Nietzsche and the Burbs by Lars Iyer

 

Nietzsche and the Burbs is a fascinatingly odd novel, one in which nothing really happens, over and over again, like time waiting for a nudge in the midriff. This is Nietzschean eternal return taken to its hellish, suburban conclusion, the world waiting for its ubermensch while all the time knowing deep down that no overcoming is forthcoming. It’s also extremely funny.

The narrator, Chandra, is a Pakistani teenager, part of an apocalypse-obsessed group of sixth-formers plodding their way towards their final exams and the end of childhood and the beginning of – what? They dream of death and discord, play doom-laden music which is seemingly devoid of melody or substance or cohesion or anything vaguely musical, they take drugs and debate the philosophy of nothingness. It is their fuck-you to the death-inducing stupor caused by living in the suburbs of Wokingham.

Into their life comes a new student, studiously strange, strangely charismatic. He argues with the teachers and is given to gnomic utterances about nihilism. Immediately, the others identify him as a leader and invite him into their group. He is nicknamed Nietzsche because of his resemblance to the philosopher of Sils Maria (except for the moustache, obviously). Here, the author, Lars Lyer, clearly a playful sort, has all sorts of fun threading the real Nietzsche’s history into that of his schoolboy Nietzsche – the overbearing mother, the bullying sister, dead father, love for a girl named Lou, the portents of mental disintegration. Nietzsche joins the band as lead singer, chant-speaking his way through typically adolescent death lyrics like Ian Curtis but without the talent.

The group’s story is at once banal and hilarious. They study, do PE, make smart-arsed comments to their teachers, deprecate the cheap lives of the grunts around them, get fabulously drunk and pair off in a variety of ways over and over, each chapter divided into the days of their final ten weeks of school. There isn’t a lot of plot and there doesn’t need to be. Lyers’s ear for dialogue is acute, and the unintentionally bathetic nature of the group’s philosophical pontification is extremely funny. There are certainly flaws in the novel – in particular the constant repetitions of the starts of sentences or people’s names or activities becomes wearing. The musical descriptions, although initially funny – Chandra’s unwitting self-delusion about the band’s musical ability most strongly reminds me of the achingly funny musical essays Patrick Bateman slides into his narration in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho – in the end appear to often and at too great length.

But make no mistake, this is gloriously funny. If you’ve read Percival Everett (particularly Erasure) and enjoyed his whimsical use of philosophy as narrative engine, then Nietzsche and the Burbs is for you.

Blindness by Jose Saramago

 

Blindness begins with a man inexplicably going blind as he sits in his car in the middle of a traffic jam in a nameless everycity. What follows is swift and horrifying. The white blindness is highly contagious and, one by one, everyone the man comes into contact with also goes blind, including an opthalmologist to whom he is taken for help and his entire waiting room of patients. Realising the imminent danger of an epidemic, the authorities quarantine the infected and their relatives in a disused mental asylum, where they are forced to live in rudimentary conditions. The situation quickly deteriorates. More people are struck blind and they, too, are forced into the asylum. The numbers increase. There are insufficient beds. There is insufficient food. Sanitation breaks down. Within a short period of time the inmates are living in squalor and filth, quite unable to fend for themselves. Illness is rife, made worse by hunger. Impotent, the authorities are left terrified. A group of inmates is shot dead while waiting for food, and the survivors have to bury them to prevent further outbreaks of disease. Chaos and disorder reigns. Meanwhile, on the outside the contagion is spiralling out of control. Ultimately, everyone – perhaps in the country, perhaps even the entire world – is struck blind. Society has collapsed.

All of this unfolds with a terrifying inevitability. Left on their own, unaided by the authorities, unable to see and thereby to help themselves, the inmates have no defence. They do not even think of themselves as people: no-one is named in the novel and, when they are first gathered together and effect introductions, they call themselves ‘Number One’, ‘Number Two’ and so on. In such circumstances, hope, that most important of human emotions, withers. When they are confronted by a gang of blind men who effectively stage a coup in the asylum, installing themselves as de facto rulers and controlling the supply of food, they are helpless. They agree to the men’s demands for all valuables to be gathered and given to them in exchange for food. That suffices for a short period, but we sense already that it will not be enough. Eventually, inevitably, the call is issued for female inmates to present themselves to the ruling group, submitting their bodies in exchange for food for themselves and their menfolk. Shorn of hope, devoid of options, they accede, and the descriptions of sustained rape and brutality are harrowing in the extreme. This represents the nadir of the novel, the moment in which society disintegrates entirely, when barbarity triumphs over civilisation. What we do not realise at this stage is that outside the asylum the same thing is happening in the rest of the country.

