Rape review goes for tea and sympathy

An ingenious and bizarre tale of a woman-hating murderer in snowy Oslo tops the list of new releases in crime fiction

Stalked by a creepy gym teacher, Sarah struggles to cope with her feelings and the realisation that the two events may be connected. Casey has created a flawedbut like-able heroine and a tremendous sense of suspense that continues until the final page.

The Janus Stone (Quercus £12.99) marks a second outing for Elly Griffiths’s amateur detective, forensic archeologist Ruth Galloway. A former children’s home is being demolished in Norwich to make way for flats when a child’s skeleton is discovered in the foundations. The Catholic priest who used to run the home confirms that two children went missing many years ago, and Galloway is called in to establish the age of the bones. This is a promising series with clever plots and beguiling characters.

Frank Tallis’s Deadly Communion (Century £12.99) takes his psychoanalyst protagonist Dr Max Liebermann deep into the mind of a murderer. Someone is killing young women in fin-de-siecle Vienna, where Liebermann is fascinated by Freud’s theories. Our hero suspects that the motivation for the murders lies in childhood trauma, and employs Freud’s ideas about the unconscious to find a strikingly modern killer.

Great expectations for many, hard times for the old

A “death tax” sounds shocking: a cruel imposition on bereaved families who have enough to think about without having to hand over thousands of pounds to an unfeeling government. The phrase resurfaced last week, a month after the Tories’ controversial poster, and Tory-supporting editors know that it strikes middle-class voters where it hurts: in their fantasy about every Briton’s right to a substantial, property-based inheritance.

Condemning the house-price bubble which contributed to the dire state of the British economy is one thing. Asking the public to give up even a modest proportion of the wealth accumulated by their parents is another. There is something inherently ridiculous about the way in which rising property values hold out the prospect of a substantial windfall to relatives who’ve contributed nothing to it themselves. Many middle-class people who already own their own homes are looking forward to an inheritance of several hundred thousand pounds – the first £325,000 is tax-free – when a surviving parent dies.

It’s almost as if the money is already theirs and the idea that 10 per cent, say, should be paid as a levy to fund social care for the elderly causes spluttering outrage in some quarters. The Conservative Party regards the proposal as such an assault on inalienable property rights that it is refusing even to talk to government ministers while any form of compulsory levy is on the agenda. Yet it’s hard to see how its own really rather feeble plan for a voluntary insurance scheme could possibly fill the £6bn black hole caused by the physical needs of an ever-larger ageing population. No one wants their parents or grandparents to suffer, but they’d rather the state paid for social care; elderly people are entitled to it, surely, after paying income tax and national insurance throughout their working lives?

The truth is that increased longevity has created financial demands on the state which it did not foresee and cannot cope with. In 1889, when Bismarck introduced the first social insurance scheme, the retirement age was set at 70. During the previous decade, life expectancy at birth had been 35.6 years for German men and 38.4 for women; some of that is accounted for by high infant mortality, but by the first decade of the 21st century it had increased to 75.9 years for men and 81.5 for women. In this country, the retirement age is set to rise gradually for both sexes, but it’s still on the low side for healthy people, leaving them dependent on pensions or state benefits for two or three decades while their chief, and not easily realised, asset is property. (And not everyone wants to give up work completely in their sixties, which means that the current system suits no one.)

It’s a mess, no matter how much the Tories pretend there are less drastic solutions. Labour hasn’t suddenly reverted to it socialist roots under the current secretary of State for Health, Andy Burnham, but ministers are trying to come up with a fair scheme that removes some of the worst anxieties of old age, such as the fear of losing your home.

Almost 50,000 elderly people in England and Wales have already had to sell their homes to pay for residential care. “Don’t vote for Labour’s new death tax,” the Tories warned last month. A less emotive description of the proposal is a deferred insurance payment guaranteeing social care for all who need it. It also means challenging middle-class dreams of inherited wealth. Does any party have the guts to do that with a general election looming?

The male-female divide gets worse as you grow older

The Independent, Thursday 11 March 2009

New research suggests men can expect a longer sex life than women

Wouldn’t you know it? Just as the popular press is getting up to speed with the idea that older women enjoy sex – a notion so scary that some have been dubbed “cougars” – a new piece of research suggests that men can expect a longer and more satisfying sex life than women.

You can relax, guys: according to the online BMJ, studies in the US show at least twice as many men as women in the 75-85 age group are still sexually active. And they’re said to be enjoying it more.

“Sexual activity, good quality sex life, and interest in sex were higher for men than for women and this gender gap widened with age”, the researchers conclude. Now there’s a surprise: a woman who has reached her late 70s or early 80s would have grown up before the sexual revolution and the Pill, both of which drastically changed women’s expectations about sex. There are always exceptions, but most of the pre-Second World War generation became wives and mothers at a time when women lacked a language totalk about what they liked and didn’t like in bed. Maybe some read The Hite Report and caught up, but my guess is that lots of them didn’t.

Then the baby boomers came along and set about deconstructing not just sexual mores but expectations about behaviour at every stage in their lives; the idea that people are elderly in their 60s or early 70s no longer holds, which is why I’m not sure that these studies tell us much about the sexual prospects of people who are currently a lot younger.

Take a high-profile couple like France’s President Sarkozy and his glamorous wife Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, for instance: according to the research, Ms Bruni-Sarkozy at 42 has fewer years of active sex life ahead of her than a man of the same age. By the time she reaches 55 (her husband’s current age) the gap will be around four years; the President can expect to go on having sex until he is 70 whereas his female peers face a sexual drought at the age of 66.

As it happens, rumours sweeping Paris this week suggest that the marriage of this sexually-adventurous couple is in trouble: Ms Bruni-Sarkozy is said to have found herself a younger man, a 37-year-old musician, while her husband’s new love interest is supposedly a40-year-old female minister in his own Government.

Why should she? Unlike one shame-faced British footballer after another, she has never pretended to value monogamy; she belongs to a generation which seized women’s new-found sexual confidence with both hands, at a time when it hadn’t yet become fashionable to complain endlessly about young women looking too sexy. Indeed she should be cheered by another finding from the two studies reported in the BMJ, which is about the impact of good health on older people of both sexes. “Men and women reporting very good or excellent health were more likely to be sexually active compared with their peers in poor or fair health”, the researchers found.

At one level, it’s a statement of the obvious. Obesity, lack of exercise and poor diet age the body prematurely, predisposing it to cardiovascular disease which damages sexual capacity. Such physical problems affect men more than women, yet it’s the latter who are assumed to become less interested in sex as they get older, leading to a dearth of representations of sexually confident older women.

Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin play for laughs in It’s Complicated, Nancy Meyers’s film about a divorced older couple having a fling, but there’s a striking asymmetry between Baldwin’s impish self-mockery and Streep’s shyness in revealing her 60-year-old body.

