“Purity posits the notion that we are not one another, whereas clearly, to live, we must imagine how it is to be one another.  This is where fiction, though it is not a utilitarian art, or anything so simple, cannot but come in.  We need urgently to know how other people feel.” (p.224)

Candia McWilliam has bravely and unflinching shown us how she feels, and has done so in a consummate work of art. Like the best fiction, it will live in our imaginations and inform the way that we, if we are fortunate, are able to see the world.

The conscious reason is because I wanted to pay the book the respect which it deserves; to read it carefully, thoughtfully, taking notes and pondering its revelations. But there’s more to it than that. What The Shock Doctrine did for me (to me?) was, once and for all, to demolish those ideas that, though I’ve probably never held them intellectually, provided the emotional underpinnings to my comfortable Ladybird-book world. These ideas: that global corporations are just like big corner shops, that democratically-elected governments are essentially benevolent, that people like us don’t deliberately starve people like them, are meticulously taken apart by Klein, not by rhetoric but, far more scarily, by the patient accumulation of fact upon fact.

The shock of the title is twofold: the destruction of an individual’s identity through physical and psychological torture and the paralysis of a society through the imposition of brutal economic measures. The two act as mirrors and paradigms to each other, but, more than that, share a history in the modern world where the first is often employed in the service of the second.

The story begins in the 1950s with the CIA’s covert and illegal MKULTRA experiments in brain manipulation using surreptitious chemicals including LSD, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation and abuse, both verbal and sexual. These and other atrocities informed the 1963 CIA KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual, which, together with its 1983 successor, has provided comprehensive instructions to state-sponsored torturers worldwide. Since 9/11 these coercive techniques have been openly used in Guantanamo and elsewhere, with George Bush claiming the right to interpret the Geneva Convention as he saw fit, reclassifying prisoners of war, whose rights are protected, with the term, now so broad as to be meaningless, of ‘enemy combatants’. We are now all too familiar with the resultant horrors: blacked-out cells, isolation, sensory bombardment and the drowning simulation given the jolly beachdude name of ‘waterboarding’.

Meanwhile, as esteemed psychiatrists in the pay of the CIA were giving their mildly anxious and postnatally depressed patients ECT at forty times normal levels, putting them into comas for months at a time and leaving them incontinent, amnesiac and unable to talk or recognise their parents, another doctor was prescribing shock remedies on a broader scale. Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom, published in 1962, summarised the economic doctrines which he had been promulgating in the University of Chicago for over fifteen years. Basing its theories on the conception of an ideal free market, a state of pure capitalism, the Chicago School advocated the removal of any rules restricting the accumulation of profits, the sale of any public assets which a corporation could run at a profit and remorseless cuts in the funding of social programmes.

During the 1950s developmentalist policies, especially in the Southern Cone of Latin America, began to build strong internal markets, investing in infrastructure, regulating key industries and raising import tariffs. Corporate America didn’t like it, and the Chicago School provided a fig leaf to cover their rapacity. According to their convenient doctrines, developmentalism wasn’t wrong because it reduced the potential profits of giant exporters; it was wrong because it countered the scientific truths of economics and thereby, ultimately, precluded individual freedom.

This claptrap was enough. In 1953, at the instigation of the British, the CIA overthrew the democratically elected president of Iran [among his many social and economic reforms, nationalising Iran’s oil industry was probably the real bugbear – now where have we heard that again?]. Building on their success, the following year the CIA orchestrated a coup in Guatemala, apparently at the request of the US United Fruit Company (now Chiquita, if you’d like another reason to stick to fair trade bananas). More followed: in the 1960s US-backed military forces seized power in Brazil and Indonesia until finally in 1973 the CIA, the giant corporations and the Chicago School together enacted the greatest of their experiments in human annihilation: the Chilean coup of General Pinochet.

It had been a while in the planning. Since 1956, Chilean students, funded by the US government, had been travelling to Chicago to study economics under Milton Friedman. Many subsequently took up posts at Santiago’s Catholic University, teaching the same curriculum with the same claims of scientific purity. With the election of President Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government in 1970, despite a million dollars in opposition bribes from ITT [the US-based International Telephone and Telegraph Company whose Chilean operation was due to be nationalised] these ‘Chicago Boys’ and their corporate backers were outraged and ready for action. Nixon instructed the CIA to ‘make the economy scream’ and the Ad Hoc Committee on Chile, comprising ITT, mining companies and other corporations, did their utmost to make the cries as anguished as possible.

Within Chile, the Catholic University became the breeding ground for the fascist Patria y Libertad party and what the CIA described as a ‘coup climate’. A dual strategy was devised, a ‘war structure’ which liaised with the military on one hand while developing Friedmanite economic policies on the other. These policies, developed by Chicago Boys, overwhelmingly funded by, yes, the CIA, were enshrined in a five hundred page document – ‘The Brick’ – passed to and specifically endorsed by the military authorities. To complete the jigsaw, US trainers had spent years spreading propaganda within the Chilean armed forces, convincing them that socialists were Russian spies, the perennial ‘enemy within’. Everything was ready.

It was the eleventh of September, 9/11 as the Americans say, when Pinochet’s tanks thundered down the streets of Santiago and fired twenty-four rockets at the thirty-seven people within the presidential palace. What Pinochet insisted upon calling a ‘war’ lasted from 7am when he took control of Valparaiso port until 2.30pm when Allende’s handful of supporters surrendered and the president’s corpse was carried out of the palace. But these few hours, a prototype for later Shock and Awe demonstrations of US might, were only a foretaste of the real shocks to be inflicted upon the Chilean people.

During the next few days around 13,500 civilians were imprisoned and thousands tortured and executed in Santiago’s football stadiums while more were killed in the northern provinces in what became known as the Caravan of Death. Altogether, more than 3,200 were executed or ‘disappeared’, 30,000 tortured, 80,000 imprisoned and 200,000 forced to flee the country.

But even this wasn’t the end. On the very day of the coup, copies of The Brick were hastily printed for the military officials who were taking charge of the administration. There was to be no doubt as to the shape and the economic purpose of the new Chile. Central were the three pillars of Capitalism and Freedom: privatisation, deregulation and savage cuts in social spending.

For the first eighteen months of his dictatorship, Pinochet followed the prescriptions of the Chicago Boys; privatisations, removals of import barriers, cuts in government spending (except for the military) and the abolition of price controls. The effect was disastrous. Businesses closed, unemployment swelled, inflation reached 375% and millions went hungry. Milton Friedman flew into Santiago and declared the only solution was more of the same: fewer controls and more cuts – ‘shock treatment’. Even the Economist called it ‘an orgy of self-mutilation’. For those lucky enough still to have a job, 74% of their average income went on bread alone.

In 1982 the Chilean economy finally crashed under the weight of a $14 billion debt run up by the unregulated corporations who had bought up public assets with borrowed money. The only company to have continued in public owership, Codelco, which owned copper mines, was by now providing 85% of Chile’s export revenue. Pinochet took the only escape route left; he defied Friedman and started re-nationalised the others. But the important work had been done: a massive transfer of wealth away from the poor and middle-class into the pockets of a few. As Klein writes:

“It’s clear that Chile never was the laboratory of “pure” free markets that its cheerleaders claimed. Instead, it was a country where a small elite leapt from wealthy to super-rich in extremely short order – a highly profitable formula backrolled by debt and heavily subsidized (then bailed out) with public funds.” (pp. 85-6)

But the significance of what happened under Pinochet is not limited to Chile, to dictatorships, to Latin America or to the twentieth century:

“Chile under Chicago School rule was offering a glimpse of the future of the global economy, a pattern that would repeat again and again, from Russia to South Africa to Argentina – an urban bubble of frenetic speculation and dubious accounting fueling superprofits and frantic consumerism, ringed by the ghostly factories and rotting infrastructure of a development past; roughly half the population excluded from the economy altogether: out-of-control corruption and cronyism; decimation of nationally owned small and medium-sized businesses; a huge transfer of wealth from public to private hands, followed by a huge transfer of private debts into public hands.” (pp. 86-7)

For a time the focus was still on South America with the 1973 coup in Uruguay and 1976 seizing of power by the military junta in Argentina. As in Chile, these regimes were characterised by a combination of Chicago economic policies, death squads and ‘disappearances’. Under Operation Condor, intelligence agencies used a Washington-supplied computer system to share information about ‘subversives’, followed by cross-border kidnappings and torture, in a chilling rehearsal of the CIA’s later ‘extraordinary rendition’. The murders of Rodolfo Walsh and Orlando Letelier were only the visible tip of a network of torture and fear of which Klein writes;

“The point of the exercise was getting prisoners to do irreparable damage to that part of themselves that believed in helping others above all else, that part of them that made them activists, replacing it with shame and humiliation.” (p. 112)

In an interesting footnote she compares this with recent attacks by coalition forces upon the Islamic practice of their prisoners;

“Islam is desecrated not because it is hated by the guards (though it may well be) but because it is loved by the prisoners. Since the goal of torture is to unmake personalities, everything that comprises a prisoner’s personality must be systematically stolen – from his clothes to his cherished beliefs. In the seventies that meant attacking social solidarity; today it means assaulting Islam.” (p. 113)

Metaphors of sickness and health were, and are, used to legitimise violence, with left-wing groups being seen as ‘microbes’ and right-wing paramilitaries as vital antibodies which will fade away harmlessly once their work is done. But in some places, a more conservative resistance had to be overcome.

