Armchair politics – as good as a seat in the House
Independent on Sunday, 4 July 2010
It couldn’t have happened to a nicer Liberal Democrat. The Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, last week launched an experiment in democracy, aimed at creating a “more open and less intrusive” society. He inveighed against laws that “interfere in everyday life” and asked you (I use the word loosely) to help him by posting ideas on a “Your Freedom” website. He invited “you” not just to identify laws that need changing or abolishing, but to get involved in making actual government policy. “You” certainly made the most of it.
Restoring the death penalty was popular, especially for drug dealers. “Third time cought [sic] dealing compolsary [sic] hanging’, as one concerned citizen phrased it. So was beating up and even executing burglars, with one correspondent noting that “if you hadn’t attacked me you wouldn’t have gotten hurt”. Immigration was another popular subject, although the individual who wanted to “stop immigration from Muslim countries” ran into a bit of trouble with the site’s moderator. “Stop deleting my post and allow people to comment and vote on it,” he (or she) remarked crossly.
One of the earliest posts wrote lyrically about “life as it was”, fulminating against the Human Rights Act and “the ridiculous idea that we pay prisoners companstion [sic] in jail”. Sadly, a number of individuals failed to take the Deputy Prime Minister seriously, demanding such things as the right to marry a horse and an end to the ban on slaughtering domestic livestock at home. One correspondent called for a ban on necro-bestiality because “I don’t want to have to worry about what some pervert might do to my cat when it dies”.
This is e-democracy in all its glory, a Lib Dem variation on the e-petitions people were encouraged to post on the Downing Street website (only to be totally ignored) under Labour. It’s a species of populism that was roadtested – to destruction, some of us believed – in 2003, when the Labour MP Stephen Pound offered to sponsor a Bill based on a vote among listeners to Radio 4’s Today programme. A Bill allowing people to use any means to fight off burglars won. That was before e-democracy really took off, offering an irresistible forum to spout all sorts of rubbish without the bother of going down to the local pub.
To be fair, not every idea posted is reactionary, satirical or illiterate – just quite a few. As an experiment, I posted one myself, suggesting that civil partnerships should be open to heterosexuals, but I couldn’t get back on the site to find out how it popular it was. I’d actually rather write to my MP, but then I’m one of the people – there are more of us than Clegg thinks – who still believes in representative democracy. It’s fashionable to hate MPs, but few people get into Parliament without a coherent political philosophy, amended over time, and some notion of how legislation works.
“What I find especially exciting is that, now we have got the ball rolling, the debate is totally out of the Government control”, Clegg declared. So what was the point of electing a new one to run the country only two months ago? The Deputy Prime Minister has even promised that the “best suggestions” will be put into practice, although he didn’t explain who’d have the final say. Either he’ll have to ignore thousands of posts, infuriating people who believed his promise that they are now in charge, or we will find ourselves living in a very peculiar type of society: like Saudi Arabia, with public executions and convicted drug dealers being birched on roundabouts. Nothing very liberal or democratic about that.
Crime novels roundup
Sunday Times, 4 July 2010
A distinct sense of paranoia runs through the novels in Joan Smith’s selection of the best recent crime writing
There are some moments in history when being a detective isn’t the wisest career choice. Stalin’s Russia is a case in point, especially in 1936 when purges are everyday events and another world war is on the horizon. Ordinary police officers live in fear of cases that might be “political” and attract the attention of Stalin’s feared secret police, but the mutilated corpse of a woman in a disused church doesn’t obviously fall into that category. Captain Alexei Dmitriyevich Korolev, veteran of the Polish front and protagonist of William Ryan’s The Holy Thief, is horrified by the woman’s injuries but has no idea how much trouble the murder is about to cause him.
Ryan’s first detective novel confidently re-creates a paranoid society where mutual suspicion is the norm. Korolev’s colleague, “Knuckles” Mendeleyev, has disappeared after being denounced by a traffic cop for spreading anti-Soviet propaganda, and his accuser now sits at his desk. When Korolev arrives after an early-morning meeting with a colonel in the secret police, the new man immediately accuses him of being late: “It’s not what the party expects. It’s my duty to raise it at the Works Council.”
