We Need To Talk About China

Ah, China. And Chinese economics... I have been obsessed with China, and in particular its uniquely lunatic economy, for the past few years. Why? Because Chinese economic policy has been the biggest elephant in the global economic livingroom since 1989, lumbering around breaking things while the West says "Elephant? I don't see any elephant. Owch, my foot."

A charming and self-explanatory graph, courtesy of The Daily Reckoning, Australia

I’ve come up with, and abandoned, half a dozen plots for satirical stories about the Chinese economy, I’ve written draft after draft of a satirical BBC radio play about the Chinese economy, I’ve read and researched obsessively on the subject. And, every year or so, for the past five years, I have opened up a new file in Scrivener, and started, with furious energy, to write an over-long and over-complicated blog post about China, and how its mysteriously placid economic surface masks a series of catastrophic Communist Party decisions, over the past thirty years, which will lead at some point to China’s implosion, economically and socially… Each time, the post becomes book-length, and I abandon it… Well, here we go again.

Here’s my take on China, boiled down.

In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell; democratic protests swept China; and the Party panicked. They murdered unarmed protesters across the country (including the students in Tiananmen Square), arrested four million people across the country in the following weeks, and then tried to pretend nothing had happened.

Party leaders were determined that China would not collapse like Soviet Russia. So they abandoned Soviet-style economics, and built a gigantic new national financial system, modelled loosely on the Western financial system; but with the state performing every function. As Carl E. Walter and Fraser J. T. Howie put it (in their excellent book Red Capitalism: The Fragile Financial Foundation of China’s Extraordinary Rise), “The state is involved at every stage of the market as the regulator, the policymaker, the investor, the parent company, the listed company, the broker, the bank and the banker.”

And the state decided that 8% economic growth was the target; and the entire economy was configured to hit this target… Well, if you only look at the GDP figures, the Party succeeded. Western free-market economies go up and down like yo-yos, but China has not had a recession since 1976. Even more ridiculous, it's not had so much as a single year of low growth since 1990.

But those reassuring figures mask the roaring balls-up the Communist Party has made of the real economy, particularly in the past decade. Pre-2005, although growth was horribly lop-sided and manipulated, much of it was at least real: the cities that needed connecting were being connected by road and rail; ports and airports were being built in places that needed them; financial reforms were being pushed through; etc, etc.

In 2005, the financial reform program ended, when the leading reformers were ousted (like Zhu Rongji) or died (Vice Premier Huang Ju)– China’s GDP growth figures have been, increasingly, bullshit, driven by terrible lending by the state banks to state industries, massive malinvestment in ever-more-useless infrastructure, and a huge property bubble that has built entire cities and airports in the wrong places.

China’s banks have gone bust once every decade since the seventies, but each time the government managed to recapitalise them, or roll over the bad loans, without writing down the debts. It can’t write them down, because it owes itself the money; to cut the value of the non-performing loans is to say the state can’t pay its debts. It’s trapped. Every bank collapse is a sovereign debt default: and so there can be no bank collapses. But at this point, in my opinion, they’ve finally run out of road. Total debt in China has exploded to unprecedented levels in the past five years.

China, now, is essentially a multi-trillion dollar Lehman Brothers, circa 2007, but with a billion employees. It looks OK, but it is totally hollow; it’s massively leveraged, it’s out of capital, a shit-ton of the assets on its books are in fact worth nothing, and people are starting to believe it’s not good for its promises.

And so China isn’t going to collapse like Soviet Russia; it’s going to collapse like Lehman Brothers.

A giant, weird, slow-motion Lehmans, because it owes the money to itself. So, it will take some time for the collapse to take place. It can print money, roll over debt, do all the things it’s been doing for decades. But, in propping up the fake economy of 8% growth forever, they’ve broken the real economy.

When China finally gets its recession, it's going to be so godawful that it will almost certainly destroy the legitimacy of the Communist Party, which, after 70 years in power, is essentially an incompetent, wildly corrupt, third-generation mafia. Sure, there are some good people in there, but the system itself is totally corrupt, and corrupting, with no mechanism to reform it; and all the alternatives to the Communist Party have been annihilated. Plus, the concentration of power, wealth and influence at the top of the Party has made the leadership of China essentially hereditary, with all the incompetence that entails. (For western examples, think King George III and IV of England, or Presidents George W. Bush I and II, of the former colonies.)

OK, a prediction isn’t a prediction if it isn’t specific. A vague “bad things will happen… somewhere… sometime…” doesn’t count. So here goes.

• The recession will come within the next three years, and will be extremely deep: the Chinese economy will shrink, for the first time in nearly 40 years (and that’ll feel horrendous, from 8% growth to negative growth).
• Many State Owned Enterprises will go bust; the Chinese banking system will collapse; the enormous shadow banking system will collapse; the Chinese stock market will collapse (well, that’s been happening while I wrote and edited this, over the past week or two, so no credit for that prediction).
• How this collapse of the financial system plays out is hard to predict, as it’s all the Chinese state owing itself money, and printing money to pay itself. But that pressure should break the renminbi, which is a joke currency anyway. And pretending to fix the banks won’t work, if nobody believes in them as a safe place to store assets any more.
• In the real world there will be massive unemployment across China (over 15% officially but far more in reality).
• Social unrest will get out of control, with huge street protests and riots in the cities and in the countryside; uncontrolled population movement (something the Party has always feared and tried to control through the hukou residency permit system, which will break down); and anger expressed through violence against anything associated with the Party. (You’ll see a lot of police stations on fire.)
• I believe the Party will lose legitimacy; will lose control of the country; and that, within the next decade, China will break up: Neither Tibet nor the Muslim, Turkic-speaking Uighur territories in Western China can be held without a functioning Party and Army to enforce their occupation.

That’ll do for now.

So why didn't I finish writing and editing all my previous China blog posts, and put them up? Well, the story was so big, and I kept trying to say everything in a single post. But you can't. (And there was always fresh information, new knowledge.) And it was always so much easier to just post a link, or make a sarcastic remark, on Twitter. Sigh. Twitter has ruined my ability to blog. And, five years ago, I felt that if I said "China will collapse", it was probably too soon. I figured China's leadership would be able put it off for another few years.

But now I don't think they can put it off much longer. They will try; but this time I think it's over. I suspect the shadow banking system has already begun to collapse (along with the housing market and the stock market), and with it the Party leadership's control over events.

Anyway, my greatest regret, as a (former) blogger, is in not posting my thoughts about China. (Every few weeks, for about three or four years now, I’ve woken in the night groaning, why didn’t I blog about China six months ago?) So, over the next few months, I'm going to try and put down a few years' worth of thoughts. It's too late for me to get credit for the prediction, but it's not too late to be part of the conversation. And we're going to be talking a lot about China over the next 5 years.

Extreme Metaphors: Selected Interviews with J.G. Ballard, 1967-2008

To celebrate the paperback release this week of Extreme Metaphors: Selected Interviews with J.G. Ballard, 1967-2008, I've reprinted my Irish Times review of the 2012 hardback, below. (That original review has now vanished into the Irish Times archive, behind the paywall.) For those too busy to read the whole review: basically,Extreme Metaphors was my book of the year. I read it with delight, frequently chortling. An extraordinary alternate history of the 20th century, packed with prescient ideas which help explain the 21st.

- Julian

A photo of my copy of Extreme Metaphors, taken five minutes ago. The image links to more information, from the website of one of the editors, Simon Sellars.

Extreme Metaphors: Selected Interviews with J.G. Ballard, 1967-2008

Edited by Simon Sellars and Dan O’Hara

Fourth Estate

503pp, price £stg25

J.G. Ballard might be the greatest English writer of the 20th century. He was certainly, for much of the second half of that century, the least understood, and most misread, when he was read at all. In 1970, when Nelson Doubleday Jr, a senior executive at Ballard’s American publishing house, finally got round to reading a finished copy of The Atrocity Exhibition, he was so horrified he ordered all copies pulped. In the UK, the reader’s report for Ballard’s 1972 novel Crash famously said “This writer is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish.”

But live long enough, and respectability eventually covers you, like jungle vegetation claiming a wartime runway. In 1984, his most nakedly autobiographical novel, Empire of the Sun, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Martin Amis says on the back of this handsome hardback collection of interviews, “Ballard will be remembered as the most original English writer of the last century.” Will Self concurs; “Ballard issued a series of bulletins on the modern world of almost unerring prescience. Other writers describe; Ballard anticipated.”

Ballard most certainly did. The chapter of The Atrocity Exhibition which so disgusted Ballard's own publisher was titled “Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan”. In it, Ballard portrayed the former Hollywood actor, who’d co-starred with a chimpanzee in Bedtime for Bonzo, as President of the United States. It would be over a decade before reality caught up with Ballard’s imagination.

Indeed, some of the interviews here are almost comically prescient; Ballard predicted Facebook before the internet even existed. In 1979, dismissing the BBC and ITV news as “that irrelevant mixture of information about a largely fictional external world”, he describes a future in which we video everything, and

“…the real news of course will be a computer-selected and computer-edited version of the day’s rushes. ‘My God, there’s Jenny having her first ice cream!’ or ‘There’s Candy coming home from school with her new friend.’ Now all that may seem madly mundane, but, as I said, it will be the real news of the day, and how it affects every individual.” (And yes, he goes on to predict Youporn…)

He predicts the future; but he also questions the present. And many of the questions he raises here have not yet been answered. The real issue, behind all the fake issues, in this year's American election [2012], was summed up succinctly by Ballard in 1984, talking to Thomas Frick:

“Marxism is a social philosophy for the poor, and what we need badly is a social philosophy for the rich.”

As with a number of the more interesting American SF writers of his era (Philip K. Dick, Thomas M. Disch, John Sladek), Ballard became a science fiction writer by default. The SF market was the only available outlet for fiction this odd. But he is not a science fiction writer. He is not, indeed, a writer, in the normal sense of the term. Ballard is a visual artist. He makes the point again and again here; the greatest influences on his works are not other literary works; they are the paintings of the surrealists. As he said in an interview with James Goddard and David Pringle in 1975,“They’re all paintings, really, my novels and stories.”

And it is true. You read his spare, functional prose, and the most astonishing images erect themselves in your mind. The beauty of the sentence itself didn’t interest him. (This makes him hard to quote: reading Ballard, you drift into a dreamstate which can’t be evoked in a couple of lines.) Certainly he set much of his work in the future. But there isn't a space ship to be found. (Well, OK, one, in an early story.) As mainstream SF explored outer space, J.G. Ballard explored what he came to call inner space. He wasn't similar to SF writers like Heinlein and Asimov and Arthur C. Clark, he was their opposite, a point he makes in an interview from 1975:

“You can’t have a Space Age until you’ve got a lot of people in space. This is where I disagree, and I’ve often argued the point when I’ve met him, with Arthur C. Clarke. He believes that the future of fiction is in space, that this is the only subject. But I’m certain you can’t have a serious fiction based on experience from which the vast body of readers and writers is excluded.”

I get the feeling J.G. Ballard passed Ireland by. He was seldom piled high on the front tables in Easons. Seen, perhaps, as too English for our tastes? But of course, he wasn’t English at all. His sensibility was formed in Shanghai, where he was born to English parents in 1930; and in particular in the vast civilian internment camp of Lunghua, where he was interned by the Japanese (at the age of 11), along with his family. In this book he frequently talks of never getting used to the England he first encountered aged 16, in 1946, as a traumatised child of the tropics.

Exiled from Shanghai, an alien in England, Ballard nonetheless had a spiritual home. No matter where his books were ostensibly set, Ballard always wrote about America; not as a place, but as a state of mind. America as a condition. America as a psychological disorder… He loved America. Though Crash is set in England, on the motorways connecting his quiet home in Shepperton to London, the cars in Crash are American cars. His Shanghai childhood — in an Americanized Asia — was a century ahead of its time. He grew up in the future. As a result, these interviews have aged well. It helps that Simon Sellars and Dan O’Hara have edited this 500 page book with such love, intelligence, and deep knowledge of the material and its context. Extreme Metaphors presents, in chronological order, 44 interviews from the many hundreds he gave. (The editors estimate the total wordage of the novels as 1,100,000; short stories, 500,000 words; non-fiction, 300,000… and interviews, 650,000.) The interviews they’ve chosen have a very low fluff content. Many of the best originally appeared in long-vanished, never-digitised, photocopied fanzines, and are genuine, deeply engaged and engaging conversations about important subjects. Nobody is trying to sell you anything (it’s often impossible to tell what book Ballard is supposed to be promoting).

The wide range of interviewers adds to the pleasure of the book. Ballard attracted intense, usually male, interviewers, who had a deep engagement with his work. There is a pleasantly kaleidoscopic effect, as each sees Ballard through the lens of their obsession. Fellow novelists Toby Litt, Will Self and Hari Kunzru take a literary approach. John Gray is philosophical. The Russian Zinovy Zinik gets Ballard to talk about Soviet utopias and dystopias. With Iain Sinclair, Ballard discusses the design of 1970s multi-story carparks in Watford. (Ballard; “They covered them in strange trellises. It was a bizarre time.”)

And he is very open. When Joan Bakewell says of Crash, “Now, this is a deeply disturbing book. Were you very disturbed when you wrote it?” he replies “I think I was. I think in a way the novel is the record of a sort of mental crash that I had in the mid-sixties after the death of my wife…”

Ah, death. Yes, it’s everywhere in his work. Ballard’s fiction is largely set in the dead spaces of the modern world. Underpasses, flyovers; abandoned and disintegrating runways; nuclear test sites; blockhouses; drained swimmingpools. The tide of humanity has gone out. What is left is returning to the natural world. The atmosphere is that of Max Ernst’s Europe After The Rain. The organic and the inorganic are inextricably linked. Things grow, and things crumble. The work of man is absorbed by the jungle.

It’s hard, reading this book, not to think of contemporary, Americanised Ireland, with its motorways and drive-thru McDonalds. Of Dublin, with its low corporate tax rate, reckless financial zone, and Euro-HQs of American corporations; with its expat communities of British, German and US workers in gated dockside settlements, surrounded by grinding native poverty; an open city, in a state too weak to defend itself. Dublin was, for a decade there, the closest thing Europe had to the booming, buckaneering Shanghai of the 1930s.

