Arise, Sir Salman!

All too predictably, Islamic extremists have reacted with gleeful outrage to the news of Salman Rushdie's knighthood. I write 'gleeful' because there is something orgiastic about the 'spontaneous' demonstrations that have taken place in Karachi, Kashmir (whose sad fate Rushdie has so beautifully fictionalised) and, um, Regent's Park. There is no need to wonder how many of these 'defenders of Islam' have actually read The Satanic Verses: reading a work of fiction is an individual act and so, by definition, inimical to the mob.

Riots in Pakistan and elsewhere are nothing new. Nor do they have much to do with faith. They are, rather, a perfect example of what Aldous Huxley termed 'downward transcendence', offering the thrill of belonging, the exaltation of righteous anger and the sanctionable release of sexual tensions. All repressive societies need safety valves to contain the pressure of the discontent they brew, and the mullahs are only too happy to have a bone to throw to their followers. Hating a novelist whose work you've never read is easy; hating the people who govern and control you is difficult and, potentially, dangerous.

But I don't want to heap invective on the mob: it is only behaving as mobs do, to the collective discredit of our species. No, what most amuses and infuriates me is the reaction to such behaviour in our conservative press.

Back in 1988, when Rushdie was sent into hiding by Khomeini's fatwa, many right-wing opinionati in this country were loath to defend the author's rights to life and freedom of expression. Not, you understand, because they didn't believe in those rights for people of the requisite political and racial persuasions, but rather because Rushdie was a foreigner and an intellectual whose Satanic Verses was savagely critical of Thatcher's Britain. Rushdie may not deserve to be murdered, these columnists seemed to opine, but he did rather ask for it.

Eighteen years on, the same bad faith is still alive in the Daily Mail. Ruth Dudley Edwards cannot comment on the literary value of Rushdie's fiction, chiefly because she hasn't the wit to read it. (Nothing will endear a columnist to Mail readers more efficiently than a display of philistinism.) The real reason for denying Rushdie a knighthood, according to Ms Edwards, is that he has consistently sniped at Britain and 'British values'; he has not shown sufficient gratitude to that same country for upholding those values by protecting him from assasination; worst of all, he no longer lives here but enjoys the high life in Manhattan with a wife who is far too good-looking for propriety.


Personally, I don't think Rushdie has been much cop as a novelist since The Moor's Last Sigh. But his remains one of the great imaginations working in the English language and he deserves to be feted for his earlier novels - not least Shame, whose scathing portrayal of a corrupt Pakistan may have as much to do with that country's current fervor as any religious grievance.

Oh, but speaking of grievance brings me to the point of writing this post. There is, in the Islamic world, a cult of it which fuels terror and keeps that world in its benighted condition. Rushdie has long recognised that the cult must be abandoned if there is to be a decent future for the world's Muslims. Normally, right-wing columnists blame the Left for adding to this sense of grievance. On the evidence of the Daily Mail, at least, j'accuse the unusual suspects!

Where I'm At Again

It occurs to me that, although this is a writer’s personal blog, very little of it is either personal or about writing. There is a lot of stuff about climate change – I’m somewhat obsessed with it – but even so that isn’t (or shouldn’t be) the central preoccupation of my waking life.

So I have decided to make an effort with the other stuff – to give visitors (if there are any) a sense of what it is to be me: an earnest, slightly portly, thirty year-old heterosexual obscure novelist.

The first item on the agenda is that I have just moved, properly and with much of my clobber, to Edinburgh. My little house in Hampshire is home to a young couple whose rent payments are just about my only reliable income. It has been a pretty tiring business and expensive: if only I’d learn to use a lending library. My girlfriend, mercifully, is not as acquisitive as me (in fact she’s rather a minimalist), so I’ve been able to bring up about two thirds of my books, along with pictures, clothes, computers and a surprisingly large amount of underwear. We’ve set me up in an ‘office’ overlooking combined tenement gardens: about an acre of ash trees and burgeoning scrub, with sparrows and starlings nesting in the walls and fat wood pigeons shitting on the goose-grass. It is a lovely, shifting green and full of incident for a bird watcher who isn’t unhealthily preoccupied with spotting rarities. My working day consists of lengthy sit outs in front of a screen, occasional trips to the research library and pleasant strolls about the Meadows. For all the anxieties of writing, I’m aware how lucky I am to be free to pursue my own projects, scarcely known or read but, for the present at least, getting by. And in excellent company.

