More and more I find that life is a series of disappearances followed usually but not always by reappearances; you disappear from your morning self and reappear as your afternoon self; you disappear from feeling good and reappear feeling bad. And people, even face to face and clasped in each other’s arms, disappear from each other.
Fremder, Russell Hoban
I have been reading a lot about economics recently. In an effort to understand, I suppose, how exactly the financial crisis (ongoing) came about, and what it means for the way we do things, and whether the way we do things might conceivably change, be changed, fundamentally, for the better. I imagine this is pretty common thinking at the moment. As is the realisation (new for many) that the way we do things is actually the way things are done to us. Your wages, your rent or the cost of your mortgage, your savings or your debt, the food you can afford to put on the table, the education of your children and the welfare of your elderly, the quality of your surroundings and your life, the chance of you getting a job, what you live on while unemployed, where you live, the portion of your taxes spent on killing people or on allowing others to get away without paying tax, the treatment you can expect if you become ill, the assumptions made in your name about what it is you value, the bonuses, the pay offs, the deals, the theft – the killing and the theft – all of these things are done to you by other people. They are not natural inevitable forces beyond anyone’s control. Behind each and every one of them lies a series of decisions, ideologically based, taken by a tiny group of people whose interest lies in obscuring the fact of their own power, and who spend a lot of energy getting you and I to look elsewhere in anger – at each other for example. The great opportunity that the financial crisis offers us is that of training our gaze on the man behind the curtain. That little shit. Look at him. Let’s kill him. Let’s kick his fucking head in.
This is why I am a novelist and not a journalist. I have anger issues.
Anyway. One of Ireland’s most famous journalists, Fintan O’Toole, has spent a couple of decades writing eloquently about the nonsensical and deeply corrupted way in which the state of Ireland is organised and run. In recent years, mainly through his pieces in the Irish Times, he has precisely and with passion detailed the catastrophic behaviour of the banks and their property developer clients who have run Ireland for their own benefit, and the craven stupidity of a whole generation of politicians whose self regard and incompetence has facilitated them. The economic crisis (ongoing) in Ireland is bigger, more profound, more terrifying, more absolute and more revealing of the perpetrators than it is in most other places. Ireland’s ‘elite’ has left the country bankrupt and shattered, and probably – for many of its current school and university leavers – uninhabitable.
In the last couple of years O’Toole has written two really quite remarkable books – Ship Of Fools and Enough Is Enough . Ship Of Fools documents, in all its astonishing and depressing absurdity, the apparent boom and definite bust of the Irish economy. While it took place against the background of the world financial crisis, the Irish disaster was really its own sort of thing altogether. What happened worldwide with the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the near collapse of the rest of the financial apparatus, and the subsequent massive rescue of this apparatus by governments, was a complicated, fine grained sort of fuck up. Technically labyrinthine. You can get a headache reading the details of how it happened. The Irish one was simpler. It was so stupid it could make you cry.
O’Toole opens Ship Of Fools with a juxtaposition. February 2009 – former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern addressed the members of the Honduran National Business Council on “The Celtic Tiger: The Irish Model Of Development”. Ahern explained how as Finance Minister and Taoiseach he had led Ireland to the remarkable position of being amongst the wealthiest nations on the planet. It was a regular gig – Ahern travelled the world doing this speech, at a reported fee of €30,000 a go. But he was running out of audiences. By February 2009 the Irish collapse was well under way. The day after he spoke in Honduras, it was revealed that the Anglo Irish Bank (a commercial bank hugely invested in the grotesquely over-inflated property market which had begun to crash in 2008) “had over the previous few years given €225 million in loans to its own directors, chief among them its chairman, and Ahern’s good friend, Seán Fitzpatrick.” In the previous month Seán Fitzpatrick made a speech during which he addressed the rapidly developing crisis in Irish banking by saying that the government should cut its spending on what he called the “sacred cows” of Irish society – children, the elderly, and health care. In March 2010 Seán Fitzpatrick was arrested for fraud. In September, the government announced that the estimated cost of the Anglo Irish bailout would eventually be €29.3 billion. Why is the state bailing out a bank that has no positive social role whatsoever? Because the Fianna Fáil government, in what is widely believed to be the worst decision made in the history of our malformed state, undertook to guarantee all deposits and borrowings for the six Irish-owned banks, on behalf of the Irish taxpayer. The worldwide con-trick of private profit / public loss was repeated in Ireland. But in Ireland, the politicians looked very much like they were on the right side of the deal. One of the factors that led to the end of Brian Cowen’s political career was the revelation that as Taoiseach he had played a round of golf and had dinner with Seán Fitzpatrick and other Anglo Irish directors not long before the bank guarantee was signed off.
What Ship Of Fools does brilliantly is expose the culture of political and financial corruption and elitism in Ireland that has been (a tolerated, accepted, even celebrated) part of the fabric of the state for the entire history of the state. And it traces the inexorable path that winds from localism and clientelism to the property insanity that distorted Ireland’s notion of itself and its wealth. The truth is, there never was a Celtic Tiger. Ireland borrowed a lot of money and Irish people passed it around amongst themselves like idiots playing three card tricks on each other. It’s true that the country went from being backward, poor and miserable to being a reasonably civilised and prosperous place over the course of a few good years in the 1990s. But then it simply went berserk. Ships Of Fools is – by a long way – the best account I’ve read of it.