In a 1982 letter to Friedrich Hayek, the free-market and anti-socialist economist, Margaret Thatcher wrote;

“[I]n Britain, with our democratic institutions and the need for a high degree of consent, some of the measures adopted in Chile are quite unacceptable. Our reform must be in line with our traditions and our Constitution. At times the process may seem painfully slow.” (quoted p. 131)
It was painful at the time, three years into her term as prime minister with both unemployment and inflation doubled and a government approval rating of only 18%. But she wasn’t the only one in trouble. On the other side of the Atlantic, in Argentina, the junta was struggling under a collapsing economy and renewed human rights campaigns. In a last-ditch attempt to distract the attention of the Argentine people from their corruption and abuses, General Galtieri planted his country’s flag on the Malvinas, otherwise known as the Falkland Islands.

Mrs Thatcher could probably have kissed him. Brushing aside the United Nations, she (or rather the troops sent in her name, 255 of whom died, with many more suffering horrendous physical and psychological injuries) sallied forth into battle and victory both in the South Atlantic and the following general election. The counterinvasion had been codenamed Operation Corporate, and Britain was about to find out why.

“We had to fight the enemy without in the Falklands and now we have to fight the enemy within, which is much more difficult but just as dangerous to liberty.” (Margaret Thatcher, quoted p. 138)

The enemy within, was, of course, the coal miners, against whom Thatcher fought with every weapon at her disposal, including riot police on horseback, infiltration and phone-bugging. The government’s victory against the strongest of unions in the most essential of industries sent a message to the others – don’t mess with our agenda. It was followed by a wave of privatisations – British Steel, British Gas, British Telecom, British Airways and many more – a massive haemorrhage of public assets which has never, despite thirteen years of Labour government, been stemmed.

Meanwhile Argentina was the victim of its own Operation Corporate, as, just before it collapsed, the junta agreed that the state would absorb the debts of their multinational allies.

“The tidy arrangement meant that these companies continued to own their assets and profits, but the public had to pay off between $15 and $20 billion of their debts; among the companies to receive this generous treatment were Ford Motor Argentina, Chase Manhattan, Citibank, IBM and Mercedes Benz.” (p. 158)

It was not only these debts, of course, with which the newly democratic Argentina (and other countries in similar positions) were crippled, but the massive liabilities of the junta itself, incurred with the enthusiastic assistance of friends like Henry Kissinger. And when the Federal Reserve increased interest rates in the early 1980s, its chairman gave his name to a new source of misery – the Volcker Shock. Ballooning debts throughout the 1980s combined with dramatic falls in the prices of the cash crops and raw materials upon which developing countries had been forced to rely for their only revenue.

“This is where Friedman’s crisis theory became self-reinforcing. The more the global economy followed his prescriptions, with floating interest rates, deregulated prices and export-orientated economies, the more crisis-prone the system became, producing more and more of precisely the type of meltdowns he had identified as the only circumstances under which governments would take more of his radical advice. “ (pp.159-160)

The role of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in all this is interesting. To a fundamentalist Friedmanite, they ought, of course, not to exist as all, but since they did, they were ideal purveyors of economic shock. The World Bank was set up to provide long-term investments in developing economies; the IMF to give short-term loans and grants in order to provide stability and assist in reconstruction. Gradually, however, the Chicago School began to infiltrate these institutions, an influence confirmed by the Washington Consensus of 1989. This set out “the common core of wisdom embraced by all serious economists” including the instructions that all “state enterprises should be privatized” and that “barriers impeding the entry of foreign firms should be abolished”. As Joseph Stiglitz pointed out, “Keynes would be rolling over in his grave were he to see what has happened to his child.” (all quotations p.163)

The scene was set for worldwide performances of the Shock Doctrine. In Poland, after seven years of courageous underground activism, Lech Walesa’s Solidarity was legalised and galloped to victory at the subsequent elections. “To our misfortune, we have won!” declared Walesa, for the chalice of power was toxic indeed. Poland’s debt was $40 billion, inflation stood at 600% and the people were suffering severe food shortages. Jeffrey Sachs, who had acted as shock doctor to the Bolivan economy (requiring the deployment of riot police, the banning of opposition politics and the internment of trade unionists) was now invited to pour his medicine down Polish throats.

The Sachs Plans included overnight abolition of price controls and selling off state factories, mines and shipyards to private buyers, all previously anathema to the workers’ movement. But, as Klein writes,

“Poland became a textbook example of Friedman’s crisis theory: the disorientation of rapid political change combined with the collective fear generated by an economic meltdown to make the promise of a quick and magical cure – however illusory – too seductive to turn down.” (p.181)

The illusion didn’t last long; the side-effects for decades. In 2003, long after the patient should have been healed, 59% of Poles were living below the poverty line and in 2006 40% of young workers were unemployed. The Solidarity movement was not forgiven, defeated at the next elections by a coalition which included the former Communist Party.

Meanwhile, as Solidarity were debating Sachs’ remedy, four thousand miles further east, protesters were gathering in Tiananmen Square. We in the West heard all about their demands for elections and civil liberties, but that, it turns out, was only half the story. The Chinese government had, in 1980, invited Milton Friedman to address economists and civil servants on the glories of free-market capitalism, and now they were determined to put his theories into practice – in their own fashion.

“The party wanted to open the economy to private ownership and consumerism while maintaining its own grip on power – a plan that ensured that once the assets of the state were auctioned off, party officials and their relatives would snap up the best deals and be first in line for the biggest profits. … The model the Chinese government intended to emulate was not the United States but something much closer to Chile under Pinochet: free markets combined with authoritarian political control, enforced by iron-fisted repression.” (p.185)

Along, therefore, with foreign investment, reduced worker protection and the lifting of price controls came the establishment of the People’s Armed Police, a roving riot squad primed to act against ‘economic crimes’ such as strikes and protests. As Wang Hai, a participant in Tiananmen Square, explains in his book China’s New Order, it was the speed and brutality of these economic changes that was the real catalyst for the protests. And the government’s response; the declaration of martial law, hundreds, if not thousands, of deaths and mass imprisonment of factory workers, cleared the way for the acceleration of Friedmanite policies and for China’s new role as the sweatshop of the world.

South Africa received the shock in a similar way to Poland, with a long-suppressed and popular movement achieving power only to find its hands fettered. The ANC’s Freedom Charter had been drawn up in 1955 from scraps of paper collected from the townships by fifty thousand volunteers. Its demands – living wages, land for the landless, free education, the nationalisation of banks and mines – were central to the party’s vision of a just and compassionate society. But the outgoing National Party government, in its negotiations with the ANC, succeeded in designating huge areas of economic policy as technical matters, to be kept under their own control, or, at the least, handed over to the like-minded IMF and World Bank. What was more, they were saddled with an enormous debt to pay the salaries and substantial pensions of civil servants employed in the apartheid system.

After two years of unsuccessful attempts to put what remained of the Freedom Charter into practice, the ANC changed tack. In June 1996, Thabo Mbeki unveiled a shock therapy programme: more privatisation, cuts in government spending, reductions in workers’ rights and looser controls over international trade and currency flows. As Mbeki himself said, “Just call me a Thatcherite.” (quoted p.209)

The results were sadly familiar. Between 1994 and 2006 the number of people in South Africa living on less than a dollar a day doubled, from two to four million. Nearly a million people were evicted from farms and the number of shack dwellers increased by fifty percent. In 2006 more than one in four South Africans lived in informal shanty towns, many with no electricity or running water. It was a sad fiftieth birthday celebration for the brave hopes of the Freedom Charter.

In 1990 the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Mikhail Gorbachev, the president of the Soviet Union. His policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) were intended to transform his country into somewhere like Sweden, with social and political freedoms, and an economic mixture of private enterprise and a strong welfare safety net, with key industries under public control. But at the 1991 G7 summit the vision was shattered. The consensus among the other heads of state and subsequently from the IMF and World Bank was that the Soviet Union was to follow Poland’s shock therapy example – only faster and harder. As Gorbachev himself wrote,

“Their suggestions as to the tempo and methods of transition were astonishing.” (quoted p.219)

Gorbachev was unwilling to play the role assigned to him by the West and its press as the ‘Russian Pinochet’. But there was someone else who would. In December 1991 Boris Yeltsin, president of Russia, formed an alliance with two other republics, essentially dissolving the Soviet Union. Jeremy Sachs, that peripatetic shock doctor, was already in the room.

The Russian ‘Chicago Boys’, direct ideological descendants of the Chilean . demolition team, set about drawing up their economic programme . A week after Gorbachev’s resignation it was launched: price controls removed, free-trade policies and the first of over two hundred thousand smash-and-grab privatisations. The consequences we know too well.