Such exchanges powerfully convey the atmosphere of Moscow in the 1930s, and the plot focuses on a murky aspect of state policy: the government’s willingness to sell icons and other artefacts from disused churches to wealthy overseas buyers. Korolev gets his first inkling of trouble when he discovers that the dead woman is foreign, and seems to have been involved in a struggle for possession of one of the Orthodox church’s most treasured icons. Some readers may find the violence hard to stomach, but The Holy Thief is an absorbing and assured debut.
A different kind of paranoia suffuses Argentina in Guillermo Orsi’s No-One Loves a Policeman, translated by Nick Caistor. Dazzling and bewildering, the novel is set in 2001 as the country heads for bankruptcy. Pablo Martelli stopped being a policeman a long time ago, leaving a force nicknamed the “National Shame” for a lonely life selling bathroom fittings. “Five years ago, when I lost the last person I cared about, I vowed never again to answer the telephone after midnight,” he declares. But he breaks his own rule, taking a late-night call from a friend in a village six hours south of Buenos Aires.
The friend needs help, but by the time Martelli finishes the long drive, it’s too late. Corpses pile up, apparently the work of a serial killer, and Martelli is trapped in a byzantine plot involving corrupt cops, 1970s revolutionaries and an enigmatic woman who dances the tango. Orsi’s mordant, reluctant detective is definitely a one-off.
The highly regarded Peter James tries something unusual in Dead Like You, in which Detective Superintendent Roy Grace searches for a brutal rapist. The novel is set in Brighton but based on a real case, the “Rotherham Shoe Man” who raped more than 20 women (and stole their shoes) in the 1980s. When two women are assaulted in the same week, Grace realises that the cases are similar to an unsolved series of rapes that ended with a murder in 1997. One of the best things about this novel is its acknowledgment of the impact of rape on victims and the changing attitudes of the cops who have to investigate it. James is to be commended for producing an insider’s view of a rape investigation. This is a gripping novel about a desperately serious subject.
Karin Fossum has been described as “the most important female writer of foreign crime fiction at work today”. The Norwegian novelist writes spare prose with elliptical dialogue, and her latest novel is no exception. Bad Intentions, translated by Charlotte Barslund, has an edgy opening scene in which three young men inexplicably row out into the middle of a lake on a cold September night. Only two return and they agree not to report the “disappearance” of their friend — who was being treated in a mental hospital following a nervous breakdown — until the next morning.
Fossum’s Inspector Sejer doesn’t believe the official explanation that the missing man committed suicide, and he proceeds to place the friends under subtle psychological pressure. This is a battle of wits, conducted with chilly intensity and an unsettling sense of menace.
The Swedish novelist Hakan Nesser has created a very different kind of detective: Inspector Van Veeteren is eccentric, impulsive and unable to distance himself from the crimes he has to investigate. In The Inspector and Silence, translated by Laurie Thompson, Van Veeteren takes on a religious sect led by a charismatic charlatan, Oscar Yellinek. A girl has gone missing from the organisation’s summer camp, and neither Yellinek nor any of his creepy female acolytes has any intention of co-operating with the police. The sect preys on damaged people, and Van Veeteren’s humanity is severely tested by the case, but he remains grimly determined to discover who is targeting girls at the spooky camp.
Nicola Upson’s Two for Sorrow is the third in a series of novels built around the Golden Age crime writer Josephine Tey. As the book opens, Tey is writing about two women hanged in Holloway prison 30 years earlier for killing babies. But her research is interrupted by the horrific murder of a seamstress who turns out to have a connection with one of the hanged women. Leaving behind the hectic rural setting of the second novel in the series, Two for Sorrow is curiously touching and psychologically compelling.
Sofi Oksanen lifts the lid on Soviet imperialism
The Times, 26 June 2010
It is a chapter of history that’s little known in the West: how the tiny Baltic states found themselves, at the end of the Second World War, under a brutal Soviet occupation. Now a novel about the Russian occupation of Estonia has taken the country by storm, threatening to bring into the open secrets that have been undisturbed for half a century.
So sensitive is this subject that it comes as no surprise to discover that the author, Sofi Oksanen, lives in Finland and is Finnish-Estonian; she is a playwright as well as a novelist, and Purge had its first outing as a play that was produced at the National Theatre in Helsinki.