Now, in neglected Dublin back gardens, the outdoor hot tubs fill with dead leaves. Beyond the M50, the ghost estates are reclaimed by the whitethorn bushes. Ireland has become a Ballardian landscape. Given the extraordinary relevance of his work to Ireland’s psychological condition, it might be time for more Irish people to start reading J.G. Ballard. And this lovingly curated book of interviews is a fine place to start.

I will be very surprised if any novel this year gives me as much pleasure as this book. And I can guarantee (now that Ballard is dead) that no novel will contain so many provocative, intriguing, and visionary ideas.

Julian Gough is an Irish writer, living in Berlin, whose work was shortlisted this year for both the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and the BBC International Short Story Award. His latest novel, Jude in London, is out now in paperback from Old Street Publishing.

ENDS.

Ireland After The Bailout - A Few Thoughts

My mum voting in the recent referenda, in our local national school, in Nenagh, Co.Tipperary

Ireland is about to emerge from the bailout process that she was forced to enter when her banking system and economy collapsed in 2008. Will Ireland emerge like a butterfly from a chrysalis, or poop from a butt? We shall see...

Anyway, that fine and thoughtful journalist Conor Pope of the Irish Times asked me a few questions last week for a long piece he was writing on the subject.

I haven't read the article yet (I'll link to it here when and if it goes online), but I'm familiar with the way that quotes in an article can become unmoored from what you actually said (no matter how good the journalist, or the paper). That's just the nature of a daily newspaper's high-pressure, high-speed editorial process. Qualifiers get left out; the first half of a balanced argument makes the cut because you said it in a sexy way, the second half doesn't 'cause you didn't; a subeditor in a hurry can accidentally trim the punchline from a joke, or, in tightening up a saggy sentence, accidentally flip its meaning on its head. (Yes, all these things have happened to me. No, I'm not looking at you, New York Times, or Prospect, or Financial Times, or GREY Magazine, or The Times, or The Believer, or any of the little literary magazines. YES, I'M LOOKING AT YOU, GUARDIAN.)

Also, I miss the good old days, pre-Twitter, when I frequently blogged about economics from a novelist's perspective; I thought posting this might jolt me back into that habit. Plus, I gave myself a headache thinking about all this, and I know that, at best, only a couple of lines will make the finished article. (Conor has talked to a lot of people.) So, if anyone is interested, here's what he asked me, and here are my answers in full...

How would you explain the madness that gripped Ireland during the boom and why did so few people see the calamity coming down the tracks in 2006? 

I wouldn't give us a hard time over this. We were part of something much bigger than Ireland; the structural problems with the Euro blew up all the peripheral economies. Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain; the way the Euro was set up almost forced them into classic, credit-driven bubbles, in their national flavour. The bubble just came down the easiest credit channel. In Greece, it expressed itself through state patronage; in Ireland, it expressed itself through property & mortgages, etc. If the founders of the Euro refused to see the coming problem, even thought they were warned by several grumpy economists at the time, then we can hardly be blamed for not spotting it.

Also, we were drunk at the time. And high. Not all of us, but a startling number. I’m going to guess that our consumption of alcohol, cocaine and credit all mapped onto each other fairly exactly in the bubble years. Again, I don’t blame us. We were coming out of centuries of relentless, grinding national poverty. And when you’re poor, you don't need to cultivate a habit of restraint. You spend till you run out of money; you drink till you run out of drink. Poverty stops you killing yourself drinking, and lack of credit stops you killing yourself with debt. But give a poor society unlimited drink, or unlimited credit, and it's likely to end badly. I stopped going out in those years, because my friends were putting three or four €70 bottles of champagne on their credit cards and saying, sure we’ll split the bill at the end of the night. And I’d be nursing a single glass of fizzy water for five hours. Socialising became impossible; being frugal was seen as being disapproving, or difficult. We were drunk on credit, and everything looked more and more beautiful the drunker we got. Until we ran out of drink, and had to deal with the hangover. Countries that have been wealthy for a long time have to develop internal habits of control. You won't see the Swiss drinking their wages, because that would kill them.

What impact did the scale of the banking crisis have on Irish people? 

What about the bailout? What impact did that have? 

 ((Yeah, I'm in Ireland a lot, but I live in Berlin now. I didn't feel qualified to answer these two questions, so I skipped them.))

Repeated studies have shown that in spite of the horror show, Irish people have remained happier than in previous recessions - why do you think that is? 

The recession removed the unpleasant, highly competitive status anxiety that was the least attractive aspect of the bubble years. We are much more respectful of our friends’ feelings now, of their situation. Much more sensitive to the fact that they might not be able to afford to keep up. I was so pleased when I started to see party invitations that say, no presents. Strip away the material things from a relationship, and, if the relationship survives, it strengthens the relationship, it doesn’t weaken it. We see each other to see each other, now, not to show off. Also, this is a recession, not a famine. It's only a recession relative to the boom. It's a very painful adjustment, but we still have colour TV and the internet. And the suffering has been spread relatively evenly, across the classes, which gives a sense of solidarity. We’re in the shit, but we’re in the shit together.

We seem to have accepted all the austerity - imposed first by our own masters and subsequently by the Troika without so much as a murmur. What, do you think, does that say about us as a nation. 

I know there’s a lot of bemoaning this, but I think it reflects well on us as a nation. It’s only money; it’s only stuff. Fuckit, we still have each other, and nobody died. That’s a good attitude. If we took to the streets and had a revolution because our investments went badly… No, that’s not us. What’s tragic is that some people have been destroyed psychologically by their losses. But what is marvellous is that most people have not been. Their identity was not tied up with their property, their self esteem did not collapse along with their bank balance.

What impact - both psychologically and practically - do you think the bailout exit will have?

Not a lot. It’s a shaky exit. The Eurozone still has enormous problems, we haven’t really fixed a lot of what went wrong. The European financial system is still under horrendous strain. I don’t think the story of the Eurozone crisis is over yet, and through no fault of our own we may yet be dragged back into it.

And do you think we have learned from our mistakes? Property prices are rising in Dublin - and to a lesser degree in other urban centres - could we possibly allow another bubble to inflate or have we learned our lesson?

Well, if you don’t fix the fundamental problems; and the ECB and Germany and France have not fixed those problems, just stuck some enormous band-aids over them; then yes, another bubble could well inflate. But that’s not because WE haven’t learned from our mistakes. That’s because Germany, the country on the other side of all these imbalances, and the cause so much of Europe’s structural internal imbalance, still doesn’t believe it has made any mistakes. We've acknowledged our errors. Germany has not. Let’s not give ourselves such a hard time… I think Ireland's behaved well, and with remarkable restraint, under very difficult circumstances.  We've held together as a nation, unlike Greece say, which has been massively divided and embittered by their crisis; and at an individual level I think we've, by and large, looked after each other.

50 Free Copies of “CRASH! How I Lost A Hundred Billion And Found True Love”

So, I’ve been laughing and crying, listening to the Anglo Irish Bank tapes for the past fortnight. How can you satirize this? The line about the bailout figure of €7bn —  “I pulled it out of my arse…” — sounds more like one of my lines than most of my actual lines do.

First cover designMore specifically, they sound like they come from the comic novella I’m publishing next week. Which, oddly enough, stars a senior Irish banker, naming no names (and a very broke Irish taxpayer… and a woman awfully like Angela Merkel… and a man awfully like the head of the European Central Bank).

It’s called “CRASH! How I Lost A Hundred Billion And Found True Love”, and DailyLit are collaborating with Amazon to publish it as a Kindle Single, on July 11^th. On the left there you can see all the cover designs we considered. But let's get down to the meat of the matter...

FREE COPIES!

I’ve talked to DailyLit, and to Amazon (who are publishing this together worldwide), and they’ve given me 50 free copies, to give away to my long-suffering followers, here and on Twitter. (At last, a reward for putting up with my blog posts about German elephants eating Christmas trees, and my 3am Twitter rants about African toilet design improvements.)

Second cover ideaGive me your email address, and whether you use the UK Amazon store or the US store, and I’ll paste the info into our elegantly named DailyLit Amazon Kindle Gifting Spreadsheet, and, on the day of release (July 11^th), you will be sent a free code so you can download a copy.

Your emails will just be used for this, they won’t be shared in any way. You can mail me personally —  I’m juliangough (easy enough to remember) at gmail dot com — or mail me through the website; or leave it in a comment down below; or tell me by tweet (or DM, if our relationship is already intimate) on Twitter. Disguise it (yourname at something dot com) if you fear spambots, or give it to me straight. Whatever works for you.

First 50 I see will get a copy. (I may even be able to give away more copies than that, but I don’t want to over-promise.) 

Third cover idea. Funky angle! Funky chicken!Oh, and tell me which cover design you like best, while you’re at it, in the comments below, or on Twitter. We’ll see if our tastes align…

OK! I will blog more about this in a few days. And maybe put up an extract. Hey, it’s practically a media strategy!

Talk soon,

-Julian

Fourth cover design. Magnificent chicken, but you can't read CRASH! Take more drugs, drink more coffee, off we go...

Fifth cover design. The winner! Perfectly balanced. Hurray for Michele de la Menardiere and Tiya Tiyasirichokchai!

Update on 2013-10-19 19:35 by Julian Gough

Well, that all worked out most satisfactorily: CRASH! went to number one in the UK Kindle Single chart in the week of release, and got  some very nice reviews. Thanks for your support, massively appreciated...

Odd how much things have changed on this blog (as on others). Traditionally (pre-Twitter), if I asked for feedback, or a favour, all the action used to be in the comments below the post. Now, everybody pops over to Twitter and, if I'm around, we chat in realtime... (The CRASH! giveaway took place mostly through Twitter, maybe a third through the email address I gave in the blog post, and a couple through the Mail Me feature here on the website.)

An Open Letter To Jonathan Ive (and Apple)

Yes my short story, the iHole, was here. No, it's not there now...

Yes, there was an open letter to Jonathan Ive (and Apple) here. No, there isn't now.

Sorry about that. (If you are REALLY disappointed, here's a different free story instead, as a consolation prize. It's a comedy about a financial catastrophe involving goats. You might even like it more than The iHole.)

Back to the missing iHole.... For background, I'll just quote briefly from the original open letter:

"Dear Jonathan,

My name is Julian Gough. I write fiction. And I have a problem that only you can solve.

I recently wrote a short story called The iHole, and I think it’s the best I’ve ever written. It’s about the design of an imaginary product, and it’s set inside a fictional version of Apple, at some time in the near future. A fictional version of you is mentioned, by name, a couple of times, though he stays offstage as a character.

A major media player wants the story. Their editorial people love the story. The potential audience is a million plus. So far, so good. But now their lawyers have asked me to change the name of the fictional company from Apple, and change the name of the character I’ve called Jonathan Ive..."

 

OK, I put that letter, and the story, online three days ago. This morning, we've all come to a satisfactory resolution.  I'm really sorry if you came here to read The iHole and are disappointed. It will be available (legally) again later this year, honest. 

First, I want to say thanks to everyone - Minecraft fans, fiction fans - on Twitter and elsewhere, for their support, encouragement (and even editorial suggestions), over the past three days.

And second, I want to say that THERE ARE NO VILLAINS in what's just happened. Apple behaved perfectly, and the media organisation wanting to use The iHole behaved perfectly, as did their lawyers. I'm not mad at anyone and I don't want you to be mad at anyone. if there was a problem here, it was with archaic laws that make it hard for writers to write about the modern world.

In fact, I particularly want to defend the media organisation involved. There are precious few media outlets for short stories already, so the last thing these guys deserve is to be kicked for having the courage to take on an unusually tricky modern story like mine. They have behaved impeccably throughout, attempting to keep the story intact while still obeying the law.

My attempts to sort this out directly, by going over their heads, have almost certainly made their lives more difficult, for which I apologize. There's always a healthy creative tension between the artist and the industry, but I realize I generate a lot more tension than most. Sorry, everyone...

Finally, I'm happy that we seem to have sorted out a compromise that doesn't damage the story artistically. And I'm very happy to discover that such large numbers of people can still get excited, and passionate, over a short story.

Fond regards,

-Julian Gough

 Photo courtesy Sophie Gough Fives (age 7)

An old scratchy photo of Malcolm McLaren, Suzie Shorten, Michael D. Higgins, and me.

I've been so FLIPPING busy that my blog has been left unfed since October. (Also, I will admit, the crack cocaine of tweeting has weaned me off the long opium dream of blog posting.)

But my old friend Suzie Shorten just sent me this photo, so feck it, I'll slap it up for your amusement.

Major flashback... Galway, 1997... Town Hall Theatre bar. Left to right: Former Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, Suzie (who's at MCD now), future president of Ireland Michael D. Higgins, and me (with blond hair).

Some cowboys, in the Wild West, 1997: Malcolm McLaren, Suzie Shorten, Michael D. Higgins, and me.

By golly, a night out in Galway was a NIGHT OUT in those days. Malcolm had finished his talk, and was about to be taken away by the Arts Festival organisers, to the respectable and venerable festival club in the Warwick, in Salthill. They'd almost got him safely into the taxi when he escaped from his minders, trotted up to me and my beloved (we were sheltering for a last few minutes in the theatre doorway from the inevitable Galway rain) and, under the entirely mistaken impression that we knew where the cool clubs were, asked us where he should go. (I was a milk-drinking, hot-water-bottle-using homeboy who went out about once every three years, and my beloved was worse, but he wasn't to know that. It was the hair, man. Blondes DO have more fun.)

I had heard of an illegal wine bar, in a cellar under a solicitors on Abbeygate Street - passwords! secret knocks! - but I'd never tried to get in. It turned out that "er, yeah, that's Malcolm McLaren" was a secret password. And so Malcolm held court, enthroned in a very comfortable old leather armchair, in the Galway underworld, till pretty close to dawn. Stories, theories, stern lectures, good advice (which I never took), even better anecdotes, and his complicated, multiple, silly, brilliant future plans. (He was most excited by his Chinese, satirical/situationist, pop group, The Rice Girls... I don't think he ever did get a record company to fund that one...) A highly entertaining man. (Oh, if any tabloid journalists are reading this; the future president retired early - long before the illegal wine bar - don't worry.)