“After only one year, shock therapy had taken a devastating toll: millions of middle-class Russians had lost their life savings when money lost its value, and abrupt cuts to subsidies meant millions of workers had not been paid for months. The average Russian consumed 40 percent less in 1992 than in 1991, and a third of the population fell below the poverty line. The middle class was forced to sell personal belongings from card tables on the streets – desperate acts that the Chicago School economists praised as ‘entrepreneurial’, proof that a capitalist renaissance was indeed under way, one family heirloom and second-hand blazer at a time.” (pp.224-5)

In Russia, Poland and South Africa, crisis capitalism showed itself ready and ruthless to take advantage of political change. But what happens when crises are running short? The answer was given by Davison Budhoo, an IMF economist who resigned in protest at the manipulation and outright invention of statistics in which he had been complicit.

“I have taken the first big step to that place where I may hope to wash my hands of what in my mind’s eye is the blood of millions of poor and starving peoples.” (quoted p.261)

He claimed that ‘statistical malpractices’ by the IMF had been carried out to make oil-rich Trinidad and Tobago appear unstable, unproductive and saddled with (entirely fictitious) government debt.

But Trinidad and Tobago wasn’t much more than a rehearsal. The next principal performance came in 1997 in Southeast Asia. As Klein says, the crisis,

“had no rational cause. On television and in newspapers, analysis kept referring to the region as if it it had contacted some mysterious but highly contagious disease – “the Asian Flu”, as the market crash was immediately labeled, later upgraded to “the Asian Contagion” when it spread to Latin America and Russia.” (p.264)

A few weeks earlier, these had been the ‘Tiger Economies’, feted throughout the world. But a rumour about Thailand’s dollar holdings triggered a global panic and consequent ruin and suicides across the region. A quick loan, such as that given to Mexico three years earlier, would have saved the situation, but the financial establishment refused to contemplate offering any help at all. The unforgivable sin committed by the Asian economies had been to build their tigerish success not on the free trade Washington Consensus but on protectionist policies and public ownership of key sectors. Under pressure from Western and Japanese banks, they finally agreed to lift barriers to their financial sector, while keeping their industries out of foreign hands. It was this crack, the new vulnerability of the Asian countries to financial speculation, which allowed the West to shove its foot firmly in the door. As a Morgan Stanley ‘strategist’ admitted,

“I’d like to see closure of companies and asset sales … Asset sales are very difficult; typically owners don’t want to sell unless they’re forced to. Therefore we need more bad news to continue to put the pressure on these corporates to sell their companies.” (quoted p.267)

More bad news was just what they made sure of getting. Finally the IMF came up with an offer that the Asian economies couldn’t refuse. (Apart from Malaysia, that was, whose relatively small debt allowed them to opt out, their prime minister saying that he did not see why he should “destroy the economy in order that it should become better”. (quoted p.268)). But for the others, it was the same old story: savage public spending cuts, privatisations, worker ‘flexibility’ (which, as always, meant the end of their hard-won rights) and unfettered free trade.

Unfortunately, the markets reacted with even more panic. As Jeffrey Sachs, who had by now changed his mind about the universal Friedmanite panacea, put it, “Instead of dousing the fire, the IMF in effect screamed fire in the theatre.” (quoted p.272) 24 million people lost their jobs and 20 million were flung into poverty. Child prostitution went up by 20 percent in Thailand in a single year, while other children across the region lost their free education and went out to work as scavengers on rubbish dumps.

The children weren’t the only scavengers amongst the ruins. The IMF’s own auditors scolded them for their free market fundamentalism but meanwhile Wall Street was on a spree. Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, the Carlyle Group (cosy retirement home for that nice Mr Major) and others bought up Asian firms at a fraction of their true value.

But it was all a bit too visible. At the 1999 World Trade Organisation’s talks in Seattle, the young anti-globalisation protestors outside were the public face of discontent. But inside, their rhetoric was made tangible by a bloc of developing countries who refused to submit to trade concessions while the United States and Europe went on protecting their own industries. It seemed as though the triumph of the Washington Consensus might be over …

…But on 10th September 2001, Donald Rumsfelt declared war. Yes, on the 10th. His speech began,

“The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America. … With brutal consistency, it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas. It disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk.
Perhaps this adversary sounds like the former Soviet Union, but that enemy is gone: our foes are more subtle and implacable today … The adversary’s closer to home. It’s the Pentagon bureaucracy.” (quoted p.286)

He didn’t want to save money – he’d just asked Congress for an 11% budget increase – but he wanted it spent in the private, rather than the public sector. Anything that could conceivably be outsourced, was to be. The speech was largely forgotten, overshadowed by a rather more immediate attack on Pentagon employees the following day, but the policy was to thrive over the difficult months and years to come.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when the spotlight was shone upon the cost-cutting recklessness of airlines and airports, followed by the Enron bankruptcy, there was a brief flurry of anti-corporate feeling. The heroes of the hour were the public sector, blue-collar workers – the New York police, firefighters and rescue workers. But the White House was not to be put off its stride.

George Bush declared a New Deal, but unlike that of Franklin D. Roosevelt seventy years earlier, his programme offered nothing to the ordinary American, let alone the poor and marginalised. This was a network of secret contracts granted to private corporations, with the ostensible aim of fighting terrorism and the real purpose of privatising the very core functions of government. Assisted by a massive growth in the state’s powers of surveillance and detention and a patriot card that trumped any opposition, the new policies rolled out as inexorably as Pinochet’s tanks, and with much the same effect. Rumsfelt himself and his protegé Dick Cheney, on the boards of pharmaceutical, weapons and engineering (including nuclear) companies as well as the soon-to-be-notorious Halliburton were already adept at making a lot of money out of disaster capitalism. They were in a prime position to take advantage of the new environment. The fact that Rumsfelt never actually divested himself of his private defence and biotechnology interests while in public office naturally helped.

And disaster – terrorism, homeland security, pandemics – call it what you will, continues to be big, big, business and not just in America. From CCTV cameras (one for every fourteen people in the United Kingdom) to the sale of Guantanamo prisoners (up to $25,000 was the going informer rate), fear sells.

“Finally, it all came together in Iraq where “fighting terrorism, spreading frontier capitalism and holding elections were bundled into a single unified project. The Middle East would be “cleaned out” of terrorists and a giant free-trade zone would be created; then it would all be locked in with after-the-fact elections – a sort of three-for-one special.” (p.328)

First came the military shock: more than thirty thousand bombs and twenty thousand cruise missiles between March 20th and May 2nd 2003. “In open defiance of the laws of war barring collective punishment, Shock and Awe is a military doctrine that prides itself on not merely targeting the enemy’s military forces but, as its authors stress, the ‘society writ large’ – mass fear is a key part of the strategy.” (p.332)

Next was sensory deprivation; the destruction of Baghdad’s phone and electricity networks, the destruction of the treasured and sacred in the looting of antiquities, unchecked by coalition troops. For “Just as one culture was being burned and stripped for parts, another was pouring in, prepackaged, to replace it.” (p.339)

Paul Bremer, who was effectively Iraq’s governor and government from May 2003, was himself a successful disaster capitalist, having set up his Crisis Consulting Practice exactly a month after 9/11. He spent his first four months in Iraq almost entirely upon economic matters, enacting what the Economist described as the “wish-list that foreign investors and donor agencies dream of for developing markets” (quoted p.345).

Corporation tax went down from 45% to 15%, foreign companies were allowed to own 100% of Iraqi assets and remove 100% of their profits, tax free. Contracts and leases were granted for forty years after which they would be renewable, and $20 billion worth of revenue from Iraq’s oil companies was taken, nearly $9 billion of which has never been accounted for. When Bremer’s financial advisor was asked by a congressional committee about these missing billions he replied “Yeah, I understand. I’m saying what difference does it make?” (quoted footnote p.345).

None of this money, nor the $38 billion from the US Congress or the $15 from other countries went to rebuild Iraqi factories, either public or private. Instead, vast contracts were given to US firms who imported their own foreign labour and were overseen in turn by other US firms. The consequent mismanagement, corruption and scams were extraordinary, even by the standards of Wild West capitalism. Bremer’s first act was the firing of around half a million state employees, doctors, nurses, teachers and engineers as well as soldiers (many of whom, understandably, were to join the emerging resistance). An interim constitution then allowed him to ‘lock in’ economic changes, as had been done by the outgoing South African government. One of these changes was the privatisation of Iraq’s two hundred publicly-owned companies, involving mass redundancies to make them more attractive to the circling foreign vultures.

The conflicts which escalated in Iraq have generally been blamed upon sectarianism and religious extremism. But these elements hardly existed at all during the immediate aftermath of the invasion: most people wanted a secular government and there was no major sectarian violence until March 2004. What led the despairing and infuriated Iraq people to resistance was not their Muslim faith or internal differences but the “nightmare of unfettered greed unleashed in the wake of war”. (p.351)

During the early summer of 2003, spontaneous elections had been held across the country as the Iraqi people took the coalition’s promises of liberation and democracy seriously. Many US troops, also believing what they had been told, helped to organise the elections, even building ballot boxes.