In any case, men can always use Viagra, and the fact that traditionally they choose younger partners works to their advantage. Many women in their 70s and 80s have been widowed, which means that sex is simply no longer an option. You can mock Madonna (51) for her punishing exercise regime and younger boyfriends, but she may be the smart one after all.

Conversation with Dominque Manotti

Dominique is one of the very best crime novelists in France. On March 17 I’ll be discussing the political novel with her at the French Institute In London, details below:

les dialogues du centenaire: Dominique Manotti and Joan Smith on the Political novel

 Wednesday 17 March

7.30pm |£5, conc. £3 | in English

French Institute , 17 Queensberry Place, London SW7 2DT

Tickets: call 0207 073 1350 or go to www.institut-francais.org.uk

The spurious morality that turns Venables into a victim

The paper had already painted a provocative picture of the convicted child-killer stuffing himself with burgers and chips at taxpayers’ expense, treated like a celebrity at a prison it wasn’t allowed to name. Rather, I suspect, 27-year-old Venables is being held in isolation for his own protection, which is perfectly reasonable in light of the rage that is being whipped up against him. I don’t want to live in a country where prisoners are starved or beaten to death, as under regimes without respect for the rule of law.

Nor am I impressed by synthetic rage at the fact that Venables will need to be given another new identity because his cover has been blown. When editors put such stories on their front pages day after day, they know that the name in question is likely to circulate on the internet, even though they are legally constrained from publishing it themselves. Spurious moral arguments are used to justify creating an ugly atmosphere in which vigilante attacks are more likely.

The murder of James Bulger in 1993 was a ghastly crime. That his killers were only 10 prompted understandable revulsion, though it also suggested that they were young enough to be rehabilitated. Venables and his co-accused, Robert Thompson, lacked empathy with their victim, but there were reasons to hope that sustained intervention might turn them into decent adults with an understanding of the enormity of what they had done. This is a very different case from the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, who is arguing that he should be given a release date. On at least 22 occasions, Sutcliffe lacked the moral sense which would have prevented him from launching pre-meditated attacks on women, placing him in the category of offenders too dangerous ever to be released.

A civilised society has to make such distinctions; the popular press chooses not to. The new identities for notorious offenders who have completed their sentences provide its reporters with an irresistible challenge. They are as eager to expose the identities of offenders who have been successfully rehabilitated – the child-killer Mary Bell was hounded as an adult, even though she had not committed any further offence – as they are in cases where rehabilitation has failed. Venables served his sentence, was released in 2001 and has now behaved in a manner which suggests he poses a risk to the public. There may be a question about whether he was monitored closely enough, but that will emerge when the case is dealt with by the parole board and the courts.

The “justice for James” campaign assumes that there is a single course of action that would make victims’ relatives feel better, if only unfeeling officials did not stand in the way. In societies which use the death penalty, bereaved families are encouraged to believe that an execution will provide closure, only to discover afterwards that they feel their loss as keenly as ever. The Sun’s campaign may be popular with some readers but it’s about retribution, not justice.

The State of Feminism

Literary Review, March 2010

Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism
By Natasha Walter (Virago Press 288pp £12.99)
The Equality Illusion: The Truth About Women & Men Today
By Kat Banyard (Faber & Faber 304pp £12.99)

Publishers have a big problem with feminism. Editors tend to subscribe to the notion that feminists are dreary and not to be bothered with, but every now and then a feminist book is a spectacular (and enviable) success. People are still reading The Second Sex – even my local Waterstone’s, which does its best to disguise the fact that it sells any books at all, has a copy on its shelves – and The Female Eunuch remains one of the most famous publications of the twentieth century. Publishers have an uneasy feeling that they might be missing something, and a key text in this state of affairs is The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf.

Wolf sidestepped the fierce intellectualism of Simone de Beauvoir, Germaine Greer and Kate Millett, offering in its place a mass of statistics and a species of autobiographical writing that editors and readers turned out to love. Wolf’s genius (in marketing terms, obviously) was to combine feminism with an emerging genre, the misery memoir; she wrote furiously about her adolescent anorexia, while her appearance was an antidote to media calumnies against feminists. Wolf was no Andrea Dworkin, which was good from an editor’s point of view but not so good if you like your feminism bold, controversial and uncompromising. I didn’t always agree with Dworkin, but she was an original thinker and unafraid of giving offence. She became a byword for scary feminism, and she certainly wasn’t lionised like Wolf or her ladylike English successor, Natasha Walter.

In the late 1990s, Walter published a book called The New Feminism, which appeared to go out of its way not to offend anyone. Walter set out to save feminism from its most strident and dishonest critics, assuring young women that it was all right to wear nail polish; this was a version of feminist history in which stylish thinkers and activists like Shere Hite, Caroline Coon and Gloria Steinem had no place. Walter was averse to discussions of sexuality, apparently unaware of the long-established tension between a politics of sexual freedom and the faux-liberation proposed by the commercial sex industry. (I can’t imagine why anyone is surprised when Hugh Hefner, founder of the Playboy empire, presents himself as a feminist.) Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon and others understood decades ago that pornography and prostitution took what they wanted from feminism, shamelessly appropriating its language to defend practices which were degrading to women; the problem for many of us was maintaining our right to pleasure amid the constraining demands of puritans on the one hand and commercial pornographers on the other.

For Walter in 1998, however, all this stuff about female sexuality was out of date: it was time for ‘the new feminism’ to get on with unpicking ‘the tight link that feminism in the Seventies made between our personal and political lives’. This was not so much reforming feminism as ditching a great deal of it, and it’s hard to imagine a more egregious intellectual error. It’s to Walter’s credit that she admits as much in Living Dolls: ‘I believed that we only had to put in place the conditions for equality for the remnants of old-fashioned sexism in our culture to wither away. I am ready to admit that I was entirely wrong.’ Walter’s new book goes back to territory she originally dismissed, examining the impact on self-image of sexist assumptions from the wider culture and a thriving commercial sex industry. Her thesis is that the industry has become more mainstream, expanding to include men’s magazines, lap-dancing clubs, prostitution memoirs and pornography: ‘The messages and values of this revitalised sex industry have reached deep into the hearts of many young men and women.’

This is how Walter writes, sentimental about victims and unimaginative when it comes to solutions. She is still the same old inoffensive feminist at heart. But she misses what’s really changed in the last thirty or forty years: the industry has become much more international, discerning huge commercial opportunities in the mass movements of people in response to wars and poverty. Not long ago, a Moldovan delegate stunned colleagues at the Council of Europe when she claimed that whole villages in her country had next to no young women left because they’d been absorbed into the west European sex industry. This phenomenon, sex slavery in effect, is barely mentioned in Walter’s book and I wonder if that’s because it undermines one of her key arguments. It’s true that there’s increasing demand for paid-for sex in the UK, as she states, but the fact that vulnerable foreign women are being imported to meet it suggests that British women are not so easily seduced by the industry’s propaganda. The industry has also suffered some major setbacks: Walter mentions OBJECT, which has argued for tougher licensing laws to prevent lap-dancing clubs opening in residential areas, but there have been many other successful campaigns against the sex industry. MPs, journalists and the POPPY Project (which supports women who have been trafficked for prostitution) persuaded the Government to ratify a key Council of Europe convention treating trafficked people as victims of crime; and there has been a significant change in the law, which means it will soon be a criminal offence to pay for sex with anyone subject to ‘force, threats … or any other form of coercion’.