This is, however, a novel of hope. Initially, it appears we are being confronted with a Hobbesian ‘condition of war of every one against every one’ but, gradually, an order of cooperation and mutuality develops. Among the patients is the wife of the opthalmologist who, alone, has not been struck blind. She finds the moral courage to commit an immoral act and, resulting from this, a group – largely comprising the initial victims from the doctor’s waiting room – makes an escape from the hospital. What they escape into, of course, is the same condition magnified: a country in ruins, populated by groups of blind people foraging for whatever food they can retrieve that has not yet rotted. Unable even to find their own homes, people live wherever they happen to be, and their entire consciousnesses are consumed by the need to eat, to survive. They have regressed to an animal state, and this represents an essential thematic element of the novel.

It is important, however, when talking of humanity and animalism, not to simplify Saramago’s message into a straightforward binary of ‘human good, animal inferior’. That is not at all what he is saying. He is referring, rather, to the consciousness, the ability to think objectively rather than entirely subjectively, which singles out humanity as a higher order. And, Saramago is telling us, man is in danger of losing that. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech he wrote:

Blind. The apprentice thought, “We are blind,” and he sat down and wrote Blindness to remind those who might read it that we pervert reason when we humiliate life, that human dignity is insulted every day by the powerful of our world, that the universal lie has replaced the plural truths, that man stopped respecting himself when he lost the respect due to his fellow creatures.

The spiritual blindness which has befallen humanity is occasioned by loss of empathy, that ability to understand and appreciate the feelings of somebody else. In Blindness, however, despite the doctor’s wife’s immense courage and great morale stature, the character which best articulates those human emotions of empathy and compassion is a dog, the ‘dog of tears’ which attaches itself to the group of survivors and licks away their tears. It becomes a strong symbol of goodness, indeed it is one of the key characters of the novel. When it sees dead humans rotting in the street and being eaten by other dogs, it reacts in horror:

The dog of tears moves closer, but death frightens it, it still takes two steps forward, suddenly its fur stands on end, a piercing howl escapes from its throat, the trouble with this dog is that it has grown too close to human beings, it will suffer as they do.

Thus, animalisation is essential to the novel: throughout, the descent of the characters is depicted in animal terms – crawling on all fours or being described as pigs or dogs and so on. But here Saramago is not talking literally of the difference between animals and humans, but rather of the ability to show understanding and compassion and love. To have a grasp of these concepts elevates one above the mere animal. And it is the ‘dog of tears’ that best embodies this.

After their escape from the asylum, the group retrace their steps back into their previous lives, returning to their old homes as though in some way they might return to their pre-blindness condition. They cannot. Their homes are now mostly inhabited by other people and they have no connection with them any longer. Finally, they return to the flat of the doctor and his wife, which has been left untouched. The doctor’s wife finds food and the group settle into a vestigial approximation of comfortable normality. In small measures, a degree of humanity returns to them. Torrential rain, for example, gives them water to clean the dirt and encrusted excrement from their bodies, an act which is presented as being almost spiritual, a purification of mind through the cleansing of body. It proves to be a turning point: the novel ends in hope, heart-wrenching hope. Some semblance of humanity is rediscovered.

Saramago’s style is challenging. He creates long, elaborate run-on sentences which meander from subject to subject and meaning to meaning, and dialogue is completely undifferentiated from narrative, to the extent that the words of different characters are not given separate lines but flow continuously on the page, separated only by commas. It takes time to get used to this but after a few pages it begins to feel natural and gives a hallucinatory, nightmarish quality to the writing. The resultant sense of confusion and disorder beautifully mirrors the emotions of the characters themselves, terrorised as they are in their white tombs.

