Sometimes a novel is ahead of its time, seeming to write about events that predict the future. In Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report, the idea of precognition allows the police to know in advance about future criminal activity and to stop it before it happens.

The future is that strange, unknowable terrain over the horizon. In the mind’s eye, we speculate on what awaits us on the other side of the present. But speculation is not the same as what actually will transpire. Novelists also speculate about the future. Sometimes they predict the general pattern of what the future will bring; other times they strike gold by predicting an actual event.

From our vantage point in the present, we can read books that appear to predict what will happen.  A large number of speculative books about the future fall into the category of science fiction. Jules Verne predicted moon shots from Florida. That sounds impressive until you remember that Jules Verne’s launch vehicle was an astronaut shot from a cannon.

Arthur C. Clark foresaw satellite communication systems. George Orwell’s 1984 predicted a future of surveillance cameras, newspeak, perpetual hate campaigns. William Gibson’s Neuromancer anticipated cyberspace and virtual reality. H.G. Wells predicted the importance of planes in warfare, bombing raids by planes, and the atom bomb.

Morgan Robertson’s Futility was a book written fourteen years before the maiden voyage of the RMS Titanic, about a ship called Titan that hit an iceberg on the starboard side and sank in the Atlantic Ocean. The sinking was in April. In other words, many of the details in Robertson’s novel tracked the actual details surrounding the sinking of the Titanic.

William Gibson’s take on predicting the future is clear: he can’t. No one can. If he possessed such precognition, Gibson says, he would have written about Facebook, incorporating it into one of his novels years before it came into being.

Science fiction and crime novels can overlap. Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report, where three mutants can predict future criminal activity, is an example. In Minority Report, precognition creates paradoxes. A cop receives precognition about murdering a person he’s never met. If precognition of crime is a possibility, then our notion of free will need to undergo a major transformation.

In Michel Houellebecq’s The Platform, there is a terrorist bombing in Phuket in which two hundred people are killed. After the novel was published to great acclaim, the Bali terrorist bombing killed over two hundred people.

In my recently released novel, The Wisdom of Beer, there is a warehouse heist. The warehouse is filled with weapons destined for terrorists groups. Last week, when The Wisdom of Beer appeared in bookstores in Thailand, the police uncovered a rental premise filled with materials for bombs and the theory of the police is that those materials were being readied for export to possible terrorists organizations outside of Thailand.

Does that mean Michel Houellebecq in The Platform and my The Wisdom of Beer predicted the future? In reality, neither novel predicts the actual place but does come close to predicting the nature of the occurrence of the criminal activity.

Novelists share with the police and others in the law enforcement system an ability to reason based on probability analysis. Predicting the dangerous is about assessing the probability of people, ideologies, politics and opportunities collating over time to create an incident. The future of dangerousness is less crystal ball-gazing than statistical analysis of vast amounts of data, cultural and historical trends, and personalities.

What novelists often do is employ pattern recognition to a vast amount of information, taking into account trends, prior cases, and probabilities. We take the temperature of the body politic and look at whether the patient has a fever and then make a case as to the possible outcome. Modern crime novelists are cultural profilers. We mine the source material and our own experiences in order to create narratives that are plausible outcomes for the reader. To the extent that the profiling works, it seems that we have predicted the future. But, in fact, we have gauged the probability of events correctly. No magic. No voodoo. No precognition. Just an ability to combine ingredients from the past and to present those elements and bake the cake we subsequently recognize as the future.

Elmore Leonard has 10 rules for writing. They don’t cover most of the important points of writing. They could really be called: Ten Rules for Writing That Isn’t So Bad, Even if You’re Not Much of Writer.

Still the rules have been turned into a book and are quoted with something a little more mystical than simple reverence by crime writers when I go to crime conferences.

Some of the rules are pretty silly. No adverbs? Well, if you’re a crappy writer who dumps adverbs all over the place, then you ought to get rid of adverbs. But someone who writes well ought to be able to use all the tools of language. Would you tell a great composer not to write in B minor? Or not to use C sharp?

When I mentioned this on stage with a couple of other writers earlier this year (just after the pro-Elmore symphony had been sounded) I registered a degree of hostility on the part of at least one of the others on the panel rather akin to my having told a bunch of Orthodox Jews that they ought to expand their palate to include pork.

When Elmore goes deeper into his rules, he usually says something like “Don’t do X unless you’re Margaret Atwood [or some other writer], who can do it without sounding like shit.” In other words, if you’re a good writer, don’t follow Elmore’s rules for writing.

