First published on Blogcritics

I was reading an article about “Armageddon fiction” — well there is a lot of it around at the moment, for obvious reasons — and comment left on it recommended Gwyneth Jones’s Bold As Love in a way that caught my fancy. Something a bit both radical but also playful seemed like the seasonal thing, if you’re going to read something like this at all. (Couldn’t face The Road again – it is a brilliant book, but I spent two weeks depressed after reading it!)

Published in 2001, it tells the story of “Dissolution Summer”, as Britain splits into its constituent parts, the economic and technical systems break down, and total societal collapse looms. (The rest of the world, we sketchily learn, is on varying parts of the same spectrum.)

What’s curious, reading it now, is how many echoes there are of the Occupy movement, in a novel written more than a decade before the first Occupy tent peg was driven in. At the centre of the story are fans of alternative music, and alternative lifestyles, who gather at traditional spots (and some non-traditional) around the country and refuse to move. They’re keen on a particular mask (though this is fro a rock group, not a movie, as today). And there’s a faint echo of Charlie Brooker’s recent Black Mirror – albeit far grimmer, in the fall of England’s first prime minister/dictator.

There’s also a war with Islamic separatists in Yorkshire, 300,000 environmental refugees and cyclical brownouts as the fossil fuel runs out – not much that dates there. Although perhaps the nation looking to alternative music stars has – we’ve had far too much X Factor for that industry’s magical gloss to have been retained.

The whole thing is centred around a romance, told from the perspective of the female lead, which not being a reader of romances I often found quite irritating, and it fluctuates in tone and content between the fantasy genre (this is the first of the series and you get the feeling the main character’s “magic” credentials will come to the fore later – Jones gets a touch of JK Rowling influence there, you feel) and rather more realist disaster fiction – the later elements being those I found more interesting.
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A shorter version was first published on Blogcritics

Sometimes it helps to approach politics from a sideways direction – from a different perspective you can see the old political issues – why was the British Labour government from 1997 to 2010 so awful in so many ways (only of course to be far surpassed by our current Tory-Lib Dem nightmare)? – in new ways.

Owen Hatherley in A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain approaches from the direction of architecture, and very enlightening, if depressing, that direction turns out to be – helped by a wry, not infrequently laugh-out-loud dry sarcasm and a minimum use of professional jargon. He’s on form on the Science Centre in Glasgow – “If we really need these comprehensive redevelopment-trailing enclaves of titanium tat housing interactive experiences to patronise pre-teens (and I see no reason why we do), then this is one of the better example.” (p. 191)

Despite the general lack of jargon, I did, however, learn a new term, Googie, for architecture that originated in American Forties to Sixties roadside diners and coffee shops, designed to catch the eye of passing motorists, and which Hatherley traces through “radical” architecture to the typical boring but “enlivened” by weird roof shapes and odd bits poking out or off kilter that characterises a mean and poky “luxury flat complex” that’s bound to be located near you – “its forbears are in the aesthetics of consumption and advertising, its forms designed to be seen at great speed, not in serene contemplation. It should not surprise us that a style of consumption would return under neoliberalism, but the formal affinities of Pseudomodernism with this aesthetic offers an alternative explanation for what often seems an arbitrary play of forms. By drawing on the futurism of the McCarthy era, the architecture of the equally conformist neoliberal consensus establishes a link between two eras of political stagnation and technological acceleration. It also allows us to reinterpret what purports to be an aesthetic of edification as one of consumption…. The architecture once described as deconstructivist owes less to Derrida than it does to McDonald’s.” (p. xxix)

So that pretty well tells you where Hatherley is coming from, both politically and architecturally. He’s a fervent critic of the past couple of decades of “regeneration” of British cities, and something of a defender, if far from an uncritical one, of the aspirations of the Fifties and Sixties – and the structures built then, often poorly and carelessly, but he says with good intentions, and designs that would have held up fine had faith, and investment, been maintained. Now instead we’ve got, he says, rightly in my view, mean and pinched, poorly built structures characterised by “vernacular” brickwork (often clearly “decorative”) and slatted wood, or even worse plastic and plasticky or metalled panelling in preschooler-friendly colours, thrown up by developers with no consideration to the environments in which they’re placed. Topped off, of course, with oddly angled or shaped roofs, which almost invariably leak. (I’m reminded of a Camden new block of flats crammed into a busy road that I visited recently – badly placed glass, odd shapes, and plaster weeping from barely finished walls to show the cheap and shoddy concrete block beneath.) And that’s without mentioning the seemingly deliberately, outright, unredeemably ugly hotels….
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I’ve been reading recently about the people of Southeast Asia who seem to have chosen a “lower” level of development – and a freer, less laborious life – with an attempt to look at a view of history from outside the nation state, and that took me on to Joseph A Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies.

Published in 1988 it is a book that sometimes shows its age (and I think its account of the Ik in northern Uganda – based on others’ research – is frankly bizarre and nonsensical; the controversy is discussed on Wikipedia).

But I found myself revisiting the thoughts of how many peoples through history might have chosen to move back to a lower level of complexity and technology, in the interests of a better life (a thought with obvious importance today).

Tainter is, as you’d expect, much interested in the fall of Rome, which he puts down to, as with other cases, to a decline on the rate of return on expansion, to the point where it starts to be negative: “the Empire had to maintain a far-flung, inflexible administrative and military structure on the basis of variable agricultural output, and in the face of an increasingly hostile political environment.” (p. 149) “During the fourth and fifth centuries .. The Empire… was suistaining itself by the consumption of its capital resources: producing lands and peasant population…. the Dominate paid for the present by undermining the future’s ability to pay taxes… reduced finances weakened military defense, while military disasters in turn meant further loss of producing lands and population.” (p. 150)

His view of the so-called Dark Ages is rather different to the classic one: “The collapse yielded at the same time both a reduction in the costs of complexity and an increase in the marginal return on its investment. The smaller, Germanic kingdoms that succeeded Roman rile in the West were more successful at resisting foreign incursions (e.g. Huns and Arabs) than had been the later Empire. They did so, morever, at lower administrative and military costs. The economic prosperity of North Africa actually rose under the Vandals, but declined again under Justinian’s reconquest when Imperial taxes were reimposed. Thus the paradoz of collapse: a drop in compexity brings ith it a corresponding rise in the marginal return on social investment.” (p. 151)

So there as, Tainter suggests, often a welcome for the “barbarians”. “Contemporary records indicate that, more than once, both rich and poor wished that the barbarians would deliver them from the burdens of Empire. While some of the civilian population resisted the barbarians (with varying degrees of earnestness), and many more were simply inert in the presence of the invaders, some actively fought for the barbarians. In 378, for example, Balkan miners went over en masse to the Visigoths. In Gaul the invaders were sometimes welcomed as liberators from the Imperial burden, and were even invited to occupy territory. … Zosimus, a writer of the second half of the fifth century AD, wrote of Thessaly and Macedonia that “as a result of this exaction of taxes city and ountryside ere full of laments and complaints and all invoked the barbarians and sought the help of the barbarians”.” (p. 147)
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