But that wasn’t what they had meant at all. Bremer ordered the immediate end of all local elections, dismantled the new councils and replaced them with US-appointees, very often Saddam-era military officials. Six months later he announced the cancellation of the promised general elections. The new government, like the local authorities, would be appointed, not elected.

As resistance to Bremer’s policies, “replacing one dictatorship with another”, as a senior cleric put it (quoted p.365) grew, the occupation forces used more and more violent shock tactics; breaking into homes at night with abuse towards women and children, mass imprisonment, snarling dogs, torture, sensory deprivation, isolation in tiny boxes, and electric shocks. Bodies began to appear on roadsides with bullet or electric drill holes in their heads, and delivered to the Baghdad morgue, their hands bound with police handcuffs.

If the shock was intended to bring peace and stability, it isn’t working.
Klein notes that in the early days of the corporatist crusade, policies were enacted that were overtly genocidal. Now, however, it isn’t only a particular race or religion who are being disappeared but an entire nation: the women behind veils and doors, the children no longer attending school, two thousand doctors and three hundred academics assassinated, hundreds of thousands kidnapped and four million, by April 2007, having fled their country.

“Countries, like people, don’t reboot to zero with a good shock; they just break and keep on breaking.” (p.372)

Klein closes the book with two further examples of disaster capitalism, in Sri Lanka and New Orleans. This time the initial disasters were natural, but the corporate response was the same. The tsunami cleared the beaches of poor fishermen and their homes, but it was their government, USAID and the World Bank that made sure they would never return, their places taken by luxury hotels paid for with the world’s charitable donations.

Similarly, within days of Hurricane Katrina striking, ‘relief’ policies were being implemented: tax cuts, waiving of the regulations which had protected workers and the environment, vouchers to promote private schools. Emergency relief was contracted out to the usual suspects with the usual mismanagement and layers of middlemen. Meanwhile savage cuts were made to student loans, Medicaid and food stamps.

Disasters such as these are going to happen again, in many places and many times, with the dual stresses of climate change and a rapidly diminishing level of investment in infrastructure. And the corporations are ready.
“It’s all going to be private enterprise before it’s over” said the chief of emergency management for the Florida Keys. (quoted p.416). And as Klein points out,

“Looking ahead to coming disasters, ecological and political, we often assume that we are all going to face them together, that what’s needed are leaders who recognize the destructive course we are on. But I’m not so sure. Perhaps part of the reason why so many of our elites, both political and corporate, are so sanguine about climate change is that they are confident they will be able to buy their way out of the worst of it.” (p.419)

So is there any hope? She thinks so, not in big government or corporate conversions but in

“movements that do not seek to start from scratch, but rather from scrap, from the rubble that is all around. As the corporate crusade continues its violent decline, turning up the shock dial to blast through the mounting resistance it encounters, these projects point a way forward between fundamentalisms. Radical only in their intense practicality, rooted in the communities where they live, these men and woman see themselves as mere repair people, taking what’s there and fixing it, reinforcing I’m it, makiing it better and more equal. Most of all, they are building in resilience – for when the next shock hits.” (p.466)

I hope it’s enough.  This is an important book, one of the most important I’ve ever read: I don’t feel that the months of reading and re-reading it could have been spent any more productively.  And, given the shelves and shelves of books waiting to be read, that’s about the highest praise I can offer.

It begins conventionally enough, with a theoretical and historical survey of the concept of the rule of law, fluent and fascinating, but nothing likely to frighten the horses.  But then he moves on to specific and related topics, notably human rights, about which he crisply and compassionately breaks through the fog of Daily Mail bluster.

“But most of the supposed weaknesses of the Convention scheme are attributable to misunderstanding of it, and critics must ultimately answer two questions.  Which of the rights above would you discard?  Would you rather live in a country in which these rights were not protected by law?” (p.84)

He goes on to discuss the international legal order, especially as applied to war, presenting a beautifully clear and cogent argument regarding the invasion of Iraq and the extent to which it may or may not (certainly not, in Bingham’s opinion) have been justified by existing UN resolutions.   It is not his fault that the conclusion of the chapter rings a bitter note in the light of our latest adventures in creative resolution interpretation.

“While prophesy is always perilous, it is perhaps unlikely that states chastened by their experience in Iraq will be eager to repeat it.  They have not been hauled before the ICJ or any other tribunal to answer for their actions, but they have been arraigned before the bar of world opinion, and judged unfavourably, with resulting damage to their standing and influence.”  (p.129)

A related issue is that of terrorism and the rule of law and, in particular, the state abuses: torture, surveillance and detention without charge or trial which governments have leapt to justify in the post 9/11 climate.  After another wise, calm and deeply moral examination of British and American government responses, he concludes with a quotation from Christopher Dawson, written in 1943.

“As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy.”  (The Judgement of the Nations, quoted p.159)

Tom Bingham died last year, shortly after this book was published.  For us to read it, to take these issues as seriously as he did, and to call our governments to account regarding them, would be the finest obituary which we could offer to a wise writer, a compassionate Englishman and a truly good, in every sense of the word, lawyer.

But I wasn’t really interested in the bootleg stuff.  There was already so much Dylan to listen to, and I loved it all; from the earliest acoustic stuff, songs of anger and songs of love, through Blonde on Blonde, where the anger and love started to elbow into the same songs, through to the blessed triumvirate of Desire, Blood on the Tracks and Street Legal.  I even did my best to like the gospel albums, helped by the fact that my evangelical years coincided with his, though we called the road something different after that.

For the same reason, I’ve never bothered reading much about Dylan, except for Chronicles and some stuff by Paul Williams.  I’ve got Robert Shelton’s No Direction Home on one of my waiting-to-be-read shelves but whenever I catch sight of it I just remember to go and look again for my copy of Love and Theft (nope, still can’t find it).   I haven’t even read Christopher Ricks on Dylan, despite having been at his lectures, ostensibly on Keats or structuralism,  in the mid-1980s when the guy in the next room would bang on the walls to get the volume turned down.

But I’ve recently begun to notice the bookcase just inside the local library door where they put the new acquisitions, and have developed a craving for them in their virgin fastness, each so hopefully jacketed and barcoded, pale and smooth as a girl before prom night, with a big blank label crying out for its first date stamp.  So, a few weeks ago, along with The Great Disruption by Paul Gilding which I’ll review soon, and Grant Morrison’s Supergods which I’ll eventually prise from the elegant fingers of Son Number Three, I found this, The Ballad of Bob Dylan: A Portrait by Daniel Mark Epstein.  A pleasantly unpretentious sort of title, I thought; not the sort of thing that would infect my lifetime memories with tacky innuendo or sicken them with globs of schmaltz.

And so, precisely, it proved.  Epstein himself is a biographer, poet and musician, so the life, lyrics and music each get proper attention, albeit with the proportions shifting as the book progresses.  He doesn’t pretend to be a personal friend of Dylan’s, but has been close to other poets and musicians, such as Allen Ginsberg, whose circles have overlapped.  The book is written in four principal sections, each focussed on Epstein’s personal experience of a Dylan concert, in 1963, 1974, 1997 and 2009.  It’s an effective structure, roughly, though not rigidly chronological, a generous space filled with reminiscence, analysis and a little, not too much, conjecture.

It’s not in any way comprehensive – how could it, at a mere 496 pages (including index) cover Dylan’s seventy years of life, performance, songs, poetry, films, invention and influence?  For the definitive Dylan the geeks will have to await something far more warehouse-sized.  But it told me a lot of things I didn’t know – exactly why the audience booed at Newport, the nature of the mysterious motorbike accident and why I like Modern Times so much.  It also put me right on a few of the lyrics that I’ve been singing inaccurately to myself for thirty years – turns out it’s not the meaningless ‘Lake and County Road’ in ‘Senor’, but ‘Lincoln County Road’, where the ranchers and the merchants did battle.  But then it took me twenty-five years to notice that Hattie Carroll wasn’t killed by two young men, Williams and Zinger.  I really ought to pay more attention.

The one word that keeps recurring to me in thinking about this book is ‘kind’.  Now that really sounds like damning with faint praise, but it’s not intended to be.  I don’t mean that Epstein denies the less savoury episodes of Dylan’s life or the dips in his composition or performance, only that, following the classic advice of Thumper’s mother, if he can’t say anything nice, he says as little as possible, passing on to something more interesting and positive.  It’s this courtesy which accounts for the slight unevenness which I mentioned above.  The early years of Dylan’s love life are largely public property: everyone knows about Suze Rotolo, Joan Baez and the ineffable Sara, so Epstein follows the shifting triangulations in some detail.  But, though I suspect he knows more than he tells about Dylan’s later romantic entanglements, he doesn’t let on, concentrating instead on the minutae of drummer replacements in the Never Ending Tour band.  (I must confess to a modicum of skimming at this point.)