But what about breaking them all at once? The National Post has a competition running in which it asks readers to write a single sentence that breaks all Elmore’s rules.

It’s a little tricky, because some of Elmore’s rules (eg. Avoid prologues) aren’t really sentence-specific. But here’s my attempt:

Rain threatened suddenly, as it had for days and would go on doing, over the art-deco red-brick main street with its hardware store, candy store, video store and tattoo parlor, no matter how much the delicately featured red-headed woman with the up-turned nose opined tartly that the weather “would turn out just ticketty-boo, bejasus!” while she was on a visit from Ireland to complete her studies in a subject irrelevant to the book or her role in it.

I think that also proves that Elmore’s rules aren’t rules for good writing. They’re just rules to avoid being totally crap. Which is worthwhile…he said, hopefully.
–
The wait for a successor to Amadeus is over.  MOZART’S LAST ARIA by Matt Rees www.mattrees.net
www.themanoftwistsandturns.com/

Press freedom is not a new topic. It’s been with us, as an issue, since the days of town criers – probably before. However, in the wake of the News of the World phone tapping scandal here in the UK and the arrests of several journalists in Turkey this is not a subject that is going away.

Boiling the whole thing down, I think there are basically two issues here. Firstly how invasive is a state prepared to be in the process of disseminating information to the public and what the words ‘in the public interest’ actually mean?

To take the second issue first, my interpretation of ‘in the public interest’ covers those things that the public need to know and/or will benefit from knowing. For instance I would say it is in the public interest to know if or when a nuclear accident occurs. In the past accidents have happened and they have been covered up, even here in the UK. That’s a no brainer. What’s also in the public interest are details about politicians shady pasts (and presents) because if your Prime Minister is a convicted fraudster or paedophile you need to know about it so that you can, at the very least, be on your guard against him/her. Moving further into the vexed area of ‘celebrity’ I would argue that it is in the public interest to know whether someone who claims to be a role model of some sort is actually telling the truth, especially if he or she is trading commercially on his or her image as a ‘good sort’. After that, for me at least, it all starts to get a bit odd.

Do I, for instance, need to know that a famously promiscuous rockstar is having sex with another girl half his age? Do I actually want photographs of his saggy old bum alongside hers in some villa in Barbados on the front of my newspaper (over my cornflakes)? More importantly do I need to know what was on a murder victim’s mobile phone years after her death? I don’t. The police need that information, for what it’s worth and it shouldn’t be in the hands of some journalist who is only interested in raising the profile of his or her newspaper.

What is in the public interest is something that requires the application of a bit of common sense. Heaven forefend that I should protect celebrities and their brittle egos but journalism that concentrates obsessively on these people not only invades their privacy but also raises their profiles to ridiculous levels. So called ‘celeb magazines’ run exclusively on this nonsense which is puerile and shallow and makes those who read it puerile and shallow too. Personally I couldn’t care less whether Kim Kardashian (whoever she is) has had a tummy tuck or not, I’m too busy trying to earn my living and pay my bills.

More sinister however is the issue of the involvement of governments in press and media freedom. Putting the problem of copyright and piracy to one side, this is where governments decide that their citizens are forbidden access to certain information. The classic example is China where all references on the internet to the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989 are just not there. The Chinese government don’t want to deal with it and so it just didn’t happen.

I think that what offends me most about all this is the lack of respect it shows for the citizen. Do the Chinese government think that their citizens are stupid? It happened, everybody knows it and I just don’t get what pretending otherwise achieves. Dissent is normal amongst humans and in fact all animals and my belief is that you deny or persecute dissent at your peril. Give people information and a voice and they will respect you for it, tell them that something doesn’t exist when it patently does and you’re storing up a world of trouble for yourself.

But governments across the world still relentlessly tell their people that black is white and make moral judgements on behalf of their citizens on a daily basis. Personally I don’t see that it’s getting any better either. I was actually listening to a small news item on the radio this morning where the reporter was saying that modern Britain was going back to the 1980s. With mass unemployment, a hard line Conservative government and civil unrest, yes the similarities are there. I just hope that we manage to avoid some of the limits on our freedoms that Margaret Thatcher wanted to impose back then, when we all marched and shouted and rioted against her. I just hope that this current generation does get its head out of its celebrity magazines and at least prepare to storm the barricades. Our freedoms are not to be taken for granted and they have to be nurtured, like plants, all the time.

I took my first driving test in a regional Icelandic town in about 1980, 350 kilometres from the nearest roundabouts and traffic lights, and with three inches of snow on the ground that was four inches by the end of the test. I didn’t even get as far as fourth gear and the examiner was more interested in telling me about his holidays in Sherwood Forest than quizzing me on my knowledge of the highway code.