For a more detailed account of the night... er, email me.

World Women in Literature Day

Mr. Jonathan Franzen, author of the acclaimed novel, Freedom, was unable to attend the launch of World Women in Literarature Day.

 BREAKING NEWS: Jonathan Franzen, author of the acclaimed novel Freedom, was unable to attend the launch of World Women in Literature Day.

Philip Roth and the President of America discuss World Women in Literature Day

Philip Roth, author of the great American novels, The Great American Novel, American Pastoral, and The Plot Against America, said last night "It is a tragedy for world literature that Jonathan Franzen was unable to attend."

Women's literature is currently making a big splash in America. News that a woman had won the recent Pulizer prize for fiction was covered by the New York Times, who devoted a full line to it in their initial announcement. In a break with tradition, they even spelt her name correctly in some later editions of the paper (see correction below the article).

David Foster Wallace celebrates World Women in Literature Day. Image courtesy Esquire and the collective unconscious.And the publishing world has been swept by rumours that several female Nobel Prize winning authors from unfashionable countries may be briefly reviewed in two, or even three, American news outlets next year, so long as David Foster Wallace (author of the wildly acclaimed first half of a novel, The Pale King), doesn't release a collection of unfinished short stories, or a facsimile of a notebook.

A spokesman for the American Press Association said last night: "Your mouth is moving but I can't hear you, I think because your voice is so high."

Please click on the three photographs for further information on this story.

In Honour of the Moriarty Tribunal Report: guns, camels, icebergs, and brown envelopes.

In honour of the recently published (2,400 page) Moriarty Tribunal report, I thought I'd post 20 pages from my last novel, Jude: Level 1. In these chapters, (spoiler alert!) Jude is shot at by Charles J. Haughey, "heroic leader of the Fianna Fáil Party, former Taoiseach, Celtic Chieftain of all the Gaels, gun-runner, phone-tapper, tax-dodger, cute hoor and Saviour of Ireland." He also accidentally kills Dan Bunne, "Supermarket Magnate, and one of the great Political Donors of our Age". And he ends up in a Mexican stand-off with the man who made him homeless, Jimmy "Bungle" O'Bliss, "Ireland's greatest property developer"...

No similarity to any person either living or dead is intended or should be inferred. Especially to Charles J. Haughey, Ben Dunne, or, most of all

((Julian's lawyer wrenches Julian's hands off the keyboard at this point.))

            CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

            I determined to leave the hospital immediately, and have no more to do with women. My clothes having been destroyed, the hospital authorities issued me a pinstripe suit, from the stock of charitable clothing out of which they habitually re-clothed injured street drinkers before their discharge. The lady Doctor attempted to persuade me to stay for a week's further treatment, to stabilise my erectile nose, but I could not bear to stay another hour. When she realised there was no changing my mind, she left me, to return some minutes later with a brown paper bag.

            Silently she gave me the eloquent gift of sandwiches, and left the ward without turning back.

            I paused only to say good-bye to Miguel de Navarra, my Mexican neighbour. He looked up from the Galway Advertiser and shook my right hand sorrowfully with his right hand.

            "This Banana," he said, waving the Illustrative Fruit with his left, "Is a weapon of Oppression."

            I nodded. "Can I have it, so?" I said.

I left the hospital with only a brown paper bag full of sandwiches, a banana, and a broken heart.

            During the long morphine dream of my stay in hospital, Galway had changed. Most of its buildings had been knocked and replaced with buildings one storey taller. Many of these new buildings were now, in their turn, being replaced with buildings two storeys taller again. I grew confused and lost among the taller storeys and the construction's confusions. All about me as I walked I heard talk of Shares and Options, of New Technologies, Investment Properties, and Easy Money. Galway seemed to be accelerating into the new millennium in an explosion of optimism and cement dust. Fellow teenagers passed me in Mercedes-Benz cars, often several times, trying in vain to find a place to park.

            A shoe-shine boy offered me a share tip as I passed Griffins' Bakery, and the street entertainer, Johnny Massacre, was now swallowing swords of gold.

            I finally found Saint Nicholas's Church, my beloved home. I was surprised to see the entire Church of Ireland population of Galway outside it, weeping and wailing in the shelter of a golf umbrella. Far above them, a fat man atop a high ladder was nailing a "SOLD" sign to the Bell Tower. The fat man turned to address the crowd. His lower face was covered by a scarf.

            "Feck off,” he told them. “It's mine now.”

            "Who is that masked man?" I enquired.

            "'Tis Jimmy O' Bliss," sobbed the pensioner holding the umbrella.

            I reeled. Jimmy “Bungle” O'Bliss was Ireland's greatest living Property Developer. No deal of his had ever fallen through. His fame had spread even to Tipperary, where he had bought the abattoir and converted it into luxury eco-friendly apartments, using only paint and plywood. This was the crack of doom for Saint Nick's.

            O'Bliss descended, the better to address the pensioners.

            "Ye selfish bastards! Don't ye care about Galway's homeless?" He wiped a tear from his eye with a silken 'kerchief. "All those young, unmarried management consultants, without a roof over their heads? Dear God, you people have hearts of stone."

            "But 'tis our Church," quavered a pensioner.

            "Pah! I bought it fair and square, at auction, for a grand."

            "Auction?"

            "Look, it's not my fault if somebody forgot to put a reserve on the property. Next thing you'll be telling me it's my fault that the other bidder came down with the flu and broke both his arms."

            "The flu doesn't break your arms."

            "This flu does."

            "But where will we worship? Wed? Baptise?"

            "Amn't I providing you with a Portakabin out near Menlo, for the love of God? What more can I do? Do ye want to ruin me, with your religious shenanigans? Have ye any idea what it'll cost me to replace this knackered wreck with decent townhouses, with ground-level Retail Premises? If I hadn’t got an offshore client for all these old stones, I’d hardly bother."

            "But... what of my Bell Tower, my Home?" I burst out.

            "Oh the Bell Tower stays."

            I breathed a sigh of relief.

            He nodded. "We're enhancing it into a twelve-storey, Swedish, state-of-the-art, automated vehicle-storage tower facility."

            "So I can continue living there, then?" I said, in happy confusion.

            Jimmy O'Bliss winked at me.

            I relaxed.

            "No," he said. "It's a fecking carpark, you big gom."

            Having lost my Job, my Good Looks and my True Love in swift succession, I had come Home to find that I had also lost my Home. My sandwiches slipped from my fingers to land in the mud, my legs trembled and gave way, and I fell to my knees in the muck and rain...

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN           

            The National Anthem rang out in thin, high, single notes from the inside pocket of the lumpy navy jacket of Jimmy "Bungle" O'Bliss.

            As I knelt, in my devastation, in a puddle, Jimmy O'Bliss high-stepped over me. Pulling a small telephone from his inside pocket, he dislodged a bulging Brown Envelope. It splashed into the puddle in front of me.

            A strangely familiar voice came tinny from the tiny telephone, its tone a question.

            "I got it, Big Man," replied Jimmy shortly. “Deal's done and dusted." He poked at the little machine, and slid it back into the empty inside pocket.

He stopped. Withdrew his hand. Slapped the pocket.

He stared all around, then down at the ground. With a start and a grunt, he glared at me, then scooped the soaking brown envelope from the muck and thrust it, mud and all, back into his inside pocket.

            "You saw nutting," he said, and walked rapidly away.

            Wet-kneed, I pulled a disconsolate sandwich from its damp brown wrapper.

My initial bite met with unexpected resistance. I could not recall a tougher crust. I removed it from my mouth to have a look at it. It was green. It had an elastic band around it. I looked at the wet brown paper bag I had taken it out of. It wasn't a bag.

            A curious hush had fallen over the crowd. "'Tis the legendary Brown Envelope," whispered one ancient.

            I looked back at my sandwich. It wasn't a sandwich.

            I gave pursuit.

            "Sir!" I cried as I ran.

            He did not appear to hear me over the noise of construction. I almost caught up with him on High Street, but the demolition of Sonny Molloy’s shop sent a cloud of dust billowing.

Jimmy O’Bliss vanished.

By the time the rain had damped the dust down, he was gone.

There! At the far end of Quay Street.

But when I got there, he had crossed to the Spanish Arch, where a helicopter sat, in the lashing rain, on Buckfast Plaza. Above it was a blur of whirling blades which blew the surface water off the Plaza in a great circle about it, so that it rained sideways, as well as from above, on the young men nearby as they leaped a limestone bench on their rollerskatingboards.

It rained sideways, too, on the woman in black who fed the white Corrib swans that had gathered below her on the river.

            The woman in black turned, to stare at me. I took a step towards her. The swans began to swim obliquely away, across the Corrib, towards the Claddagh Basin and its rich sewage outfalls.

            Her eyes, now, were all I could see; her body, her face, her head wrapped tightly in black as she stood in the horizontal and vertical rain.

            There was something unusual about her eyes…

            This woman, I thought, could mean something to me. This woman of whom I know nothing, could tangle her destiny with mine. I merely have to take another step, and speak, and the threads of our destiny cross, and who knows where it will end? Together on some tropical island? In wild flight? In love? In madness?

            She stared into my eyes. I shuddered with possibilities. On the blankness of her canvas I painted future after future.

            In the distance, the white birds moved, slowly.

            She turned, and walked away, over the bridge to the Claddagh, following them obliquely in her vertical rain.

            Behind me the helicopter’s blades sped up. I turned away from her, to face my horizontal rain.

The helicopter was marked with familiar bold greens. Celtic Helicopters, I thought. The company owned by the family of the much-loved Charles J. Haughey, heroic leader of the Fianna Fáil Party, former Taoiseach, Celtic Chieftain of all the Gaels, gun-runner, phone-tapper, tax-dodger, cute hoor and Saviour of Ireland.

            Jimmy O'Bliss leaped aboard, and the helicopter whined and rose immediately.

            As I reached it, it was already above my head. Eager both to return the poor man's envelope with its huge wad of banknotes, and to regain my sandwiches, I bounded up onto the limestone bench, scattering the rollerskatingboarders, and leaped high, grabbing with my free hand one of the two fat rails or skis on which it had previously been resting.

            I began to regret my rash impulse when the helicopter lurched, turned and began to head out across the water.

            The mouth of the river opened into the sea.

            The helicopter swung low above the rain-swept wave crests. My weight seemed to tug it lower by the second. My hand began to slip. With my other hand, I crammed the Brown Envelope down alongside the banana in the inside pocket of my pinstripe jacket. Then, with both hands, I hung on.

            Dear God, was this the end of me?

            Slowly, surely, my strength faded...

As we approached the Aran Islands I made out the black bulk of Inis Mór, then Inis Meáin, then Inis Óirr... Far below me I saw the rusting hulk of an enormous cargo vessel, hurled by storm up the beach and into the rocky fields, long before I was born.

            Then we were above the sea again, and into a thick wall of offshore mist. There was no sea and no sky and I had the curious illusion that, were I to let go of the helicopter, I would simply hang where I was, suspended, cushioned on all sides by the cotton wool mist, as the helicopter laboured away from me and vanished.

Cushioned, suspended, no effort, no noise...

My weary fingers began to relax their hold. No! I fought this treacherous vision of comfort, and with numb hands hauled myself higher on the ski, and slung a leg up onto it, and managed, at length, with difficulty, one-handed, to button my jacket around the ski so that my weight was half-supported by my jacket, in which I now hung as in a sling. My aching hands could relax a little.

Then, from out of the mist, loomed the terrible and wonderful shape of the fourth Aran Island.

Hy Brasil…

Yet it did not look right. Its bleak profile should have been familiar from old photographs in the Lifestyle Supplements, back when our Chieftain still gave interviews, before disgrace and self-imposed exile. But no, the familiar dark bulk was half-eclipsed by a great white mountain thrusting out of the water, hard against the island. White fog condensed and rolled off its sides, to form an enormous ring about the white mountain.

The white peak itself, to my exhausted, wind-wracked eyes, seemed to resemble a giant Nose rising from a submerged Face. There were two dark ovals near its peak resembling nostrils . Yes, a Nose sticking up out of the waves. But this, I realised, must be a Neurotic Delusion, caused by the traumatic mutilation of my own nose. I felt delighted at my sophistication. To have acquired my very own Neurosis after so short a time in the Big City! Or, I mused, perhaps I was Hallucinating: an even more sophisticated Metropolitan response to reality, and one conferring great status back at the Orphanage. Thady Donnelly had not been right for a week after doing mushrooms on his way to the 1996 All-Ireland hurling semi-finals in Thurles, and the younger orphans had followed him around the Orphanage Grounds, beseeching him to speak of his Visions, till he finally Came Down on the following Friday…

            We approached the white peak which masked the dark island. The helicopter flew low over it, and a powerful downdraft sucked us lower still, so that we staggered from the sky to within a few metres of the White Mountain. Even above the Roar of Blades and Engine, I heard Jimmy "Bungle" O'Bliss and the pilot exclaim to their Maker.

            The lurching recovery of the helicopter, as it shot back up to a decent height, was good news for the occupants of the helicopter, though of slightly less benefit to me. My numb fingers had been shaken loose by the sudden fall, and all the buttons on my Charity Suit now gave way under the tug of the sudden rise.

For a moment I hung suspended, as the ski-tip caught in my inside jacket pocket... But the pocket ripped. 

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

 

I fell thrice my height, to strike the White Mountain a glancing blow with my Arse.

The entire mountain rang like a bell, with a hollow, crystal-clear chime. I skidded, bounced, skidded and began to pick up speed as the sloping shoulder of the mountain dropped away beneath me. My sliding descent through the Arctic air grew pleasing to me, and I began to control my course by movements of the shoulders and hips.

            Bruised but exhilarated, I hurtled off the last ledge of the iceberg and crashed down to the shingly beach, which was knee-deep in a cushioning layer of  slush and fallen ice.

            I looked about me, as I brushed the slush from my pinstripe suit. The iceberg almost filled the tiny natural harbour of Hy Brasil.