Kat Banyard, author of The Equality Illusion, is involved with OBJECT and her book is tougher in tone than Living Dolls while being addressed primarily to younger women. My problem with both books is that they’re journalistic – Walter is forever telling her readers that she talked to someone over coffee, while Banyard’s book is tiresomely structured around timed moments in a single day – and they present a picture of the modern world which seems to me unduly pessimistic. This may be the fault of their publishers, who have their own problems with feminism (Faber’s press release for Banyard’s book says it’s considered ‘irrelevant, or old-fashioned, or even embarrassing’), but it remains a fact that Western women’s lives have improved immeasurably since the Second World War. Sexism never actually went away, but the balance sheet of gains and setbacks is more subtle than either of these books suggests.

The food revolution we still await

The Independent, Tuesday 2 March 2010

For all that Rose Gray did, much of what people eat is pre-cooked rubbish

But the fact remains that most people in this country are overweight or obese, much of what they eat is pre-cooked rubbish, and Tesco has had more influence on their eating habits than the River Café.

I’m sorry about this, loathing Tesco as I do, and I wish the general public paid more attention to the good guys of the food business. But the River Café is expensive and cheap food is regarded as a human right these days; burger chains compete to advertise price cuts on bus shelters as though nothing else actually matters. Jamie Oliver, who once worked at the River Cafe, has hectored and cajoled the inhabitants of South Yorkshire without managing to achieve a lasting change in their eating habits. Fried chicken, meat pies and curries dripping with clarified butter still reign supreme.

This unhealthy approach to eating has had dreadful effects on the way animals are reared, and Oliver is one of several well-known chefs who have campaigned for more humane treatment of farm animals.

For middle-class foodies, the two arguments naturally go together: they want to eat high-quality meat which has been reared in conditions that cause the least possible suffering to animals. Gray and Rogers have been credited with renewed interest in traditional cuts of meat such as lamb shanks which had disappeared from supermarket shelves, only to reappear at farmers’ markets.

Now a new book, Eating Animals, by the American author Jonathan Safran Foer, is creating shock waves among some meat-eaters. Safran Foer says he didn’t explicitly set out to turn his readers into vegetarians but he seems almost as dismayed by organic farming as he is by factory farming methods. His challenge to the philosophical arguments for eating meat is receiving a great deal of attention, even though sceptical readers wonder why he was prompted to write the book by the prospect of becoming a father. There is no ethical distinction between eating animals yourself and feeding them to someone else, and I’m always suspicious of anyone who experiences such epiphanic moments with parenthood.

I wish people would eat less meat, for all sorts of reasons, but what’s needed here is less sentimentality and more politics. The public has become disconnected from what it eats, not just the fact that meat is the flesh of dead animals but the whole notion of what food is and where it comes from. Children need to be taught about food preparation and cooking at school, from an early age. And that’s a more realistic project to pursue than a mass conversion to vegetarianism.

Men Who Love Women….In Their Own Words

Monday 1 March 2010

In his new memoir, Christopher Hitchens is contemptuous of the notion that his friend Martin Amis is a misogynist. How could he be? The novelist adores ‘ladies’, even the ones he hasn’t slept with! According to Hitchens, Amis even has the ‘rare gift’ of being able to find something attractive in ‘almost any woman’.

What about Hitchens himself? He and Amis have enjoyed an ‘inexhaustible conversation’ about ‘womanhood in all its forms and varieties and permutations’. It wasn’t just locker-room talk, you understand, although they fantasised about ‘the possibility of enjoying two young ladies at the same time’. They also visited a brothel in New York together – Amis was doing research for a novel and had cleared the ‘hand-job’ in advance with his then wife – but Hitchens was saved from going through with the act when the ‘avaricious bitch’ asked for too much money.

Is there no end to the esteem which these old friends feel for the opposite sex? A mutual friend once offered the ‘appalling yet unforgettable idea that there is a design flaw in the female form, and that the breasts and the buttocks really ought to be on the same side’. Amis took it one stage further, discussing which side it ought be but failing, again according to Hitchens, to come up with a definitive answer: ‘One doesn’t necessarily want to see both features walking towards one, for example, but then again it might be dispiriting to see them simultaneously marching away’.

Personally, I have no desire to rearrange the male genitalia, but I’d be happy to see both these examples marching smartly in the opposite direction.

The march from minority to mainstream

Independent on Sunday, 28 February 2010

Forty years ago this weekend, the first Women’s Lib conference called for radical changes that transformed the prospects for girls

Four decades ago, when the first women’s liberation conference was staged in Oxford, I was at school in Hampshire. I knew nothing about the momentous meeting at Ruskin College but I felt frustrated at every turn, running up against bizarre assumptions based solely on the fact that I was a girl. I didn’t know there was a women’s liberation movement in the UK, but I was already a feminist.

At my all-girls state school, I wasn’t allowed to study economics; that was taught at the boys’ grammar school on the other side of town. When it came to choosing A levels, I was advised to take anatomy, physiology and hygiene so I could become a nurse and resume my career after having children. To a girl who had recently mortified her mother by publicly announcing that ‘marriage is a patriarchal institution and I want nothing to do with it’, this was a singularly useless piece of advice.

What made me even more angry was the way one or two girls disappeared from the school roll after the holidays, amid rumours that they had ‘got into trouble’. Clearly, as I tried to tell the headmistress, there was an urgent need for sex education at the school; she dismissed my call, saying the subject was covered in biology lessons. I tracked down one of these ‘disappeared’ girls and found her living in a council house with her equally youthful husband and a tiny baby. Her education had been abandoned.

Shame was a huge issue for girls. Working in Manchester as young journalist, I interviewed a woman who had been confined in a mental institution for 30 years because she had had an ‘illegitimate’ baby. I thanked the gods I didn’t believe in that abortion had been legalised and the contraceptive pill was available, but other people didn’t share my thinking. Turning up at a family planning clinic to get a prescription for the pill, I was surprised to be addressed as ‘Mrs’ and explained that I wasn’t married. ‘We call everyone Mrs to avoid embarrassment’, an angry nurse told me. Not long afterwards, I discovered how difficult it was to get a mortgage as a single woman when you didn’t have a man to stand as guarantor.