In Enough Is Enough , O’Toole steps up to the challenge of plotting the path forward. (It’s typical of the Irish public discourse that intelligent criticism is always attacked with angry shouts of well-what-would-you-have-done-you-smart-arse? O’Toole takes that at face value and tells us.) The book goes over some of the ground covered in Ship Of Fools , but it’s calmer, more systematic. His basic contention is that we have never, for all our blather, created a Republic in the true sense. We have cobbled together an almost feudal state, disinterested in the well-being of the many when it interferes with the interests of the powerful few; a state hopelessly compromised in its relationship with its own “citizens” by its relationship with the Catholic Church. Above all he identifies the lack of any shared notion of what it is we are about, and what it is we want to do for ourselves and for each other. It’s a fragile trick of self deception that allows us to call ourselves a Republic at all. And that is most evident in what we have recently been through :
If we hold in our heads the ideal of the boom years as a period of stunning prosperity, we will not understand why the boom failed. More fatally, we will be trying to ‘return’ to a place we never really were.
The book is structured almost, you’d think, like a manifesto. O’Toole identifies five broad myths about Ireland. The Republic, Representation, Parliamentary Democracy, Charity and Wealth. And they are myths. Which means that they do not, in any sense that matters, exist. And he names five ‘decencies’ upon which a real Republic might be built : Security (by which he means housing), Health, Education, Equality and Citizenship. And in straightforward, clear language he lays out real concrete steps that could be taken, immediately, to move Ireland away from the despair and anger which currently paralyses it, towards a society of which we might begin to be proud.
And pride is not a minor variable in the Irish equation. There is a terrible hobbling concern in most Irish people about what others think. It was very noticeable over the ECB/IMF bailout. There was a sense of shame. A sense that Ireland had failed. Ireland has failed. But it’s failed for very specific reasons, and been failed by specific people – politicians for the most part. At the end of Enough Is Enough , just in case anybody might still need something more direct, O’Toole lists “Fifty Ideas For Action”. Most of them are, I would have thought by now, completely uncontroversial and should be undertaken immediately by the new government. Others are more nebulous. A few of them I’d take issue with. But these are 50 ideas I’d vote for. Number 50 is “Declare a republic.” There is something very stirring about that – a hopefulness, and an aspiration towards pride that any decent Irish woman or man will identify with. We have a spent 90 years being timid, diffident, half-arsed and stupid. Now we have a chance to start again. It would be a tragedy not to take it.
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Having been attacked and derided and ridiculed by the political, business and media gobshites who were the fluffers of the bogus boom, you’d think O’Toole would be in a fairly good position now to have an eager audience not only for his diagnosis of the problems of the failed state but for his suggested remedies as well. And you’d be right – he does have an audience, and a lot of (late but deserved) respect. But the audience remains largely passive, placid, afraid, and there has been little sign in the recent election or in the discourse since (that I’ve been able to hear from here) that anyone has really heard much that he’s said. O’Toole, sensibly and calmly, wants a new Republic. A new state. As the wonderful Michael D Higgins put it in his valedictory speech in the Dáil in January “The model that is broken should not be repaired.” In February, Ireland elected a new government, dominated by the repairmen of Fine Gael.
Which may be, in part at least, Fintan O’Toole’s fault.
Towards the end of last year, when Enough Is Enough was published and a general election was certain to be called within a few short months, people began to wonder whether O’Toole might himself run for the Dáil. As the Fianna Fáil government collapsed in farce and ignominy in February, he was silent. It seemed certain that he was going to run. And then, an announcement in the Irish Times, summed up on his Twitter account on January 30th – “Apologies to everyone who was hoping for an electoral initiative. I’ve never worked harder or been more disappointed. Nearly worked too.”
What nearly worked, it turned out, when O’Toole appeared on a late night RTÉ politics show the next night, was a sort of loose alliance of what might be called “prominent” people from various walks of life, to be called Democracy Now. (We’ve learned since then that they would have included economist de-jour David McWilliams, sportsmen Liam Griffin and Dónal Óg Cusack, and Shane Ross, a right wing ex-Fine Gael senator and former stock broker, who did in the end run as an independent, topping the poll with a huge vote in Dublin South. His views, diametrically opposed to O’Toole’s in many ways, were apparently to be accommodated in the new group with a voting-on-conscience arrangement, with the only pre-agreed policy being to call for a referendum on the terms of the ECB/IMF bank bailout.) Unfortunately with O’Toole on RTÉ that night was Eamon Dunphy, the ex-footballer and football pundit, ghost writer for Roy Keane and U2, radio celebrity, banal provocateur and general all round gobshite. And another one of those who would have been a candidate in the aborted attempt on the Dáil. The show turned to farce when another panelist, the political academic Elaine Byrne, made the not unreasonable observation that O’Toole and Dunphy looked liked “more middle-aged angry men, who are telling us what the world should look like and then … they talk the talk and don’t walk the walk.” Dunphy railed, accusing her of sexism, ageism, and various crimes against his dignity, and looking generally like he’d never been so gravely wounded in his life. O’Toole just sat there looking bloody miserable.