Once or twice I’ve mentioned driving in Iceland. It’s not for the faint-hearted, and I speak as one who has been through the heart-stopping experience of the Casablanca rush hour – maybe not quite at the same level as Cairo or Bangkok, but still genuinely terrifying. Driving in Iceland isn’t in that league, but it does have its own peculiarities.

Iceland is at the edge of the habitable world, which gives it its own flavour of frontier mentality, so while there’s a robust faith in the rightness of law and order, there’s also an underlying belief that rules and regulations should apply to everyone else.

Also, cars are important to Icelanders. Let’s qualify that. Cars are important the world over. Men especially often lavish far more care and attention on their treasured wheels than they’d devote to their girlfriends, wives or children. To Icelanders cars are particularly important and in a country of individualists, that frontier mentality dictates that a man’s car is his castle, and there are plenty of monster castles out there. For years there were American gas guzzlers everywhere. A friend of mine once proudly owned a down-at-heel Oldsmobile that he drove to work every day in a town you could walk the length of in a few minutes – roughly as long as it took to clear the windscreen and bonnet of snow of in the morning – but being able to drive to work was important. It’s a statement. Walking to work was the equivalent of admitting to a serious cojones shortfall.

These days it’s the ubiquitous monster 4x4s. Fair enough, there are people who travel in the highlands and those who need to get around the country in winter. But in reality a good proportion of these trucks rarely go anywhere beyond city limits but have a far more important role as urban status symbols.

There’s definitely something about big cars that appeals to Icelanders, not least because of the spend-it-now culture, a legacy of the work-hard-play-hard mentality and galloping inflation, as well as a desperate need to keep up with the neighbours that afflicts a sizable proportion of the population.

Iceland has a traffic culture all of its own. Outside the towns and onto country roads there are some respectable distances between settlements. The roads are narrow and it’s not that long since the whole of Highway 1, which runs right round the island, was finally finished in tarmac. Before that these were loose-surfaced dirt roads that were mostly the width of a car and a half. Meeting a car coming the other way in a cloud of brown dust could be a hair-raising experience as nobody wanted to sacrifice valuable milliseconds by easing off the accelerator.

Winter makes the whole thing even more of an experience when the roads are covered in snow, or better still, the layer of compacted snow that turns back to ice once there has been a brief thaw.

But it’s in town that the fun begins. Reykjavík traffic is unnerving. It’s not the speed of the traffic, but the feeling that every one of those drivers out there is in his or her own little world, entirely oblivious to what’s going on around them – possibly a result of decades of driving tests that were so easy that hardly anyone ever failed. There’s no looking from side to side, definitely no making eye contact and none of the good-natured leaving a space for someone else to join from a side road that you see elsewhere. Things like lane discipline and elementary stuff like signalling left or right are ridiculous concepts that apply only to old ladies, foreigners and country bumpkins. On any of the two-lane thoroughfares through town, look both ways, as there’s bound to be someone overtaking you on the inside, or better still, just sat there matching your speed and carefully keeping inside the blind spot.

The traffic tends to be furious and very close. A few inches from the bumper in front is pretty normal at whatever speed. The saving grace is that Reykjavík’s traffic is so heavy these days that it has become bogged down under its own weight and there’s not much chance of getting from A to B with any kind of speed. But add an unexpected sprinkling of snow to the mix, and all bets are off.

This doesn’t mean that it’s not easy to get a speeding ticket, because that’s not difficult at all these days. There are automatic cameras here and there that will ensure that you receive an expensive (although not as eye-wateringly stiff as in Norway)  ‘gladdening’ through the mail. There are areas of the countryside where it’s wise not to stray far over the 90km/h limit, as the cops in those counties really love their mobile speed cameras. Húnavatnssysla, that’s you I’m waving at.

So if you venture to Iceland and pick up a hire car at the airport, be forewarned. If you’re used to Casablanca or Saigon, you’ll probably be fine. If you hail from Tunbridge Wells, you could be in for a shock.

Last light as night falls in Rangoon. Shwedagon Pagoda framed against the twilight. It is like watching a great diva knowing in less than a generation she will be reduced to a walk on role. But that is the future. At this moment such a command performance can only leave you in awe. Our world has lost something. And I am witnessing what is front of me and remembering what we’ve left behind with a sense of joy and regret.