It isn’t only the biographer’s kindness that we notice, but that of his subject.  It isn’t one of the first qualities that springs to mind on thinking of Bob Dylan, but, beginning with a personal experience after the 1963 gig (I won’t spoil it for you) Epstein brings out the singer’s gruff generosity  (if only it could extend to allowing his videos onto YouTube …) and openness, especially with children.  It’s not globally or musically important, but it’s satisfying on a personal level to have the gaps between the songs, so often characterised by a harsh obscurity or dogmatism, filled by something more human and humane.  When you’ve spent over two-thirds of your life defending someone, it feels good for it to be morally as well as aesthetically justified.

But most of all, this book made me want to go back and listen again, listen more carefully and more widely to Dylan’s music.  So, if you’ll excuse me, I have Time Out Of Mind still waiting …

The cover, as you can probably tell, is plastered with extravagant praise with two fly leaves similarly doused. “A wonderful, wonderful book”, “Totally brilliant”, “Destined to be a modern classic”. A modern classic? Really? Along with Midnight’s Children , East of Eden and The Road? To be fair, that quotation emanated from the Mirror, while the attributed bits of puffery come from, inter alia, Nick Hornby, Tony Parsons and Fay Ripley (actress from Cold Feet) which probably tells you most of what you need to know.

It’s an seductive piece of flummery built on the premise that two students spent their post-graduation night and day together (St Swithin’s Day 1988) and thereafter are revisited by the author on the same date for the next twenty years, chronicling their lives, loves and entwined fortunes. It’s a neat, if rather irritating device which serves the dual purpose of seeming very clever and allowing the author to avoid all those tricky joining-up the scenes bits of writing that make a novel into a novel rather than an screenplay with internal monologues. But then David Nicholls has been an actor as well as a screenwriter (oh, he wrote Cold Feet – fancy that) before writing and adapting Starter for Ten (irritating vehicle for the even more irritating James McEvoy) so it’s no great surprise that One Day might just as well have been published on paper watermarked with the words Film Me – You’ll Make a Lot of Money.

Hornby describes the book as “brilliant on the details of the last couple of decades of British cultural and political life”. Well, er… Details of middle-class metropolitan media life, perhaps; we get cold overpriced fish and chips, cocaine in the loos and that sort of television that Terry Christian used to do, along with London house prices and expensive wedding invitations. But, other than a few pages slumming it in a Mexican fast food dive and gritty comprehensive, we don’t see much beyond the BBC and its country-house hinterland. The characters are supposed to have gone to university in Edinburgh, but it feels as though Nicholls just couldn’t decide between Oxford and Cambridge. And the only function politics plays is to distinguish between the character who cares about it and the one who doesn’t. She has Nelson Mandela and CND T-shirts and periodically thinks about rejoining the Labour Party. Oh, and there’s the brilliant detail that John Smith died.

If, like me, you’re in your forties, you may enjoy this book (and/or the film, though I suspect that it’ll really be redundant to bother with both) in the same way that you may indulge yourself in watching those cut-and-paste budget television shows called things like “I Can’t Believe I Really Wore That in the Nineties” that keep the wolf from the Maconie doorstep. But, like me, next morning you might feel a tiny bit ashamed of yourself.

(It’s this good-eggery which emboldens me to refer to him by his first name, despite our never having met.  ‘Brigstocke’ would probably be more appropriate for a serious review, but comes across as somewhat peremptory – a cross between ‘brigadier’ and ‘lock, stock and barrel’ – while ‘MB’ sounds coy, ‘Mr. Brigstocke’ archaic and ‘the author’ as though I’ve forgotten his name and can’t be bothered to look it up.  So Marcus it is, and I trust that he’ll forgive the informality.)

So, if I write that God Collar wasn’t quite so funny or quite so thoughtful as I’d hoped, you’ll understand that my initial expectations were very high indeed.

As the close relatives to whom I moan about these things will know, I’ve been slightly niggled over the past couple of years at the laziness with which several atheist comedians formulate their anti-religion routines.  To do him credit, Marcus refers to this ‘low-hanging fruit’ himself and avoids its most indolent tropes.  It isn’t (just to forestall any images of a Melanie Phillips-Daily Mail-What sort of society do we live in where I can’t go to work as a nursery teacher dressed as a freshly crucified corpse?) that I don’t think Christians ought to be ridiculed.  Personally, I’d like to be ridiculed as satirically as possible, preferably with a bit of reviling and persecution thrown in.  It seems, according to the Sermon on the Mount, to be one of the easier and less painful ways of achieving beatitude.  (The others: being poor in spirit, mourning, being a peacemaker etc. involve considerably more hardship, or at least long hours sitting round a conference table punctuating treaties and eating Rich Tea biscuits.  I’ve never liked Rich Tea biscuits.)  Of course, the snag is that you have to be reviled etc. for actually doing what Jesus told you to, rather than for wearing polo shirts buttoned to the top or listening to Cliff Richard.

Be that as it may, we Christians (I won’t speak for believers in other faiths but I’m pretty sure that many would agree) have done, and are continuing to do, or at least condone, some pretty atrocious things; things which, on the whole, our founder and guide instructed us specifically not to do – live by the sword, lay up treasure on earth, harm little ones etc.  Our failures in these areas, though rarely rib-ticklingly hilarious, are undoubtedly valid objects for no-holds-barred satire.

What annoys me isn’t the target itself but the imprecision of it and the inaccuracy of the weapons used.  Blunderbusses are being employed to nudge pachyderms on their broad but insensitive bottoms where a catapulted pebble could catch that spot where it really hurts.  Partly this results from an understandable ignorance.  Because the most egregious horror committed by professional Christians in recent years is the Catholic sex abuse scandal, and the most howling faith-related scientific blunder anti-Darwinism, there is a tendency to characterise the typical believer as a paedophile-shielding creationist.  In fact most Catholics have no problem with evolutionary or other fields of science.  To borrow a device from Marcus himself, if you constructed a Venn diagram in which circle A contained Catholics and circle B creationists, the section AB would contain a fairly small number of people.  A small number of people who, had they happened to be at the Glastonbury Festival (probably an unlikely scenario), would be wondering exactly what they’d done to become the specific butt of quite so many late-night jibes in the Cabaret Tent.

Marcus manages to avoid this particular combinational canard in favour of some more original reflections.  Unfortunately, several of these are even more inaccurate.  In his live show he speculated  about the probable fate of  believing audience members who were reluctant to identify themselves.

“I did take great delight in reminding them that they only had to deny it twice more before they were in a whole heap of trouble.  They couldn’t be sure if I’d ask them twice more, but it’s a tough call, isn’t it?  Slight awkwardness at a comedy show versus eternal damnation for thrice denying the Lord.”  (p. 149)

All cartoons from The Pick of Punch, 1957

A nice line, but diametrically wrong. In fact, according to John’s gospel, the follow-up to Peter’s threefold denial of Jesus in the Temple courtyard wasn’t condemnation but his threefold avowal of love after the resurrection and his being given the task ‘Feed my sheep’.  So those who are tempted to leave their faith behind at the entrance to comedy clubs are far less likely to be flung onto everlasting barbecues and more likely to be forgiven and told to go on a sponsored run for Oxfam.  Sweat yes, charcoal no.

Similarly, he gets the story of Sodom and Gomorrah the wrong way round, misremembering (could it really have been a prep school lesson?) that it was the visiting angels who wanted to rape Lot’s neighbours rather than vice-versa.  It doesn’t take away the distasteful spectacle of Lot pimping out his virgin daughters, but does shed a slightly different light on the moral to be drawn.  In fact it has been convincingly argued that the sin of Sodom wasn’t buggery at all but a failure of hospitality^[6], it being less than gracious to gang-rape visitors to your neighbourhood (as members of town-twinning committees worldwide will no doubt be relieved to hear).  Under this interpretation, contemporary sodomites would include tabloid editors with ‘bogus asylum seeker’ headlines,  men who complain about official leaflets in Punjabi and women who tut in the post office queue at people sending parcels home to Ghana or Lithuania.

I do realise, by the way, that most of the material in the book first appeared within Marcus’s live show, and that a comedian’s poetic licence is endorsed with generous allowances for hyperbole, embellishment and sheer fantasy.  Far be it from me to censure anyone’s extended riff on what happened when the Angel Gabriel, Holy Roly^[7] and the Dalai Lama walked into a pub.  But (and this may reveal a many-layered depth of uncoolness and decrepitude) I do have the feeling that when something is written down and put into an Actual Book, it ought, so far as possible, to be checked with its sources.  And when the source is the Bible, which, as Marcus points out, “has been the number one bestseller since before even Bruce Forsyth was born”, it’s not that difficult to check.  Some of the other rather lurid stories, such as the holey chair through which papal testicles are verified, do, I admit, require a little more research to disprove, such as, er, looking it up in Wikipedia.

Lecture over.  One of the more endearing results of the confusion over what sort of book this is – polemic, humour, autobiography? – is an awful lot of digression.  Most of these meanderings I like – there’s a long one on climate change which has little to do with the subject at hand but is currently so important that every newly published book should probably include a gratuitious global warming update.  There’s another on iPhones with an unsettling gerbil image that is wholly impossible to forget (I’m trying very hard), then one about pilfering postmen which I didn’t enjoy; it had the air of a right-wing meme that had somehow crept in uninvited.  After that came one about Marcus’s dyxlexia, which is a really sneaky thing to put into a book.  When an author explains, in tear-jerking detail, how  difficult it is for him even to read a book, never mind undergo the slogging agony of writing one, it’s hard to criticise it without feeling that one is slowly and deliberately crushing a kitten’s paw. Yowl.