At 33, Oksanen is a literary phenomenon; she has won every main literary award in Finland, has been translated into 28 languages and was named Estonian “Person of the Year” in 2009. As if the Soviet occupation of Estonia were not sufficiently explosive material for a novel, Oksanen has linked it to a shameful feature of contemporary history; while her mid-20th-century characters endure political re-education and deportation to camps in Russia, their grandchildren are vulnerable (literally, in one case) to the pimps and gangsters who have made fortunes selling women’s bodies since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
If the connection initially seems tenuous, perhaps even sensational, Oksanen writes with such force that it’s possible to give her the benefit of the doubt until her purpose becomes clear. Ideologies come and go but Oksanen sees them as excuses, political cover for material greed and lust for power that inflict terrible wounds on human beings. This is an unusually tough novel, and Oksanen’s handling of rape scenes almost 50 years apart reflects the very different sensibilities — a shamed silence in one case, an almost pornographic openness in the other — of the two periods.
The novel’s main characters are an elderly Estonian woman named Aliide Truu and a young woman called Zara who turns up unexpectedly on her doorstep, speaking Estonian with a Russian accent. The year is 1992: Estonia is free again and Aliide is living alone in the village house where she was born. Constantly at work in her kitchen, where she bottles and cans produce from her own garden, she is a parody of a rural housewife. But this is no Baltic garden of Eden; Aliide is plagued by a blowfly that repeatedly tries to get into the house.
The symbolism may be a little heavy-handed but Aliide is under siege from Nature and local tearaways alike; her first reaction on seeing Zara collapsed in a heap in the garden is to leave her there. Even when she realises that the girl has been badly beaten, Aliide allows her into the house only reluctantly, plotting all the time to send her on her way. There is no meeting of minds and little sympathy from the older woman, whose slight thaw towards her unwanted guest is expressed not in words but in traditional offerings from her store cupboard. Zara is just as wary, claiming to have run away from a violent husband while she is actually trying to escape from Russian sex-traffickers.
But Zara knows something that Aliide doesn’t: the two women are related and Zara has the evidence, an old photograph of Aliide with her sister, Zara’s grandmother, who was deported to Russia in 1949. On being shown the photograph, Aliide tells a practised lie: “I don’t have a sister”.
When that story collapses, something just as ugly emerges; Aliide tells Zara that her grandmother was a thief, a traitor and an enemy of the State. No longer obliged to parrot Soviet propaganda, Aliide still has so much invested in her version of the past that she cannot get out of the habit: “I was good, and so was my husband, Martin. He was a Party organiser. From an old Estonian Communist family, not like those opportunists that came later.”
The truth behind this façade is a story of jealousy, thwarted love and multiple betrayals, in which the paranoid political atmosphere of the 1940s came close to destroying Aliide. She survived, but it emerges that even she does not appreciate the full cost or extent to which she was betrayed by those closest to her. Her unrequited passion for her brother-in-law, an Estonian nationalist wanted by the Russians, has been the driving force of her life; it is also the cause of the terrible suffering endured in Estonia and Russia by Zara’s grandmother and mother, creating the conditions that lead to her own exploitation by Russian gangsters.
This is a heavy responsibility for a single character to bear and it sometimes feels as though Oksanen’s imagination cannot quite face the consequences, leaving key moments in the relationship between Aliide and Zara undescribed. The novel’s short, intense scenes hint at its origins in the theatre, and a startling series of revelations — some of them contained in secret- police files that appear near the end — veers occasionally towards melodrama.
That said, it is clear that Oksanen’s chief characters have gone far beyond guilt and shame, leaving behind troubling questions about the long-term impact of occupation, torture and deliberate cruelty. This is not a book about redemption and after such a long silence it may be that the history of the period, during which the Nazis were driven out of the Baltic states and the Communists instituted a savage purge of collaborators, requires frank and unsentimental treatment.
Purge is a flawed, brilliant piece of work that does not easily relinquish its grip on the reader’s imagination.
Purge, by Sofi Oksanen, trans Lola Rogers (Atlantic, £12.99; 400pp)