The reason for not running was, in the end, so undramatically prosaic and dull that no one I’ve talked to believes a word of it, and yet can’t quite rouse themselves into thinking up a reasonable conspiracy theory either. It’s just too boring. According to O’Toole there was simply not enough time. The election had come too soon. They couldn’t get organised to “do it properly”. Never mind that independents all over the country seemed to be able to manage it. The O’Toole people had jobs, families, these things are difficult, the upheaval …. and it petered out into a sort of mumble of the-dog-ate-my-homework-sir . It looked and sounded pathetic.
And so there was (with the honourable exception of the United Left Alliance, who did very well, despite predictable marginalisation in the mainstream media and – perhaps not unrelated – a fairly low key campaign) no obvious vehicle for the anger and resentment of an electorate finally waking up to their own terrible electoral mistakes. Labour damaged themselves with what looked very like a slavering interest in a turn at government above all else, with polices that drifted all over the place like kites put up in a storm. The Greens had facilitated the Fianna Fáil disaster for the previous five years and were simply unthinkable. Sinn Féin looked like a terrible mixed bag – opportunistic on the one hand, and, well, inopportune on the other. Fine Gael looked like they knew what they were talking about (repetition will often do that for you) and promised above all to be Not-Fianna-Fáil. As for the independents – and there were many – what was the point of voting for a candidate who would, if elected, be almost entirely powerless and unable to influence the national debate? A lot of people voted for them anyway.
So, the Greens lost all their seats; Sinn Féin did well but not well enough to overtake Fianna Fáil, who were reduced to what is probably the optimum size for a party that needs a good ten year conversation with itself before making a comeback; Labour did well enough to get them their prize, which was government with Fine Gael, who did well too, but who, in the circumstances, and a little like the Conservatives in the UK last year, should really have done a lot better. Perhaps the reason they didn’t is that people could see the plain truth – that Fine Gael policy is Fianna Fáil policy with the barefaced cheek taken out. The electorate has put its energy into punishing Fianna Fáil largely because it didn’t have any other strategy to put its energy into. It would be ludicrous to suggest that had Democracy Now got its arse in gear it would have ushered in a new dawn in Irish politics. But it could have dramatically altered the terms of the debate during the course of the campaign. And it’s not entirely unreasonable to suggest that it might have affected the outcome – probably to the detriment of Labour and the ULA – and could have resulted in Fintan O’Toole holding the balance of power.
I would have liked that. I would have liked it a lot.
Though reading Ship Of Fools and Enough Is Enough made me quite glad that Democracy Now was deferred, or at least that O’Toole himself remains out of electoral politics. While the Dáil remains dysfunctional, leaving the non-government benches – as O’Toole points out – effectively without any powers over government legislation or any ability to initiate any legislation itself, his presence there would be pretty much useless. And getting him onto the government benches would have been a long shot, and would inevitably have involved an ugly series of compromises. A seat in the Dáil would presumably have limited his ability to continue as a working journalist as well. And it is as a working journalist that O’Toole is most needed. The clarity of his thinking and analysis, and the calm head he brings to a catastrophic mess that prompts panic or despair in most of us, is invaluable.
And anyway, Eamon Dunphy might have held the balance of power.
If you’re interested in Ireland, if you’re interested in what’s wrong with it, and what might be done to fix it, then these books are essential reading. I’d like to think that in generations to come they will be familiar to Irish citizens as a part of what became the foundations of a new Republic. For them to end up as footnotes in a history of a state folding in on itself and failing utterly would be tragic. And bloody typical.
There is an inland village in the county of Clare called Kilaroe. And it is not really a village so much as a post office and a primary school, a pub and a two pump garage with attached mini-market, shared between the town-lands of Alva and Rahaniska. The post office has been the subject of a continuous row since 1992 – a row that has made the national phone-in shows and once the television news – and the public windows are footnoted with posters demanding it be saved, and insisting that everyone, everyone, needs to cherish rural Ireland.
When I was a boy holidaying every year on the coast nearby, there were stories about a house in Kilaroe. The house was about a mile from the village, in Alva, an usual part of Clare packed with dense small hills where little woods nestle in the dips, and bits of streams cough and splutter by the roads like wounds. It’s not like Clare at all.
The house was a bungalow, or it was an ordinary two storey. It was a 1950s purpose build of peculiar design with secret rooms and tunnels into the fields, or it was an old farmhouse from famine times, converted and expanded. It had been occupied since 1947, or 1956, or 1963, by a foreign couple who were said to have at least two sons, possibly three. The rumours changed as I grew older. Or rather, as I grew older I was admitted further along the path of suspicion, trusted with more complicated articulations of what was basically distrust.