Throughout these battles, I couldn’t understand why it should be such a struggle to be treated like any other human being: like men is what I really meant. And when I began reading the great feminists texts, it was a joy to encounter the fierce intellectualism of writers – Kate Millett, Simone de Beauvoir, Germaine Greer, Susan Brownmiller, Andrea Dworkin – who thought about these things in pretty much the same way I did.

Now the culture I live in has changed out of all recognition and feminist ideas have become mainstream: the right to equal pay for equal work, paid maternity leave, women keeping their surnames on marriage, unconditional access to mortgages and bank accounts, not having to tolerate sexual harassment, girls studying the same curriculum as boys (and outstripping them in some subjects), recognition that not all women want to have children. I’m not arguing that we’ve achieved all these things but there have been huge changes for the better in women’s lives.

Of course I want to see more women in Parliament and in boardrooms. And I’m glad that where the state has failed, notably in the area of equal pay, lawyers have begun winning settlements for women in the public sector who have been underpaid for decades. Quite right too: they’ve been let down by employers, trades unions and politicians who still seem to think that ‘worker’ is a masculine noun. But that doesn’t alter the fact that there’s never been a better time to be a woman in Europe. That isn’t the case for women in developing countries – I have just returned from Sierra Leone, where most girls are subjected to FGM and most adults are unable to read – and we need to do our bit to ensure that they get rights we take for granted.

All political movements change and develop. In the Nineties, the Spice Girls embodied a populist version of feminism – ‘girl power’ – which didn’t appeal to me but some young women found empowering. At around the same time, Diana, Princess of Wales, pioneered a species of victim feminism which encouraged women to feel sorry for themselves. Now a new generation of feminist writers is arguing that equality is an illusion and suggesting that young women’s lives are being ruined by the commercial sex industry. The authors are too young to remember what this country was like half a century ago, and don’t seem to know about the tumultuous debates around sexuality which began in the Seventies. 

Feminists have struggled for decades to make space between puritans on the one hand and pimps and pornographers on the other. In the late Seventies, I covered the Yorkshire Ripper murders and couldn’t avoid thinking about sexual violence while I was learning about sexual pleasure in my own life. In the first decade of the 21^st century, I’m proud to have been involved in successful campaigns to establish legal rights for trafficked women and to criminalise demand for paid sex in certain circumstances. But I don’t believe that young women are having their lives ruined by the existence of pole-dancing clubs, unless they have the misfortune to work in them.

I know many young women who travel fearlessly – last year my god-daughter spent her university vacation in Ghana – and are more inclined to join Amnesty International than aspire to be ‘glamour’ models. Feminism is an unfinished revolution, but it’s given the next generation opportunities we could only dream about in 1970.

Sierra Leone: a new chapter of hope in the wake of war

The Times, Saturday 27 February 2010

Books donated by Times readers are giving children in this troubled country faith in a better future

The children at Bread of Life school in the centre of Waterloo, Sierra Leone, were not expecting visitors. Almost 50 ten-year-olds were crammed into a single sweltering room, each of them wearing the school’s smart green uniform, and there was a moment’s confusion while they decided how to react. Then they burst into song: “We love our school,” they sang and clapped with spontaneous enthusiasm. Soon they were out of their desks and crowding round, wanting to show us their books — almost all of them donated by Times readers in this country.

It was an extraordinary moment. Fifteen months ago, after my first trip to Sierra Leone, I wrote about the schools in the town of Waterloo, 15km from the capital, Freetown. I invited Times readers to collect children’s books, hoping to send 50,000 to Sierra Leone, but the response exceeded all expectations. Up and down the UK, individuals and schools organised collections, producing an astonishing 300,000 books for shipping to Freetown. More than 100,000 of those books have already been distributed in Waterloo and nearby towns; they vary from children’s favourites to textbooks and hundreds of copies of the Harry Potter books generously donated by J. K. Rowling’s British publisher, Bloomsbury.

At Bread of Life the boys proudly showed me a book about the Romans, while one of the girls offered to read aloud a story by Beatrix Potter.

She was a confident reader and it was clear that the books delivered to the school from the UK had already made a big impact. Shortly afterwards Bread of Life’s headmaster, the Rev John Kamara, took me into his office where the books — precious objects in a country where libraries and schools were deliberately destroyed during the civil war — are kept safe between lessons.

Kamara is a handsome, quietly spoken man whose dedication to his pupils is obvious. Now 54, he has been teaching since he finished his training more than 30 years ago. “We distribute the books every day,” he told me. “The children love them. It makes a huge difference — it makes them eager to come to school.”

The school has 400 pupils, aged 3-17. When I asked Kamara how many books he had received, he told me that he had been offered 2,500 but had accepted only 1,500 because he wanted to share with other schools. It was a selfless gesture, for Bread of Life remains short of resources. “We especially need dictionaries for the children and the teachers, and textbooks for the older children,” the headmaster said.

When I first talked to teachers in Waterloo in 2008, 24 schools were represented at the meeting. As word of the book collection spread, more head teachers got in touch; now 70 schools have received books or are about to receive them.

The scheme has created a spirit of optimism in a country of 5.8 million that was torn apart for more than a decade by a brutal civil war that ended in 2002. Last year Sierra Leone was third from the bottom of the UN development index. Waterloo is the gateway to the Freetown peninsula. It was occupied for long periods by the main rebel group, Foday Sankoh’s Revolutionary United Front, which became notorious for grotesque human rights abuses: rape, murder, the forced recruitment of 30,000 child soldiers who were given hard drugs to encourage them to kill, and the practice of amputating hands and feet to terrorise civilians.

What happened to Sierra Leone during and after the conflict leaves a bitter taste for an older generation who remember when Freetown was known as the Athens of West Africa. Now adult literacy rates have fallen to just under 40 per cent; among women it is even lower, with maybe a fifth of the female population able to read.

Ten days ago, when I met a group of 20 women from Waterloo and nearby villages, I got a startling insight into how widespread illiteracy is in the adult female population. Several of the women are “chairladies” of local women’s associations and my interpreter — the formidable Julia Tyler, who is a teacher — asked for a show of hands so that I could see how many of the women in the room were literate. Only two raised their hands. Seven had been to school but had left between the ages of 9 and 11 and never completed their education. “My parents refused to take me to school because they did not think a girl child’s education was important,” one of the women told me. “It is an ache to me because there are so many things I can’t do, such as signing my name in a bank.”

All the women have children and some have grandchildren. Every child is in school and the women shouted out a list of careers they would like for their kids: engineers, journalists, librarians and hotel managers. I asked whether the illiterate women would like to learn to read or whether they feel it’s too late. Even the oldest, 65-year-old Kaday Bundu, wanted to attend classes.

Illiteracy inflicts huge damage on women’s health. Healthcare is patchy in Sierra Leone, HIV is rife and most women have undergone a form of genital mutilation. Giving birth is risky — one woman in eight dies in childbirth.