I turned my back on harbour, iceberg, Aran Islands and Ireland, and walked inland.

            The shingly beach became, by imperceptible degrees, stony fields. There were signs of construction work: rough stone channels cut into the unique black limestone of the island and away across the desolate fields.

I looked back, and from this slight elevation could see that the towering mountain of ice was no longer a free-floating berg, but had been pushed or hauled or driven ashore, and up the gently sloping offshore sheet of basalt which surrounded the island.

            Why, he is irrigating the fourth Aran Island in the time-honoured way of the nomadic desert peoples of Arabia, I realised. He has towed an iceberg here from the poles. My respect for the genius of Charles J. Haughey grew greater still. Was this not a potent Metaphor for his benign stewardship of Ireland herself? Had he not inherited a desolate island, parched of self-belief, and remade her into an Earthly Paradise flowing with, awash with, drowning in...

            I was distracted from my Metaphor by a distant whinnying. Charles J. Haughey's famous string of racing camels! A generous gift to the then-Taoiseach from an Arabian admirer in the 1970s, all Ireland knew their fame. These beautiful beasts reputedly ran wild upon Hy Brasil. Further away again, I heard a curious cracking or crackling noise. It echoed back off the vast North Face of the towering iceberg and mingled with the whinnying, confusing my senses so that I could not make out the direction from which it came. I resolved to head further inland, for it was my vague recollection from the half-remembered Sunday colour supplements that Charles J. Haughey’s palatial retirement home was on the far side of the island from the harbour, facing only the bleak Atlantic waves, so that the great man would not have to look upon the Ireland that betrayed him.

            I headed directly across the black limestone island, featureless except for the dry stone walls around the dry stone fields and the occasional shallow labourer's grave, cut with a Kango hammer into the raw stone. Here and there, a white arm bone protruded.

            The going was extremely difficult, as I scrambled down and up the steep rocky gullies in whose shelter grew ferns and mosses and orchids.

            I was breathing heavily when the Salmon unexpectedly leapt in my rear pocket. I hauled it out, and received its Wisdom.

An oblique walk across an area of open crag is a continuous struggle with little cliffs and ridges and gullies, with no two successive steps on the same level, whereas if one follows the direction of the jointing, smooth flagged paths seem to unroll like carpets before one.

-Tim Robinson, English writer of Irish sympathy, Stones of Aran: Labyrinth, 1995

            Walking with the grain of the landscape, I made far better time.

            A thrill of delight ran through my chilled body at the thought that I might soon lay eyes upon the Great Banqueting Hall of our deposed Chief, and that I might be invited to partake in his fabled hospitality.

            As I crested the windswept hill I saw, sheltering behind a tall boulder from the wind, the noble profile and imposing brow, the long, sweeping eyelashes and strong jaw, of a racing camel. It turned and gazed with its warm, liquid eyes into my eyes.

"Hullo Camel," I said to it.

It whinnied. There was a crack, another crack, and the noble beast slumped to its knees as though shot.

            From the doorway of his palatial retirement mausoleum, former Taoiseach Charles J. Haughey, the smoke curling from the barrel of his rifle, trotted with dainty tread down the broad granite steps and across the gravel. He was followed by the masked figure of Jimmy O'Bliss, and by Dan Bunne, the Supermarket Magnate and one of the great Political Donors of our Age. Our greatest living Retailer, our greatest living Developer and our greatest living Politician! We would have been naked, homeless and ideologically incoherent without them. They had given us so much, no wonder they looked so Wrecked.

            "Great shot, Big Man, great shot, head shot, hard shot, great shot," said Dan Bunne, his voice somewhat muffled by his constant chewing on a piece of gum.

            "Shut your hole, Bunne, you fucking spastic mong," said Charles J, "You're giving me a fucking headache."

            The camel, its eyes now glazed and untenanted, toppled slowly sideways. Charles walked up to the dying beast and, carefully aiming behind its ear, fired a final shot into its brain. The camel’s flanks subsided as its last breath shuddered from its throat, rattling its relaxing tongue out of the way in a staccato spray of spittle.

            It was not how I had imagined meeting my hero, Charles J. Haughey, but one cannot entirely control one’s destiny. I stepped forward and reached for my inside pocket, intending to return the brown envelope full of money to its rightful owner, Jimmy O'Bliss. I cleared my throat.

The three Giants of Old Ireland failed to notice me, Dan Bunne being distracted by a lock of his own matted hair, and the others being distracted by Dan Bunne. The lock of Dan Bunne’s hair swung in the breeze, slightly to the right of his right eye. Unable to see it clearly by turning his eyes, he was turning his head.

The hair, being part of his head, turned an equal amount.

He swung around on his heel in an attempt to take the lock of hair by surprise. It remained slightly to the right of his field of vision. He began to pirouette, then reversed direction.

He fell over. Charles J. Haughey sighed.

            My fingers, still numb with the cold and locked in a clawlike grip from my helicopter ride, fumbled in my torn jacket pocket for the envelope and grabbed the banana instead, which had become stuck in the lining.

            "Shite," I said.

            Charles Haughey and Jimmy spun around and saw me for the first time. Dan looked up, blinking and chewing.

Charles Haughey stared at me with the most bloodshot eyes I had ever seen, until I looked down at Dan Bunne's. Their shirts were delightful.

            I was pleased that I looked so natty in my pinstriped suit. The bulge of the stuck banana, though, was ruining the cut of my jacket. I tried to jerk it free.

            “Drop the gun,” said Charles Haughey.

            “Gun?” I said, bewildered, and gave another tug on my banana.

            “Don’t play the innocent with me," said the former Taoiseach. "Freeze."

            "I'm already frozen."

            "Shut it, funnyman," said Charles J. Haughey.

            "He's after the fifty grand," said Jimmy O'Bliss. "I know that fecker from earlier, at Saint Nick's. Oldest trick in the book, kneeling, trying to trip me. He must have followed me in another chopper."

            "Which reminds me," said Charles Haughey. "Give me that money for safekeeping while I think what to do with our Mafia chum here."

I began to realise that they had grasped entirely the wrong end of the metaphorical stick.

            Jimmy reached into his pocket and brought out a sodden brown paper package. "It fell in a puddle boss, sorry," he said.

            Charles J. Haughey grunted and, without taking his eyes off me, ripped open the brown paper with his teeth.

            He glanced down at what he held.

            "What. The fuck. Is this."

            He looked upon my cold toast and chocolate spread sandwiches with a wild surmise. He looked up at me, then across at Jimmy. His eyes grew more bloodshot on the instant, as though a small blood vessel had burst.

            "My God. He takes my money and he comes back for more." He looked me up and down with an expression that bore a most curious resemblance to respect.

            "I can explain," I said.

            "Or die trying.”

            "I have your money here in my pocket. I merely wish to return it..."

            "Bollocks. You have a gun in that pocket."

            "No, that is a banana."

            "Who are you trying to cod? It's a gun."

            "A banana"

            "Gun"

            "Banana"

            "Gun"

            "Banana"

            Dan Bunne had meanwhile stood up, and now chose this moment to spin anti-clockwise upon his left heel, in an attempt to sneak up on his lock of hair from the far side.

            He failed. He fell over. His gun went off.

I jerked in reaction, and the banana flew out of my pocket, as Dan Bunne said, "Sweet Jesus Big Man, I've shot myself in the foot!"

Jimmy O’Bliss fell over.

“Oh no, wrong, cancel that, I’ve shot Jimmy in the foot,” said Dan Bunne, and tried to spit out his chewing gum. Nothing emerged but a small quantity of pink spit. "Dear God! I have been chewing my own cheek this past hour!" exclaimed Bunne. “Isn't that gas, now? Hah? Hah? Hah?" He spat more pink spit and had a poke at the inside of his mouth with a jittery finger.

            Charles J. ignored him and the yelping Jimmy. "Well, you were telling the truth about that banana. So give me my money."

            I delved deeper into my pocket to retrieve the fifty thousand pounds. My fingers slid down, and along the bottom seam, and up the side seam, and out the gaping flap of the ripped, empty pocket.

            "You'll never believe what I'm going to tell you," I said to Charles J. Haughey.

            Charles took a step towards me, raising his gun, a semi-automatic weapon that appeared custom built. Dan Bunne’s long barrelled goose-gun had a magazine big enough to contain a full box of cartridges. Jimmy O'Bliss had just dropped a Browning large-calibre sniper rifle.

            "Are such weapons not illegal in the Republic?" I enquired, interested.

"We're not in the Republic now, Pinocchio,” said the former Taoiseach, stroking his trigger and stepping closer. “This island is extra-territorial. It's beyond the remit of the glorious fucking Republic."

            "Which is handy if you're bringing in workers, and you don’t fancy the paperwork…" said Dan Bunne cryptically, with a wink.

            "Shut the fuck up, Bunne," said Charles J. Haughey, scowling. He turned back to me. "I am the law here. I am Judge, Jury and fucking Executioner."

            A vivid metaphor indeed, I thought. He had not lost his oratorical panache.

            “Hang on here a minute,” I said.

            I picked up my banana, and ran.

CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

            Obviously, the pocket had ripped open after being snagged on my fall from the helicopter. The great wad of cash could have slipped out at any point since. My only hope of clearing up this misunderstanding lay in recovering the money from where it had fallen and returning it, as proof of my bona fides. No doubt we would soon be laughing about their ludicrous mistake over a pewter goblet of hot mead. I retraced my route as exactly as possible, hopping into the fern-filled high-walled channels in the limestone and running along them for a while before leaping out and tacking across the grain of the land, leaping the channels at right angles, before dropping back into another for a long, oblique run.

            Further and further behind me followed Charles and Dan.

            I made it back to the beach with little incident, but there was no sign of the envelope. I clambered from the beach to the iceberg across a shifting mass of collapsed, melting debris.

            Cracks and fissures provided hand- and foot-holds in the hard, frictionless surface, and with difficulty, often on all fours, I retraced the path of my easy descent. The ice creaked and cracked beneath me, whole slabs sometimes peeling away as I searched for a solid handhold.

            At one point, spread-eagled on the face of a flat cliff of ice, I noticed a curious phenomenon: the ice exploded out in a small spray of shattered fragments just a foot to the left of my head. When I leaned across to look at the strange hole or crater revealed, the same phenomenon took place a foot to the right of my head. I looked back at Charles and Dan to see if they could explain this curiosity, but they seemed busy, a little way up from the base of the iceberg, fiddling with their guns. Not wishing to distract them, I pulled myself up over the lip of the cliff and kept climbing, hidden from them now by the high flank of the berg.

            At last, I reached the top:

            And there it was, pristine upon the peak: the Brown Envelope, lying where it, and I, had first fallen.

            I relaxed and awaited the others’ arrival. It had been an exhausting climb, and I was glad of the chance to rest and eat my banana. Though bruised from the morning's events, its flesh was sweet ambrosia to me. I warmed myself with the thought of how relieved and delighted they would be to have their money returned to them.

They seemed a long time coming. Dan Bunne had no doubt been slowed by his unsuitable shoes.

            At length I heard their slow, almost cautious approach. "Up here!" I cried. "Come and get it!"

            The boom and echo of my voice shook free several ledges of snow, and, disintegrating, they were whirled away down the berg by the chill wind. A split in the ice at my feet widened. I dropped my banana skin into it. The splayed yellow star vanished, tumbling, into the darkness.

            A low creak came from the depths.

            Charles Haughey’s rifle barrel appeared over the ridge, wearing a hat. I laughed at his prank. "Come up here and I'll give it to you!" I shouted, anxious to put the whole embarrassing misunderstanding behind me.

            From behind me, I heard the crunch of footsteps on fresh ice crystals. I turned in time to see Dan Bunne appear from over the far side of the frozen peak. He was looking at his feet, stepping carefully around the rim of the enormous nose-holes.

            “I’ll give it to you right now. You asked for it,” I said, reaching for my pocket, “And now you’re going to get it.”

            Dan Bunne swung the long barrel of his goose-gun in my general direction and convulsively pulled the trigger. The massive recoil sent him skidding a full three yards backwards on the smooth leather soles of his Italian shoes. This would not have been so bad had he not been standing two yards from the edge of the Northernmost Hole.

            I reached the edge too late to save him. "Dear God!" he cried as he fell. "The Snorter has become the Snorted! It is a judgement on me!"

            His hands still gripped the gun, and as he fell he fired, the recoils tumbling him end over end faster and faster till he vanished into the darkness spinning like a Catherine Wheel and emitting great blazing gouts of burning cordite with each report of his weapon until he had exhausted its capacity.

            The explosions echoed and re-echoed long after the last blast of flaming gunpowder had scorched the Arctic air. A booming rumble began as the last echoes died, and grew louder. Ice cracked and split far below.

            I stepped back from the edge of the Hole as the edge crumbled and fell in. A hairline fracture appeared in the hard ice beneath me. It ran past me in both directions, to the cliff edges.

             It widened to an inch, two inches...

The left side of the peak suddenly fell a full foot.

            I had a remarkably bad feeling about this.

            With awful slowness, the iceberg began to split down the middle.

CHAPTER THIRTY           

            As the shuddering iceberg began to split, I tried to decide which side of the divide would be the better one to ride out the collapse upon. Yet the great noise made thinking difficult.

My mind was finally made up by the arrival over the ridge of Charles J. Haughey. Perhaps in some way blaming me for the destruction of his iceberg and the death of his oldest friend, he loosed a wild shot at me from close range. I prudently leaped the widening chasm, and found myself falling inland atop a cliff of ice, as Charles J. Haughey’s side of the iceberg fell away from me, out to sea.

            I wedged myself in a fissure, and endured the accelerating fall.

            My half of the split mountain toppled inland, its broad point of contact rolling up the shingly beach and across the stony fields, ever faster, until the very peak slapped against the stony hill crest and snapped off, countless tons of ice now tobogganing down the far slope to overrun the retirement home of Our Great Leader, coming to a halt now in its ruins.

            I emerged from my fissure, and slid and fell down off the ice, through the shattered roof, and into the Imperial Bedroom.

            I landed upon the plumped, heaped, purple satin pillows.