What I first heard was that it was a haunted house. That ghostly figures could be seen at the windows. Strange sounds emanated from it at night – howls and screams and silences. Then I was told about a murder. One of the sons had killed a girl in the attic. Or in the kitchen. Or he had killed a boy. Or he had killed one of his brothers, and hence the confusion about their number. And maybe it was haunted, and maybe it wasn’t, but it was a house of evil, and you could feel the pulse of it if you walked by on the road. Then when I was in my early teens I heard that all of that was nonsense, deliberately put about to scare off the children, and that the house was a brothel, that a red light burned in an upstairs window, and there were no sons, just “daughters”, and the place was notorious but discreet and tolerated, even valued. A year or so later, and that theory seemed immature, silly, naive. The man of the house was a criminal. But he was no mere brothel keeper. He was a big, international criminal. He was a smuggler, obviously, but also a counterfeiter and jewel thief. He was wanted by police forces all over the world, but who would think to look in Co. Clare? But no, that was nonsense too. That was movie nonsense. He was an IRA man. He wasn’t a foreigner at all, he was from Ennis, and he was one of the men behind Guildford, and Birmingham, and he had slipped out the door at Balcombe Street and there was a bomb factory in the barn, and sometimes cars arrived from the north in the early hours and hooded men were bundled into the house and later, shots could be heard in the woods.
When I was about seventeen I heard that the man was a Nazi. At first I think he was supposed to be a Nazi like the ones in The Odessa File and The Boys From Brazil . He had the a swastika button on the reverse of his lapel. A portrait of the Führer hung over the fireplace. He plotted long into the night about how to get it right next time. But the story mellowed over the years. He was an old man. An old fugitive. He had changed his name and he lived like a recluse and his wife was a haunted woman and they were prisoners of their own fear and shame and so much time had passed and how could such things be addressed, here of all places, and really they were only to be pitied.
Much later, I heard that he’d died. And that his widow had sold the house and returned to Germany, where she had lived another couple of years somewhere in Bavaria, and that one of the sons still visited Clare every summer and could often be seen swimming in the Pollock Holes in Kilkee, where the wags called him Adolf, which he didn’t seem to mind.
I believed every version of the story about the house. Every version seemed completely convincing and true until I heard the one that superseded it. The last story I heard was that he was a Nazi, and I have sought no further clarification. I like the idea. I like the idea of an old Nazi living out his life in a peculiar house in a quiet and peculiar place on the edge of Europe, baffled and ashamed or defiant and bitter – it doesn’t really matter. Clare is a place that reels from terrible things, so old that they are barely named, so hard to imagine that they survive by haunting, and there is nowhere in its landscape that is not infused with oddness and a quiet sleepy violence – a delicious sort of threat. And it is an impossible fact but whatever happened here happened everywhere, and whatever happened everywhere happened here, and so it is with books, and so it is with stories and rumours and the past.
When you swim in the Pollock Holes you can see a lip of rocks at eye level, and beyond you can see the Atlantic and its waves and the cliffs in the distance and storms passing north or south on the horizon, and it is all colossal, and you can feel – it is possible to feel – either that you are nothing at all, or that you are lucky.
In London since last Thursday the sky has been unbroken blue. I’ve been going out to watch the sun set. At night I have seen the stars. The noise is of traffic and people. For once, there is no airplane noise. The city is a little calmer, a little more lovely. On Saturday while I was walking, I took photographs of the sky. I saw others doing the same, shyly, in the way that people get the cameras out when it’s snowing. It’s a nice feeling.
If we’re lucky – I mean if mankind is lucky – then we are living during the time when the planet is at its dirtiest, noisiest, most polluted. In a few generations time people will either be living in a cleaner better place, or they’ll be clambering over each other for higher ground, cooler latitudes, clean water, food. It’s a little annoying – to think that you are living either in the worst of times, or the end of times.
Eyjafjallajoekull has done us a favour. It’s a neat, relatively painless but still dramatic reminder that we live on a planet. You know. A big blob of rock and water floating in space. You might live in a nice house, in a sophisticated city, in a rich western country, with a pension and broadband and a credit card. But you’re hurtling through the universe, sustained by a delicate mixture of gases, protected by a paper thin atmosphere, in a narrow band of temperature between a hot death and a cold death, on a planet that is changing, moody, impermanent, given to outbursts of violence and driven by complicated systems of self regulation that don’t include our well being in their calculations. We’re all of us hanging by a thread. Or several threads, I suppose. The thread of unlimited cheap air travel, available at the drop of a hat, seems a bit frayed. It probably won’t snap, not yet, and over the next few days they’ll tie a knot in it and we’ll all be back on Ryan Air, complaining about the fact that they take us all the way across Europe in an afternoon, for the price of a new shirt, but don’t quite take us to the door of our hotel and want us to pay them for a sandwich.
We don’t know we’re born.
This morning, two letters. One is from the Pope to the people of Ireland. You can read about that vacuity elsewhere. The other is from me to the Diocese of Westminster, formally declaring my defection from the Catholic Church. The timing is entirely coincidental, but I like it.
It’s a very long time since I was anything other than a relaxed, contented atheist. I avoid religious ceremonies of all kinds as much as I can, and have tried to be ecumenical in my anti-religious thinking. But, I’m Irish. I was baptised into the Catholic Church. I was educated at a Jesuit school from the age of 8 to the age of 18. I received communion and was confirmed into the Catholic Church. I went to a Catholic University. It’s hardly surprising if most of my atheism is, so to speak, Catholic atheism.