The safe-sex message is everywhere, sometimes incongruously to European eyes. “A force for good uses condoms” a billboard declares outside Waterloo police station, illustrated by a picture of a cop in riot gear. But most women cannot read it or find their way to pavement organisations that provide free condoms and advice about resisting domestic violence.

Five years ago Claire Curtis-Thomas, the Labour MP, visited Waterloo. When she asked local people what they most needed, they asked for a library. Curtis-Thomas is an engineer and set up an NGO, Construction & Development Partnership, to build the library and train young people.

Eight days ago three Sierra Leonean government ministers, including the Education Minister, Dr Minkailu Bah, attended a ceremony to mark the beginning of construction. The most moving moment came when a girl of 8 or 9 delivered a word- perfect speech about the importance of education for the future of Sierra Leone.

In a couple of years’ time Waterloo will have the biggest library in West Africa. In the meantime the project to build literacy continues, with a new target of collecting and sending a million books. This time we are asking for school textbooks and medical books as well as storybooks, and for a small donation (20p per book) towards the cost of shipping them to Sierra Leone.

“We understand the moral value of education,” John Kamara said. “The children love books so much they want to take them home to show their families.”

He is proud that his former pupils, from a time before Sierra Leone was ravaged by civil war, include a current Member of Parliament and several army officers. Like other teachers in Sierra Leone, he is ready to produce the new generation of professionals that the country needs to rebuild itself — but he can’t do it without your help.

If you would like to collect books for Sierra Leone or raise funds to pay for shipping, please visit the Construction & Development Partnership website: codep.co.uk. See a slideshow of images from Joan Smith’s visit to Waterloo at timesonline.co.uk/books

 Sierra Leone (c) Joan Smith, February 2010

Return to Sierra Leone

Sunday 21 February 2010

I’m writing by an open window in Lungi airport, across the bay from Freetown, trying to get some air on a hot, damp afternoon. I’m flying out two days before Tony Blair flies in and wondering how he will make the tortuous journey into town. Getting into Freetown from Lungi presents a range of options, none of them very attractive: helicopter, usually Russian or Ukrainian; hovercraft (best option, rarely in service in my experience); decommissioned Greek-island ferry. I’ve got here using the latter, which has emergency signs in Greek, not much in the way of lifeboats and is always overloaded. The first-class lounge (entry costs about 85p) is sweltering, with loud music constantly changing between rap and pop, often halfway through a track. I don’t know why Lungi was built on the north side of the third largest natural harbour in the world but it adds several hours’ uncomfortable travelling to the six-hour plane journey from London. Seeing people arrive at Lungi for the first time, I wonder if they realise quite how long it’s going to take them to get to their destination.

These days, Sierra Leone is third from the bottom of the UN development index, an improvement on when I was here 18 months ago. Then it was bottom, which seemed to be a source of perverse pride. ‘This is the poorest country in the world’, people said to me quite spontaneously on that occasion. Things have changed a bit since then: new buildings going up in Freetown, some of them smart, modern and built to European standards (and with European money, I guess), but the overcrowding is as bad as ever. The city was flooded with refugees from the provinces during the civil war and many of them never went home; they sleep in shifts in shelters (hardly houses) conctructed from wood, corrugated iron and debris. I’ve been looking for signs of economic activity, something more productive than hawking SIM cards, but they are still few and far between. People say the electricity supply has improved in Freetown – it barely exists in the provinces – though I was actually more aware of power outages on this trip than the last.

What the city has in abundance is billboards, announcing ‘I’m living positively with HIV’ or advertising condoms or evangelical churches. God is everywhere in Sierra Leone, in churches and mosques and slogans painted on buildings and minibuses. Last time, in the main Government buildings, I even saw offices where the occupants had pinned notices to the door declaring that ‘A friend of Jesus works here’. There are also thousands of messages urging pregnant women to get tested for HIV, to send their daughters to school and not to tolerate domestic violence. ‘Who will help her if YOU don’t?’ asks a poster which shows a man about to strike his wife or girlfriend with a stave. A popular poster outside police stations and army barracks has a man in full riot gear next to the startling legend: ‘A force for good uses condoms’.

I’m not sure about the origin of this exhortatory culture, whether it always existed in Sierra Leone or is a consequence of the huge NGO presence in Freetown. After a while it starts to feel bossy – infantilising might be a better word – and you begin filtering it out until a new slogan catches your eyes: ‘Love your neighbour, but not while driving’. What is that directed at? It’s coming up to ten years since Robin Cook sent British forces to Freetown, an intervention which undoubtedly turned the tide in the civil war; last time I was here, I spoke to people who saw the troops arriving and the rebels jumping in their lorries to flee. A while afterwards, at a Foreign Office party, the then British High Commissioner told me how he got a call from British soldiers to say they were in a street in Freetown and could see the rebel leader, Foday Sankoh, being dragged by a lynch mob. He told them to intervene and got a second call, confirming that they’d arrested one of the most egregious war criminals in West Africa. Hasty discussions followed and Sankoh was incarcerated in a disused prison near Lungi airport, close to where I’m sitting, to await his trial for crimes against humanity. Sadly he had a stroke and died before he could be put on trial, denying Sierra Leoneans a chance to see him called to account for thousands of rapes, murders and amputations.

I’ve seen fewer amputees on this trip and many of the children I met in schools in the town of Waterloo, 15 kms from Freetown, were born around the time the war ended in 2002. Their parents may have been emotionally scarred by it – it’s hard to see how they could avoid it – but a generation is growing up which knows little of notorious paramilitary commanders like Sankoh and Mosquito. Eighteen months ago, when I first came to Sierra Leone, the schools in Waterloo had few books or none at all; now, thanks to an appeal I launched in The Times on my return, around 300,000 children’s books have been shipped to the country. I hope you’ll be able to read my report from Sierra Leone in the paper on Saturday 27 February.

Because we hear so much about the civil war, it’s easy to forget that Sierra Leone has some of the finest beaches in the world. No 2 beach is said to be the best in Freetown and I once swam off Lumley, finding myself tumbled head over heels by warm Atlantic rollers. The country also has astonishing natural resources, gold and bauxite as well as diamonds, and the Government has recently passed a law which forces mining companies to pay a levy of 11 or 12 per cent instead of the half per cent previous administrations asked for. Tony Blair (who went to school for two terms in Freetown while his father taught at a highly-regarded college) is keen to promote tourism but it seems to me that the infrastructure problems are daunting. Sierra Leone is a small country, only 5.8m people, which means that post-war reconstruction should be achievable. Aid money has certainly poured in – I think it’s the largest per capita recipient of British aid – but people worry about aid dependency and (as seems likely) budget cuts after the UK general election.

