One of the literary excitements of this week, The Fear Index by Robert Harris, showed that the journalist and
novelist continues to mine both the ancient and modern world for inspiration. His latest thriller revolves around a mad scientist who’s created a beast he can’t control. So far,
so Shelley, but this monster is unmistakably of the moment: a computer program designed to monitor fear in money markets for a hugely profitable hedge fund. His tale tips into gothic when the
soulless monster switches and starts to track fear in the mind of its master. Peter Kemp in the Sunday
Times (£) raved about the up-dating of a timeless classic:
‘Robert Harris’s new novel opens in a secluded mansion as a clock strikes midnight … The brief flicker of ambivalence about the period is stage-setting for a tour de force exercise in
regenerating a classic. Taking a scenario as up-to-the-minute as a news flash from the money markets, The Fear Index gives it the scary features of Mary Shelley’s 1818 shocker Frankenstein
…. Like Frankenstein, his novel is a tale of the catastrophic consequences of galvanising inanimate matter into uncontrollable life … Harris’s tongue-in-cheek flesh-creeper (whose
most chilling moments are its reminders of our present financial woes) is a virtuoso specimen of it.’
Another well-established genre also got a radical overhaul this week: the lives and legends of a modern day saint. Auto-hagiography, rather than insightful memoir, Michael Moore’s Here
Comes Trouble left Sam Leith in the Guardian a little perturbed. The boundaries between fact and
fiction blurred in what Leith described as a string of anecdotes, transcendental turning-points, self-promotion and blatant fantasy:
‘There’s one in which he eyeballs Richard Nixon, one in which he outwits any number of German neo-Nazis to picket Ronald Reagan, one in which he disrupts his class graduation ceremony to deliver a
spontaneous lecture on disability rights and discrimination. There’s the one in which he goes on a “journalism fellowship” to the Middle East sponsored by an Arab-American PR outfit
(that’s, I think, a fancy way of describing a freebie) and nearly gets blown up by Abu Nidal.’
A tendency towards self-delusion among media figures was equally apparent at the other end of the spectrum. Arguably, a new collection of essays by Christopher Hitchens was grudgingly praised by
Fintan O’Toole in the Guardian. Despite name checking George Orwell 36 times
— prompting the question whether can one ever overdose on Orwell — Hitchens doesn’t seem to bear out his hero’s prediction that dubious politics leads to dubious language.
His nosedive into neo-conservatism hasn’t impaired his prose:
‘Orwell suggested that just as bad politics produces bad language, things might also work the other way around – good English might be proof against the follies of orthodoxy. Hitchens may
have imbibed some of the old follies of imperial England, but he received as compensation the tough, pure classical prose honed by its best public intellectuals. Reading, for example, his elegant
debunking of John Updike is like watching a nerveless surgeon perform a complete disemboweling by means of keyhole surgery.’
And finally, in a week that saw Boris Johnson do “a passable imitation of an albino Martin Luther King” while defending the slightly confused Hip Hop singer Kelis, race seems to be once
again at the top of the agenda. Guy Kennaway, in a rather tenuous attempt to promote his new book in the Independent, launched a heart-rending defense of the latest minority in need
of our succour: the pheasant. Kennaway put the ill treatment that the bird (originally from Asia) receives down to the “ancient British prejudices against foreigners.” In contrast the
grouse garners more respect: “The Grouse, on the whisky label, gets to be Famous – but of course he is an indigenous Scot, an ancient Celt, and not to be mocked and then excluded like
the foreigner.”
Fleur Macdonald
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