While I haven’t claimed the Catholic Church as mine since I was a teenager, the Catholic Church continues to claim me. And you, if you received a Catholic baptism. The superb and straightforward website www.CountMeOut.ie explains how the Church continues to count us, the baptised but long gone, amongst its congregation. And it helpfully provides the resources for putting an end to this by formally ‘defecting’ from the Church. Though focussed on people in Ireland, it will be useful to Catholics anywhere who don’t want to be counted as Catholic any more. In my own case for example I printed off a PDF they supply, and addressed it to the diocesan office where I am resident along with a cover letter I wrote myself. In due course, I expect, some poor, miserable priest whose job it is to deal with the hell-bound, will write to me with a confirmation that I am no longer a Catholic.
I probably would never have bothered doing this if it wasn’t for my unfocussed feeling of disgust and anger over the recent child abuse scandals. Defection is a small but practical stand against what would otherwise be a detached, distant horror. And I can’t really think of a better word for the widespread rape and sexual abuse of children by priests of the Catholic Church, which has been, over generations, systematically covered up by the hierarchy of the church, up to and including the current Pope, Joseph Ratzinger. (For a decent summary of just how entangled Ratzinger is in this, have a read of Christopher Hitchens. ) This cover up involved moving rapists and abusers around rather than reporting them to the civil authorities. As a result it led to the creation of more and more victims, and more and more suffering. This litany of facts, which reads at first like the berserk plot of a particularly distasteful Dan Brown novel, is now so well established and documented that I frankly, honestly, cannot understand how little has been done about it. I cannot understand why many bishops in Ireland remain in their jobs. I cannot understand why they, and others, including Sean Brady, have not been arrested on suspicion of, at the very least, not reporting a crime. I am baffled as to why an international police investigation has not been launched. I genuinely don’t understand it. The Catholic Church hierarchy is morally vacuous. As Johann Hari has pointed out , if it it were any other sort of organisation, it would not be tolerated. It would have been shut down.
If you received a Catholic baptism and are now an atheist, or a person of no religious beliefs, or a ‘lapsed Catholic’, I hope you’ll think about defecting via www.CountMeOut.ie . If you remain a Catholic, please, at the next mass you attend, when you recite the Nicene Creed, consider the line We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church and consider the implications of your personal solemn endorsement, given what the Church has been involved with in your lifetime. If you still wish to stand up and proclaim your faith in it, then shame on you.
The stand off between Amazon and Macmillan over the last few days has been covered all over the place by people with a firmer grasp of the economic and legal ins and outs of what’s going on than I possess . But. This is not going to be the last such confrontation. For reasons that are all about technology and business – and have next to nothing to do with writing – the shiny spotlight of new gadgetry, and all the money that powers it, has turned its heat on the world of book publishing. Of all things.
(And I do mean books. I don’t mean newspapers and magazines, which are a separate business. And one in which the application of new technology makes more sense. While there are cross overs and tangled interests, the similarities tend to be red herrings.)
The books business has operated on a fairly predictable, if complicated, model for a long time now. There are subtleties and oddities, and I’m simplifying somewhat, but basically …
1. The author writes a book.
2. The author hands the book to an agent.
3. The agent finds a publisher for the book.
4. The publisher has the book edited, designed and printed.
5. The publisher markets the book to retailers and readers.
6. The retailers buy the book and present it to readers.
7. The reader buys the book.
8. The reader reads the book.
In an ideal world, steps 2 to 7 would not exist. In the world of new technologies – of Amazon, the iPad and iBooks, of the Google Book Agreement – steps 3 to 7 are in a mess, scrambled, being fought over, argued about, and written off and on again as everyone tries to find the right combination that will keep everyone employed.
Notice anything? It’s pretty much certain that ten years from now, those 5 steps from 3 to 7 will have been cut down to maybe 4 steps. Maybe even 2 or 3 steps. We are approaching the ideal world.
The only essential steps in this process are steps 1 and 8. If I want to pay my rent, step 7 is good too. And in order for step 7 to happen, some of the other steps are going to have to stay in place in one form or another. But the process is going to shrink. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
Mostly the debate about what to shrink and how is being had between publishers and retailers. Agents are a canny lot and are keeping a watching brief. Readers are interested, and are vaguely hopeful that when the dust settles they might have some cool new ways of reading books, and that it might be a bit cheaper. Authors are worried. Authors are always worried of course. But in this instance, how worried should we be?
Publishers certainly need to worry, particularly the big ones. Traditional retailers don’t need anyone to tell them that they need to worry. But non traditional retailers, Amazon chief amongst them, need to worry too, and from their actions over the last week, I think they know it. Neither of these two giant cogs in the process want to give way. So inevitably the pressure is being forced outwards. Readers are feeling it (or, are being asked to feel it by Amazon’s pricing games), and authors are feeling it – mostly by being told that the days of big (or any) advances are over, and that royalties aren’t going to improve either, sorry about that, and that we should shut up and be grateful that anyone does us the honour of publishing us in the first place.
This is bullshit.
Retailers and publishers are non-essential. New technology means that I can, in theory, sell you my new book on this website at a price that suits both you and me, and cut out the middle men. But I want to be a writer, not a businessman, and you want the enjoyment of browsing your local bookshop and stumbling over my book there, all nicely presented. So, I employ a middle man. But why on earth would I need two middle men?
Authors have power.