On the subject of digressions, this may be the time to admit my full motivations for buying the book in the first place.  One was the W H Smith voucher which required me to buy more than Watchmen, another our general family affection for young Marcus but the third, most compelling, was the picture on the back cover showing him as a slightly ginger cherub.

That’s the one.  And this (specs and hair model’s own) is my son Rory.

Back to the book.  If the stumbling blocks to faith in God include his Old Testament persona, the Vatican, jihad and Christian Voice’s bizarre persecution of Stewart Lee, I imagine that one of the principal barriers to wholehearted atheism is, for many, Professor Richard Dawkins.  Like Marcus, I was rather excited after reading the introduction to The God Delusion, looking forward to the brave new world of Brightness to which the good doctor was going to lead me.  Alas, we were both disappointed.

“Richard Dawkins says at the beginning of his book, ‘I would like everyone who reads this, by the time they put this book down, to be an atheist.’  Well, I was an atheist when I started reading The God Delusion; by the time I’d finished it I was an agnostic.  I was going to read it again but I worried I might turn into a fundamentalist Christian.”  (p. 156)

Not, it seems, that Marcus actually disagrees with any of Dawkins’ arguments, only with the interminably superior manner in which he makes them.  There isn’t much about evolution in God Collar, but it does appear as one of the arguments against belief in God.  I do think this is a red herring, rather like suggesting that, because Jesus talked about God clothing the lilies of the field, Christian faith and photosynthesis are intrinsically incompatible.

The creationists’ God is something like a man in a shed, tinkering with his latest project; more self-assembly than conception.  If God is God, rather than a finite member of the Olympian or Norse dynasties, he is not only the man but also the shed, the ground on which they stand, the space and time within which they exist and all conceivable and inconceivable scientific processes, ideas and imaginings.  ‘Intelligent design’ isn’t much better; it still contains the same anthropomorphic fallacy, that God’s act of creation must necessarily be analogous to our own, with discrete plans and processes and outcomes.  If God is God, then nothing is too complex or too simple to be his work.  All we are specifically told in the Christian gospels about creation is that:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  The same was in the beginning with God.  All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.”  (John, 1:1-3)

That Word is, Christians believe, the Son who lived in Palestine as Jesus of Nazareth.  So there is no particle that has ever existed in the universe, in any universe, that is outside his specific action and love.

As Antony de Mello writes,

“We forget all too easily that one of the big lessons of the incarnation is that God is found in the ordinary.  You wish to see God?  Look at the face of the man next to you.  You want to hear him?  Listen to the cry of a baby, the loud laughter at a party, the wind rustling in the trees.  You want to feel him? Stretch your hand out and hold someone.  Or touch the chair you are sitting on or this book you are reading.  Or just quieten yourself, become aware of the sensations in your body, sense his almighty power at work in you and feel how near he is to you.  Emmanuel.  God with us.”

( Sadhana: A Way to God – Christian Exercises in Eastern Form, pp 46-47)

This is the immensity of the Christian faith, not so much that Jesus died, certainly not in the reductionist doctrine that would turn his death into the crudest of passwords, but that he, the infinite God, lived on earth as we do as a finite collection of molecules and forces and all those jolly sounding quarks and bosons.  All particles are God particles, and if matter matters so much, isn’t it a bit petty to be squabbling about dinosaurs?

Suffering is hard, much harder than evolution and any believer who isn’t regularly stumped and stymied by it hasn’t been doing much thinking.  It looks as though Jesus was when he asked on the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”  There are a few things we can say.  A huge part of the suffering in the world is caused by people, directly or indirectly, by war and greed and injustice and carcinogenic pollution and climate chaos.  If we all lived as we should we might even survive earthquakes and tsunamis.  But that only raises the question of why we don’t.  Free will, yes, but why is it so easy to choose the bad paths?   Couldn’t we have been created with a better default setting?  We can believe that, in the life of an infinite soul, our time on earth is necessarily short and incomplete, but we still grieve, and rightly, when someone dies almost before they’ve started.  We can know that the incarnate God, the God of the Sermon on the Mount, suffers with those who hunger and thirst and mourn, but we don’t know why his messengers don’t do more to feed them in the first place.

Which brings us on to what seems to lie at the heart of Marcus’s atheism (which is so hedged about with uncertainties to be, if he won’t mind my saying so and won’t have to give back his Dawkins T-shirt, scarcely more than tentatively agnostic) – the behaviour of religious institutions.  As I’ve already indicated, I have a lot of sympathy for him here, but I’m not sure that the situation is quite so simple as he suggests.  His basic argument is that, regardless of whether there actually is a God or not, it is wrong for us to lend our support to organisations which have carried out acts of inhumanity.

“You wouldn’t save your money at the Bank of Rape, so why pray at a church whose record on child abuse means I’d rather employ Gary Glitter as a nanny than send my kids to a Catholic school?”  (p.72)

This is pretty much unanswerable (with the minor caveat that most child abuse of every sort happens in the secular context of the family)  if you accept the basic consumerist assumption lying behind it, that just as a bank is a purveyor of financial services, so a church, mosque or temple is no more than a purveyor of religious ones.  If this were the case then obviously we’d simply consult our Ethical Shopper and select the Buddhists or Quakers along with the Co-op Bank, Ecover and Yeo Valley organic yoghurts.

But it isn’t, not quite.  Being a member of a faith tradition isn’t just a question of paying your dues and receiving certain spiritual and social benefits.  The decision as to whether to join or leave involves many factors: history, theology, revelation, community and vocation.  The ethical behaviour of your fellow-members may be one of these, but whom are you judging and how?  How many Maximilian Kolbes count in the balance against a Brendan Smyth?  After all, the point of a church is that it’s made up of sinners; if we weren’t then we wouldn’t need it.

What it’s rather more like is being a citizen of a country.  Like Marcus, I’m English, though I haven’t lived there for a while, and I rejoice to be so when I think of Julian of Norwich, William Cobbett, Jane Austen and Show of Hands.  Then I remember Cromwell in Ireland, the Opium Wars, Dresden and the invasion of Iraq.  Hmm.  Occasionally people renounce their citizenship of a country on a point of principle, but it doesn’t happen very often.  Most of us stick with it, vote, join political parties or pressure groups, work for the common good and campaign for an end to the injustices perpetrated in our name.  It’s not so different within a faith.  The view of the religious social structure presented in God’s Collar is rigidly hierarchical:

“It appears to me like a human pyramid.  In Christianity, the impressive triangle of political power looks like this.  On the bottom, with their feet on the ground, are the rank-and-file believers, churchgoers who occasionally arrange flowers and dabble in light charity work. …  One row above them are the ones who are mildly disapproving of the somewhat occasional attendance of the bottom row.  The second tier are religiously observant.  They pray, sing, attend church, run weekend Bible studies and read the Daily Mail without laughing.  …  Above them are the ‘active’ members of the church; they ruthlessly promote their passion for the Christian way of life … are judgemental and cherry-pick from the scriptures to suit the politics they grew up with.  Above them, very near the top, are the ones who say, as Stephen Green from Christian Voice did, that the floods in New Orleans were God’s just punishment for homosexuality.”  (p.239)

Of course, faith organisations have hierarchies, few more so that my own, but, again, it’s not so straightforward as Marcus suggests.  For one thing, the guys (and yes, I’m afraid they’re mostly still guys) at the top aren’t necessarily the baddies.  Within the Anglican and Catholic churches, for example, recent archbishops have included Desmond Tutu, Oscar Romero and Basil Hume as well as H.R. himself.  Stephen Green, by the way, is not very near the top of anything except his own estimation.   And does Marcus really think that there is a direct correlation between the involvement of the believer and his or her worsening behaviour, so that occasional churchgoers are decent enough chaps but by the time you’re on the cleaning rota you’re sunk into a ditch of depravity?  And as for those reprobates who insist on ringing the bells ….

Of course, church hierarchies, like any other, afford opportunities for the abuse of power.  People who want to do nasty, selfish, cruel things are always going to use the most powerful excuse they can to justify their actions.  Just as, in a world where oil is running out, the unscrupulous backers of tar sands and fracking use the excuse of cheap energy and in a secular society dictators like Stalin and Mao used the good of the State, so, in a culture where people believe in God, divine sanction is invoked by those who want to consolidate their position.  None of this proves the rightness or wrongness of fossil fuels, communism or theism, only that the powerful know their PR.  No one ever got very far committing genocide, environmental destruction or wholesale theft on the grounds that Double Gloucester ought to be more widely available.

Over the past couple of millennia, religious structures have been the most stable and powerful  and so have been the most successful at shielding crime and persecution.  But in the hundred years or so that secular hierarchies have been thriving they haven’t done too badly at it either.  Wherever you have hierarchical structures, you have power, power that tends to attract people who aren’t as nice as Marcus.  You can say, as I do, that people who believe in a good and loving God ought to behave better, but there isn’t any evidence to suggest that not believing in God would encourage them to do so.