            Sitting at the foot of the bed, bathing his wounded foot, happily untouched by the falling lumber, masonry, and ice, was Jimmy O'Bliss. He looked back at me over his shoulder with an expression I found difficult to interpret, due to the scarf obscuring his lower face.

            He stood, and hopped at high speed from the room.

            CHAPTER THIRTY ONE

            I was delighted by this unexpected chance to return to Jimmy O' Bliss his packet of money. Still shivering from the icy peak, I wrapped myself in a beautifully soft sheet of rich Egyptian cotton, and pursued him down the main stairs, through the banqueting hall, into the kitchens, down into the cellars, and further down into the sub-cellars and past a dark tunnel-mouth.

            Then back up again.

            Finally, as loss of blood slowed the modest and reluctant old fellow, I cornered him in the banqueting hall. Above us, the clear glass roof was spangled with chunks of ice, and, above that, the shuddering overhang of the iceberg itself was a rich, dark blue you could almost mistake for an evening sky, were it not for the facthe
that it dripped and creaked. Out through the French windows I could see the open-air swimming pool. A camel swam in its limpid waters. I advanced towards Jimmy and pressed the banknotes into his trembling hands. "You dropped this," I said, and turned to go.

            "Wait," said Jimmy in a weak voice, and I stopped, and turned. "One moment... I know it's here somewhere..." He opened a wooden cabinet and rooted around in its interior. Was I finally to be offered a glass of mead, in thanks for my kind deed? Jimmy O'Bliss emerged with a bolt-action rifle.

            "You're too fucking dangerous to live, Sonny Jim," he said, cocking the gun with a snap of the bolt. A tremor ran through the cliff of ice overhanging us, rattling the glass roof in its frame. A little avalanche of slush and melt-water ran across the glass, rippling the blue light that filtered through to us so that we seemed to move underwater. "It is a thing I never understood, in the James Bond fillums," said Jimmy O'Bliss, "why it is they always explain their nefarious plans to James Bond, and then leave him to be killed by some complicated, untried, and unsupervised stratagem. Lasers, indeed. Volcanoes. Fecking alligators… Myself and Charlie would always be roaring at the telly, 'Shoot him in the head! Just shoot him in the head!'" He sighed, pointed the gun at my head and pulled the trigger. The loud click of the firing pin on the empty chamber caused the cliff of ice above us to rumble, and lurch forward some inches. "Feck. No bullets. Hang on." He found a box of bullets in the cabinet.

            "You are planning to shoot me in the head?" I said, somewhat taken aback.

            "I am," he said, sliding out the empty magazine and loading it swiftly with bullets.

            "That thought is a source of sorrow to me," I said, "for I am on a quest to win the heart of my true love, the most beautiful woman in Ireland and possibly the world."

            "You intrigue me strangely," said Jimmy O'Bliss, pausing. "Tell me more."

            I told him more.

            "Sounds great. Where does she work?"

            "In SuperMacs of Eyre Square."

            He nodded, and closed his eyes, and smiled. “Ah, young love.” He opened his eyes. “God, I haven't ridden the hole off a young one in a long while. Yes, I have neglected the needs of the Heart.” He slammed the full magazine up into the gut of the gun with the palm of his hand. The tremendous blue ice-cliff overhanging us swayed and dropped a foot at the report. "Ah,” he sighed, “youth is wasted on the young." He swung up the barrel.

"I was intrigued by the tunnel mouth," I said.

"What?" said Jimmy.

"Mr Bunne said something, too, about workers..."

            "Oh, Big Mouth Strikes Again," said Jimmy. He put aside his rifle. "Sure, I suppose it won’t do any harm… This is where the Blacks are brought in. Hy Brasil is, by a curiosity of the law, in extra-territorial waters. Then down the tunnels with them, and Barney writes the cheque....”

            I was puzzled. “Is such importation of shackled humanity strictly legal?"

            “Our once and future King can do whatever he fucking wants here, sonny boy. It's his rocky kingdom, the barren field of his exile. From this stony grey soil he shall gather his strength, till the people repent their treachery and call for him..." Jimmy sighed. “He dragged this shit-hole out of the middle ages and into the twentieth fucking century, and how did the people thank him? They shafted him.” He brooded a bit on this, and clarified. “They fucked him up the arse and hung him out to dry. But why am I still yapping? Old age..." He snapped up the bolt on the rifle, hauled it back, baring the chamber into which popped up, spring-loaded, a large bullet. He then slammed forward the bolt, knocking the bullet into position.

            The cliff of ice above and behind him shifted, shifted again, lurched, and fell in its entirety on the banqueting hall, driving its stout pillars down through the next two floors, collapsing its own great wooden floor, the ancient carpet ripping free and sliding down the hole, so that I fell through the cellar, into the sub-cellar and rolled down the mouth of the tunnel wrapped in sheet and carpet. Jimmy, his suit snagging on a splintered joist as he fell through the cellar, did not follow me down. His rifle, jerked from his hands by his sudden arrest, did.

            Now I had a gun. Jimmy did not. My position had improved.

            Unfortunately, the collapsing iceberg had also breached the side wall of the open-air swimming pool, in which a camel still swam, alongside the banqueting hall.

            It would have gone easier with me if the swimming pool had not been connected by a deep channel to the sea, to ensure the freshness of the bathing water: but it was: and the tide, too, being high, all the broad Atlantic attempted to follow me, camel and all, into the cellar, the sub-cellar, and, subsequently, the Tunnel.

Jude: Level 1((There you go... This episode is taken from Jude: Level 1, which will be reprinted later this year as Jude in Ireland. Jude's adventures will continue in the new novel, Jude in London, due out this September from Old Street Publishing.))

The State of Irish Literature 2010

To my slight surprise (and immense delight), my story “The Orphan and the Mob” was chosen to represent Ireland in the ambitious new anthology, Best European Fiction 2010 (edited by Aleksandar Hemon, and introduced by Zadie Smith). The book’s publishers, Dalkey Archive Press, recently asked me five polite questions about the state of Irish literature. I replied with an intemperate rant. A slightly updated version follows below…

1. Are there any exciting trends, movement, or schools in contemporary Irish fiction? Who do you feel are the overlooked contemporary authors in Ireland who should be more widely read and translated?

I haven’t the faintest idea. As is traditional with my people, on achieving the status of Writer, I was strapped to an ass and driven from the City. I’ve lived in Berlin for the past few years. When I was in Ireland, I lived in Galway city, which is on the opposite side of the country to Dublin, where the novelists fester. Galway doesn’t really do literature. And I grew up in Tipperary, in the midlands, where writers were, until recently, killed and eaten. And quite rightly.

If there are exciting trends in literary Ireland, the excitement hasn’t made its way to Berlin yet. Anyway, I don’t believe in trends, movements, schools, and the whole German classification mania. That’s all made up after the fact, to help university libraries with their filing.  Each pen is held by a single hand. But for what it’s worth, none of my Irish friends read Irish books any more.

Indeed, I hardly read Irish writers any more, I’ve been disappointed so often. I mean, what the FECK are writers in their 20s and 30s doing, copying the very great John McGahern, his style, his subject matter, in the 21^st century? To revive a useful old Celtic literary-critical expression: I puke my ring. And the older, more sophisticated Irish writers that want to be Nabokov give me the yellow squirts and a scaldy hole. If there is a movement in Ireland, it is backwards. Novel after novel set in the nineteen seventies, sixties, fifties. Reading award-winning Irish literary  fiction, you wouldn’t know television had been invented. Indeed, they seem apologetic about acknowledging electricity (or “the new Mechanikal Galvinism” as they like to call it.)

I do read the odd new, young writer, and it’s usually intensely disappointing. Mostly it’s grittily realistic, slightly depressing descriptions of events that aren’t very interesting. Though, to be fair, sometimes it’s sub-Joycean, slightly depressing descriptions of events that aren’t very interesting. I don’t get the impression many Irish writers have played Grand Theft Auto, or bought an X-Box, or watched Youporn. (And if there is good stuff coming up, for God’s sake someone, contact me, pass it on.) Really, Irish literary writers have become a priestly caste, scribbling by candlelight, cut off from the electric current of the culture. We’ve abolished the Catholic clergy, and replaced them with novelists. They wear black, they preach, they are concerned for our souls. Feck off.

But let us accentuate the positive, for the love of the Lord:

I do like Kevin Barry. His collection There Are Little Kingdoms had something special about it. Hints of glory ahead. (I gather there will be a novel. I’ll be buying it with cash money.) And from a few years back I loved Mike McCormack’s first book, the story collection Getting it in the Head. I always felt Mike McCormack had the great, demented, Irish small town heavy metal novel in him, he just needed to get it out. Then this week I discovered, from a very reliable source, that he’s finished his next novel, Pilgrim X, and it’s a post-apocalyptic Western set in the west of Ireland. Hurray! Exactly what Irish literature needs right now. I hear there’s a strong Scandinavian death metal vibe off it. This has all the signs of being his major breakthrough, and breakout.

For me, the only writer to grab the Celtic Tiger by the tail and pull hard while the tiger roared was Ross O’Carroll Kelly, the pseudonym of Paul Howard. And that was a newspaper column. (Collected every year into a new book – read them all if you want to understand Ireland’s rise and fall. No other writer caught it while it happened. The best, funniest, and most historically important run of Irish satirical journalism since Myles na gCopaleen.)

The Irish writer that most excited me recently was Diarmuid O’Brien, and he writes unproduced television scripts. Very funny, very Irish, on the edge of the surreal, a nice mixture of  WB Yeats and UK sitcoms. Padraig Kenny is another very funny, passionate, interesting guy trying to do interesting things with TV and radio scripts. (He has already managed to turn his Twitter rants into an artform.) Tommy Tiernan is Ireland’s most philosophical voice, but he has chosen stand-up comedy as his way of delivering his philosophical prose. Tiernan has read everything by Beckett, and everything by Lenny Bruce, and combined them. On the right night you will end up on the floor weeping tears of laughter and recognition as he takes Ireland apart. I remember reading Graham Linehan when he was only 17 and writing for Hot Press, and thinking, this guy is the funniest writer in Ireland. Of course, he got no recognition or encouragement in Ireland, so he went to London and co-wrote Father Ted, and Black Books, and now writes The I.T. Crowd. (Two days ago, as I write this, he won the British Comedy Award for writers.) The guy’s a genius, but he’s been working out of London, with UK broadcasters, since his early 20s, so he has no reason to address Ireland. (We had other geniuses, a decade or two back, but we didn't want them either. Cathal Coughlan tried to tell us who we were, spewing poetic vinegar with Microdisney, then sulphuric poetry with Fatima Mansions, but we didn't want to listen. Don't get me started on Cathal Coughlan, I'll cry.)

But then, why would our funniest, most original voices want to join a pompous, priestly, provincial literary community?  I’m pretty sure the best of the new, young Irish writers are writing for film, TV or computer games. Of course, anyone decent then has to go to England to get anything made. Another problem with Ireland is that its national broadcaster makes civil service television. Raidió Teilifís Éireann have never made a good comedy, they hardly ever make decent drama, and they treat writers like shit. Any work that has to go through an official Irish institution is slowly castrated by committee. All of those things are set up wrong. Our national theatre, The Abbey, is a weird, dysfunctional machine for setting fire to money. There is an almost total disconnect between the plays the Abbey puts on and the nation they are supposed to represent. (It does put on work by good playwrights: but with a thirty year delay.) Its most recent director, Fiach Mac Conghail, is doing his darndest, but turning round around The Abbey is like trying to do a wheelie in an Airbus full of American tourists. As an Irish playwright, you’ve a far better chance of getting your first play put on by the Royal Court in London than by any theatre in Dublin. Culturally, Ireland is a failed state. The fact is disguised because the UK and the USA have taken up the slack, and given our artists an outlet. But Ireland herself has, for example, never made a television program that anyone outside Ireland would want to watch. Given the quality of our writers, and the size of the global English-language TV audience, this is an immense national disgrace. (Just to repeat, everyone involved in Father Ted was Irish - but it was made by the British broadcaster Channel 4.) I know and like many of the individuals who work in RTÉ, but it is institutionally incapable of using the talents of its people, and it is institutionally incapable of change. Its news and sports coverage are excellent, the rest of it should be shut down. At the moment it’s a machine for wrecking talent, and the talented people inside it would be much happier under almost any other system.

The only area where Irish writing is thriving in Ireland itself is on the internet, because it’s a direct connection, writer-to-reader. Blogs captured, and capture, Ireland in a way literature  no longer does. Sweary Lady was brilliant (on her Arse End of Ireland blog), right through the Celtic Tiger years. Kav wrote the great Kav’s Blog. (Sweary and Kav both moved on to the Coddle Pot group blog…) And the quality, and quantity, of the swearing was and is very high on the Irish blogs, with guys like Twenty Major. The Irish swear better than almost anyone else on earth, bar maybe the Spanish and a couple of countries in Africa. That’s another area where I think recent Irish literary writers  – with the honourable exception of Roddy Doyle - have failed us badly. Ireland’s great lost playwright, Kevin McGee, was a master of the kind of swearing that had you desperately poking your inner ear with a biro to try and remove the images from your head. However, he was let down by professional theatre, moved into writing television soap operas (and translating the classics), and seems to have abandoned the stage. Who will swear for us now? Who will let rip the savage, guttural, primal utterance – half Yeats poem, half Guinness fart – required, DEMANDED, by the current state of Ireland? {EDIT: Probably Kevin Barry. Since this was first written, his apocalyptic story Fjord of Killary has appeared in the New Yorker, gracing its fragrant pages with North Galway lines as pinpoint accurate as these: 

“Fuckers are washin’ diesel up there again,” John Murphy said. “The Hourigans? Of course, they’d a father a diesel-washer before ’em, didn’t they? Cunts to a man.”