It’s very difficult to convince any but the biggest name authors of this. Most of us feel that we have no power whatsoever. This is because we tend to forget, indeed we are encouraged to forget, that we are, to use the iLanguage, the ‘content providers’. And what is content? King. Without us, there are no books. No books, no business.
It’s difficult to do anything with that. It’s difficult to organise a bunch of isolated, solitary social misfits. But it’s not really necessary. Agents form a strong, though admittedly not comprehensive, bodyguard. They act of behalf of individual authors rather than some greater ideal, but they know what side their bread is buttered. The generality of agents’ work is done to the benefit of the generality of authors. They are, after all, a non-essential step as well, and they know it.
And within publishing there is a core of people who know full well that the business is about writing, and that what serves the writing will in the long term win out over what serves the process. These people are clinging to door frames maybe, but they’re there. And they’re right. And the wrong ones who have replaced their colleagues will not last.
I’d argue, and I don’t think it’s a controversial argument to make, that publishers and retailers have done a pretty good job of diminishing quality over the last, say, fifteen years. They’ve become involved in the chase for big money phenomenon books; they’ve invested in non-writing celebrities and have tried to contrive titles to appeal to perceived markets; they’ve sacrificed long term modest sales authors in favour of one off high sales ones – part of the misguided strategy of focussing on titles, not on writers; they’ve taken discounting to an absurd level – seeming to misunderstand the very nature of what it is they’re selling, believing books to be as amenable to regular bulk buying as ready meals. They have, and it’s a generalisation that doesn’t have to contend with very many exceptions, behaved bloody stupidly.
The current scramble for the future of books hopefully lends itself to a refocussing on books themselves. People want good ones. Formats and methods of delivery may change, but people will continue to want great books and great writing. Anyone who misses that point, be they author, agent, publisher or retailer, is going to lose out. Anyone who forgets that it’s about connecting the reader to the writer is going to lose out. Anyone who thinks the authors are the non-essential cog in this process are going to lose out spectacularly.
A future is opening up in which retailers and major publishers will in all likelihood merge, probably bloodily, and will start cannibalising each other’s traditional roles. The biggest book publisher in ten years time could be Amazon. Or Apple. Or perhaps the biggest books retailer in ten years time will be Barnes & Noble. Or Apple. But certainly, something has to give. Probably not Apple.
It may be that big corporate publisher/retailers will become simply an annexe of the entertainment industry, publishing only the brand name authors with guaranteed returns. And that literature will be carried out elsewhere, by smaller, independent publishers working both with old fashioned physical books and their digital counterparts, selling directly online to a worldwide readership. Some would argue that this is exactly what’s happening now.
But I’m not simply whistling past the graveyard here. At least I hope I’m not. Authors are the books business. In all the shouting that’s going to go on (and on) in the next while, listen out for the businesses – be they retailers or publishers or both – who are putting writers at the centre of their plans. They’ll be the ones left standing.
Vic Chesnutt died on Christmas Day. I didn’t hear until just this week. Just the other day. I don’t know how that happened. I don’t understand it. It seems such a stupid thing, on my part, to have missed that piece of news, given all the useless, pointless, frivolous pieces of news I did not miss. I am angry that he died. Angry that I didn’t know. The anger serves as flimsy cover for the fact that that I am peculiarly moved by his death. By its circumstances, by his age, by the feeling it leaves me of something close to grief.
Which is, objectively, silly. I didn’t know him. Never met him. Saw him play live just once. I don’t have anything at all to say about him other than that his music was and remains important to me, and that he struck me as a better man than I could ever hope to be. He created. He expressed and manifested a relationship to the world and to being alive that was straightforward art, and which was beautiful and profound, and he nudged me with a truthfulness that will touch me, I’m pretty sure, for the rest of my life.
This song, that he performs in the video below, has been my favourite song for months, since it first appeared on At The Cut . It is almost unbearably poignant now. I love its honesty, its precise pain, and its insistence on not being ready. Maybe readiness comes suddenly. And when we’re ready, we go.
So, I did next to no work in the middle of the day. I just read through some work and made some notes. It’s more or less been a day off. This is not good.
I went down to Holloway on the tube to have a coffee with my friend Raj. Stop , he cried.
We talked about religion, our parents, Roberto Ballaño, vampires, films, work, our friend Jasper, pencils, and other things I can’t remember.
I took the tube home and it was pretty full but not as full as it was this morning when I took the Victoria line down to Kings Cross.
Things I have learned today :
1. a full tube train smells better – more natural – in the evening than it does in the morning when it’s full of perfumes and deodorants.
2. everyone wants to talk about vampires.
Last night I finished a long (20,000 words) short story that I’ve been stalled on for what feels like years, called The Spectacular . I don’t know if it’s any good. I have my doubts. Over the weekend I have to finish off another one – easier, this, mainly because it’s rubbish. They get sent to my agent on Monday. Then it’s downhill through the others, rolling the whole lot up into a nice bouncy ball – hopefully before Christmas. Then I’m going to live on the west coast of Ireland for three months to write a book about sea ghosts. Then I’m going to come back to London and have a breakdown.
This morning I went over to West Ham for breakfast with my friend Jasper. Stop , he cried.