I’m not sure why I feel more anxious about Sierra Leone after this trip than I did the first time I came here. Maybe it’s because I’ve seen more and gone beyond first impressions, but I’m puzzled that the country hasn’t developed more economically since the war. It used to be the Athens of West Africa, as well as the UK’s chief Atlantic port, and many British people retain tremendous affection for it. I’m one of them, not least because my father was stationed there during the Second World War and spoke about it fondly during my childhood. But as I wait for my flight to London, I’m wondering how much will have changed for the better next time I return to Sierra Leone.

Islam, art, creativity – and fashion

Tuesday 16 February 2010

I often sit on platforms where I’m the only woman, which is ironic when I’m there to talk about equality and human rights. This morning, I arrived at a conference at SOAS in London to discover I was on a panel consisting of half a dozen women and one man. And what amazing women they were: the BBC’s Razia Iqbal, Saira Khan from The Apprentice, Tahmena Bokhari who is both a professor and Mrs Pakistan World 2010, and the wonderful Ayesha Tamy Haq, a human rights lawyer who organised the very first Pakistan Fashion Week.

We were brought together by my Independent colleague Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who chairs British Muslims for Secular Democracy, and we soon discovered how much we had in common. Razia and I talked about the liberating role books and education played in our younger lives, and several of us have worked in zones devastated by conflict and natural disasters; we were enthralled to hear Ayesha describe how she invited war correspondents to her fashion shows in Karachi when Western fashion journalists got cold feet.

The conference directly addressed attempts by Islamists to close Muslim minds – to prevent adults and children having contact with art, culture and fashion. ‘We know that in certain Muslim homes, children are strongly discouraged from participating in drama, art and music’, the organisers declared. ’Fourteen hundred years of Islamic contributions to art, literature, and history have been pushed aside in favour of a hardline interpretation of religion that denies the legitimacy of any form of artistic expression’.

It was a vibrant, funny and moving conference which reminded me once again that human beings have more in common than separates us. Have a look at the organisation’s website, which can be found at www.bmsd.co.uk.

Millionaire dilettante wonders whether rationality is really such a good thing and calls for, er, harmony with grain and soul of nature

Thursday 4 February 2010

Breaking news: the Prince of Wales has announced that he doesn’t like the Enlightenment. ‘We cannot go on like this’, the Elvis Presley of contemporary philosophers lamented at a ‘conference’ at St James’s Palace in London, ‘just imagining that the principles of the Enlightenment still apply now. I don’t believe they do’.

I look forward to publication of peer-reviewed papers from this top-flight intellectual event. The Prince is a prime example of everything the Enlightenment rightly rejects: inequality, privilege, credulity and sloppy thinking. He’s never said anything of any note and he isn’t even bright enough to recognise the contradictions which characterise his extraordinarily privileged existence.

Voltaire and Descartes versus Charles Windsor? Bring it on. 

Birds of a feather?

Tuesday 2 February 2010

The BNP is facing legal action because its constitution discriminates against black and Asian people. Quite right too.

The Vatican is demanding exemptions in the Government’s Equality bill because it wants to continue discriminating against gay people. The Pope has called on the 35 Catholic bishops in England and Wales to fight with ‘missionary zeal’ for the ‘right’ not to employ people the church doesn’t like, even in secular posts. 

I do hope the Pope has scheduled a meeting with Nick Griffin when he comes to London later this year.

McQueen had a sinister view of women’s bodies

Independent on Sunday, 14 February 2010

Fashion isn’t usually a matter of life and death. People who work in fashion take it incredibly seriously, but you have to be a stylist or a fashion editor to care passionately about the cut of a pair of trousers. So I wouldn’t be surprised if many people were baffled last week when they heard fashion industry insiders responding to news of the death of the British designer, Alexander McQueen. Even making allowances for the fact that some of the interviewees knew him personally and were speaking while the shock of his death was still raw, they struggled for a language which would make sense to ordinary human beings; if you weren’t acquainted with McQueen’s work, you might come away with the idea that he put men in bottom-exposing “bumster” trousers – or that he was a wayward genius.

The word used over and over again was “edgy”. McQueen was a showman and fashion editors emerged from his collections stunned by the extravaganza; when you’re basically there to write about clothes, what are you to make of models tottering along the catwalk in ripped dresses, looking like blood-stained rape victims? It’s not cool to break ranks and ask what’s behind such supposedly “ludic” misogyny. Even when commentators talked last week about McQueen’s fascination with death, religion and violence, they did it in a disturbing way, as though such themes were simply expressions of his theatricality. Friends mentioned his mother’s very recent death – her funeral hadn’t taken place when McQueen hanged himself – but very few seemed willing to mention the subject of depression.

It’s a taboo subject in the fashion industry. Zandra Rhodes acknowledged an “undertone of depression” in McQueen’s last collection, but it’s more comfortable to talk about “edginess” than admit that aspects of someone’s work signal deep-seated unhappiness or clinical depression. The reaction to McQueen’s death reminded me of the suicide three years ago of his close friend and mentor Isabella Blow, whose eulogies offered a similar impression that the fashion industry is utterly at a loss when it collides with painful reality.

McQueen’s work was disturbing from the start. His 1992 graduation show (bought in its entirety by a wildly enthusiastic Blow) was entitled Jack the Ripper Stalking His Victims. Three years later, he defended the title of his Highland Rape collection as a reference to the Battle of Culloden, but his repeated use of images reflecting violence against women was shocking from a gay man.

Born in 1969, at a time when many of his contemporaries were consciously rejecting an older generation’s misogyny, he played with it in show after show. In 2001, he sent a model on to the catwalk in Paris representing a dying bull, her torso apparently pierced by two lances, while his autumn 2009 men’s collection featured Jack the Ripper types in leather butchers’ aprons. His final women’s collection used models wearing hats made of bin-liners and aluminium cans, and wearing make-up which gave them garish faces and huge clown-like lips. Rapturous fashion editors explained that his use of rubbish was an ironic commentary on the fashion industry, but avoided asking why McQueen associated women’s bodies with rape, murder and trash.

More men commit suicide than women, and the death of someone so young is an unnecessary tragedy. But I don’t think that the world of fashion is any more able to make sense of Alexander McQueen in death than in life. He provided spectacle after spectacle, and it was taken in by the show.

Maya by Alastair Campbell

When the novel opens, Steve is hiding out in a cabin on a lake, thousands of miles from home in Hammersmith. Just what has ­happened — whether we are talking about a tiff or cataclysmic events — gradually becomes apparent in a lengthy flashback. Steve’s wife Vanessa is expecting their first baby, but the most significant thing in his life is his old friend and the reflected glory he enjoys when he drops her name into conversations. This is unsettling enough, but soon Steve is interfering in Maya’s marriage to a ghastly television presenter. In no time, he has Dan under professional surveillance and the material that turns up — drugs, extramarital sex and leaking his wife’s movements to journalists — thrills Steve while presenting a dilemma. Not wanting to be the bearer of bad news, he manipulates Maya’s family into revealing Dan’s infidelity (and creates an unresolved plot problem involving an incriminating piece of evidence which Maya’s father improbably fails to spot).

