The Dictator's Learning Curve
There’s a beginning-of-term feeling about September’s books. After the summer’s featherweight holiday reads, it is back to serious study of the human condition in all its infinite variety, beginning with Howard Jacobson’s choleric comedy about love, longing and literature.
I once saw a reader reduce Jacobson to silence (a considerable feat) at a summer literary festival. A character in his most recent novel, she complained, was dislikeable. Patiently, Jacobson explained that his character was a construct. It was necessary for him to be flawed—indeed the novel hinged on his failings. In vain. His reader continued to insist that the book had been ruined for her because she couldn’t identify with its hero.
It is not hard to imagine that this reader, or someone like her, inspired the bravura opening of Jacobson’s latest fiction, Zoo Time (Bloomsbury, £18.99). His hero, novelist Guy Ableman, travels to Chipping Norton to address a reading group, where he receives a hostile reception from the members. “Why do you hate women so much?” asks one of his readers. Another announces that, “The only character I identified with in your book was the one who died… because I’d been wishing I was dead from the first word.” “Were dead,” says Guy (like his creator, a fastidious grammarian), and flees.
It is not just readers who may wince on reading Jacobson’s novel. Publishers, agents, critics—in fact anyone involved in the production of books—are all elegantly flayed in this angry, funny and profoundly pessimistic fiction, which has one of the bleakest comic endings since Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust. Book groups will hate it.
When it comes to reinvented masculinity, Michael Chabon is ahead of the game. Two years ago the Pulitzer-prizewinning novelist published Manhood for Amateurs, a collection of essays on the joys and trials of being a chap. He returns to fiction with Telegraph Avenue (Fourth Estate, £18.99). Set in California in 2004, the narrative follows the entwined stories of two families, one black, one white. Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe run a vintage record store, while their wives, Gwen and Aviva, work as independent midwives. But their mellow existence is dramatically disrupted by lawsuits, racial tension, big business and family secrets. Chabon’s novel is everything that Jacobson’s is not: expansive, inclusive and sweet natured to the point of sentimentality.
The Nigerian novelist, poet and intellectual, Chinua Achebe, has lived through almost a century of turbulence in the country of his birth. His memoir, There Was a Country (Allen Lane, £20), combines personal reminiscence with a magisterial account of Nigeria’s post-independence political upheaval.
Achebe was born in southeastern Nigeria, the traditional Igbo homeland whose attempt to secede as an independent republic, following a coup, countercoup and massacres of Igbo civilians in 1966, led to the Nigeria-Biafra War of 1967-69. The conflict put Achebe and his family in extreme danger, particularly as he consented to act as an unofficial envoy for the Biafran cause.
At the time of the conflict he chose to express himself in poetry. Some of these poems are included in this memoir, illuminating the measured prose with bursts of intense feeling.
Achebe observes that “the Nigeria-Biafra War was arguably the first fully televised conflict in history… The sheer amount of media attention led to an outpouring of international public outrage.” He is particularly interesting when discussing the response of writers and intellectuals, both Nigerian and foreign, to the war, and notes with amusement the decision of the late Auberon Waugh in 1968 to name his newborn child Nathaniel Thomas Biafra Waugh.
Violence used to be written into the grammar of political protest. Riots were its verbs, explosions its full stops. But William J Dobson’s study of tyranny and protest explores an entirely different syntax of control and subversion. In The Dictator’s Learning Curve (Harvill Secker, £18.99) he notes that the global ubiquity of mobile phones and social media mean that “the world’s dictators can surrender any hope of keeping their worst deeds secret… The costs of tyranny have never been so high.” His exhaustive research took him to China, Russia, South America, Africa and the Middle East, where he gleaned first-hand accounts of the courage and wit of dissidents fighting for political change by non-violent methods.
A political journalist based in Washington, he writes with exemplary clarity and a sharp eye for colour. He is particularly good on the animals he finds wandering about on the margins of his stories.
Timely, authoritative and as readable as a novel, this is one of the Autumn’s most resonant books—not least because it ends on a note of guarded hope for the future.