We talked about canons, vampires, computer games, our friend Raj, the Royal Mail dispute, food, getting up in the mornings and copyright. And other things I’ve forgotten. I told him stuff that’s been happening on the news, and he told me a very funny story about Vienetta.
I took the train home from Barking, all through the north east looking down on the city in the chilly sun.
I lived in Florence briefly, about ten years ago. In terms of getting to know the place, I really only scratched the surface, finding a fairly closed, almost claustrophobic society – mono-cultural and deeply conservative – in an astonishing, surreal setting. It was at its weirdest, and its beautiful best, in the depths of winter when there were no tourists, and the ancient, quotidian traditions of the citizens re-establish themselves in a gentle, sensuous sort of way. Italians generally, and Florentines perhaps in particular, like to do things just so . And each Italian will know, better than any other Italian, what just so actually involves. I miss the cafés and the narrow streets, the mysterious, touchable buildings, the damp cold mornings and the mist on the Arno, and the frequent feeling that you’ve turned a corner into 1498. And of course, the Renaissance art, which seems inexhaustible, and is exhausting, and which can, if you let it, colour and shape every thought you have while there. I found it, after just a couple of months, a very difficult place to write in. It squats in your imagination like a hulking, mostly malevolent, melodramatic bully.
Around the city are the sweet hills of Tuscany, dotted with the sort of tiny villages and historic villas that you’ll see in the tourist brochures. But there is another side to the idyll, of course, and as undersides go, it’s grimy, crawling, repulsive and scary – or at least it is in Douglas Preston ’s at times almost unbelievable account of the murder mystery that has been playing havoc with the Italian national psyche for nearly three decades now.
In 1981 a couple having sex in a car in the countryside outside the city were murdered. Both were shot to death. The young woman was mutilated. It didn’t take long for the murders to be linked to another, almost identical double murder from 1974. The lid was lifted on two previously obscured aspects of Tuscan life. The first was that young couples could be found in cars all over the the hills around Florence, looking for a quiet spot to have sex. Italians, traditionally, live at home with their parents until they are married. Privacy becomes a major concern early on in their lives. The second was that of the Indiani – the voyeurs who spend their time watching the youngsters. This scene, it was revealed, was an elaborate and organised staking out of “prime sites” where the best action could be viewed, and where vantage points were claimed and traded, bought and sold, often with seasoning of violence.
The police arrested one of these voyeurs and charged him with the murders. While he was in prison awaiting trial, another couple were murdered. It would became one of the hallmarks of the investigation – the police would arrest someone, lock him up, and then wait and see if the killings stopped. They didn’t, until 1985. The killer’s total is fourteen, at least. And although a man named Pacciani was convicted in 1994, he was acquitted on appeal in 1996, and no one now seriously believes he was responsible.
A journalist called Mario Spezi has followed the case. He is credited as the joint author of this book, and in many ways he is the character who dominates it, though he never actually takes charge of the narrative. Spezi seems to be the sort of journalist that they don’t make ‘em like anymore. Dapper, chain smoking, dogged, clever, cunning, congenial, his investigative intelligence is more sober, more careful, and a lot more impressive than that of the authorities. He remains a still point of sanity in what quickly becomes an astonishing shit storm of craziness.
Spezi’s experiences from 1981 until the present day are narrated by Douglas Preston, who arrived in Florence about a month after I left, in 2000, and who stumbled into the case of Il Mostro while attempting to write a medieval murder mystery. Preston is an American, a writer of crime fiction, thrillers, and his writing style is pretty much as you’d expect – journalistic, pacey, fond of the cliff hanger and the shock reveal, and with excellent organisational skills. He marshals a vast amount of complicated information without ever neglecting his duty to engage and entertain. He is helped by the nature of the material – but he could have been swamped by it, and he isn’t. I admired him a great deal by the end, long past the point where a less robust writer, like me for example, would have thrown in the towel and gone running home to mummy. Not least because the investigation, eventually, insanely, perversely, turned its attentions on him, and more worryingly, on Mario Spezi.
There have been, broadly speaking, two main strands to the investigations over the years. By far the more convincing is the one that the police first embarked upon. They knew that the same gun linked all the crimes, and that this gun had been used in a double killing, superficially similar to Monster killings, which had taken place in 1968. This first crime had been ostensibly solved. A Sardinian man had shot his wife and her lover in a car in the hills outside Florence, while their six year old son slept on the back seat. The gun had never been found. Find the gun, and you find the Monster. It turned out the the murderer in this first case had been accompanied, and probably manipulated, by a man called Salvatore Vinci, another Sardinian. Suspicion, for a long time, alternated between Salvatore and his brother Francesco.
It’s complicated. I’m not going to redo in miniature the job Preston does so well in large scale. Suffice it to say that this “Sardinian Trail” involves a probable murder back in Sardinia dating from 1961; the two brothers, each of whom seems by turns creepier than the other; a boy who hates his father and loves his uncle; and a whole mess of complicated violent and sexual intricacies between a bunch of characters who provided the model for the mad Sardinians in Hannibal – the ones who do horrible things with wild pigs. Thomas Harris sat in on the trial of Pacciani, and hung out with the chief investigating officer. The detail about the pigs, which seems so over the top in both film and book, is real.
