Whatever it is, I Don't Like it (30 page)

We leave the Albert Hall in silence and walk home through the park. I am wondering if she is thinking about leaving me for a writer who doesn't revere comedy, a true artist who never deviates from the sacred task of life-renunciation. After half an hour of walking I dare to look at her. ‘Well?' I ask.

‘I don't know how to tell you this,' she says. ‘I know how much it's moved you . . .'

‘And?'

‘I really don't want to say this to you.'

‘Go on.'

She breathes hard. ‘I hated it.'

I gather her up in my arms. ‘Thank the fuck for that,' I say.

Natural-Born Killers

 

What would we do if we didn't have America? Invent it. Because without America we wouldn't feel half as good about ourselves as we do. And that isn't because America is now the only country left on earth that can't beat us at cricket. Without Americans we'd have no one to whom we could feel morally superior.

Guns again. Though our own kids are learning the trick of homicide fast, and can do pretty well with knives if knives are all they can lay their hands on, you strictly speaking need a gun to pull off a real spectacular. Hence our moral superiority. Because we make it that little bit harder for a college student without underworld connections to obtain a gun, we are able to shake our heads and wonder when those damn Yankees are ever going to learn.

I'm not saying they don't make superiority easy for us. When the executive director of Gun Owners of America, Larry Pratt – a man whose name I promise you I have not made up – describes the massacre at Virginia Tech as an opportunity for the gun lobby, arguing that if only every student had been armed fewer of them would have died, we all but give up on Americans. Arm everybody then nobody is a victim; kill before you can be killed – only in a universe of the insane is this a blueprint for a good society. Ask Pratt if it wouldn't be safer if no one could get a gun period, and he'll laugh in your face, that's if he doesn't shoot you in it first.

Americans!

What an orgy of righteousness we've enjoyed this week, accusing the Americans of glorying in gore, observing with a sneer that the only freedom they value is the freedom to pull a trigger. How many more? How many since the last time? Every paper had a journalist on hand to tell us. In the last ten years fifty-seven college kids plus eight of their teachers have been mown down in episodes similar to this. When, oh when, will America relinquish its love affair with the gun?

So what, I ask in return, about our love affair with the motor car? When, oh when, will we relinquish that? And if you wonder what the one has to do with the other, let the figures talk for themselves. Even as we were counting the American dead, articles were appearing in the same papers, often on the same pages, counting our own. Not victims of the gun, but victims of the car. In the last six months alone, 840 people killed or maimed by drivers under twenty.

You can't, I accept, measure tragedy in numbers. The thirty-two dead of Virginia Tech do not become less dead because we lose as many to boy racers every week. Nor do I embrace the gun lobby argument that if a madman wants to kill he will find something else to kill with if he can't easily obtain a gun. A gun might not in itself make someone mad, but its allure will always empower and intensify the madness. So no, I do not raise the question of the killer car to distract attention from the question of the killer gun.

But we might seize this opportunity to turn a little of our moral outrage on ourselves. Cars kill. Since we know that cars kill as surely as do guns why do we not do more to keep them out of the hands of those most likely to kill with them? You are too young at seventeen to drive. I drove at seventeen, and though I pootled along like a tortoise, hated engine noise, and never found a car a glamorous or potency-inducing object, I was still a menace, crashing three times in my first three months on the road. Mind elsewhere, that was the problem. Sex. Literature. Gina Lollobrigida.

The Association of British Insurers – not normally a body we turn to for ethical guidance – recommends putting up the minimum driving age to eighteen. Too modest a proposal. If the minimum age is to be determined by a brain unbefuddled by lyric poetry, eyesight unclouded by sperm, and an adequate imagination of disaster – that's to say a recognition that not only yours but every car coming towards you is being driven by a killer – then fifty should be the minimum age. But as society is probably not yet ready for that, we could settle, with enormous benefit to ourselves, at twenty-one.

Age is not the only issue. No car should have a speed capability, or an aesthetic denoting a speed capability, over what is legally permitted and what is legally permitted is already too high. Beyond sixty miles an hour we know not what we do. It's not just our bones that shake: the vibration of travelling beyond sixty miles an hour can cause our synaptic cleft – the space between the terminal button of the presynaptic neuron and the membrane of the postsynaptic neuron – to widen, confusing the flow of signals between one neurotransmitter and another. With young men this neural malfunction can occur even in anticipation of speed, as witness any crowd of them gathered jibbering around a Ferrari parked in Sloane Street.

What they will argue, of course, is that it's the beauty of the car not its intrinsic violence that renders them incoherent with admiration. I don't doubt it. Gun lovers, with equal justification, argue likewise. There is a terrible beauty in a weapon of destruction. Men are creatures built to kill, and whatever will facilitate that killing or add to the splendour of the ritual of causing death must necessarily excite their senses. Sport, the gun lobbyists call it. Drivers and rallyists ditto. Legislate against the gun or against the car, they cry, and you take away our fun. Tough. Find some other way of whiling away your time. Take up curling. Embroider. Knit. And if those won't give you the odour of deadly risk and slaughter you cannot do without, try dressing in ladies' underwear with an orange in your mouth and hanging yourself from a hotel doorknob.

For starters, then, no one under twenty-one to be allowed behind a wheel, and whoever breaks that law, or drives recklessly at any age, to be banned from driving for life. Not a fortnight, life. For our lives are their playthings. And should we catch them driving after that, we cut off the foot that presses the accelerator.

If you find this too draconian, fine, that's your human right – but you cannot now occupy the moral high ground when it comes to Americans and their guns.

What if Joseph K. Did It?

