As George Bush continues his embarrassing farewell tour of those countries prepared to let him in - perhaps a "global itinerary of apology", as Boris Johnson put it when his most recent gaffe had been to cast anthropophagic aspersions against the people of Papua New Guinea, might have been appropriate - I've found myself reading a couple of novels which examine the West's guilty conscience at exploiting the rest of the world in any number of hideously obdurate ways.
The first is Lost Boys by James Miller, a July debut about terrorism and child abduction, those nightmarish shibboleths with which the more reactionary elements of the media chose to browbeat us into submission to their grasping and paranoid agenda.
The novel opens quite unassumingly and I was at first wary of the descriptions of stuccoed West London terraces which are the touchstone of countless novels of middle class suburban ennui. But this, I came to realise, was very much the point, as it's also obvious from the outset that twelve year-old Timothy Dashwood will vanish. And indeed he does, despite his mother's hysterical mollycoddling and the the precautions taken by his school when other boys start to vanish without trace.
The middle third of the book is essentially one long passage bridging the transition from the family's initial shock at Timothy's vanishing to his father's attempts to track him down. It consists simply of his father's listening and reacting to tapes of interviews and musings by the unorthodox private detective looking into the case. There is an apparent discontinuity suggested by the father's having these tapes, but inevitably this little mystery turns out to be fulcrate to the plot.
This bravura is the catalyst for an essential transmutation: what might have been an adolescent raging against the legacy of Western callousness becomes an eloquently deconstructionist analysis. Britain is already alarmed by home-grown terrorism within Muslim communities, but we are yet to consider that possibility that our foreign policy decisions - in trade and in conflict - will sire an entire generation which rejects contemporary values as untenably exploitative. The bubble of comfort inside which the West has attempted to seal itself is under will be under threat from just as much from within as without.
This cosy bubble, a forcefield against intrusion from the mundane horror of reality, is very much the motif of The Other Hand by Chris Cleave, out in August. On holiday in Nigeria in attempt to revitalise a marriage undermined by an affair, Sarah and Andrew venture out of the hotel compound only to be confronted by the full horror of a nation divided by greed and fear once the West realises there is oil to be had.
They encounter Little Bee, who turns up at the door of their cosy suburban home two years later, an asylum seeker with no paperwork. Andrew has just committed suicide, leaving Sarah with her four year-old boy, whose steadfast insistence that he is Batman, with a mission to fight baddies, is a source of both endearing humour and sobering pathos.
The West's shucking of accountability is personified by Lawrence, a Home Office press officer, whose affair with Sarah provoked the holiday which resulted in Sarah's and Little Bee's being yoked together. He is reluctant even to acknowledge unintended consequences, let alone admit any responsibility. He simply cannot understand how Sarah's feeling of duty towards Little Bee can survive in the face of the threat she poses to her way of life.
The book is much more than a critique of Western imperialism. Just as in his first book, Incendiary, Cleave shows a rare talent for developing culturally convincing characters and making interactions of differing perspectives entirely plausible. Despite the horror at its heart, The Other Hand is very funny, sometimes life-affirming, story. Little Bee is a perceptive commentator, whose occasional naivety is simply due to quite how alien Western life is to her. The absurdities and parochial concerns of middle-class existence are not lost on her. Casual racism is smartly lampooned and she establishes that those with the least to give are, perhaps through empathy, often the most generous.
And she recognises the West's bubble of comfort and denial as a mechanism for self-protection because she has seen such horror and endured such pain that it is only a degree of self-denial at her situation that allows her to carry on.
The book is so effervescently entertaining that the raw accounts of what happened that day on the beach in Nigeria could seem dissonant. But, because they are so graphic and upsetting, I shall never forget them and must conclude that, on a metatextual level, they remind me that the comforts of my life have consequences and I have it within me to bring some influence to bear on what they might be.
The first is Lost Boys by James Miller, a July debut about terrorism and child abduction, those nightmarish shibboleths with which the more reactionary elements of the media chose to browbeat us into submission to their grasping and paranoid agenda.
The novel opens quite unassumingly and I was at first wary of the descriptions of stuccoed West London terraces which are the touchstone of countless novels of middle class suburban ennui. But this, I came to realise, was very much the point, as it's also obvious from the outset that twelve year-old Timothy Dashwood will vanish. And indeed he does, despite his mother's hysterical mollycoddling and the the precautions taken by his school when other boys start to vanish without trace.
The middle third of the book is essentially one long passage bridging the transition from the family's initial shock at Timothy's vanishing to his father's attempts to track him down. It consists simply of his father's listening and reacting to tapes of interviews and musings by the unorthodox private detective looking into the case. There is an apparent discontinuity suggested by the father's having these tapes, but inevitably this little mystery turns out to be fulcrate to the plot.
This bravura is the catalyst for an essential transmutation: what might have been an adolescent raging against the legacy of Western callousness becomes an eloquently deconstructionist analysis. Britain is already alarmed by home-grown terrorism within Muslim communities, but we are yet to consider that possibility that our foreign policy decisions - in trade and in conflict - will sire an entire generation which rejects contemporary values as untenably exploitative. The bubble of comfort inside which the West has attempted to seal itself is under will be under threat from just as much from within as without.
This cosy bubble, a forcefield against intrusion from the mundane horror of reality, is very much the motif of The Other Hand by Chris Cleave, out in August. On holiday in Nigeria in attempt to revitalise a marriage undermined by an affair, Sarah and Andrew venture out of the hotel compound only to be confronted by the full horror of a nation divided by greed and fear once the West realises there is oil to be had.
They encounter Little Bee, who turns up at the door of their cosy suburban home two years later, an asylum seeker with no paperwork. Andrew has just committed suicide, leaving Sarah with her four year-old boy, whose steadfast insistence that he is Batman, with a mission to fight baddies, is a source of both endearing humour and sobering pathos.
The West's shucking of accountability is personified by Lawrence, a Home Office press officer, whose affair with Sarah provoked the holiday which resulted in Sarah's and Little Bee's being yoked together. He is reluctant even to acknowledge unintended consequences, let alone admit any responsibility. He simply cannot understand how Sarah's feeling of duty towards Little Bee can survive in the face of the threat she poses to her way of life.
The book is much more than a critique of Western imperialism. Just as in his first book, Incendiary, Cleave shows a rare talent for developing culturally convincing characters and making interactions of differing perspectives entirely plausible. Despite the horror at its heart, The Other Hand is very funny, sometimes life-affirming, story. Little Bee is a perceptive commentator, whose occasional naivety is simply due to quite how alien Western life is to her. The absurdities and parochial concerns of middle-class existence are not lost on her. Casual racism is smartly lampooned and she establishes that those with the least to give are, perhaps through empathy, often the most generous.
And she recognises the West's bubble of comfort and denial as a mechanism for self-protection because she has seen such horror and endured such pain that it is only a degree of self-denial at her situation that allows her to carry on.
The book is so effervescently entertaining that the raw accounts of what happened that day on the beach in Nigeria could seem dissonant. But, because they are so graphic and upsetting, I shall never forget them and must conclude that, on a metatextual level, they remind me that the comforts of my life have consequences and I have it within me to bring some influence to bear on what they might be.
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