent, and decide how to present news and opinion that actively shapes the wider public’s outlook- often without allowing for any countering opinion for that public to consider.    Our popular press therefore I fear, create a general public more in their own image than I think Baggini gives them credit for…

But a relatively small niggle and it in no way detracts from the solid intellect that runs through this book, whilst remaining one that is also supremely accessible.  It’s a  great book about contemporary Britain and where we’ve come from, and one that easily eclipses the efforts of the Paxman’s et al of this world.