 

Does literature serve us ill sometimes? Or, to put that another way, do we sometimes learn the wrong lessons from it?

What if Joseph K. was guilty? ‘Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K.,' is how Kafka's great novel
The Trial
begins, ‘for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.' But what if no one was telling lies and Joseph K. really had done something wrong?

Part of what makes that opening so chilling is its understated menace. The morning is fine. Terrible things happen in storms, in literature as in life, but at least you get a bit of warning with a storm. Our greatest dread is catastrophe striking when we least expect it. When the weather's good, all seems right with the world, and our defences are lowered; unprepared, we are at our most vulnerable.

And more vulnerable still when the attack comes not only from a clear blue sky but through an agency unknown.
Someone
. An unidentified person or persons, acting we don't know where or when or why. It's all surmise. Not ‘someone was telling lies about Joseph K.' but someone ‘must have' been telling lies about Joseph K. A deduction, in the dark of day, working backwards from the inexplicable arrest. Inexplicable, because the man is innocent.

Assuming that he is.

No wonder this novel has been speaking eloquently to our fears for eighty years. I am not sure whether we can talk of the last century yet, because the last century is by no means over. We shop side by side in Harrods now with Russians, but we'd be fools – as recent absurd and sinister events have proved – to think the Cold War has been amicably settled. It's been given a moneyed makeover, that's all. The spies are still busy, if in slightly better suits, and therefore so must be the secret police. The
someones
remain out there, somewhere, telling lies. Last century or this century, ours is the age of the faceless state, policed we do not know by whom.

Though it is history, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's remarkable debut film
The Lives of Others
, about the humanising of a Stasi agent, works partly because it somehow doesn't feel like history. The Stasi have been dismantled yet the apparatus of continuous surveillance looks familiar to us. The Wall fell, but we haven't stopped living in a world that punishes us when we believe other than we are meant to believe, no matter how liberal what we are meant to believe appears. Say the wrong thing about race at a British university, for example, and you can kiss goodbye to your career. If you happen to be the ruined academic, you will think, with reason, you are living in a police state. Someone has been telling lies about you. For it is a lie that some things are unsayable.

That we can fear the monolithic state in one context and be its agents in another is one of those paradoxes to which human nature is subject. Universities are bulwarks against tyranny but at the same time practise ruthless tyrannies of their own. Imaginatively, though – regardless of our being spies and informers in reality – we are all so many inmates of the Gulags, each our own lonely warrior of individualism standing up against authority and those who do its dirty work. Thus we slip at once into the person of Joseph K. about whom someone has lied and who is arrested one fine morning for an unnamed crime he has not committed.

Simply to be lied about is enough to make a hero of us. The Advocate in
The Trial
tells Joseph K. about Leni's weakness for accused men. ‘She makes up to all of them, loves them all . . . It doesn't surprise me so much as it seems to surprise you. If you have the right eye for these things, you can see that accused men are often attractive.' We are not, of course, to take this diabolic needling at face value. The Advocate and Joseph K. are rivals of sorts for Leni's affections. But we recognise a version of the condition he describes. Sexually and ideologically, we love a victim of what we take to be injustice. And conversely we assume an injustice where we sexually or ideologically have decided to love.

So have we decided too soon to love Joseph K.? Or, if you like, to love the prose in which he makes his first appearance? ‘Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K.' It's a brave and sophisticated reader who will resist the blandishments of that opening sentence, though it's entirely possible that the super-subtle Kafka is leading us into a trap of gullibility, for in a world where truth is hard to come by, how foolish of us to suppose we have so easily come by it.

Don't mistake me: I am not saying the innocent and the guilty are interchangeable. There is guilt and there is innocence and to pretend otherwise is, as Primo Levi says, an aesthetic affectation or a moral disease. But the siren call of literature, enticing us to identify without question with whoever insists he is innocent and has been lied about, can land us in trouble in the real affairs of life. So deeply implanted in us is the idea that the state must always be wrong and the individual always right, that we do not notice subtle supersessions in that conflict. But it sometimes happens, as in the case of terrorism, that it's the individual and not the state who is our enemy.

Old habits of allegiance die hard. Thus, though we don't usually smile on judges, we cheered them when they substituted control orders for imprisonment where there is evidence in plenty of malign intent but not evidence of the sort judges like. Normally we castigate authority for not protecting us from perceived danger. Why wasn't that paedophile arrested when his intentions were apparent? The long-time stalker and demented serial-strangler on parole, ditto. But when it comes to men with declared ambitions to be human bombs, we think that keeping half an eye out for them is enough – until they either run off or blow us up, and then we wonder why they weren't in prison.

Whether Joseph K. is innocent or guilty, the term Kafkaesque answers to a deep anxiety in us about power wielded cruelly and irrationally. Though the anxiety is psychological, it is justified by history. But the world isn't only Kafkaesque. Sometimes an accused man is guilty of a crime, even if the agencies who accuse him are shadowy, and the crime is one he hasn't committed yet.

Be Very Afraid

 

So now we know where the destruction of Western civilisation is being plotted: not in the madrasas of Karachi and Lahore, not in the Taliban training camps of Helmand Province, not even in the eschatological fantasies of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but in Crawley, West Sussex. I am not of course suggesting that we rule Karachi and Tehran out of the topography of terror altogether, only that we adjust the range of our apprehension and learn to grow afraid of the loathing for the way we live that's being brewed just around the corner, in the suburbs, in the green belts, in the new towns of our fair and pleasant land. Crawley, West Sussex – never did sound fun, but never did sound dangerous either. But there you are, nowhere's safe, now we all know how to make explosives out of aftershave, from the menace which is certainty.