Big newspaper headlines are greeting the arrival of two works, a novel and a BBC adaptation of a novel, which centre on the maelstrom of iniquity symbolised the 1980s in the United Kingdom.
One is an adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst’s “The Line of Beauty” which is at the more conventional “identity-politics” angle - at least conventional in terms of how issues are seen in the early years of the 21st century. The other, “The Dream of the Decade - The London Novels” by Afshin Rattansi takes a much more Dostoyevskian path, looking at the critical determinant of class rather than more fashionable identities such as race and gender.
Whereas in Hollinghurst, we see the world through the upper middle classes, Rattansi shows us the few newly rich and there wonderment at what they have gained and what they have lost. For it is the disparities of wealth that were created that are still stinging Britain today. There may now be rich gays and rich women but to be poor, being gay is no fun and to be a woman - the poorest are still women - all is not those who have bankrolled their fast cars via privatisation of taxpayers’ assets, paid for by the post-war generations.
Interestingly, all the significant novels associated with the 1980s (in the U.S., those by Easton Ellis and McInerney, in the UK, Amis and Coe) fail when it comes to tramping through the financial drought-lands of Michigan or Louisiana let alone Peckham or Gateshead. It’s that perspective and the authenticity of writing in Rattansi’s four novels that create what the 1980s were about and how we are all living its brutal legacy. In four novels (”The Dream of the Decade” is, unfashionably, a quartet) rather than Hollinghurst’s one he dissects love affairs gone awry, sure. But he shows how they go awry because of new laws and feelings about house prices, about property, about new fears of crime and unemployment and homelessness not seen since the thirties and yet now seen through the prisms of massively murderous campaigns in Latin America and yuppie City of London champagne and nightmarish U.S. army build ups. You get the whole picture from the threat of terror - campaigns in London were then much more fearsome - to the threats of environmental and bodily destruction.
Nevertheless, Hollinghurst and Rattansi seem to share a view that what happened in the 1980s was deeply important to how we and generations born since then are today. Interestingly, the London Daily Telegraph was horrified to hear that in the Hollinghurst adaptation, the BBC has cast Kika Markham, a member of the Left-wing Redgrave Dynasty and supporter of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, as Britain’s first female Prime Minister.
But, in all but the last novel of the Rattansi quartet, the humour is at more at bay and there are not the set-pieces of young gay men, hysterical, on the fringes of Tory high society. After all, “The Dream of the Decade” is epigraphed with Antonio Gramsci: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appears.”
And a paragraph at random from Rattansi’s third novel in the volume explains the difference:
“There were now three others seated around Leymann’s table, each with an exotic cocktail in front of them. He stared at the lemon, lying in a syrupy brown liquid in front of him. It reminded him of a house he had visited yesterday. Everything was brown or yellow, the wallpaper, the curtains, the carpetswhere there were any. There had been a tramp living in one of the upper rooms. He remembered the blankets he was using and how they were stained with blood. He was quite an expert at getting people out of houses without having to resort to the courts. It wasn’t that difficult, of course: most of them were breakable human beings. Others were already broken: alcoholics and mad people that had been thrown out of wherever they had been before. Leymann remembered a documentary he had seen. “Care is expensive,” a woman had said.
Jocelyn had always told him to wait, to wait until the decorators were in. “Then you at least have others on your side for backup. If that doesn’t work, let the courts do it all,” she would say. She was right, too. The job was usually quicker with builders and decorators on one’s side. But it was easy for Jocelyn to give advice. She only saw properties after they’d been done up, when there was no more weeping, when the desolate homes were made beautiful. “Each floor now has a video-entry phone and a microwave cooker and if you don’t think they’re beautiful look at the way the light glides into the room, the way the shutters seem to lift the sunshine so it glints in all the right places. It’s like a film, like a Hollywood film,” Jocelyn had once said.”
To be sure, books about the 1980s are getting better and more profound as time goes on. Perhaps only John Updike or Norman Mailer in the U.S. managed to write contemporaneously so well about the Anglophone world in recent times.
The plot of the Hollinghurst and the applause of tunnel vision “identity” obsessives makes “The Line of Beauty” a little creepy. The gay relationship between two women in the first of the “The Dream of the Decade” quartet is sensitively handled with an extra frisson of class and dominance. But in Hollinghurst, we have Nick, down from Oxford University laughing at women as closet-cases are found out. Perhaps that is an “identity” based critique, however. From Genet, we know of the gay objectification of black men and Hollinghurst, to put the book into its gay drawer, shows just the same touch.
However, whilst “The Line of Beauty” is explicitly identity-obsessed (just as all fiction now has to be, it seems), we know that the 1980s Brixton riots were not just “black riots.” Any attempt at using (even unwittingly) patchwork post-Marxist dogma to write a novel will fail when it comes to the 1980s. The whole Anna Karenina picture, as it were, comes from the explicit idea that it is income that decides life. There may be other things but when it comes to the Cold War and Nuclear Mutually Assured Destruction, Rattansi’s “Dream of the Decade” makes it live for us today.
And perhaps it’s no wonder. Cyril Connolly’s dictum about the Blue Bugloss - that journalism is the deadliest weed encountered by a new writer is wrong when it comes to Rattansi. No wonder he can make us feel the 1980s paranoia about Armageddon and revolution - he reflects and transposes it using acute writing as only someone who has worked at Al Jazeera or the BBC Today programme at its height can do. Whilst Hollinghurst has relaxed 2006 shades on - one can feel he is not so worried about the world in which his poorer readers inhabit today - Rattansi makes us relive the 1980s anew and make the present century much more terrifying, much more romantic and much more real than we may already feel it to be. That is the worth of near-historical fiction and that is a feat that shows Afshin Rattansi may have defeated enemies of promise better than any other writer in English today.
Information on Alan Hollinghurst’s new film can be found at http://www.bbc.co.uk
Information on Afshin Rattansi’s new book can be found at http://www.zen13743.zen.co.uk/novels.html