Books we like ... and books we're not too fussed about
Francis Wheen
Fourth Estate 2010
On the train back from London the other day I was listening to the first album I ever bought, Power in the Darkness by the Tom Robinson Band, on my iPod as I was reading this book. One illuminated the other: I’d never thought about it before, but each track (with the exception of that extolling the virtues of the grey Cortina) is an exercise in paranoia. There’s a spy on every corner and we should “never trust a copper in a crime car” already; however, things are going to get much, much worse: soon “all the gay geezers” will get “put inside” and “coloured kids” will get “crucified”; the military are planning a coup; “the shit’s going down before too long” so we’ve got to decide which side we’re on. The suspicion and sense of foreboding is relentless – and yet when it came out (1978), none of it seemed particularly surprising. Wheen’s entertaining and informative book explains why: according to him the seventies were The Golden Age of Paranoia. From Nixon bugging himself and others, to Wilson imagining Russian spy ships off the Scilly Islands, to Pol Pot executing anyone with glasses (intellectuals you see), to the Baader Meinhof gang in Germany threatening to murder hostages with “Jewish-sounding” names, he makes a convincing case. Obviously there is a little bit of over-egging at times, and, as with his last book How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered The World, some chapters reveal their origins as newspaper articles by telling us things we’ve already been told (i.e. two discussions of the film Duel), but overall this is a fascinating and thought-provoking account of a pretty horrible decade from a witty and humane guide.
23 June 2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/feb/03/top10s.modern.delusions
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