The cover of James Robertson’s latest novel, News of the Dead, has a blurb from Ali Smith: ‘A marvellous novelist’. I spend much of my time looking at marketing techniques, when I should be reading, or even writing. Get a big hitter, preferably Scottish, like Ali Smith to say something nice about your writing and copy and paste it to all of your other books. It doesn’t need to be a novelist or writer. Billy Connolly’s good press (Jane Godley Handstands in the Dark). A gold-leaf endorsement of Scottishness and quality. I don’t know Billy Connolly or Ali Smith. I have met James Robertson on the page before. I looked for a review of his debut novel I might have written, but couldn’t find it. His novel, The Testament of Gideon Mack was stupendous. All the fine granular details have fell out of my brain like sand in a broken sandglass.
News of the Dead offers that old trick of bringing things back to life. There’s a ghost that only a young boy, Lachie, aged eight, can see.
‘Lachie Darroch came to see me, for the first time in a while. It was autumn, the leaves were turning and falling fast, and most afternoons it was cold enough to light the stove before it got dark.’
‘…What’s a ghost?’ he asked.
…He had this story and he knew he could tell it to me and I would not laugh. Or tell anybody else.
‘…A girl. She had a white dress on. Well kind of grey. It was quite dirty, I think.’
I’ve used that trick too, in one of my longer stories, Lily Poole. There’s a holy man. Saint Conach— the story setting, Glen Conach. I’d written something about that too, but hadn’t finished it. Stories are brought to life by believers, so that’s OK, I’m not sure I believed in it enough. No church recognised Conach as a Saint, but a follower left a Latin chapbook, which showed that like all men, he had failings and was a sinner.
Marj, the old buddy, Lachie visits, has an inkling who the ghost was, or indeed is. Ghosts an echo of the past—I was here—but also for some reason a marker of the present.
The Journal of Charles Kirkliston Gibb, a penniless antiquarian, which begins Sunday, 2nd July 1809 takes us back to the beginning of the nineteenth century and before that to the Jacobites and Highland Clearances. His transcription of a Latin manuscript of Saint Conach and his miracles takes us back to the time of the Picts. A thread of time runs from the Middle Ages to coming to the Glen of the Corona Virus. A backwater that reflects back what Scotland was and is in a whimsical and realistic manner.
A good book asks questions of you. News of the Dead leaves you thinking this could happen, or this happened. The circularity of time provides answers. Often, not as we expect, but perhaps recognise. Read on.
Our ancestors believed that the sky was round and the earth was
square, the sun and all the planets circled the earth. All these things were
self-evident.
When emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the
University of Cambridge were hacked in 2009 the theory that global warming was
a hoax gained credence and the sky really was round and the earth square.
Everything was up for grabs, including the truth.
Since 1880 our planet has warmed to around 0.85
degrees
100 percent certainty doesn’t exist in science,
but we can say this with between 95 percent to 99.99999999999 certainty that
half the global warming is due to human activity, in particular our reliance on
fossil fuels
To stay below 2 degree and runaway global
warming we have a ceiling of one trillion tonnes of carbon which we can afford
to burn.
But we’ve already burnt more than half that
figure and are accelerating towards runaway global warming.
Scientists in The Climate Research Unit don’t use terms like
runway global warming. They use more prosaic terms such as ‘dangerous levels’
of climate change. In other words we are facing an existential threat in the
same category as nuclear annihilation and nuclear winter.
The Third World War has begun but before it heats up, the
propaganda campaign takes place. Climategate was the epicentre of the
propaganda war.
One of the most striking features of the programme was science
isn’t about certainty but uncertainty. Validation comes from not one body but
many. When CRU released the data they used to a team of global-warming sceptics,
physicists from the University of California, Berkley—with a $150 000 grant
from Charles Koch, one of the richest men in America, friend of the moron’s
moron in the Whitehouse and prominent climate-change denier— who used a
different methodology, but came up with the same figures as the CRU that should
be the end point of the earth is square believers. But we know that didn’t
happen.
This is an interesting case study in why that didn’t happen and
trolls rule the world. David Attenborough, Seven
World, One Planet, can tell us that a football-pitch sized piece of the
Amazon forest disappears every seven seconds and this can be seen from space. Similarly,
Jonathon Watts, report Battle for The Amazon can make the
analogy, ‘rainforests function as the heart of the world…sucking carbon dioxide
out of the air’ converting it by photosynthesis ‘pushing 20 billion tonnes of
water vapour into the atmosphere each day’ as part of the earth’s cooling system.
But for square earthers if we don’t see it, it doesn’t exist. When
we waken up in the morning take milk from the fridge and eat Cornflakes today
is much like yesterday. The bomb hasn’t landed.
We’ve been here before. Thomas Malthus, for example, Essay on Population (1798) argued that unless we showed ‘moral
restraint’ population levels would increase at a greater level than we could
feed ourselves. He factored in the horseman of the apocalypse, War, Famine and
Epidemics, but even allowing for these levelling factors his argument, like
that of David Attenborough, on land and sea, mass species extinction and a
holocaust, remained self-evident.
Malthus hadn’t factored in Planet B, the increasing efficiency
of food production and the rise of global capitalism. As a general rule those
that own the land own the people on the land. Natives of the Amazonian forest,
for example, are vulnerable because clearing the land of forest increases its value
by 50-to-100-fold and they have no land deeds to say they own the land.
Land-grabbers, logging, mining and farming combine in a toxic mix that leaves
little room for sentiment.
Marxism like Malthusianism has been overtaken by events. Liberalism
and Capitalism have established hegemonic influence as the only game in town.
Marx argued, ‘It is not the consciousness of men that
determines their being but, on the contrary, their social being that determines
their consciousness’.
In other words, the interests of the dominant class (the 1% to
our 99%), land grabbers, logging, mining, industry, and farming conglomerates
are reflected back to us in ideology.
Marx’s architectural metaphor makes this clear. The legal
system, our ideology and politics is the ‘superstructure’ that rests on the ‘base’
of the economic structure and socioeconomic relations.
In crude terms, Marx describes morality, religion and
philosophy, as ‘phantoms formed in the minds of men’.
When, for example, during the Highland clearances crofters were
replaced by the more valuable monocrop of sheep, crofters had to sell their
labour and learn to say ‘baa’ to survive. For their children this was a natural
state, inseparable from their historical condition.
Marxism’s endpoint was when this false consciousness was shaken
off. Climategate, the rise of the moron’s moron in the Whitehouse and Boris
Johnston as the people’s czars show this is unlikely to happen soon.
Hannah Arendt, who fled Nazi Germany, argued ‘Things only
become irreversible, when people start to think so’.
The dominant class, our 1%, since Climategate have opened up
new fronts in the propaganda war. The nothing can be done argument has gained
traction. Our eco-system rests on an economic system in which there are clear
winners and losers. The Malthusian monopoly ‘on virtue’ has been co-opted by
those that benefit most.
An archaic term, ‘running dogs of capitalism’ set loose to
defend their rights and virtue. Marxism posited another scenario in which ‘contradictions
of capitalism’ would be exposed and the workers would gain control of their
workplace and the surplus value extracted from their labour.
Climategate shows there’s no Planet B and we burn through existing resources quicker than we can replace them leading to the increasing likelihood of extreme weather conditions and sea level rise. Bots and trolls rule the world. The contradictions of capitalism might just bring them down. But Malthus might just have got his timing wrong. Far more likely is tens of millions of refugees on the move. Wars and famine. An Amazonian frog doesn’t jump out of a pot if the water is slowly heated.
odonnellgrunting 