Blindness is clearly an allegorical novel, a cautionary tale presenting a via negativa in which the reader is presented with a vision of the future that we – all of us – are in danger of creating. But what is Saramago’s specific target? Given that the novel is scrupulously neutral in terms of place, it is probably not political. Rather, it is operating at a higher level than mere politics: it is not the administration of human society that concerns Saramago, but its soul. Civilisation, the nature of humanity itself, is his subject matter. We are in danger, he is cautioning us, of losing sight – and here the metaphorical is made horrifyingly literal – of what it is that makes us unique, of what it is that civilises us. We are increasingly living isolated lives, trapped in our own solipsistic worlds, oblivious of the warp and weave of humanity around us, becoming resistant to love. This is what society is coming to: numbed, lost, insensate, blind. The main protagonists of the novel mostly represent a flawed humanity before blindness strikes them: the girl with dark glasses turns to prostitution and has cold sexual relations for money; the good samaritan who comes to the aid of the first man to go blind steals his car; the first man is in an unhappy marriage, unable to communicate effectively with his wife; and so on. Only by reflecting on truth, on compassion, on love, can humanity be restored. And, gradually, this is what happens in the novel. Trapped in blindness, the characters come to see. Written like that, this sounds trite and shallow, but such is the depth of Saramago’s vision and the warmth of his compassion, the reader is swept into the narrative and drawn inexorably towards his message. Only at the end, in a scene inside a church, is Saramago’s theme delivered in a heavy-handed fashion. This is a great pity, a clumsy, clunky intrusion of author into the narrative in order to force home a message when that message has already eloquently been explained. It is most clearly enunciated, near the end, by the doctor’s wife, when she says: ‘I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.’ Again, taken out of its context, this could sound dangerously close to new age waffle but, coming from the mouth of this strong, humane character, it conveys perfectly the call for compassion and community that the novel so powerfully portrays. Blindness is a rallying cry for humanity, a beautiful and terrifying work.

The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad and Fyodor Dostoevsky are at one in their abhorrence of anarchists and social revolutionaries. In them, they see a nihilism which ends only in the self-fulfilment of Silenus’s words of wisdom – existence itself is tainted, and the best thing is to be done with it. Thus, the conclusion of Conrad’s The Secret Agent takes place in a beer-hall called, ironically, the Silenus. The world those revolutionaries Ossipon and The Professor are seeking to transform is itself already sordid – late nineteenth century London, down among the lower orders, wallowing in the murkiness of espionage and paid agents provocateur – and therefore, it seems, whatever the outcome of their anarchistic endeavours, be they successful or otherwise, the world will be no less and no more sordid, only different.

Mr Verloc, the novel’s central character, is someone engulfed by indolence. He has the air of ‘having wallowed, fully dressed, all day on an unmade bed.’ He is an agent provocateur, what we would nowadays call a sleeper, in the pay of a foreign power and providing information, waiting to act as required but, in fact, doing an absolute minimum to earn his pay. A change in personnel at the embassy forces his hand: he is impelled by his new boss, Mr Vladimir, to engineer a terrorist outrage, a meaningless explosion at the Greenwich Observatory – an attack on the first meridian, that potent symbol of science and progress. Mr Verloc is unhappy with his assignment, but he has no option but to obey. Tragedy ensues.

In his time in England, Mr Verloc has inveigled himself into English (lower order) society. He is married to Winnie and shares her house with Winnie’s mother, a frail and fading woman, and Winnie’s brother, the slow-witted Stevie. Ostensibly, he is the proprietor of a shop which has a reputation for dealing in unusual and illicit, probably pornographic material smuggled in from the continent. It is a comfortable living, requiring no great effort on Mr Verloc’s part, and this forms part of his irritation at being forced to act on behalf of his paymasters. Thus, the character of Mr Verloc comes under Conrad’s critical gaze twice over: as a reckless anarchist and as a laggard whose indolence results in moral apathy. His response to the tragedy he provokes is one of vexation, momentary shock, fleeting regret, but his overriding impression is that it was inconvenient, and not his fault, and something that had happened which simply had to be overcome. His inability to comprehend the emotions of his wife are symptomatic of a morally casual, reprehenisble nature. Mr Verloc is found wanting, in almost every respect. But he is not an evil man, he is merely banal. Through him, and those like him, Conrad argues, evil is allowed to flourish.