From my balcony the Shwedagon Pagoda is on a hill enveloped in a forest of trees. One way to understand a place is to move beyond the iconic view and into the region of folk tales, proverbs, and legends. Buried in these narratives are the treasures that define a people, their morality, ethics, and worldview. As you will have gathered from the news headlines over the past couple of weeks, Burma is a society undergoing important political changes.

The people of Burma are like travelers who have been on a dusty road for a long time and are able to enjoy a simple meal.

There is a Burmese folktale* about a weary traveler who stopped along the road to eat his lunch. The traveler was poor and his meal was a meager helping of rice and vegetables. Nearby a food vendor was selling fried fish and fish cakes. The stall owner watched the traveler eating as she fried fish. The smell of the fish drifting toward the traveler who squatted alone, lost in his own thoughts.

As the traveler finished his meal and was about to depart, the woman from the food stalls shouted at him, stopping him in his tracks: “You owe me a silver quarter for the price of one fried fish.”

“But madam, I did not eat one of your fried fish.”

“You are a cheater,” she replied. “A person who takes without paying for what he takes.”

“But, madam, I’ve taken nothing from you. I have not come within five feet from your stall.”

“Ah, ha. And you’re a liar to boot. I have many witnesses who will testify that they saw you enjoying the smell of my fried fish as you ate your meal. You would not have been able to eat that disgusting mush of rice and vegetable without taking in the sweet aroma of my fish frying. So pay me the silver quarter and don’t make any more trouble for yourself.”

The confrontation soon drew a crowd around the traveler and the fried fish seller. She plays to the crowd who had to agree that indeed the traveler had availed himself of the smell of the fish frying. Even the traveler could not deny he had smelled the fish frying. But he insisted that he had no duty to pay for that privilege.

The matter was taken to a royal judge who heard the evidence. The judge deliberated on the matter in a courthouse nestled under the shade of a coconut tree, chickens pecking for grain along the road. Several minutes passed before he announced to the parties and the crowd who had accompanied them as to his verdict.

The judge found the basic facts weren’t in dispute. The traveler had indeed enhanced the enjoyment of his meal because of the pleasant smell of the fish frying. He had received a benefit. But what was the value of that benefit? The fish seller said the price for a plate of fish was a silver quarter. The judge ordered the parties to leave the courthouse and to walk out into the sun. The traveler was then to hold out a silver quarter and allow the fish vendor to grasp the shadow made by the silver quarter. The judge reasoned if the plate of fish cost one silver quarter, then the exchange value for the smell of the fish was the shadow of one silver quarter.

As the gold rush of investors are jumping headlong into the newly opened Burma, they might be reminded that so far the Burmese, like the traveler, have only had a whiff of the frying fish called freedom and democracy. Whether they will be left only with a scent or will be allowed to enjoy the full plate, remains to be seen. The future will tell whether the price of freedom 60 million travelers’ benefit will be judged to be payable silver or a mere shadow of silver.

*Story adapted from Maung Htin Aung’s Folk Tales of Burma.

Now we know that the good people at Wikipedia are bastards on a par with the self-satisfied tossers at Google and Facebook.

Click on Wikipedia today and you’ll see a page informing you of the horrors of living in a world where there’s no “free knowledge.” That’s the underlying lie of all these big media companies masquerading as heroes of the freedoms of the internet. Because behind all of it is the desire to create cost-free pages around which to place advertisements – the revenues of which go to those big companies.

I’m writing about this here, because it’s as much of a threat to creativity in the crime fiction genre as in any other creative endeavor in which artists attempt to eke out some kind of a living.

Wikipedia joined Facebook and Google in opposing a couple of bills now before the US Congress which would hit international internet piracy. Rupert Murdoch, among others, joined in on the other side of the battle, arguing that newspapers and publishing houses (owned by him, of course) shouldn’t be pillaged by people who want to make money off them without paying the artists and journalists and editors who make them.

But the “new media” assholes seem to have been winning. The White House is opposing key elements of the bills. Blackberry-surfing Barack Obama has evidently been bought off by the bums in Silicon Valley. If he continues to block such bills, it could well be that other media ventures will go the way of the newspaper business (I’m a former journalist who watched as “free” internet access, aggregating by sites like Huffington Post, and pure theft destroyed that industry and put so many of the people I’ve worked with over the years out of a job. Yes, people do lose their jobs when you take what they do and don’t pay them for it.)

