Mads, bads and Blairs

When the Globe and Mail in Toronto asked me the other day for three books to help its readers understand Tony Blair's Britain, I assumed that three newish books were wanted.

Out came two lightish current novels, Zoe Heller's Notes on a Scandal and Paul Torday's Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, plus David Runciman's The Politics of Good Intentions for Canadians more philosophically inclined.

But comments to this blog have called for much deeper stuff.

Moby Dick? Several readers have suggested that one.

Suitably biblical, I agree. With Tony Blair as Captain Ahab, converting his own obession into something universal which we all must share.

But perhaps a bit too big a book.

Who, asks Mat Sumner, would be Blair's shipmates? Who are Starbuck, Queequeg and Ishmael?

Hmmm.

For Starbuck, the thoughtful, practical Quaker first mate who thinks Ahab's single-minded zeal a madness but cannot change his mind, the answer must be the late Robin Cook.

And Gordon Brown too may yet go for the part when the full story finally comes to be written.

For Queequeg, the semi-house-trained, semi-savage harprooner.

Choose from the 'Two Johns', Reid and Prescott.

The last is easy. Ishmael, the narrator?

This has to be Alastair Campbell - though he will have to get in fast if he is to beat Ahab himself to the bookshops.

Other suggested Blair books have been The Brothers Karamazov, with particular emphasis on the Grand Inquisitor who thinks we would be better off under autocratic rule without all that awkward free will.

And Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead - with Blair as the dictator-fancying ideas-destroyer, Ellsworth Toohey.

Ian McEwan's Enduring Love. For, in Mark Szawlowski's words, "the idyllic opening sequence of a balloon in effortless flight over England's pastures green, buffeted by a supporting wind before the true reality dawns, namely, that the balloon is out of control, drifting away from the people watching it and ultimately leading to shackle-raising death".

And Alice in Wonderland. Hail to the Mad Hatter.

I feel almost ashamed of those first thoughts from the top of my own head.

But since some readers  have complained of not being able to find the original "THREE FOR THOUGHT - WHAT YOU NEED TO READ ABOUT . . . TONY BLAIR'S BRITAIN", here it is.

Tony's time

As Britain's floundering Prime Minister prepares to leave office, PETER STOTHARD offers a novel reading of his career.

Notes on a Scandal, a bestselling novel first published after Tony Blair joined the war against Saddam Hussein, is now available again, in "A Major Motion Picture" version, just as the Prime Minister ends his days mired in police investigations. Zoe Heller's tale (Viking, 2003) of how a married female pottery teacher finds sexual and emotional fulfilment with a 15-year-old male pupil does not deal directly with any scandal of the Blair government, neither the false prospectus for the invasion of Iraq nor the offer of seats in parliament to secret Labour financiers. But it does contain, somehow, a novelist's sense of both events.

"Education, education, education" was Tony Blair's priority list when he won power in 1997. Since then, in Sheba Hart's rundown London school, as in hundreds of non-fictional others, "in the same period that pedagogical ambitions have become so inflated and grandiose, the standards of basic literacy and numeracy have radically declined." When Sheba's headmaster was appointed, he was St. George's "youngest ever" and "very big on communication." He has set up a "Morale Watch," ordered false accounts of student riots, an annual staff photo opportunity and permanent reforms for problems that have remained no less permanent.

This fictional head, like our real Prime Minister, is nothing like as popular as he once was. Some former supporters argue that power has changed him for the worse; others think his "gauleiter tendency" was always there. But "no one says he is fresh air any more." By the time that his pottery teacher is revealed as "rutting" on Hampstead Heath with a young stalwart of her extra-homework class, he is already seeking his place in the school history book. It is time for the police to take over.
The real police have been at Tony Blair's office door twice in the past few months -- and at his outer office door a dozen times -- in search of evidence that he or his aides sold peerages for party funds. This is a very British malpractice long honoured by non-exposure, long committed by all parties and, unless one is careless, not a crime at all.