On the writing side, I have completed ‘post-production’ on Serious Things. My editor, the scarily perceptive Carole Welch, has sent me her questions and queries and helped me knock the manuscript into shape. Now I am waiting to see the galley proofs. The opportunity to make substantial changes has gone. And thank goodness, since the text leaves me cross-eyed after so many months of work. Anthony Burgess once compared writing a novel to burrowing for months underground, only to surface and be bashed on the head by a critic. That last detail is something I still have to look forward to.

So what next? Well, I intend to take a breather, writing articles and short stories and maybe finding a part-time job until I decide which of three ideas I intend to focus on. One has to be sure one can stomach two years in the company of fictional people before embarking on a project. Just like in real life, I suppose.

After ook

To judge from some headlines yesterday, you might have thought we were saved already. In fact, the ‘climate deal’ reached at the G8 is nothing much to write home about.

Yes, the G8 leaders have agreed to negotiate a UN deal by 2009 (when Dubbya will have buggered off back to Crawford). But there is still no American backing for the fixed emissions targets climate experts say are needed to avoid dangerous climate change.

We have such low expectations of our leaders that a simple pledge to negotiate can be seen as progress.

Still, Canada and Japan have moved closer to the EU’s position, while the announcement ought to buoy carbon markets. At the same time, business in the States is starting to green up its act in the expectation that, sooner or later, federal action will force them to.

It remains to be seen what concrete measures, if any, will be adopted at future negotiations. China and India must be brought on board: the damage their unchecked growth is doing to the planet is enormous. Yet the G8 nations remain, per capita, the largest emitters of greenhouse gases. It is, overwhelmingly, our mess that needs to be cleaned up.

It would seem that Tony Blair and Angela Merkel have pushed the Chimp hard on climate change. But the sacrifice of a hundred Britons in Bush’s war may not have signified a thing. Domestic pressure and corporate greening back home in the U.S. have probably had more to do with… what, exactly? George W. Bush agreeing that a spade is, in fact, possibly, come to think of it, a spade.

Ook! Ook!

The United Nations Environment Program (Unep) has just produced a report warning of human suffering on a massive scale due to the melting of sea and land ice everywhere. One need hardly bother reading further: anyone with half an ounce of imagination will know the score. And indeed, now that climate change is brutally upon us, it would seem that people worldwide are beginning to cotton on.

In Australia, John Howard has acknowledged the real causes of the 'once-in-a-thousand years' drought that is devastating his country. He is starting (far too late, of course) to instigate meaningful action. And the reason? Most Australians have made the link between global warming and their own suffering and they expect their politicians to help them. If Australian opinion polls are to be trusted, Howard is facing a real prospect of defeat in the forthcoming elections. Let's hope the world can be rid of the sour-faced little git. It will set an important precedent to be heeded in Washington and Ottawa: ignore global warming and you'll be booted out of office.

The American people are also getting real. Thanks in no small part to Al Gore, an overwhelming majority of the population now favours "immediate action" to confront global warming. In late April, a poll conducted by the New York Times and CBS showed that 90% of Democrats, 80% of Independents and even 60% of Republicans want action.

And yet the vast majority of Republicans in Congress continue to serve Exxon and others by refusing to support meaningful policies on a federal level. Meanwhile, the Bush administration is stuffed with half-witted cronies who pretend the crisis isn't happening. And the Chimp King himself is doing all he can to stall international efforts. Just wait and see what guff he comes up with at the G8 summit on Wednesday.

Forget Iraq. Disgraceful as that has been, it's for his stance on climate change that George W. Bush will be remembered as the WORST AMERICAN PRESIDENT EVER.