There are many examples of how this affects crime fiction writers. Let me give you just a couple in my case. All my novels are published in Norwegian. All of them are out there on the web for a free download in Norwegian. (The Scandinavians are at the heart of the internet piracy con; there’s even a Pirates Party in the Swedish parliament.) But the book wouldn’t be in Norwegian if my publisher in Oslo hadn’t figured on making a small amount of money from it, had it translated, and put it out there. So the “free” information wouldn’t exist, were it not for someone who deserves to put bread on the table in return for providing it.

My latest US novel “Mozart’s Last Aria” just turned up on a free download site. I alerted my publisher, which has started a procedure to have it taken down. Now I’m not a millionaire – not even in Hungarian forint or Israeli shekels – so I need to earn some money off my Mozart novel if I’m to be able to write the next one. Or else that’s another book that won’t exist – or won’t be as good, or will take a lot longer to write, while I find another job with which to feed my family.

Now, I hear some of you rolling out the usual litany of excuses for these racketeering Silicon Valley wankers: Wikipedia is a foundation, not a profit-making company; information wants to be free; people would write books even if they didn’t get paid for them.

Well, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales presumably gets a salary, and I expect it’s rather a good one judging by the proliferation of smug photos of him around the web. No doubt if Wikipedia weren’t able to include copyrighted information on its site without paying, there’d be fewer users and, thus, fewer donors and, thus thus, Mr. Wales wouldn’t be able to swan around in the style to which he has grown accustomed.

As for “information wants to be free,” think of the kind of information you traditionally could get free –– that’s the information that “wants” to be free. Because the rest of it wouldn’t exist if someone didn’t make a little money for producing it. That desireable, important information wouldn’t “want to be free,” unless information also “doesn’t want to exist.”

And finally, creative writers for the most part get paid very little, unless they’re huge bestsellers. Other writers, of nonfiction for example, earn even less. To suggest that writers – or photographers, or filmmakers, or musicians – shouldn’t expect to earn money for what they do goes against the grain of our entire society. Why don’t you go to Ikea and tell them that their Ektorp two-seater sofa “wants to be free”? Or just go to your bank and tell them that the money in the cashier’s till “wants to be free”?

You see, Google and Facebook – and now in a perverse way Wikipedia – have convinced everyone that theft is in all our interests and that people who don’t want to be stolen from are Orwellian monsters who’re against freedom of thought.

Studies show that people will steal as long as they can get away with it. They’ll steal if no one sees them do it. That’s why we need laws passed by Congress –– and other national jurisdictions around the world –– to protect the rights of writers and other creators.
–
The wait for a successor to Amadeus is over.  MOZART’S LAST ARIA by Matt Rees, 2011 www.mattrees.net
www.themanoftwistsandturns.com/

Writers do some odd things. Apart from the main oddity of sitting down in a tatty room in front of an old computer to make stuff up, the research we sometimes have to do can be, well, a bit ‘out there’. Whether we always have to do so much research or not is often a moot point. But I do like to – as you know.

However, I may have finally met my Waterloo. Crack house visits and scrambling about on rooftops are in one category, going on stage (after a gap of about a million years) is quite another. By the time you read this I will have finally performed my five minute routine at a comedy club in Manchester and I’ll either be elated or in a state of shock.

I’m doing it, I tell myself, because one of the characters in my next book is a stand up comedian. But is that really why I’m doing it and why, anyway, does it seem to matter so much to me?

Of course I want to know what it feels like to be a stand up comic so that I can write, with some authority, about how that feels. On that level I shouldn’t actually give a toss about whether I’m any good or not, whether people laugh, cry or throw tomatoes at me. But I do and I think that it’s because I absolutely hate to do ANYTHING badly (except cooking).

There’s part of me that wants to be the funniest, the most loudly applauded nascent comedian at the gig. Realistically I will probably be crap. I’ve rehearsed my set over and over and I’m still making mistakes, just three days before the event. I’ll probably have twenty years on most of the other performers, God knows what the audience will make of me and I am really scared. Of course I could just not go and forget the whole thing. But then that will bring it’s own raft of problems when my mind decides that I am the worst coward in the world and will not let me forget it. I’m exactly the same with fairground rides. I HATE massive great roller coasters, they frighten the living shit out of me and they make me feel sick. But once I’ve seen one the gauntlet has been thrown down and I MUST go on it, come what may. To not go on it just isn’t an option. If I don’t I will not be able to live with myself.

It’s very weird to be the type of person who would rather face a charging lion than an audience full of young people or the delights of Blackpool Pleasure Beach. I think it’s pretty odd that I want to do a lot of the things I do in the name of research. But then I suppose that people who lurk in tatty rooms have to get out some time and maybe this is our (writers) way of interacting with the real world.