Despite the apparently obvious evidence that the Vincis are linked in some way to the Monster killings, there are too many reasons why Salvatore or Francesco cannot have been the Monster. The police, frustrated, pressured, looked elsewhere.
The other strand to the investigation involves a kind of fantasy world in which Pacciani (a violent and disgusting killer and rapist – of his own daughters) is the Monster. In this fantasy, Pacciani was sent out by a group of respected and wealthy citizens of Florence to collect the sexual organs of women, for use in Satanic rituals in which portals between this world and others are opened. I kid you not. This fantasy is, currently, the official story of what happened. A lot of it seems to come from, or bear a marked similarity to, the rantings of a "medium" called Gabriella Carlizzi, who runs an conspiracy website. The evil satanic organisation behind the Monster killings is the same, according to Carlizzi, as the one which masterminded 9/11. She’s like a Dan Brown novel come to life. The investigators seem to have been using her as a source.
Mario Spezi was arrested in 2006 as part of the investigation into this infernal conspiracy, and was released only after an international outcry. The main problem that the investigating authorities had with Spezi was that he was pointing out (and here, unbelievably, he was in a minority in Italian journalism) the bullshit nature of the official fantasy. Such attempts to discredit the conspiracy theory amount, in the prefect-circle logic of the crank, to evidence of complicity in the cover up. Preston was taken in for questioning, placed officially under suspicion of a conspiracy to plant evidence, and more or less intimidated out of the country.
It’s breathtaking. Shocking, scary, troubling stuff. You’ll laugh at it, think it impossible for times like our own. Impossible that it could continue. Today. Think again.
Spezi and Preston have an impressive theory about who Il Mostro di Firenze actually is. They make their case calmly, and pretty convincingly within the pages of this book. The man’ s photograph is there. They interview him. He denies it of course, but he’s one fairly scary individual. He lives in Florence, ignored by the authorities, to whom he is simply impossible, irrelevant. He doesn’t fit the fantasy.
And by the last third of this book, the monster you find yourself contemplating is not the killer, but the investigation into the killings. Monstrous is truly the word. A simple account of it suggests serious problems in Italian investigative practise. The detailed account you get here exposes Italy’s justice system as a complete basket case. And the most worrying thing about it is the fact that it is ongoing. Right now. Summer, 2009. The monster of official paranoia and tunnel vision currently has in its gaze the pitiful figure of Amanda Knox.
The investigating official responsible for the Pacciani fantasy has been indicted on charges relating to illegal wiretaps of journalists, and other matters, arising out of his conduct in the Monster case. Despite this (Ciao! Italia! ) he remains in post as the Public Minister of Perugia (the region next to Tuscany, to the south), with responsibility for the conduct of major investigations, and for their prosecution in court. He is called Judge Giuliano Mignini. He recently took time out from his busy schedule of phantasmagoria to tell the BBC that he isn’t “mentally unstable”. He is the chief prosecutor in the Amanda Knox case.
Preston gives us a troubling afterword on Amanda Knox. She’s on trial for the murder of Meredith Kercher, a murder which it is highly unlikely that either she or her boyfriend had anything to do with. She has been demonised by the media (inside and outside Italy) to a horrible extent, in ways which put (or should put) the journalists involved to shame. Lied to in the course of interrogations (coordinated and led by Mignini), allegedly mistreated both physically and psychologically, not given access to a lawyer or a translator, the American student seems to have been effectively set up. Mignini, true to form, has been throwing around accusations of “rites” and dark forces in his case against her. It’s a case which requires an acceptance of hysterical, gothic improbabilities in order to stand up. The alternatives, which Preston goes through calmly and carefully, seem to make a hell of a lot more sense.
As you can tell by the length of this post, this is one of those books that contains a story so shocking and bewildering that it can turn you into a real bore at parties. The book itself never bores. Preston does a great job, and his own bewilderment and anger, and real fear (he has been warned, within the last year, not to return to Italy), are honestly presented, without any self aggrandisement. You really do get the impression that he’d rather not have become part of the story thanks very much.
And he writes well about Florence. He has succeeded with the city that defeated me. He is always aware of the historical context, and of how it both charms and distorts. One of his most memorable portraits is of Florentine nobleman and Anglophile, Count Niccolò Capponi, who pops up throughout the story with words of wisdom about the peculiar nature of Italy and Italians, delivered to Preston with a gentle and cautionary solicitude. He talks about dietrologia , telling Preston that it’s the only Italian word he needs to know in order to understand the investigation into Il Mostro.
“ Dietro – behind. Logia – the study of. Dietrologia is the idea that the obvious thing cannot be the truth. There is always something hidden behind, dietro. It isn’t quite what you Americans call a conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theory implies theory, something uncertain, a possibilty. The dietrologist deals only in fact. This is how it really is.”
The case of Il Mostro is a labyrinth of wrong turnings, a succession of doors leading to other doors, and behind each of them nothing but the promise of something else again behind the next. Italy is perhaps one of the few places left in the world where it’s possible that a tyranny of the imagination can take hold on such a scale. If Giuliano Mignini can imagine it, then it exists. Such power in the mind of one person can create wonders – Florence is full of them. And such power can create nightmares. Florence is full of them too.