The early Tony Blair would have -- and did -- excoriate such sleazy favours. And if a whiff of trouble were to have reached anywhere near his desk, one of his ubiquitous "spin doctors" would have effortlessly whisked it away. No longer. Think of a word to sum up the Blair era. "Spin" has to be the one, the contribution to the language that future historians will find hardest to avoid.
Literary critics may call Heller's older character, Barbara, played by Judy Dench in the film, an "unreliable narrator": But for the tabloid press, the lesbian rival to Sheba's young boy is effortlessly and ever comprehensibly dubbed "the saucy schoolteacher's spin doctor." A fair charge against Blair? Not entirely. He would claim, with justification, to have been the first PM to face the relentless demands of 24/7 news, the first Labour PM to decide that the Tory press would not be allowed to destroy him. But the mud still sticks.

In the second exemplary text for this past decade, a Blairite PM and his press spokesman play even more direct parts. Paul Torday's first novel, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (published this month by Weidenfeld & Nicolson), tells of a plan to distract public attention from Baghdad bloodbaths by putting British aquatic expertise behind the fly-fishing aspirations of a Yemeni sheikh. The hero is a "government scientist," a phrase that will never be quite the same after the death of WMD expert Dr. David Kelly during the investigations into the "dodgy dossier" of Iraq's illegal weapons.

This is a tragicomic story of self-deceptions and deceptions of others for only occasionally decent motives. Dr. Alfred Jones, international authority on caddis flies, knows that there is no possible chance of Atlantic salmon spawning in the Arabian peninsula. But his boss likes the boost to his budget, and the prime minister's man sees a fine photo-op at the foot of a fast-flowing, fish-filled, British-built cultural initiative. Al-Qaeda terrorists may be one threat to this enterprise, but their tartan-clad incompetence is as nothing to the dangers within the hopes of the visionaries themselves. The conclusion makes even Tony Blair's likely demise look kind.

It is tempting to choose a novel for the third book too, and one more likely than Torday's to stay on the library shelves. Ian McEwan's Saturday, set on the day of the "not in my name" marches in February, 2003, catches more fairly than most the conflicts within honest minds about whether the Iraq war could be justified. It is not his best work, but it is his book most associated with Blair.

It would be wrong, however, not to include a book that was directly and non-fictionally about Tony Blair. His biographies are all adequate and all mediocre: so let it be The Politics of Good Intentions: History, Fear and Hypocrisy in the New World Order, by David Runciman (Princeton University Press, 2006).

This is a powerful piece, a short critique of the types of rhetorical arguments used by the creator of New Labour in his notorious "preacher on a tank" mode. Runciman assails the use of "new dangers" as a justification for "new obediences," the way that if a "risk" is "new," a democratic leader need not make the normal informed balance of known risk and known freedoms, and thus the way that not taking the country to war becomes a "risk no responsible government could afford to take."

There is much more in the same vein. Fair? Not always. Useful for understanding Blair's beliefs and motivations? Only partly. Essential for understanding how he is likely to be judged when he leaves office? Sadly, absolutely.

Comments

[Susan Balée]

How about _The Pickwick Papers_?

[Clayton Burns]

Presented with intelligence, Sir Peter. If John Bell's one-man "Moby Dick" has not been to London, TLS should bring him in from Australia for a UK tour. I might consider James Hawes's "Speak for England" on Blairism. A found sentence in ALR (Australian Literary Review) in The Australian: "Like some precious marsupial driven from its relict habitat, he is searching for another ramshackle shelter underneath another elevated home." No application to Blair? ALR would benefit from Stothard-Beard style blogs (even though the comment there is quite good). ALR should also supplement its relationship with University of Melbourne with a performance contract with the universities of Macquarie and Sydney. If ALR ran continually on www.news.com.au with much better design and photography, it could be much more successful internationally. A solid project for Sir Peter: to visit Sydney and sort out the affairs of ALR. Any word on the progress of the intelligence people as per Guardian report in nailing down Auden? I was pleased to see the Kundera response. Clayton.

[Andrew Kenneally]

Though perhaps the lackey, Smerdyakov, from The Brothers K was a bit of a forerunner of honest Tony Blair.

[Candadai Tirumalai]

A blog which relates two magisterial novels--"Moby Dick" and "The Brothers Karamazov"--to the Prime Ministerial quandary does a service to literature. I hope Melville and Dostoevsky gain new readers as a consequence. The juxtaposition of Melville's leading characters to present and former members of the British Cabinet was apt.