“Cunts,” Bill Knott confirmed.}

But I am biased, unstable, bitter, twisted, and living abroad, so don’t rely on my judgement. I’m sure there’s millions of brilliant writers in Ireland, I’m just mysteriously missing them every time I go there and look. In fact, aware of this, I outsourced the search to Twitter and asked who were the overlooked or neglected Irish writers that I’d missed. Here were the suggestions I got back, to balance my bile:

John MacKenna, Tomas O'Crohan, Mark O' Rowe (playwright and screenwriter), Antonia Logue, Sean O'Reilly, Vincent Woods (for “At the Black Pig's Dyke, the most underappreciated Irish play in the past 20 years.”), Gavin Duff, John Moriarty, Mike McCormack.

In an enjoyable and robust Twitter debate, Rosita Boland of the Irish Times took issue with the idea that O’Rowe, McCormack or O’Reilly were overlooked. This is a fair point, as all three do get excellent coverage in the Irish Times and on RTÉ, and O’Rowe has a powerful, thoughtful patron in Michael Colgan of the Gate Theatre.

Others on Twitter (some of them from lands far from Ireland) suggested Philip O Ceallaigh, Ken Bruen, and Dermot Healy, but it’s hard to think of these excellent, award-winning and acclaimed writers as being “overlooked” in any meaningful way.

As for Irish language writers – I’m not qualified to judge. They could all be geniuses for all I know.

2. Who are the contemporary European writers from other countries that are writing compelling fiction?

I’d only be bullshitting you if I tried to answer that question. My pitiful French, street-German, bar-Spanish and school-Irish are not remotely good enough to make literary judgements. I can barely mangle my way through comics in any of them. So, for me, all of European mainland literature is at the mercy of the quality of its translators, which makes me reluctant to judge. For all I know, I should be praising the translator, not the original writer. If you read my first book in Swedish, you would think I was a genius. If you read my first book in German, you would think I was a fool. So it goes. In fact, I strongly suspect that the Swedish translator of my first novel is a better writer than me, and wrote a better book. Molle Kanmert’s emails asking me questions were far funnier than mine, and the Swedish version outsold every other version. Someone sign her up for a novel…

3. Do you want your work to be translated? Why or why not?

Of course I do. I want readers. I want to be understood, I want to be misunderstood, I want to get into fights, I want to swim in the Dead Sea, I want to die in my swimsuit, I want to visit Siberia (but leave again), I want to butt in on your national conversation, drink your national drink, shoot and stuff your national bird, eat your national icecream, kiss your poets and pat your dogs and weep at the airport as we hug each other and exchange email addresses and our respective national varieties of flu.

4. Are there enough publishing outlets in Ireland for contemporary fiction? Is there a market for literary fiction in Ireland?

Well, we have the usual situation that arises when you share a language with a larger neighbour. A perverse, S&M relationship. You fight your oppressor & occupier for 800 years, get your freedom, then immediately ask  them for a publishing deal. Just as Bosnian writers seek Croatian publishers, Irish writers seek English publishers. Of course, English publishers seek Irish writers, so it’s a healthy, wholesome S&M relationship. 80% of Irish novels come out of London publishing houses. There’s always a slight tension in that relationship, of course, because some of your jokes and references won’t be understood by your publisher. But London publishers are very good at making sure that doesn’t become a problem, and that the integrity of the work is protected. They have to navigate the same issues with Welsh and Scottish and Indian and Australian novelists, so it’s not a big deal. There are a lot of small, very noble but very undercapitalised Irish publishers, but they have great difficulty hanging on to their writers if a UK publisher offers a decent advance. Or any advance at all.

We don’t really have a problem with lack of recognition, lack of outlets. The best Irish writers get recognised, usually in London first, after which the Irish literary establishment falls into line.  Ireland very, very seldom discovers its own writers first. Roddy Doyle had to take out a bank loan to publish the Commitments in Ireland. After which, he was picked up by an English publisher.

That has an interesting effect, though. Knowing that you are addressing sixteen UK readers for every one Irish reader, in a very mild way your book goes into translation in your head, as you write it. Most Irish writers will deny this, but I think it’s true. Of course I was born in London to emigrant Irish parents, so I feel equally at home, or not at home, in both places.

5. Given a choice, would you prefer a faithful, literal translation of your work or an interpretive re-imagining of it? Why?

An interpretive re-imaging, definitely. I don’t think a “faithful, literal” translation of my work – of any work - is even possible. If a translation were to be literal, it wouldn’t be faithful, and vice versa. Any decent writer is playing with nuances, rhythms, echoes, soundstuff that will evaporate in any literal translation. I like a lot of layers. Puns, resonances, double-meanings, Tipperaryisms, things my mum says at Christmas. Often the point of the sentence hasn’t anything to do with its literal meaning at all.

I use deliberately “wrong”, literal translations of phrases from the Irish language sometimes myself, because they sound fecking great in English. Friends of my dad would still say “I walked several strong miles”, and that is straight out of the Irish.

The Jude books are deliberately written in a stilted, old-fashioned, formal English, of the type spoken in Ireland a century ago. It’s the first-generation English of speakers who learnt English in school, from books, because their parents spoke Irish at home. For me this is a very rich form of English, because you can let the underlying Irish thoughts, structured in Irish grammar, burst through now and again. There is always a nice tension in the speech, as though Jude is walking on linguistic stilts, and has to be careful. He is trying to be terribly precise with a language he doesn’t really control or own.

Sometimes the games I play with the various versions of English are fairly explicit, as in the case of this head injury in Jude in London:

           “Their noble Tipperary speech reminded me of my mental catastrophe. I looked up from my book, and took the opportunity to experiment with my deformity: I spoke a Catholic thought, and it came out Church of England: I praised a fine All-Ireland semi-final performance by the Tipperary Under-21 hurlers against Kilkenny; and from my mouth came alien speech of an F.A. Cup semi-final replay at Villa Park.

           Sweet Mother of Jesus, I thought, astonished, and

           “Queen of Heaven!” I said.

           Christ on a bicycle, I thought.

           “Good Lord!”

           Holy fuck.

           “Blessed Union!”

           I gave up the attempt to accurately express myself, and returned to my book.”

I must be a real bastard for translators, because increasingly I like to back-engineer scenes so that a crucial line of narrative, thrown up by the action, is also a line of poetry by Yeats, or a line of dialogue is also a line of Joyce, or Kafka, or is made out of Radiohead song titles. They can be tricky to spot - most of my native-English readers miss most of them. And I also use the misunderstandings and gaps between American English and English English and Irish English to generate jokes and misunderstandings, and moments of unease.

A single English word sings in many voices, and I like to set off a couple of them, and make my words sing harmonies with themselves, or beat each other up. I doubt if anyone but me gets the half of it, but I think readers find pleasure in it anyway. I remember a woman on a blog quoting her favourite piece of my writing. She said she couldn’t put her finger on why she liked it so much. Well, I could. It was the end of a chapter, and I’d written it in iambic pentameter. Because it was laid out like prose, she hadn’t consciously registered the formal rhythm, the internal rhymes. But subconsciously, she got it...

That makes me sound too much of a word wizard – I should also say that most of my sentences are extremely straightforward attempts to get a character through a door in such a way that the reader understands it without having to read it twice, and I don’t always even succeed at that.

{EDIT: OK, I'm getting Repetitive Strain Injury from putting in links to all these bastards, enough for tonight. Hope you enjoyed it, if you got this far. I'll link a few more lads tomorrow. Your comments are very welcome.}



They Didn't Teach Music In My School

Speaking of Toasted Heretic has reminded me of a small but annoying itch I'd been meaning to scratch. Here goes.

The report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse has finally been published in Ireland. It is 2,000 pages long. It tells us that the Catholic Church in the Republic of Ireland (which ran most Irish schools until very recently, including the one I attended, the Christian Brothers, Nenagh), systematically sexually and physically abused the children in its care, particularly the boys. In particular the "industrial schools" run by the religious orders were tiny gulags. I have been reading, with mild annoyance, responses to this. John Banville's, in the New York Times, is typical:

"Never tell, never acknowledge, that was the unspoken watchword. Everyone knew, but no one said.

Amid all the reaction to these terrible revelations, I have heard no one address the question of what it means, in this context, to know. Human beings — human beings everywhere, not just in Ireland — have a remarkable ability to entertain simultaneously any number of contradictory propositions. Perfectly decent people can know a thing and at the same time not know it. Think of Turkey and the Armenians at the beginning of the 20th century, think of Germany and the Jews in the 1940s, think of Bosnia and Rwanda in our own time.

Ireland from 1930 to the late 1990s was a closed state, ruled — the word is not too strong — by an all-powerful Catholic Church with the connivance of politicians and, indeed, the populace as a whole, with some honorable exceptions. The doctrine of original sin was ingrained in us from our earliest years, and we borrowed from Protestantism the concepts of the elect and the unelect. If children were sent to orphanages, industrial schools and reformatories, it must be because they were destined for it, and must belong there. What happened to them within those unscalable walls was no concern of ours.

We knew, and did not know. That is our shame today."

Hmmm. "Everyone knew, but no one said." Below are the lyrics of a Toasted Heretic song, released in Ireland (on vinyl and cassette) as part of the Smug EP in 1990 (well within Banville's definition of that "closed state"). The song is called "They Didn't Teach Music in My School". Its real title is, of course (as it should be in any good pop song), the key line of the chorus, "Sliding Up Seamus". However, we foolishly believed that it was a good song, that it was - in as much as a pop song can be - an important song, and that the national broadcaster RTÉ might actually play it, so we made life easier for them by giving it a title they could actually read out on air. They, of course, didn't play it.

They Didn't Teach Music In My School.

"When your calls go uncollected and the neighbours have electrified the fence

Then will you start thinking, will it sink in, will you exercise some sense?

Everybody hates you, thinks it's great you got the flu, do you know why?

It's because you're such a shite we'll laugh all night with sheer delight the day you die

Your hand inside your habit, you would grab it and emit a gasping noise

As you walked in your black cassock past the showers and slapped the buttocks of the boys

But we got out alive

We're rich, we're famous

And you're inside

For sliding up Seamus

In our religion classes you would glare through black-rimmed glasses down the back

And summon up the sinner who'd regurgitated dinner, to be smacked

Vomiting in terror was a tactical error, he'd find

As you lowered his trews and began to bruise his behind

Picture our joy when you were caught inside a boy behind the bike shed

Oh summer holidays forever, and much better weather, when you're dead.

But we got out alive

We're rich, we're famous

And you're still inside

For sliding up Seamus..."

Of course, pop culture never gets much credit for saying anything of any importance, though it often speaks truth well ahead of high culture. John Banville, who is an excellent writer (though of the kind of novel I don't like), and by all accounts a very nice, decent man, appears to be speaking for Ireland when he tells the readers of the New York Times "Everyone knew, but no one said." "What happened to them within those unscalable walls was no concern of ours." "We knew, and did not know. That is our shame today."

Well, it's not MY bleedin' shame, mate. "Sliding Up Seamus" was being played live in towns across Ireland, and being cheered to the rafters by pupils and ex-pupils of the Christian Brothers, twenty years ago, before it was even recorded. And my friends and I officially released our report, on vinyl and cassette, 19 years before the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse released its report.

And, of course, being a disposable piece of pop, existing only in analogue recordings on vinyl and cassette, on an indie label,  before the internet, it has vanished almost entirely now. I don't even have a copy myself. But just to prove it existed, here is a rotten recording, with terrible sound, of a live performance of "They Didn't Teach Music In My School" - which we may as well officially rename "Sliding Up Seamus", now that it doesn't matter any more - in Róisín Dubh, Galway, on the Now In New Nostalgia Flavour Tour.

(The actual vinyl version was unusually well recorded, for a Toasted Heretic song, and sounded darn good. Renouncing our 4-track Tascam 244 for the first time, we recorded the Smug EP on 16-track in West One, with the great Pat Neary engineering.)

A final point: The song, rather optimistically, places the chap in the black cassock behind bars. In that, "Sliding Up Seamus" was less a description of the Irish present in the late 1980s, when it was written, and more a projection of a possible future, a wish-fulfillment exercise written to cheer up some friends of mine, who had suffered under the regime, and give them a laugh. No priests or Christian Brothers were getting jail sentences back when that song was written. But it is slightly sad to be reading this on Wikipedia, twenty years later:

"The report itself cannot be used for criminal proceedings (in part because the Christian Brothers successfully sued the commission to prevent its members from being named in the report) and victims say they feel "cheated and deceived" by the lack of prosecutions,^[18] and "because of that this inquiry is deeply flawed, it's incomplete and many might call it a whitewash."^[17]"

American Stars 'n' Bars

If you've read Jude: Level 1, you'll know I'm highly entertained by the glorious free-market energy of the US prison system. (The total number of people in prison, on parole, and on probation, in the US at the end of 2007 was 7.2 million - damn near twice the population of Ireland - so that's a lot of entertainment.)

But a magnificent new twist has emerged, which even I hadn't thought of. Over in Pennsylvania, people eventually started to wonder why the local judge was sentencing teenagers to serious time for crimes like putting up a spoof Myspace page about their assistant headmaster (a page marked "this is a joke"). As the New York Times reports..

"The answers became a bit clearer on Thursday as the judge, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., and a colleague, Michael T. Conahan, appeared in federal court in Scranton, Pa., to plead guilty to wire fraud and income tax fraud for taking more than $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers run by PA Child Care and a sister company, Western PA Child Care.

While prosecutors say that Judge Conahan, 56, secured contracts for the two centers to house juvenile offenders, Judge Ciavarella, 58, was the one who carried out the sentencing to keep the centers filled."

Brilliant... Sigh. I am simply too innocent to be a real satirist. It never occurred to me to formally employ the judges.... Anyway - and skip this if you've read it before - while I'm at it I thought I might as well paste in a big chunk of Jude: Level 1 at this point, for the amusement of new readers. (I'm hardly going to sue myself for copyright infringement.)

In this bit, Jude has lost his voice, got a crick in his neck, is stuck in a wheelchair, and has been mistaken for Professor Steven Hawking. Barney O'Reilly FitzPatrick McGee, the Irish-American CEO of the great American communications company, Westcom,  is showing him around a huge, secret, underground unit in their Galway plant...

From Jude: Level 1...

    “You’ve noticed they’re mostly Black, huh?” said Barney.

    I looked closer, and saw that most of the faces around me were indeed unusually deeply tanned for an underground Irish workforce in mid-winter.