Incidentally, both Marcus and I clearly think that churches are hopelessly right-wing, but we probably ought to note that others think the absolute opposite.  And, to do them justice, we have had Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement, Martin Luther King, David Sheppard and many other anti-apartheid campaigners, liberation theology, Jim Wallis and the Sojourners, John Dear, the increasingly radical Christian Aid…  The conservatives certainly haven’t had it all their own way^[8].

My own view, for what it’s worth, is that some people are meant to be inside the church, nudging it in the right (all right, usually the left) direction and others outside heckling.  (I realise that this mixed metaphor has turned the church into some sort of pedal-powered comedy bus, but I’m reasonably happy with the image now.)  One of the most important things is for the nudgers and the hecklers to communicate with one another, and one of the silliest for them to waste energy turning that conversation into a slanging match.  Some of the prime candidates for driving the bus, like Simone Weil, have been outside with Marcus and some of the best heckles have come from inside (try Googling ‘Partenia’ to see what I mean).

Marcus doesn’t like the Bible much, or the God that it portrays.  Fair enough, neither do I to a large part; except that the Bible isn’t really, as he implies, a single entity telling a consistent narrative.  Instead, it’s a collection of very disparate texts, some of which, like the Gospel of St John, are the bedrock of our faith while others, like large chunks of Leviticus, are frankly of no more than historical interest, and rather unpleasant interest at that.  Sane Christians don’t give them equal weight any more than, if you were to come across a box of your great-granny’s bits and pieces you’d treasure her mildewed butter wrappers as much as her love letters.  Not all of the Bible is ‘true’, not even as the metaphor with which Marcus accuses us of dodging the question; much of it is just stories.  What matters is that, on the whole (with the odd blip) these stories show a progression from an early idea of a capricious and bloodthirsty master through the prophets’ realisation of his concern with justice and mercy to Christ’s parables of a wholly loving and forgiving Father.  (The whole rounded off, I’ll admit, by a slightly random anti-imperialist hallucination in the form of the Book of Revelation.)

It’s therefore slightly disingenuous to treat the figure of God as though he’s a historical figure or a fully-drawn character like Peggotty or Horace Rumpole.  The story of our understanding of God is less like the reading of a biography than a process of scientific discovery – we put a hypothesis forward, test it, refine it, put it through a pretty rigorous bout of peer-reviewing …  And it’s still going on.  Jesus put us right about the more egregious horrors of the Old Testament but we manage to ignore him, going on eye-for-eyeing, walking on the side of the road without the bloodstains and obsessing about the Sabbath.  John Dear has estimated a hundred years of the church’s life as being equivalent to one in a human’s, which makes us somewhere near the beginning of our third year at university, old enough to know better but still not quite ready to leave the bar and start some serious revision.

To reject the idea of a God because tens of thousands of years ago the  Mesopotamians told a good flood story and the Hebrews subsequently put  Yahweh into it is a bit like avoiding bison because medieval bestiaries claimed that their farts could ignite a tree three acres away.^[9] Yes, it’s sad and pathetic that over-literal bits of the story lurk beneath the matted fur of internet trolls, giving them ever more bizarre excuses for disbelieving in climate change.  But they interpret the flood story in such a way to reinforce their political and social prejudices, not the other way around.  The tale can equally (I would say with more justification)  be told as the story of a family who, having learned about an impending extreme weather event (direct revelation not being that much different from the New Scientist), took mitigating steps, despite tabloid scorn, and prevented wholesale biodiverse extinction.

Marcus does, however, like Jesus.

“Jesus was a friend to the meek and downtrodden, he promoted the redistribution of wealth, he came to heal the sick and forgive the sinner.  He’d make the front cover of the Daily Mail at least once a week as the evil face of ‘Political Correctness gone mad!’ … I like the peaceful, loving, long-haired, bearded socialist dude I see in Christ.  I’m not totally sure but I think he may have pitched a tent next to mine at Glastonbury a few years ago.”  (pp. 237, 246)

The problem, so far as he is concerned, is that, having established the Old Testament God as a bad-tempered mafioso, he can’t reconcile the Father and Son figures and has to postulate a sort of Trinitarian Oedipus complex to explain the family relationship.  This leads into plenty of comic riffing about McDonalds and the Osmonds  but doesn’t actually help.  One of the reasons, if we can be so reductive as to talk of reasons, for the Incarnation seems to be so that we can understand a little of what God is actually like.  Jesus said, “He who has seen me has seen the Father”, which doesn’t make any sense if, like Marcus, you see the Father as a brutal monomaniac and the Son as a pacific hippy.  In fact, in the bits of the Bible that atheists tend not to know about, prophets had been banging on for centuries about the fact that God preferred poor people, didn’t like sacrifices, wanted widows, orphans and refugees to be treated decently, was utterly fed up with the rich and powerful among his people but would forgive anyone who showed a bit of compassion.  Sadly, no one wanted to hear it then any more that they do now.  So God, the same God, not a dysfunctional relative, followed the old writer’s adage of ‘show, don’t tell’, clambered down to earth like a long-suffering drama teacher and bloody well acted out what he meant.  And we know how that turned out.

Having been, probably, more critical than I meant to be of God Collar’s arguments for atheism, I should point out that there are lots of good things in it, lots of jolly enthusiasms for women, and sex and gay people as well as a lot more honest detail about his own history than he had to give us.  In this respect the book is a bit back-to-front in literary terms; rather than beginning with the particular and extrapolating to the general, he starts with the big statements and only much later explains why it is that he makes them.  It’s rather more like engaging in a conversation than reading a book; like meeting someone on a train and exchanging brisk platitudes only to discover that, owing to a points failure at Aberystwyth, you’re actually thrown into one another’s company for long enough to tell your life stories.  I felt slightly embarrassed by the end that Marcus hadn’t had the opportunity to hear about my own disasters and doubts.  That’s all he needs, poor man.

Before summing up, there are two small bees still niggling in my headwear which I’d like to liberate.  The first is that most Christians don’t, these days, think that non-Christians go to hell.  A few do, yes, but a few people think that electricity leaks out of wall sockets.  It doesn’t stop the rest of us from switching on the toaster.

The second is the notion that religion is an escape from reality, comparable to alcohol, and/or a way of coping with the fear of death.   Neither of these really work for me.  It’s at the times that I engage most with my faith that I am most aware of the world and people around me.  If I want to escape, to retreat into a comforting, self-centred, consequence-free zone, I don’t turn to God; I walk round a department store^[10].  The Gospels are crammed full of reality: thousands of individuals who are poor or sick or disabled or questioning or lost or over-excited, all seeking and receiving the attention of Jesus.  He didn’t live in a pastel-coloured fantasy world and neither can we if we take the slightest notice of what he told us.

And as for death, nothing seems more comforting than the idea that it’s the end of consciousness, that our bodies simply decay into the earth and, with them, the collections of synapses that we once mistook for eternal souls.  If we accept with equanimity that there was a time before we were conceived when we didn’t exist, isn’t it just as easy to contemplate our future non-existence?  I’d quite often choose that oblivion in preference to the terrible clarity of seeing my mistakes from the vantage point of eternity.  (And that will be the real judgement, I suspect.)

When it comes down to it, I don’t really believe that the significant gulf is between those who believe in something they call God and those who don’t.  The one thing we can be absolutely certain of is that if there is a God, our ideas of him/her/it are ludicrously limited.  It may well be, therefore, that to stop believing in our circumscribed conceptions is to step closer to a distant inkling of what a real God could be.

Be that as it may, it seems to me that a more important and telling question would be; if there was such a thing as an infinite, sustaining and worshippable being, what would you expect that being to be like?  Marcus’s book, I think, shows that the kind of God he would like to believe in would be compassionate, tolerant, patient and generous.  My faith is that God is indeed so, that Jesus lived to show us that, and that all the scary stories are just shadows on the wall, remnants of cruel fairy tales that shimmer into nothingness as the morning arrives.  Or, at least, that’s what I choose to believe. As C. S. Lewis wrote, in the end we can do nothing else.  Good luck on your journey, Marcus.  As you say, we’ll all finish up in Birmingham at the end.