Around Verloc is a small congregation of fellow anarchists and revolutionaries – Michaelis, Yunt, Comrade Ossipon – who share his outlook and demeanour. They are not an attractive group of people. Future society would not be safe in the hands of such immoral louts, one must suppose. And what is the alternative? Conrad offers little hope in the figures of authority who are ranged against the anarchists. Mr Vladimir, Verloc’s master at the Embassy, is a calculating, manipulative man, callously indifferent to anything but the cause. The police investigation is hampered by protocol and hierarchy and suspicion. Verloc, we discover, as well as being an agent of a foreign power, is also a double agent providing information to the police, who are happy to use him and turn a blind eye to the illicit wares he peddles. These are two sides of a single coin, then, Conrad suggests.

And Mrs Verloc is little better. She is resolute in her refusal to see anything that is happening around her, to probe for questions or meanings, to wonder at any events which may unfold. She deliberately encases herself in a cocoon of ignorance, as though she can somehow remove herself from the mortal fray. As the novel proceeds, both she and we learn the futility of such an approach. She is another individual found wanting, then. Indeed one of the few moments of genuine altruism in the novel arises when Winnie’s mother decides to move out of the family home into an almshouse, in the hope that this will make life easier for Winnie and, in particular, Stevie. We are left in little doubt that this will not be a happy retirement for the old woman – their progress as they take a cab through the streets of London towards the almshouse on the day of her departure is described almost in terms of a descensus. It is a low point for the family, but one wrought by goodness. Thus, there is an almost unbearable poignancy later in the novel when the family sinks even lower, towards its nadir, this time not as a result of failed goodness, but of Verloc’s moral vacuity.

And this gets to the heart of The Secret Agent,  what makes it a great novel. Yes, it is an insightful analysis of terrorism, as has been much discussed in the years since 9/11. Yes, it offers a perspective on anarchism and revolutionary socialism which, however caricatured, does present a cogent critique of modern thought. One may or may not agree with Conrad’s analysis – for me it is overly pessimistic – but it is undoubtedly brilliantly written.

But what makes the novel great is the way he melds the political with the personal, the public with the private. Because the events which Verloc unleashes as a result of his terrorist act undoubtedly have their public repercussions, but no act can ever be played out purely in the public arena: there must always be a private dimension. In 9/11 or 7/7 there was the political reality of those terrorist acts, certainly, and they will not be forgotten in our generation, but there were also hundreds of private tragedies, families torn apart, lovers lost, families bereaved. For them, for those who survived, there was no 9/11 or 7/7 as such, only the moment that their darling died and their lives changed. Their understanding of what those events mean is inherently different from the understanding of those of us not directly affected. And this is what we see powerfully in The Secret Agent. Verloc is not only an agent provocateur, he is a husband. He not only works as a terrorist but as a shop owner, a family man. And that family life is irrevocably violated. In a harrowing episode, Mrs Verloc overhears the terrible truth of what has happened. The moment circles around her and we are taken on a dizzying swoop around her emotions:

In that shop of shady wares fitted with deal shelves painted a dull brown, which seemed to devour the sheen of the light, the gold circlet of the wedding ring on Mrs Verloc's left hand glittered exceedingly with the untarnished glory of a piece from some splendid treasure of jewels, dropped in a dust-bin.

From that moment, the symbol of their marriage consigned to a dustbin, there is no hope for the Verlocs. The personal has been devastated. There is, then, little cheer in The Secret Agent. Throughout, it reveals a world of grim failure, a society hurtling towards a nihilistic end. And this is symbolised most effectively by the final scene, with Ossipon and The Professor leaving the Silenus. Ossipon walks blindly, ‘feeling no fatigue, feeling nothing, seeing nothing’, while The Professor averts his eyes from the ‘odious multitude of mankind.’ He has, we are told, ‘no future.’ The obvious question that Joseph Conrad is posing, of course, is: ‘do we?’