An insatiable reader, I have often winnowed my smaller life lessons from books, novels usually, dabbing into lives and times for contexts to world events. Science fiction taught me quite a lot. The pop stuff – from Dune to Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy comedy sci-fi. I knew America in my youth from the raffish Tom Robbins’ Even Cowgirls get the Blues and Russia with Solzhenitsyn. The Russian classic War and Peace occupied me for ocean passages but was fairly indigestible.
Seminal was my mother in law’s little book about 9th century scholar Johannes Scotus Erigena, who was fluent in Greek and carried stored classical Neoplatonism back from his native Ireland to what was a broken European mainland. Years later, I found him on a stained glass window in a Church in Montefalco in Umbria, close to Assisi.
New Zealander Faye Weldon’s 2009 novel Chalcot Crescent seems to have me in its grip in recent years, painting a wry and intelligent picture of 80-year-old Frances, lively and previously wealthy, who is hiding on her own back stairs, discussing politics with an educated and anarchistic grandson Amos and keeping out of sight of bailiffs from the bank lurking on the front step to foreclose on her house.
Weldon paints a near-future world reamed out by inflation and where bank foreclosures have taken anything and everything into vast storage facilities, using powers once reserved for the police under the Prevention of Terrorism Act of 2005.
People further down the road have a generator for occasional electricity and to charge cellphones but Frances and Amos cannot go out through the back door to the connected communal gardens and their vegetable patch without being caught.
Another and more reputable grandson had acquainted Frances with Amsel Rothschild, whose letter to his agent in 1838 introduced the concept of ‘the mortgage’.
It had turned up on her computer and she thought (as a lot of us do these days) that its smell of sedition was dangerous.
Fifty years before Rothschild, Adam Smith (1723-1790), Scottish, a leading Enlightenment figure and still considered a father of modern economics, had admitted, albeit sheepishly, that keeping the poor uneducated and unoccupied would breed a brutish and intransigent class.
Rothschild said of his new-minted mortgages, that “the few that understood the system will be either so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favours, that there will be no opposition from that class, while, on the other hand, that great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that Capital derives from the system, will bear its burden without complaint and, perhaps, without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests.”
Rothschild was, as Francis said, right. “We did not suspect. But it’s not, I think, that we are mentally incapable. We would just rather not comprehend, and spent the money while we could, in our two-hundred-year patch of mania.”
Equally delightfully constructed is Kirsten Miller’s just published Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books, which occupied me for the whole of last weekend’s wet weather, rather fabulously introducing the population of Troy, Georgia when a surprisingly successful book-burning crusade makes its appearance.
This is the America’s Deep South but a lot about western society flickers under the old oaks of Troy’s town square with its Confederate General on a plinth, lording it (mendaciously) over the courthouse; the fluently rendered characters in a town breaking down on a pattern we are coming to fear even here. Layer by layer, the secrets and lies of a small, stable township hit by changing power structures, societal misogyny and uncomfortable social mores are probed with forensic care.
Even the detestable Lula who has orchestrated the town’s so-easy slide into autocratic bigotry is treated with tenderness as the dynamics play out.
After that, it wasn’t easy to plunge back into the tumultuous news cycle and the unthinkable threats and atrocities now headlining every week.
Drugs and lawlessness appear to be swilling across the Pacific with us in its sights, the plundering of Europe’s once uniquely stable housing stock by marauding capital a deep shock. Our own regret that the inequality we succumbed to over the last 30 years is now being used to tear New Zealand society apart and that we are facing a rather vile class war orchestrated by what’s now a solidly right wing and not very clever government.
I was probably 11 when I first read Baroness Orcy’s Scarlet Pimpernel novels and the grotesque inhumanity of the 1780s French Revolution.
Britain’s monarchy and embryo Parliament, watching from the other side of the English Channel, dodged the same bloodcurdling retribution that occurs when blatant extreme wealth puts its gold on its own walls and, without even bread, the poor rage at their doors unheeded.
By a hair’s-breadth, Dickensian England went on to enjoy centuries of Empire. Backed up, as we look back, by its fierce work ethic and grinding poverty for the poor, of course.
Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books was doomed from the start. Its addictive, fast-paced snapshot of our times is a rare tonic – but also a bit of a roadmap out of these uneasy times.
• Liz Waters
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