We’re an odd bunch. We hide behind our fictional characters and situations, only surfacing when we need or have to and yet there is a wild exhibitionism at play here also. Whenever I give an author talk or reading I go on for as long as an audience wants me. I’m never in any hurry to dash off and I genuinely enjoy talking to readers about my books, their own literary ambitions or just about anything. And I like it when I get good feedback. I like it when someone says ‘You were brave to go on that rollercoaster,’ too.

But it isn’t real bravery, it’s actually fear. Fear of finding out where your limits are and being a little easy on yourself. I find that impossible. But of course it’ll all be over now, won’t it? Wonder what kind of a mess I’m in?

You know how it is when people suck their teeth, tut disapprovingly and tell you that something’s so idiotic or ludicrous that ‘you couldn’t make it up’?

Well, look no further than the Governor of Iceland’s Central Bank. In the years when Iceland’s economy chugged along without too many problems other than the regular currency devaluations that were allegedly engineered at the behest of fish exporters, the Central Bank was a fusty sort of affair that was almost a clearing house for pre-retirement politicians. It gave them a fat salary for a few years before retirement, but without having to do too much work.

In the final years leading up to the Crash, the Central Bank’s governor was former Prime Minister David Oddsson, a shining example of a man with legal background rather than an economist at the helm of the Central Bank, who presumably wanted the post to sit out a few years in relative peace and quiet. In the event, whatever he did while in that office didn’t do a lot to avoid Iceland’s economy grounding on the rocks in 2008. But David Oddsson is one of those unbelievable figures that Icelandic politics produces and worth a book, or at the least, a blog post here, all to himself one day.

It’s the latest instalment in the Central Bank saga that’s leaving ordinary people scratching their heads in bemusement. The present Governor, appointed in the aftermath of the Crash, really is a man who knows how to do sums. So maybe that’s why he’s now suing his own workplace.

The background is that he was appointed in 2009 on a salary of just over 1.5 million Icelandic krónur per month. That’s €9400, or $12,000. That’s a respectable chunk of change by most people’s reckoning, even taking into account that the man is a highly knowledgeable, skilled and qualified character taking on a tough job.

The problems arose when, after his appointment, Parliament enacted legislation that set a rule saying that public employees couldn’t earn more than the ISK935,000 (€5880/$7500) paycheque that the Prime Minister pockets every month, so the Governor’s salary was reduced in line with this. Doubtless he was disgruntled, and to sweeten the bitter pill, he was given a guaranteed monthly ISK300,000 (€1885/$2400) overtime payment. But the upshot is that he’s still earning around ISK300,000 less than he was originally contracted for.

Most of us, faced with this kind of situation, would start to cast around for a job somewhere else. I don’t know where ex-Governors of national financial institutions look for work, although there must be the equivalent of the Guardian’s Monday edition for media types. Somehow I can’t see him intently going through the job ads in Iceland’s main newspaper, Morgunbladid, now edited by David Oddsson – but that’s a story for another day. But more than likely there’s a suitably discreet old boys network for mega-accountants.

Instead, the Governor of the Central bank has opted to take his employer, the Central Bank, which he runs, to court to get his paycheque bumped up. Presumably backdated, and I’d eat several large hats if there isn’t interest calculated on all that dosh as well.

If the economy were booming, one could understand it, and probably hardly anyone would have noticed. But Iceland is in trouble still. Things maybe aren’t as bleak as they were in the immediate aftermath of the Crash, but they sure as hell aren’t great. The average Joe’s paycheque, if he still has one, has dropped, taxes have gone up and the price of pretty much everything has risen. There are dark comparisons between Iceland today and Eastern European nations in the years right after the Iron Curtain was taken down, scrapped and used to build new BMWs.

So the Central Bank Governor who is looking to trouser a cool extra monthly ISK300,000 (that’s €1885 or $2400, don’t forget) that he feels he’s owed – and in purely legal terms, he probably is – is the same one who has argued that proposed pay rises to Joe Public (many of whom would generally be happy to be earning what he’s after as a salary top-up) are too high.

The truly incongruous part of this is that a man who earns more than the Prime Minister would prefer to see ordinary families continue to struggle – but then has the sheer brass neck to demand more for himself. The Central Bank’s job is to primarily to keep the struggling currency on an even keel and to maintain stability. So you’d be forgiven for imagining that these kind of headlines doesn’t do a lot for financial stability.