Barney nodded. “Might be the last generation of authentic, home-grown Blacks to work for Westcom, and I’ll tell you why…” He looked about the great space, and a drop of moisture swelled in the corner of each eye.

    I settled back in my chair. I liked a story.

    He blew his nose, and cleared his throat. “Back when old man Fitzpatrick grew tobacco, the procuring of labour was an arduous, expensive, time-consuming business. Black men had to be sourced and purchased from unscrupulous Arab middlemen and imported by ship from West Africa. Spoilage rates were as high as 50%. Oh, times were tough for old man Fitzpatrick. Sure, eventually we had sufficient spare capacity to provide a breeding stock, and we were self-sufficient in labour. But then the cost of raising our African workers fell entirely on our family, a manifestly unfair situation. Often we’d get a good crop of sturdy young Blacks raised up to five or six years of age, near enough ready to do productive work and repay our investment: and they would all sicken and die in the sheds, and we had all the weary work to do all over again. The situation was intolerable, it was against natural justice: and so we campaigned for the abolition of slavery.”

I nodded my approval of this virtuous campaign.

“Came the glorious day, and we could kick them all out and they could rear their own brats on their own time, and their own dime. We rehired them, as needed, when they had matured. This improved profitability enormously. Productivity shot up too, for now the workers no longer had a cushy berth for life. The excess money saved, we invested in mining and smelting the iron ore in the hills too steep for cultivation. But, for that, a steady supply of strong male labour was required. We couldn’t be willy-nilly hiring by ones and twos. And so we contracted with the local prisons to supply our needs. They sourced the male labour as required. A vagrancy sweep, or a crackdown on gambling would supply peak labour demand at the mine. By now we were Western American Steel... But pretty soon we were paying so much out to the prisons for convict labour that we had a change of heart. Old grandpappy Fitzpatrick built our first prison. And so we could get the State, then later as we expanded into Federal Prisons, the Federal Government to pay to feed and house our workers, and we could pay ourselves for their services. So we were getting paid for them to work for us. It was soon our most profitable unit… You may have heard of our correctional subsidiary, American Stars ‘n’ Bars? Our Patriot Prison? With its uniquely flexible modular system?"

“Hmm?” I had been watching the green-eyed woman, who was very carefully taking something out of a safe and transferring it to a silver container that bounced light across her cheekbones, her noble nose… I shook my head, though as my head was on its side this involved rotating my face vertically rather than horizontally relative to the surface of the earth. Barney tilted his head in sympathy with mine.

"That's a... yes. Ha ha. Are you nodding or, ha ha... Anyway, as WAS became Westcom, and our jobs moved up the value chain, our prisoners, chiefly Negroes of little educational attainment, simply weren’t cutting it. Oh, they were bright and willing, but training them up costs time and money, and these guys simply weren’t inside long enough to make the investment worthwhile. They were missing out on training opportunities, the chance of betterment… Why, it was a crime. It was worse than a crime: it was a tragedy. So we lobbied Congress long and hard to give us time to really make a difference to these young men’s lives. And so we got their sentences doubled.”

I nodded, sideways, and stared at the face of the dark haired, green eyed woman. Head bowed over the silver container, staring into its depths.

“…But as Westcom became a favoured contractor on Federal Government Defence contracts, and we came to understand the Federal Government better, we came to… if I may use the word… love the Federal Government. And we began to feel concern for its welfare. You’ve got to see the bigger picture, and take the longer view. As the Federal Government pays us up to $500 for a screwdriver on our Defence contracts, it makes sense to maximise the State’s revenues so that they can pay us… Thus, if we can lower the burden on the Government, we can increase our income and profitability. And our prisoners are fine, fine, people. But they cost the Government a fortune in benefits, in healthcare and education, in providing streetlighting to their ghettos and so forth, before they are old enough to graduate to prison. It is the old problem my ancestor faced, of covering the overhead on their unproductive years. So the future lies in outsourcing labour to foreign slave-states. Let the Chinese and Hindus and so forth raise the whining infants to maturity. Not on America’s tab… We will build our prisons abroad, and ship the goods home. Indeed, we have used this opportunity to rethink the entire prison paradigm. In our next-generation foreign prisons, the prisoners will be kicked out after their shift and will have to feed and house themselves at their own expense. It is quite, quite brilliant, and will enhance profitability threefold… And so these are the last, I fear, of the great Black American workforce which my family has served so proudly and so humbly for so long. Here, meet some, before they vanish, like the Buffalo…”

He waved, and two young men in dark suits walked over to us. Barney whispered in my upturned ear, “Lately many of them have discovered Religion. I have encouraged it, for it makes them more Punctual, but Christ Almighty, they tend to go on about it… Gentlemen! I’d like you to meet Professor Stephen Hawking.”

“Sir.”

“Sir.”

I asked them about their religion. Barney groaned.

“Well sir, we are brothers in the Brotherhood of Brothers of Muhammad in the Hood.”

“Followers of the teachings of Muhammad…”

“It is a little known fact that Muhammad was a Black man, of Africa…”

“It is a little known fact that the first man to whom the Prophet gave the honour of giving the Call to Prayer was a freed Black slave, Bilal…”

“And so we follow that great Religion…”

“A Religion blind to the colour of a man’s skin.”

”A Religion of compassion.”

    “Religion of Love.”

    “Religion of tolerance.”

    "... for the Prophet taught us to hate no-one.”

    "And thus we hate no one."

    "Except the fucking Mexicans."

    "Yeah the Mexicans. And the fucking Koreans."

    "…’king Koreans. And whitey."

    "Yeah, whitey."

    "Fuck the Man."

    "And the cops."

    "Fuck the cops."

    "Nothing worse than a black man in a cop jacket."

    "Fuck those negroes."

    "Yes, fuck them."

    “Thank you, gentlemen,” said Barney.

    “Sir.”

    “Sir.”

    They bowed and left.

    “Oh well, it is better than Marxism,” said Barney.

(From Jude: Level 1, published in the UK by Old Street Publishing. And published in Greek by Topos Books, very handy if you're Greek...)

(Oh, and the terrific image is borrowed from Prison Penpals, check 'em out.)

Happy New Year

Back home in Berlin, and sick as a dog. My gang came down with a selection-box of diseases over the Christmas in Ireland. Returning half-conscious to Berlin - coughing and hawking our way through airports, train stations, cafés and public toilets - we spread our plagues in a mighty swathe across Europe. So if civilisation is consequently snuffed out, sorry about that.

(The Plain People of the Internet: Ah! Is that a rare reference there to the five wives and forty children he is rumoured to  have stashed away in Berlin? Make a note...)

So on a human level, I and all I love start 2009 utterly banjaxed. But as a writer (far more important, natch), my year has got off to a nice start. The New York Times has just printed a piece by me. The piece is probably funnier if you have read all of US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's official bailout statements over the past six months. (But, you know, don't. It's too high a price to pay to get a gag.)

I'll put it up on the site here, once the New York Times has had a fair run at it. But meanwhile here's their version. They even commissioned a cartoon from R. O. Blechman, which is a heck of an honour. (Blechman is seventy-eight now, and won an Emmy for his animated film of Stravinsky and Ramuz's theatre thingy, The Soldier's Tale.)

Oh, and a happy, happy, HAPPY, HAPPY New Year to you all.

(The eloquent photo above is borrowed from PawsAroundChicago.com. They give pets lifts. Oh you laugh and call it decadence, but it is only through such - not entirely necessary, yet welcome - innovations that civilization advances. I don't know the name of the photographer. A haunting picture, suffused with empathy and a deep understanding of suffering, it is possible it is a self portrait.)

Can Anyone Top Seán FitzPatrick's Record?

"Can anyone top Seán FitzPatrick's record?"

We'll get to Seán in a minute. First, for my many non-Irish readers, who trust me as their number-one source of highly biased information on the state of Irish banking...  as I predicted a while back, the Irish Government is finally going to recapitalise the Irish banks. Orwell would wet himself laughing at the language the government are using to describe this flip-flop. The Irish Government plan to pour 10,000,000,000 euro (that's not a misprint - and yes, there's only four million people in Ireland) into the black hole of Irish banking, and the Minister calls it "a demonstration of confidence in the banks."

Er, no. It's a demonstration that the government thinks the Irish banks are insolvent. Bust. Bank-rupt.

How will a government with an exploding deficit fund this? Apparently they're going to throw the national Pension Scheme down the hole. And as to terms, well, we just have to trust them. Here's the official description, from the Irish Times this Monday, if you can stomach it:

Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan is expected to meet the chiefs of AIB, Bank of Ireland, Irish Life Permanent and Anglo Irish Bank over the coming days to discuss specific proposals for an injection of new capital into the system via a new fund in which the Government will participate.

"What I'm mainly concerned about is that the banks are in a position to extend credit," the Minister for Finance said on RTÉ radio.

"That's why we want to make this gesture, a demonstration of confidence in the banks, by upping their capital to show that their buffers are so strong, they are indestructible."

The Minister said there would be "tough discussions" with banks on the details of any State injection of funds. "We'll spell out the realities as we see them to the relevant institutions."

Mr Lenihan added there was "no question" of fresh public expenditure being incurred in the recapitalisation as there were was a substantial amount of money amassed in the National Pension Reserve Fund.

He refused to be drawn on whether there would be changes in the management of the banks as part of the Government plan.

Well, changes in management are happening already. Anglo Irish Bank, whose shares have lost 95% of their value this year, lost their chairman Seán FitzPatrick today. It turns out he'd been hiding 87,000,000 euro in personal loans with his own bank. Every September for the past eight years, as Anglo Irish Bank's year-end accounts were about to be done up, he'd lob 87,000,000 over the back wall and hide it in another bank (probably Irish Nationwide Building Society, whose books aren't done up till December, but noone is saying officially). Then, once Anglo-Irish had their figures all officially audited ("Vast loans? To the Chairman? Heavens no!"), he'd lob his loans back over the wall again. So they didn't turn up on the books of either bank.

What was his quote on this matter?

"...it is clear to me, on reflection, that it was inappropriate and unacceptable from a transparency point of view."

On reflection? ON REFLECTION? He thought it was absolutely spiffing from a transparency point of view, while  for eight years he played hurling over the back fence with 87,000,000 euro, but earlier this week he finally had a spare moment to reflect (busy man), and was shocked, SHOCKED! to discover he wasn't totally transparent?

I love the way the traditional Irish cover-it-up language is being stretched to its limit by the size of the stuff it is now being asked to cover.

If this was one of my novels I'd give you an exquisitely crafted gag to finish up, that played with transparency and reflection, invisible men and vanishing money, but this is a blog and I'm knackered so that's all you get.

No, actually I'd like to end with Business Plus magazine, from November 2004. It has Seán FitzPatrick on the front cover, under the admiring headline, "Can Anybody Top Seán's Record?"

Well, Seán was the CEO of Anglo-Irish Bank from 1986-2005, then Chairman till today. He ran it right through the boom years. It's lost 95% of its value this year, and his secret loans from the bank now add up to a full third of its entire market cap.

Yes, we'll see can anyone top that in the coming year.

(Ah, he's probably a lovely man, and only wanted the 87,000,000 euro to help sick children, and hedgehogs who'd been hit by combine harvesters. And his modesty made him hide the loans. Still, though, if anyone out there can find a bigger image than this 7k gif, send it on to me and I'll put it up here...)

Finance Ministers' Top 20

I've been enjoying the annual Financial Times’ guide to how Europe’s finance ministers are doing. After a great deal of number-crunching, chin-stroking, horse-trading and coin-tossing, they have come up with the unbearably exciting, grey-pinstriped, financial equivalent of a Top of the Pops / Smash Hits / Billboard Top 20. (Well, OK, top 19.) And here they are! (If you're not trembling too much with excitement to click on the link.)

As the FT says:

"Now in its third year, the FT survey benchmarks performance, to reveal who is the best performing and most respected – as well as potential future stars. The challenges this year were greater than ever...."

No kidding.

I was delighted to see that Ireland's Minister for Finance, Brian Lenihan, didn't come last. Far from it! He came in a very respectable second last.

Sarah Palin for U.S. Poet Laureate

(A note from about a week after I posted this: the guys at Prospect magazine read it, laughed a hollow laugh, and asked for a longer, slightly different version, which you can read here...)

Well, Sarah Palin is back in Alaska, and all you can hear around these parts is the lonesome wail of the broken-hearted satirists of Europe. Come back Sarah! We love you! It's OK if you think Africa's a country! We don't mind. It's not like you were running for President of Africa. Hell, there's people over here in Europe think America's a country...

At least she's still giving interviews, to sort out these terrible misconceptions, so I can still get my regular fix. In today's one, with Fox News' Greta Van Susteren, "the Alaska governor explains what she would have discussed had she been more available to the press."

Which turns out to be stuff like - I know Africa is a continent! Embedded in sentences like this one:

"I don't know, because I remember the discussion about Africa, my concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue, as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska's investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars, I wanted to make sure that that didn't happen anymore."

I like the middle bit of that sentence the best. It has a kind of poetry. And she says "continent", just to bang it home that she knows it's a continent. Subtle, but brilliant.

Hell, it IS poetry. Read it again:

Africa, a poem by Sarah Palin

"And the relevance

To me

With that issue,

As we spoke

About Africa and some

Of the countries

There that were

Kind of the people

Succumbing to the dictators

And the corruption

Of some

Collapsed governments

On the

Continent,

The relevance

Was Alaska's"

As Kurtz should have said at the end of Heart of Darkness, "The relevance! The relevance!"

If Obama is serious about reaching out across the aisle; about ending the divisions between Republican and Democrat - between red states and blue states - between people who believe in evolution and people who believe in creation - between monkeys and humans - between literate and illiterate - if Barack Hussein Obama truly believes in Change - then he will appoint Sarah Palin as the United States' seventeenth, and greatest, Poet Laureate.