When Maya demands a divorce from Dan, Steve is on hand to comfort her. Soon she’s in New York making a movie with Matt Damon — there are endless cameos in the novel of real people, including Stephen Fry, Bob Geldof and Bono — and having an affair with a French location director. Steve and Vanessa are invited to New York to provide cover for Maya’s affair with the very ­Gallic Bernard, and Steve instantly decides that the Frenchman isn’t good enough for her. He can’t resist interfering again, although by this time even the long-suffering Vanessa is getting a bit fed up.

The problem with Campbell’s novel (it’s his second, in case you missed the first) is that it has few likeable characters. This may be deliberate, given that his subject is the corroding effect of celebrity, but Maya’s ­solipsism makes her almost as unappealing as Steve. Campbell enjoys himself hugely, writing with relish about the fatuous nature of 24-hour rolling news, yet his own style is journalistic; it’s easy to read but bland, and he doesn’t do anything with the documentary-style scenes of news anchors exchanging banalities or the corrupt friendship at the heart of the novel.

Weirdly, when he knows so much about the inner workings of power, Campbell has chosen to write instead about the less compelling subject of fame. The mystery is why someone who spent years observing Tony Blair and George Bush at close quarters is interested in this bunch of nobodies. Oh, and if you’ve set out to write an excoriating exposé of celebrity culture, maybe it’s not such a smart idea to have a gushing endorsement from Piers Morgan on the cover.

Maya by Alastair Campbell
Hutchinson £18.99 pp416

Amnesty shouldn’t support men like Moazzam Begg

The Independent, Thursday 11 February 2010

One of the things I admire about the British section of Amnesty International is its commitment to opposing violence against women.

In the past, subjects such as domestic violence, rape and sex trafficking were not always regarded as an integral part of the human rights agenda, and Amnesty’s decision to highlight them was brave as well as controversial. I am delighted to have been asked to speak at and chair meetings for the human rights organisation, and sorry that I now have to join critics who accuse it of very poor judgement.

Amnesty’s mistake is simple and egregious, allowing its name to be associated with an individual who has publicly expressed admiration for an Islamist movement which denies women’s rights. It has compounded that error by its treatment of a dissenting member of staff; last weekend, Amnesty’s international secretariat suspended the head of its gender unit, Gita Sahgal, after she voiced concern about the British section’s links with a former detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Moazzam Begg. Since his release from Guantanamo, Begg has campaigned forcefully against it. He has written a book about his experiences, speaks fluently on TV and radio, and is a director of an organisation called Cageprisoners Ltd. Sahgal does not deny that Begg and other prisoners were treated dreadfully and she has consistently opposed “the illegal detention and torture of Muslim men at Guantanamo Bay and during the so-called War on Terror”.

What worries her is the assumption among some of her Amnesty colleagues that Begg is “not only a victim of human rights violations but a defender of human rights” (my italics). Sahgal raised the issue in two memos before her concerns became public at the weekend. But what she has identified is too important to be dismissed as an internal matter, namely an intellectual incoherence which isn’t confined to the higher echelons of a single human rights organisation.

The thinking goes like this: someone who has suffered terrible human rights abuses must necessarily be opposed to similar abuses against others. It’s a nice idea but history tells us it’s wrong; today’s prisoners of conscience may turn out on release to be doughty campaigners for human rights, but they might just as easily become tomorrow’s apologists for extremism.

Let’s return now to Begg. In 2001, he took his wife and children to live in Afghanistan, then under the control of the Taliban. Women scurried from place to place in burkas, risking a beating if a passing Talib spotted an inch of flesh, and could not even speak to a doctor except through a male relative; the horrors of the regime have been brilliantly described in the novel A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. In Begg’s own book, he describes his interrogation by the CIA who wanted to know why a young man from Birmingham was living in Afghanistan. “I wanted to live in an Islamic state – one that was free from the corruption and despotism of the rest of the Muslim world,” was his reply. When they expressed scepticism, he complained: “I knew you wouldn’t understand. The Taliban were better than anything Afghanistan has had in the past 25 years.”

Begg’s enthusiasm for the Taliban is shared by another British Muslim who went to see the regime for himself: “They were amazing people. People who loved Allah. They were soft, kind and humble to the Muslims, harsh against their enemies. This is how an Islamic state should be.”

That is the verdict of Omar Khyam, now serving life for his part in a plot to blow up the Bluewater shopping centre and the Ministry of Sound nightclub (chosen, don’t forget, because it was likely to be full of “slags” enjoying themselves). Khyam appears on the Cageprisoners website, which says it exists “solely to raise awareness of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and other detainees held as part of the War on Terror”. He is in illustrious company: the site also lists Abu Qatada – once described by a Spanish judge as Osama bin Laden’s spiritual ambassador to Europe – and the notorious preacher of hate, Abu Hamza.

Amnesty protests that “any suggestion that cooperation with any group or individuals has influenced our work on behalf of victims of religiously inspired abuses and violations is simply false”. But that isn’t the charge against the organisation. What worries its critics is that Amnesty’s name is being used to provide a platform, and legitimacy, for a cause inimical to its core values. Qatada, Hamza and Khyam are not prisoners of conscience. The Taliban aren’t a little bit misguided about women’s rights. Amnesty should consider its reputation – and keep its distance.

Consumer choice is the new corset

Katie Price has taken control of her life and is hailed as a role model, but she is no Simone de Beauvoir

Independent on Sunday, 7 February 2010

Once upon a time, little girls dreamed of marrying a prince and living happily ever. Now it seems they aspire to have breast implants, date a footballer or two, marry an Australian crooner, get divorced and marry a transvestite cage-fighter. Isn’t that what social commentators mean when they describe newly married Katie Price as a role model for younger women? And not just younger women: one of my relatives, who is in her sixties, was devastated when Price came to a nearby town on a book tour and she couldn’t get a ticket. “I love her,” she told me. “I don’t know why. I just love her.”

My relative regards Price, who married for the second time in a quickie ceremony in Las Vegas last week, as a woman who has transcended the boundaries of her upbringing. Price is undeniably brilliant at providing stories: in one of the best twists yet, her “surprise” (warning to readers: adjectives seldom retain their original in meaning for long in Priceworld) wedding to Alex Reid made headlines by being a “private” affair, unlike her previous wedding to Peter Andre. On that occasion, the tutelary deity was OK!, which reportedly bought the rights to the event for a sum in the region of £1.75m “Lucrative” is one of the few words in this convoluted tale that displays an adamantine resistance to alteration.

How do we know that last week’s wedding was private? Because Price said so on a TV show, of course. That didn’t stop pictures of the happy couple flashing round the world, along with reports that they’d celebrated the marriage by visiting pole-dancing clubs in Las Vegas.