Anywhere but Iceland, this would undoubtedly have been a PR disaster resulting in massed damage limitation exercises, possibly resignations, even an apology or two and an admission that perhaps this was ill-timed. It’s worth questioning whether someone with such a clearly tenuous grasp of the realities of life at the ground floor should be in such a post, and maybe the Prime Minister could call his bluff and tell him to sling his hook if he doesn’t like it? That’s the response the rest of us would get if we were to demand a pay rise in these present tough times.

But this is Iceland, where the public and the media have a goldfish memory. Next week it’ll be forgotten. In any case, it was overshadowed by the furore over sub-standard breast implants. Let’s face it, a story about breasts is always going to gather more attention.

The Governor will probably get his pay rise – maybe not the full whack, but there’ll be something to help him keep the wolf from the door – while Joe and Joanna Public who drive the buses, empty the bins and keep the kindergartens running will continue to get by on the statutory minimum.

You couldn’t make it up…

9 January 2012

Bangkok

I am editing a new anthology titled The Orwell Brigade. On a twist to the usual noir collection of short stories, this anthology will feature non-fiction essays by a number of leading international novelists. The response to the venture has been overwhelmingly positive and there is a reason: George Orwell.

Orwell, who is remembered for his novels 1984 and Animal Farm, was also one of the great essayists of the twentieth century.

Orwell’s essays about colonial rule in Burma, the Spanish Civil War and World War II used plain language to discuss in everyday words a set of universal values that were under political attack. Orwell introduced into our daily conversation the ideas of “Big Brother,” “doublethink” and “newspeak” — terms that continue to be used today.

Timothy Garton-Ash in The New York Review of Books, 22 October 1998, wrote, “Orwell is the most influential political writer of the twentieth century.”

What is Orwell’s legacy? And why should we care more than sixty years after his death?

The simple answer is that Orwell’s worldview transcended his time. His essays remain relevant for us and those around us. Finding a way to revive the tradition of a novelist/essayist in the Orwell tradition is a way of keeping those in power honest, accountable, and actionable. Lying is a not just a way of political life; it is a way to control people’s interests, desires, motives and memories.

A Hanging and Shooting an Elephant are incredible firsthand essays. They are personal accounts of Orwell’s time as a petty colonial official during the British administration of Burma. Here was a writer who wrote about what he had experienced, shaped and honed, and refined the emotions of the day of both the hanging and shooting: the condemned man being led to the gallows and being mindful not to step in a puddle on the way to his death.

In Homage to Catalonia, Orwell drew upon his six months of fighting in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. In that book, Orwell wrote: “It was the first time that I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies — unless one counts journalists.”

What troubled him most, having been at the front of the street battles in Barcelona, was how the British press had used falsehood, rumors, and distortions to describe the events in Barcelona in a fashion that pandered to the left wing in England. Anyone who has ever been a witness to violence at or near a frontline and later reads the press reports and statements from officials who were far removed from the action, will understand Orwell’s anger.

The lies and duplicity that once shocked Orwell may no longer shock us. With scandals like the phone hacking by reporters at the News of The World, we have become cynical about “facts,” “reality” and “truth telling.” We are less innocent about the way the media and others use images and words to “sell” a position and as a collateral obligation to describe what happened on the ground. We read or watch media that mirrors our prejudices rather than confronts them. Experience has been downgraded to below junk bond grade. This is our world. But every generation has to claim the world back for truth telling. It doesn’t happen on autopilot. And Orwell was a very experienced “pilot.”

In 1984, Orwell described the country of Oceania as founded on rewriting the past. It was the power to control what people were told had happened that was most disturbing to Orwell. Governments uploading memories and pretending they had a counterpart in reality was the nightmare, the horror of 1984.

Orwell found a voice that allowed him a way to turn politics into literature. His use of metaphor and cleverly invented new terms to describe oppressive power captured the plight of the powerless. He handed down a warning for our time, perhaps for all times: “Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Clive James in The New Yorker wrote, “It wasn’t just the amount of truth he told but the way he told it, in prose transmuted to poetry by the pressure of his dedication.”

Orwell’s personal history may also suggest why more writers have not followed his path. Timothy Garton-Ash tells us that Homage to Catalonia sold only around 50 copies a year during Orwell’s lifetime (it now sells more than 10,000 copies a year).

When Timothy Ash-Garton and Clive James were writing about Orwell’s legacy, we still hadn’t entered the age of the Internet, a full-blown 24/7 information machine where false information, lies and manipulation battle to secure territorial rights over our memory and thinking.