1. ^[6] see, among many others, http://rainbowallianceopenfaith.homestead.com/Sodom3.html ↩
2. ^[7] All right, the Archbishop of Canterbury.  I’ve known him as Holy Roly since 1985, when he was my best friend’s dissertation supervisor and he’s done nothing to disprove it since ↩
3. ^[8] Though they do, on the whole, manage to monopolise the word ‘Christian’ which is presumably why Marcus spends some time exploring some of the more bizarre policies of the soi-disant Christian Party, including a return to corporal punishment in schools, a raising of the motorway speed limit with an amnesty for speeding offences and a limit on parking fines.  It begins to sound more like the Irritated Motorists’ Party until you reach the Environment section and a surprisingly comprehensive commitment to greenhouse gas reduction. ↩
4. ^[9] See T. H. White The Book of Beasts: Being a Translation from a Latin Bestiary of the 12th Century ↩
5. ^[10] But then I don’t drink alcohol for comfort, either.  Exhilaration, gluttony, friendship, obstinacy, merriment, boredom and absent-mindedness, yes, but when I’m miserable it has to be Lemsip.  Maybe I’m just weird. ↩

The headlining act, if that’s the right phrase, was John Banville, so in preparation I read The Book of Evidence and The Untouchable in quick succession beforehand. Slightly too quick, in retrospect, as I now have the two protagonists, and in particular their Irish families and ancestral homes, slightly amalgamated in my mind. Oh well. I suppose it’s only an accelerated version of what inevitably happens when we read: characters, incidents and locations become entangled with our own experiences, other books we’ve read and what is going on around us. In the end I didn’t even see John Banville; at more or less the last moment Sam Shepard turned up and was reading at the same time at the other end of the festival. I couldn’t miss the chance to hear him and have my ancient Faber & Faber Seven Plays autographed, so the Butty Barn was forsaken for the Gonzo Theatre tent. We got a bit of True West, as well, performed by the almost resident Gonzo Theatre Company.

Over the weekend I also saw more excellent theatre, including the hilarious and moving Victor’s Dung by Seamus O’Rourke:

music by our friend Frankie Dean (whose guest I was – many thanks, Frankie), Mik Artistik (hoping to reprise that one at Glastonbury), some great local bands, Paul Murray reading from his stunningly brilliant Skippy Dies, and, sheltering from the Sunday morning deluge in the kids’ film club, the delightful French bibliophile animation Eleanor’s Secret. But if a picture paints a thousand words, then one minute thirty-six seconds of film must be worth a few paragraphs, so here’s my son encapsulating the glory that is Flat Lake (not forgetting the alpaca).

newish novels

Four of these I really enjoyed: Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, much hyped, and perhaps not that good but certainly better than some of the snobbish broadsheet Christmas round-ups suggested.  I read the withdrawn uncorrected edition (the only glaring error being ‘Cypress’ for ‘Cyprus’) so will read the other sometime and see whether it leaves me with any significantly different impressions. The Slap by Australian Christos Tsiolkas is an extraordinary achievement, utterly readable while being incredibly clever, shifting perspective in each chapter so skilfully as to give the illusion of direct experience – I had to keep reminding myself that this was a  created work, and felt oddly cheated of such insight into the few characters who are not given their own viewpoint. Juliet, Naked I enjoyed much more than Nick Hornby’s previous novel,  How to be Good (see earlier post), enough, in fact for me not to notice that it was two o’clock in the morning and my teenage son not yet home.  That takes quite a gripping narrative, as other mothers will attest.  I don’t know whether it was the fact that it’s quite substantially about music, on which Hornby is always sound (though the other main background is provincial museums), that it’s set in the North, that one of the principal characters kept reminding me of the wonderful time we had in the front row for Jackson Browne in last year’s Glastonbury acoustic tent or simply that I found the characters both plausible and sympathetic.  Or maybe it’s fundamentally  a book about geekishness, for which I have something of a soft spot…  Generation A by Douglas Coupland is probably a bit geeky as well, with lots of bees (well, very few bees, actually, which is the point) science and internetty stuff.  Highly recommended, especially for you young people.  Which leads, by a process of elimination to Howard Jacobson’s Booker prize-winning The Finkler Question through which I persisted for about sixty-five pages before giving up.  I’m sure it’s me.

modern times

59 Seconds: Think a little, change a lot by Richard Wiseman is a fascinating and very useful study of psychological techniques that don’t work (brainstorming, punching pillows, mirror conversations) and those that do (writing things down, stimulating your brain, touching people on the upper arm).  Oliver James’ Affluenza looks at the extraordinary damage done, not just to society but to our individual psyches by our obsession with wealth and accumulation.  He doesn’t always carry his thoughts to their logical conclusions, but is a good deal more radical than I’d expected.  I particularly liked his proposals for nationalising estate agents and forcing newly elected MPs to look after babies for a fortnight before they are allowed into the House of Commons (the MPs, that is, not the babies, who might be in danger of doing something public-spirited in there) .   The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to be Happy by Michael Foley combines bits of both in a slightly frothy but mostly unobjectionable gallop through sociology, relgion and philosophy in search of the elusive H.  Finally, WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy by David Leigh and Luke Harding did something to fill up the giant gaps caused by my not always paying attention over the past year or so.   The authors are both Guardian journalists involved in the story, and at least one seems to have been rubbed up the wrong way (if that’s not an inappropriate way to put it) by Assange and doesn’t ask nearly enough awkward questions about his prosecution, but the book is a helpful summary, especially good on the brave but sadly garrulous Bradley Manning, and probably as much of the truth as we will know definitively for some time.

biographical stuff

All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C.S.Lewis, 1922-27 and Run to the Mountain: 1 (The Journals of Thomas Merton, V. 1) are both very early diaries, written before either man had grown into the figure that we think we know. Lewis was completing his extraordinary collection of degrees and living outside Oxford with Mrs Moore, the bete noire of his biographers and her teenage daughter Maureen.  One of the things that struck me most in this diary was Lewis’s affection and respect  for Mrs Moore and the seriousness with which he took his responsibilities towards Maureen, whose ambitions to become a professional violinist were being ruined by the sentimental techniques taught in her refined girls’ school.  The other recurrent note is of financial desperation: Lewis was reliant upon an allowance from his father which would have been more than adequate for a single student, but of course was woefully inadequate to maintain a secret family.  This was Lewis pre-conversion, pre-Inklings (though Barfield and Coghill appear, with deepening friendship), pre-Broadcast Talks and of course pre-Narnia.  The diary contains few clues to his future, little philosophical speculation or literary analysis but, along with brief notes suggesting the prodigious amounts of studying he was able to squeeze in, endless small tales of domestic life; jam-making, spring-cleaning, family feuds and social misunderstandings.  This experience was the stuff from which, in my view, his best books were created.  As far as politics was concerned, Lewis was naively conservative, failing, except for odd instances (he was surprisingly radical about vivisection) to apply the Gospel teachings to human relationships beyond the immediate and domestic, but it was here, in the fudges and muddles of the human heart, the bickering and bartering of family life, that he wrote with wisdom and authority, especially in The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce.

Merton’s diary was written after he had returned to the Church, but before he became a Trappist, while he was still hoping to become accepted by the Franciscan order.  Much of the diary is taken up with lists, random thoughts and memories but there’s also a fascinating trip to Cuba and reflections on the current Second World War which prefigure the mature Merton.  Towards the end of the book he visits the abbey of Gethsemane for the first time, and, reading it, I was on tenterhooks. Would he realise that this was the place?  I think so, but will have to start Volume Two to be sure.

The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath by Ronald Hayman, is, of course, a sad story.  When I was at college, The Bell Jar was on the list of books which couldn’t be borrowed from the University library but had to be read in situ, under the beady eye of a hovering librarian.  Not, of course, because the copy was valuable, but in case it might encourage impressionable young undergraduates to put their own heads in the gas oven (or its equivalent – probably touching any component in our antiquated electrical system).  No one, reading Hayman’s book, would be likely to be seduced by the glamour of suicide, only engulfed in a pewter melancholy at the interminable carousel of secrecy and doubt and despair.  I was glad to have read it, but even more glad not to have to read it again.

That’ll do for now, except to mention that our son Gawain’s new book, How to Beat the Sicilian Defence: An Anti-Sicilian Repertoire for White is newly published by Everyman Chess  and that my new novel, Summer 17 is still available on Kindle format at an astonishingly low price.  More coming soon, meanwhile happy reading…

(Tanya Jones)

Ah yes, new arrivals. A couple of weeks ago one of our sons asked me to look in the library for a book about group psychology. I located the psychology section to find that it consisted of one Teach Yourself book, a couple of nursing textbooks and half a shelf of accounts of psychic phenomena and the experiences of spiritualist mediums (media?). It’s not unusual. Whenever I look at the religion section, the new books there all seem to be about angels (in their new, tinkling bells, theosophy-lite manifestation), the science shelves are full of diet books and music consists of row after row of popstar biographies. Oh, and literature means the collected works of Jeremy Clarkson. Of course the purpose of a library is to serve the public, and there are still lots of interesting, intelligent and classic books on the shelves, but I do find it a depressing development. Our library is a busy and vibrant place, always busy with parents reading to toddlers in the comfortable children’s area, old men reading the papers, school students doing homework and newcomers to the area using the computers or finding out about local activities. The staff are fantastic; helpful, cheerful and patient. But then I suspect that they’re not the ones making the policy decisions.

Like everything else, the threat to libraries will probably arrive later to Northern Ireland than to the rest of the U.K. But come it no doubt will, and, with our peculiar fiscal position, bizarre politics and scary reliance on the pubic sector, it may be worse here than elsewhere. I’d cheerfully lie down in front of a bulldozer heading for our library (so long as I had something good to read for the boring waiting to be squashed bits). It would be satisfying, though, to feel that we were defending not just the social function and facilities of the library, but shelves creaking with well-written, exciting and thought-provoking Real Books.