Election Day USA 2008

At last, it's election day in the USA. Who will win? Well, I think Obama won the election six weeks ago, on Monday 15th of September 2008 when Lehman Brothers , the hundred-and-fifty-year-old American investment bank, collapsed and filed for bankruptcy protection. (And, somewhat addicted to the high-wire of public prediction by now, I'm typing this before the votes have been counted. I haven't even looked at an exit poll, if any are out yet. There's hours of voting left to go in parts of the US.) That was the event that made the collapse of not just banks but the whole deregulated financial system unstoppable.

Check out the graphs in the second half of this excellent video from John Authers of the Financial Times. (You can skip the stuff on the dollar at the start.) In the crucial states Obama needs, Obama trailed McCain until the day of the Lehman's collapse, and then bam, his line shoots up and McCain's plummets, and McCain has trailed Obama in all of them ever since.

Almost everything written about this election has been fluff. The economy will always drive politics in a democracy. Only when things are going fairly well will people bother to vote on any other issue. When the economy implodes, so do the hopes of the incumbent party. McCain actually ran a very good campaign under incredibly difficult circumstances: he stayed in the race until the entire American banking system collapsed. His problem was that he had to run as two mutually conflicting things. To get the Republican party to vote for him, campaign for him, and finance him, he needed to run as a Republican. But that's only 40% of the voters. Not enough. And President Bush was so unpopular (this week he recorded a 20% approval rating, the lowest in history, lower than Nixon in the last days of Watergate), that to win the votes of anyone else at all, McCain had to run as a crazy maverick who wasn't anything like Bush and, sure, was hardly a Republican at all, at all. And you can't be both King of the Republicans, and the Scourge of the Republicans. (Look what happened to the last guy who tried to walk that tricky line.)

It has been very refreshing to have two presidential candidates that I really like and respect running for the big gig. (I wasn't impressed by the character of either candidate the last time.) It has been sad to see McCain ripped in two by the situation he put himself in. Much of the anger he expressed in that last month was probably at himself. I think he will be very glad indeed when this is over.

Obama had the easier task but, even allowing for that, he has run a stunningly good campaign. I think he'll walk this election. On water if necessary. He's not trying to win the popular vote (fat lot of good winning that did Al Gore), he's aiming to sweep the Electoral College. I think he will.

OK, that's who will win (oh, and one last prediction... Obama will do well among white voters, getting a bigger share of them than Bill Clinton got, and all that talk about the Bradley effect will turn out to have been fluff too). But who should win? I don't think novelists should have opinions, especially political opinions. It damages their work, by ruling out certain readings, and closing down ambiguities that should not be closed down. I do have private opinions and preferences, but they are private. And my books do not necessarily share my opinions. So I shall outsource my opinion to someone much older and wiser than me, the very wonderful Alan Abelson, of Barron's (Wall Street's favourite newspaper): "This election pits one candidate who should have been elected eight years ago against one who should be elected eight years hence."

There you go. Fair and balanced.

May the best man win.

Though personally, as a satirist, I would like to get in early, and officially endorse Sarah Palin's 2012 bid for the presidency. She has given so much to us, we have a duty to give something back.

I know, I know, you've already watched it fifteen times, but indulge yourself one last time...

And, above all, on this day of all days, it is your political duty, if you haven't done so already, to click on this link, and then click on everything you see when you get there, with the sound on.

Update on 2008-11-05 04:14 by Julian Gough

The super-duper New York Times interactive map is addictive and delightful. I've been enjoying making my own calls on the states, ahead of the networks and newspapers, by zooming in and trying to work out, county by county, how the tide is flowing. I'll make a call here, for the fun of it: I think Obama will just pip McCain in Indiana. As I type, McCain is only .2% ahead, and there's still a lot of votes to come from Lake County, which contains the city of Gary, which is breaking 2 to 1 for Obama. McCain is winning in the rural counties, but they have largely been counted by now.

And now I'm off to bed, it's nearly 5am in Berlin.

Update on 2008-11-05 04:36 by Julian Gough

Nah, I couldn't go to bed, it's too exciting... Florida looks like a big win for Obama. He's 2% ahead of McCain as I type, but McCain's counties are counted, the big blocks of votes still to come in are all Miami-Dade, Palm Beach and Broward counties, (so, urban - Miami, Fort Lauderdale - and Democrat), and they are going to swing it strongly to Obama.

I really should go to bed, this election is over. Ah, it's a great shame McCain was robbed of the Republican nomination by the Rove/Bush machine in 2000. That really bent American democracy out of shape. And what consequences...

But in 2008, Obama deserves his victory. Here's the bravest and most important speech of the campaign, from either candidate. Character is destiny, and Obama has character.

Update on 2008-11-05 04:54 by Julian Gough

Yes, it's officially over. The networks have called it, and after the Kerry/Bush debacle, they ain't going to be leaping to wild conclusions. Wow. President Obama.

I'm incredibly happy. What a great day for America. What a relief for the world. (What was the global opinion poll result again? 75% of those with an opinion were for Obama?) The number of wounds that this helps to heal... holy cow.

God Bless the U.S.A.

With only a fistful of days to go, well yeah, I've got a lot of thoughts about the US election but, you know, who cares about my thoughts on the US election. Here's a clip that doesn't contain any footage of Barack Obama, John McCain, or Sarah Palin. (OK it does contain footage of Joe Biden, but hey, perfection is for Allah.)

And, wonky sound and all, this clip contains that strange, sideways something about the USA that makes me like the place so much. I'll warn you, if you're European - this clip is corny; it is cutesy (and the sound sucks); but get past that.

To make a clarifying statement which is not as cynical as it seems: America has the potential to be the country it thinks it is.

I have often found myself repeating W.H Auden's lines (below), from "On The Circuit", as I fly away from another astonishing, infuriating, sickening, exhilarating, inspiring encounter with America. I wonder do the candidates find themselves murmuring something similar sometimes...

"Another morning comes: I see

Dwindling below me on the plane,

The roofs of one more audience

I shall not see again.

God bless the lot of them, although

I don't remember which was which:

God bless the USA, so large,

So friendly, and so rich."

So, what happens next?

Well, like I said, blogging about seeing value in some areas of the equity markets last Friday "would have made me look fierce cute for a few hours." Markets go up a record breaking amount Monday - and back down nearly the same amount Wednesday. And the US markets give investors whiplash Thursday (way down, then way, way up in the last hour.)

I'm not going to bother talking about these immense shifts, because they are largely noise, not signal. They're the meaningless volatility you get around around major economic transition points. A huge one-day leap does not mean everything is going to be OK, and a huge drop does not necessarily mean it's the end of the world.

The Plain People of the Internet: What transition?

Well, the crisis is finally transferring from the financial economy to the real economy.

The Plain People of the Internet: What will that mean?

Some class of a recession. Less credit means less borrowing, less investing, less money, less jobs. We will save more, and spend less, because we will have to. Which will be good for us in the long term, but bloody painful in the short term. No chocolate on our biscuits for a while. And for a lot of people, no biscuits at all.

The Plain People of the Internet: Will the real economy collapse as much as the ghostly financial economy has?

Jesus, I hope not. The shadow banking system (which grew up outside the regulated banking system over the past decade), has been completely destroyed. The real economy will not be completely destroyed.

Within the financial sector, entire business models, an entire worldview, and an associated set of incredibly stupid but almost universally believed economic theories, have been annihilated. Basically, the financial sector has lost its money, its job, its house and its religion. The real economy will do much better than that. It might get quite a nasty kicking, but I am strangely optimistic about the real economy in the medium term, say the next few years. (Short term, sure, it's going to be horrible.)

The Plain People of the Internet: Will the markets fall further?

Yes. At least 20% and almost certainly much more.

The Plain People of the Internet: Will house prices fall much further?

Yes. US house prices will fall at least another 15%, and almost certainly much more, unless there is a massive government intervention in the mortgage market (on top of its recent interventions in the financial markets). The next US president will be inheriting a foreclosure catastrophe. Millions are set to lose their homes, so some major further initiatives are likely. This is a very dynamic situation, and it's hard to predict how it will turn out. The nature of the way in which mortgages were sliced, diced, packaged and sold on makes the problem very difficult to solve.

Oh, and Irish house prices will have their arse kicked much harder than that. There will be parts of the country where you'll be picking up houses for a few grand in another couple of years. I've seen ghost estates, built on spec in ridiculous places all over Ireland, that noone will ever live in.

The Plain People of the Internet: Is it the end of the world?

No. It's just going to be the big, bad recession the West should have had after the dot-com crash, but put off for years - and made much worse - with low, low interest rates and loose, loose money. (OK, if I wanted to be fair and balanced I'd mention a bunch of fascinating technical stuff about how the Chinese government stopped the country's dollar income reaching the workers, and diverted it straight back to the US instead... but that stuff gives people a headache, and needs a post of its own.)

Bear in mind, a country cannot get rich through its people selling houses to each other at ever higher prices. The ongoing collapse in house prices makes people with huge mortgages worse off. But it makes a heck of a lot of people without houses better off. Rents will go down, first-time buyers won't have to sell a kidney and bankrupt their parents to buy a dodgy flat, etc.

In fact, people, on average, are happier in a recession (as long as they don't lose their job or their house). There's a lot less status anxiety, and people appreciate what they have, rather than wishing for what they have not. And pop music always improves in recessions. So it's going to be great!

The War Against Icelandic Bank Terror

I am extremely pleased to see that the sweeping powers of Britain's Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act - passed in 2001 to keep Britain safe from global terror - are being used to defend Britain's shores from the lethal threat of Icelandic bank accounts.

Although lawyers, the Financial Times, and other lily-livered defeatists who would capitulate in the face of Icelandic Bank Terror are less pleased:

"Lawyers said the Treasury’s unprecedented use of anti-terror powers to freeze Landsbanki’s estimated £4bn UK financial assets could create knock-on problems for other institutions with which the failed lender was doing business.

The freezing order was issued under the 2001 Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act that was passed after the September 11 attacks the same year."

More news from the latest front in the global war on terror here...

We must remain vigilant. This is just the start. Iceland's sinister banking sector may have sleeper units all over the UK. We cannot show weakness. We cannot show mercy. I hereby call on Gordon Brown to authorise an SAS raid on Björk's Post Office Savings Account.

Look at her. Quite clearly planning to destroy our free markets by unleashing weapons of mass destruction. Quick, stop her! She's reaching for her piggy bank! We haven't a moment to lose.

And cancel the Oyster Cards of Sigur Rós while you're at it. You wouldn't know where they'd be going...

The Great European Competition Hurdles - and they're off!

Ah, now, look, that's cheating. The Irish Government have robbed me of victory in the The Great Irish Bank Collapse Sweepstakes. And I'd put my last eleven euro on the favourite!

Here's the Irish Times, talking about the Irish Government's meeting in the early hours of Tuesday morning:

"The option of allowing one particular bank to fail and then moving to nationalise it was seriously considered, but it was decided that legislation to protect the entire banking system would have a better prospect of achieving long-term stability."

I'm pretty damn sure the bank was... well, I'm saying nothing. No point making things worse for them. (But, in one of those crazy coincidences no doubt, I got a huge number of hits over the past 48 hours from people who'd googled: anglo irish bank collapse.)

Incidentally, Anglo Irish shares soared 67% immediately after the announcement of the Irish Government scheme.

I'm still not entirely sure how a government as small as ours can "guarantee" the debts of a banking system as big as ours. As a number of helpful commentators have pointed out, the Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, and finance minister, Brian Lenihan, have just promised to back liabilities that are ten times greater than our national debt. And, though the two Brians have postponed the Great Irish Bank Collapse Sweepstakes, they still have the EU Competition Hurdles ahead of them. (The job of running Ireland is a veritable pentathlon lately.) The British (and others) are furious at this move, as it gives Irish banks a huge competitive advantage, and could suck money out of fragile English banks. (AIB have a big presence in the English business sector, Anglo Irish do a lot of UK property loans etc.)

And the English, Dutch, Belgians and Danes all own banks in Ireland (Ulster Bank, ACC Bank, IIB Bank, and the amusingly named National Irish Bank- it's Danish), which will not be covered by this scheme, so they're afraid they'll lose all their depositors to Allied Irish Bank, Bank of Ireland, and - God help us - Anglo Irish Bank. There's now a strange, competitive, nationalist element to bank bailouts in Europe, as each government bailout or promise destabilises the banks of its neighbours. We need a unified EU response. And in a pig's hole will we get one, not till a few really big banks go under. Try getting twenty-two finance ministers to fly to Brussels this week, when they're all up till 5am every night, fire-fighting the collapse of their own national banks.

Of course, national banks have grown to become European banks, all over Europe. Many countries now face the problem of trying to save banks that are bigger than the country that, technically, controls and regulates them. The Financial Times has a beautiful overview of this. You'll see from it that both AIB and Bank of Ireland have liabilities that are almost exactly the same size as Ireland's entire GDP...

Well, on a lighter and more entertaining note, Momus has written a wonderful piece on the pleasures of having nothing. He did me the great honour of including some video of me in this intriguing meditation on Brecht, Wilde, and the end of the world as seen from Berlin.

We've been through all this before. It's not so bad. Nicht so schlimm...

"There is no money in this town! The whole economy has broken down! Oh, where is the telephone, is here no telephone, oh sir, goddamit, no!" - Brecht

Update on 2008-10-01 13:39 by Julian Gough

...And here's the latest on the Great European Competition Hurdles, from the Irish Times twenty minutes ago. Will Brian Lenihan even make it over the first hurdle?

Choice quotes:

The European Commission (EC) today confirmed that Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes is in contact with the Government and will examine under state aid laws the move to guarantee all deposits in Irish banks.

“It [the Commission] will look at any state aid involved as a a matter of urgency. It expects notification from the national authorities and will take decision under the state aid rules soon afterwards.”

And yes the British are very annoyed:

British banks compete with Irish banks both in Britain and in Ireland and have voiced fears they could lose out competitively to Irish banks that enjoy the full guarantee.

The Irish pledge on Tuesday to underwrite the country's banking system triggered a flood of cash from British businesses to Irish banks, a senior Irish stockbroker said.

"We just want the Irish government to look quite closely at the arrangements they are putting in place to make sure they comply with EU competition law," the British government spokesman said. He added Britain was in contact with Irish authorities at a high level over the issue.