Meanwhile, back in the UK, Price’s ex-husband Andre broke down on Sky TV when the presenter, Kay Burley, asked him how he’d feel if Reid wanted to adopt his two children with the former glamour model. Andre seems to be a nice if rather emotional chap and this possibility, which hadn’t actually been raised by any of the principals as far as I can tell, had him weeping buckets. Almost 4,000 people promptly joined a group on Facebook calling for Burley to be sacked, drawing yet another character into an already complex narrative of passion, rejection, sponsorship, “reality” TV and themed pink accessories.

Price is a phenomenon, described by Wikipedia as an “actress, author, writer, businesswoman, media personality, philanthropist, glamour model, producer, feature artist, songwriter and television personality”. And she’s only 31, for heaven’s sake, which makes Napoleon Bonaparte look a bit of a slouch; at a similar age, he had had no elective surgery and had barely launched his first coup d’état.

I might want to argue with some of those Wikipedia designations but the one I don’t question is “businesswoman”. Price has made millions out of a talent for giving the public what it wants; from being just another Page 3 girl, she has turned herself into a figure whose every move commands attention and even received a scolding from the UK’s most celebrated male feminist, the novelist Martin Amis. His sour remarks did no damage to Price, one of a handful of women whose astute business brains are often overlooked – Victoria Beckham and Elizabeth Hurley are other examples – but their success raises fascinating questions about contemporary feminism.

There is a school of thought that celebrates Price as a feminist icon, a woman who is doing something which has achieved almost sacramental status in modern culture: she makes choices. This magic formula is used to defend everything from pole dancing and cosmetic surgery to wearing the burqa; choice is so clearly a good thing that it can’t be questioned, even if the consequence is damage in one form or another.

The personal is no longer political, while justified scepticism about some of Freud’s work has banished the idea of the unconscious; people are insulted if you suggest they might be doing something for motives they don’t fully understand. Add to that a distortion of feminist ideas in popular culture, and it’s easy to see how Price has achieved a weird form of cultural domination: she has the body she wants, not just the one she was born with, and she deserves every bit of power and money she can get her hands on. She has more clothes than you’d find in a little girl’s dressing-up box, plus houses and ponies – a keen horsewoman, she has come up with her own line in riding gear – and she usually gets to keep them when a relationship ends. In the 21st century, that’s women’s liberation, surely?

It’s actually the triumph of consumerism, which has got mixed up in the minds of many young women with the notion of freedom. It’s just over six decades since Simone de Beauvoir considered women’s second-class status and came up with a brilliant formula: “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman”. Beauvoir wasn’t so much arguing that becoming a woman was hard work (thought it was), as suggesting that what women were taught to aim for was inauthentic. They had to suppress feelings and ambitions to concentrate on fulfilling male ideals of womanhood, and the result was the female eunuch that Germaine Greer would go on to write about.

Generations of women set about throwing age-old ideas out of the window, demanding the right to education and work outside the home, and ditching underwear and make-up. It was a thrilling experiment, and it became possible to play with notions of pleasure and femininity in a way denied to previous generations. Bras and lipstick came back – not for all women, of course – as writers like Gloria Steinem, Shere Hite and Nancy Friday showed how to navigate between patriarchal puritanism on the one hand and the commercial sex industry on the other.

So how did we get from 20th-century notions of equality to today’s pole-dancing glamour models and footballers’ wives? Price is their poster girl, and it would be easy to see her success as a riposte to old-fashioned (some would say outdated) notions of gender equality. But it’s vital not to confuse ubiquity and popularity, and the public response to her second appearance on the “reality” TV show I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here suggests that she inspires mockery as well as admiration. Price is the butt of constant jokes about breast implants while her taste and aspirations – sparkly tiaras and other childish accessories – inspire ribald humour. Indeed, the precise function she fulfils in popular culture is to supply an apparently endless stock of new narratives which are akin (and often as ridiculous) to tales about the gods in Greek mythology; her desires are as transparent and uninhibited as those of Zeus or Aphrodite and, on present form, almost as transient.

One problem with this is that real people, unlike gods, get hurt. Many of the people who follow Price’s adventures know that, and wouldn’t want her life for themselves. If they connect her with feminism at all, it’s only in the primitive sense that she’s a self-made woman. That’s an achievement of sorts, but it certainly isn’t what Simone de Beauvoir had in mind when she sat down to write The Second Sex.

The Man from Beijing by Henning Mankell

 Sunday Times, 7 February 2010

It is hard to think of a crime novel with a more grisly opening: the inhabitants of an entire Swedish village, 18 adults and a child, are slaughtered in a single night. ­Henning Mankell has never been reluctant to depict graphic violence in his hugely successful ­Wallander novels, but this non-Wallander thriller, The Man from Beijing, sets a new benchmark for gore.

Many of the bodies have been hacked to death with a sword. Stunned local detectives are under intense pressure to solve the crime, and they quickly decide they are looking for a lone madman. They aren’t interested in the anxieties of a Swedish judge, Birgitta Roslin, who realises she may have a family connection to the village where the killings were committed; Roslin’s late mother was adopted by a family called Andren, a name shared by many inhabitants of the village.

Roslin contacts the police in Halsingland and discovers that her mother’s elderly foster parents are among the victims. She also discovers family documents written in Swedish from Minnesota in the 19th century, and is sufficiently intrigued to go on the internet and search for any mention of her long-ago step-relatives. What she encounters is a recent story in the Reno Gazette-Journal about the slaughter of a local family called Andren, who have been murdered at home with a sword.

Astonished by the coincidence, Roslin drives to Halsingland, but gets the brush-off from the police even when she recognises one of the few clues left behind by the killer. Bizarrely, it comes from a lantern at the local Chinese restaurant. A communist in her youth and a fervent supporter of Mao Tse-tung, Roslin enlists the help of an old friend from the communist party who has become a Sinologist.

Events unfold on three continents: in modern China, where the murderer’s identity begins to become apparent; in Africa, where another killing takes place to protect his identity; and in America, where the motive emerges from the terrible treatment of 19th-century Chinese labourers who worked to extend the railroad across America. These parallel narratives are unwieldy, and as in another Mankell novel, Kennedy’s Brain, they are informed by simplistic anti-­colonial attitudes. Nowhere is this more apparent than in a scene in Zimbabwe, where a member of a Chinese delegation listens to a speech by Robert Mugabe and reflects that he has been “ruthlessly defamed’ in the West.

This is a long way from the massacre that opened the novel, and it begins to feel like a deliberately shocking device to allow Mankell to write about a subject close to his heart. There is no doubt about his passion for social justice (he works with Aids charities in Africa and is the director of a theatre in Maputo), but this is more a tract than a genuinely gripping crime novel.

The Man from Beijing by Henning Mankell, trans Laurie Thompson
Harvill Secker £17.99 pp388