Ten Years in the Tub (39 page)

I am sorry if the following lesson in UK politics is redundant, but I'm going to give it anyway: our Democrats are already in office. We voted the right way in 1997, and we have had a Labour government ever since, and at the time of writing it is absolutely certain that we will have one for the next five years: there will be an election some time in 2005, and Blair will walk it. As you may have noticed, the only problem is that the Labour government turned out not to be a Labour government at all. It's not just that Blair helped to bomb Iraq; he's also introducing the profit motive into our once-glorious National Health Service, and allowing some pretty dodgy people to invest in the education of our children. Sir Peter Vardy, an evangelical Christian car-dealer, wants creationism taught alongside theories of evolution, and in return for two million pounds per new school he can do pretty much whatever he wants. He already controls a couple of schools in the North of England.

I waited for this government all my voting life, and Harris's title perfectly captures the disillusionment of several generations of people who thought that when the Tories went, all would be right with the world. Disappointingly, Harris tells me that I should carry on doing what I've been doing: my local MP (and we don't elect leaders, just local representatives of political parties) has voted against everything I would want him to vote against, so it seems unfair to castigate him for Blair's crimes and misdemeanors. I wanted to be told that the Liberal Democrats, our third party, or the Greens, or the vaguely nutty Respect Coalition were viable alternatives, but they're not, so we're stuffed.
So Now Who Do We Vote For
? is a useful and impassioned book nevertheless; it's a brave book, too—nobody wants to write anything that will self-destruct at a given point in its publication year, and I don't think he's going to pick up many foreign sales, either. John Harris, we salute you.

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
wasn't one of the stalker books, but after a couple of recommendations, I wanted to read it anyway. Nick Flynn's dark, delirious memoir describes his father's journey from employment, marriage, and a putative writing career to vagrancy and alcoholism. (The ambition to write, incidentally, is never abandoned, which might give a few of us pause for thought.) Nick loses touch with his dad; lives, not entirely companionably, with a few demons of his own; and then ends up working in a homeless shelter. And guess who turns up? One image in
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
, of a homeless man sitting in the street in an armchair, watching a TV he has managed to hook up to a street lamp, is reminiscent of Beckett; readers will find themselves grateful that Flynn is a real writer, stonily indifferent to the opportunities for shameless manipulation such an experience might provide.

I bought Michael Frayn's
Towards the End of the Morning
from one of Amazon's “Marketplace Sellers” for 25p. I could have had it for 1p, but I was, perhaps understandably, deterred rather than attracted by the price: What can you get for a penny these days? Would I be able to read it, or would all the pages have been masticated by the previous owner's dog? It wasn't as if I was entirely reassured by the higher price, but a few days later, a perfectly-preserved, possibly unread 1970 paperback turned up in the post, sent by a lady in Scotland. Does anyone understand this Marketplace thing? Why does anyone want to sell a book for a penny? Or even twenty-five pennies? What's in it for anyone, apart from us? I'm still suspicious. It's a wonderful novel, though, urbane and funny and disarmingly gentle, and I might send the lady in Scotland some more money anyway. Or is that the scam? That's clever.

“If Frayn is about to step into anybody's shoes, they aren't Evelyn Waugh's, but Gogol's,” says the blurb on the front of my thirty-five-year-old paperback. Is that how you sold books back then? And how would it have worked? As far as I can work out, the quote is a stern warning to fans of elegant English comic writing that this elegant English comic novel won't interest them in the slightest. It was a daring tactic, certainly; the penny copies lead one to suspect that it didn't quite come off.

May 2005

BOOKS BOUGHT
:

     
  
Sleep Towards Heaven
—Amanda Eyre Ward

     
  
Dr Seuss: American Icon
—Philip Nel

BOOKS READ
:

     
  
In Cold Blood
—Truman Capote

     
  
A Cold Case
—Philip Gourevitch

     
  
Like A Rolling Stone
—Greil Marcus

     
  
How To Be Lost
—Amanda Eyre Ward

E
arlier today I was in a bookstore, and I picked up a new book about the migration patterns of the peregrine falcon. For a moment, I ached to buy it—or rather, I ached to be the kind of person who would buy it, read it, and learn something from it. I mean, obviously I could have bought it, but I could also have taken the fifteen pounds from my pocket and eaten it, right in the middle of Borders, and there seemed just as much point in the latter course of action as the former. (And before anyone gets on at me about Borders, I should point out that the last independent bookshop in Islington, home of the chattering literary classes, closed down a couple of weeks ago.)

I don't know what it was about, the peregrine falcon thing. That's some kind of bird, right? Well, I've only read one book about a bird before, Barry Hines's heartbreaking
A Kestrel for a Knave
, later retitled
Kes
to tie in with Ken Loach's film adaptation of that name. (You, dear reader, are much more likely to have read
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
than
Kes
, I suspect, and our respective tastes in bird books reveal something fundamental about our cultures.) An Amazon reviewer describes
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
as “a charming allegory with a very pertinent message: DON'T ABANDON YOUR DREAMS.” I would not be traducing the message of
Kes
if I were to summarize it thus: ABANDON YOUR DREAMS. In fact, “ABANDON YOUR DREAMS” is a pretty handy summary
of the whole of contemporary English culture—of the country itself, even. It would be great to be you, sometimes. I mean, obviously our motto is more truthful than yours, and ultimately more useful, but there used to be great piles of
Kes
in every high-school stock room. You'd think they'd let us reach the age of sixteen or so before telling us that life is shit. I read Hines's book because it was a work of literature, however, not because it was a book about a bird. And maybe this book will turn out to be a work of literature, too, and a million people will tell me to read it, and it will win tons of prizes, and eventually I'll succumb, but by then, it will have lost the allure it seemed to have this afternoon when it promised to be the kind of book I don't usually open. I'm always reading works of bloody literature; I'm never reading about migration patterns.