In The Orwell Brigade, I’ve gathered a group of modern truth tellers, writers who write fiction, but also share a vision that writers should reach with their words to contemporary political issues in the form of an essay. Their passion and experience will use plain words to shape politics into the words normally reserved for literature, drawing upon some of the great Orwellian themes of our times:

The economic collapse in America and Europe, a trend for capitalism and totalitarian elites to find common ground, anti-rational/science populists who use religion to push back the Enlightenment, the growing inequalities among people in the same country and the rise of technological means of control, surveillance and destruction.

Ministries of Truth roam the Internet on behalf of governments in a way that Orwell would never have guessed.

In 1984, Winston Smith is taken to the dreaded Room 101 for memory replacement: 2 + 2 = 5. Room 101 is a metaphor for the final destination for all of us who fail to speak plainly about the distortions in the relationship between those who cling to power and those who hunger to replace them, and the rest of us wedged in the war zone, caught in between.

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Foreign correspondents are always more enthusiastic about Beirut than about Amman. Just as critics prefer “literary” fiction to crime novels.

It seems to me they’re all wrong, and for the same reasons.

Visiting reporters always rave about Beirut. Mainly because there’s a very un-Middle Eastern nightlife there. Zinc bars. Beautiful girls in spaghetti-strap tops beside the zinc bars. Booze, dance clubs, DJs. And booze. Did I mention the booze?

They’re not really interested in the broken-down refugee camps or the ride up into the Shouf Mountains or the remnants of wars, bulletholes dug into the walls of buildings both inhabited and abandoned. It’s the zinc bars, that’s all. The things that are just like home, and the people who’d fit in back there too. It’s “cosmopolitan;” that’s what journalists always say about Beirut.

But Amman. It’s “boring,” because despite its size it’s somehow still a big Bedouin encampment. Slow and formal.

Foreign, in fact.

Turns out, foreign correspondents aren’t so interested in “foreign” places. That’s why they like the bars, zinc or otherwise, at their hotels.

Amman has an astonishing history. It was one of the 10 Roman cities of the region – the original Philadelphia, according to its ancient name. The oldest parts of town down in the valley between the hills where the wealthier people live aren’t picturesque in the way central Damascus is, say. But they’re teeming with life and with conflicts and with striving – Palestinian refugees, Iraqi refugees, Syrian migrant workers.

No nightlife, though. When old King Hussein was dying, hundreds of foreign correspondents were forced to endure nights at the Hard Rock Café (since closed) where the highlight was the Village People’s “YMCA”, danced by a staff which was not always familiar with the moves. Probably they didn’t read the Western alphabet, so they had no idea why two arms in the air had to go along with “Y” or why you had to dip to the side to make a “C.”

Having lived away from the country of my birth my entire adult life, I don’t see how anyone can say that any foreign city is boring. The culture will always be different to the one you’re familiar with. Understanding how people think in a world different to your own is an endlessly fascinating thing.

But people prefer the zinc bar, and that’s often true of books, too.

Some genre fiction is not “foreign” enough. I don’t mean that the location has to be exotic, as in my Palestinian crime series. I mean that the subject it tackles or the way of examining the actions of the characters ought to have the challenging, uncomfortable quality of an alien culture.

A book ought to be like a visit to a foreign place, even if it’s set in your own town. Genre doesn’t matter. The way a writer answers this challenge is what makes a book good or bad.

There are cheap ways of engaging readers on this level, and then there are genuine ways.

You might think at first that so-called “genre” fiction would be less foreign, because of the apparent comfort of formula. But it’s not so. Beneath the apparently challenging techniques of “literary” fiction, there’s a formulaic way of thinking that’s in contrast to the distinctiveness of ideas in crime fiction – social, sexual, animal.

Take my Palestinian crime novels. Everything that’s written about Palestinians makes me cringe or toss it aside in boredom. Because “literary” authors like Robert Stone (“Damascus Gate”) write about a false construct, an image of the Palestinians or of Jerusalem that they brought to the place with them. They see the people and places of the region only in ways that others have seen them before.

I took the real Palestinians and stories I’d covered as a journalist, shook them out of the stable formula in which they usually appeared in the newspapers, and made them strange, which in turn made them visible in a new way. (For those lit. crit. fans out there, I cite Viktor Shklovsky, Russian formalist, and his idea of “making strange” or ostranenie. For him, art brings about the perception of a thing, rather than creating the thing itself.)

So visit Amman, instead of Beirut. And on the way over, read my Palestinian novels.

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The wait for a successor to Amadeus is over.  MOZART’S LAST ARIA by Matt Rees, 2011 www.mattrees.net
www.themanoftwistsandturns.com/