the honorary consul
January 13, 2010A provincial town in Argentina in the 1970s. A group of revolutionaries set out to kidnap the American ambassador, insisting they will only release him in exchange for prisoners held in Paraguayan jails. Things go wrong, and instead they end up with local resident and Honorary British Consul, Charley Fortnum, as their hostage. He’s a middle-aged alcoholic recently married to Clara, a young ex-prostitute.
The local doctor, Eduardo Plarr, is brought in to tend to Fortnum when he falls ill. Plarr has several dilemmas to resolve. He has been conducting a desultory affair with Clara and is perhaps the father of the child she is carrying. However, his father, who disappeared more than 20 years ago, is one of the prisoners to be released. And in a further twist, the lead kidnapper is a childhood friend.
Graham Greene explores these dilemmas over the course of a few days, as Plarr is drawn, against his will, into a farce that becomes a tragedy. Like many of Greene’s lead characters, Plarr is emotionally stunted and reluctant to commit to a course of action. Events move faster than his passions can be aroused, which leads to his downfall.
I didn’t enjoy The Honorary Consul as much as The Quiet American or Our Man in Havana, but it is still an amusing book. It is meant to be set in the 1970s, but this doesn’t quite gel, as Plarr and Fortnum in particular seem to belong more to the 1950s. Still, Greene is a good enough writer to keep the tension and dread building right to the climax.
(By co-incidence, the day I finished the book, India’s junior Foreign Minister Shashi Tharoor tweeted:
Met w assocn of honorary consuls -often businessmen representing countries that can’t afford embassies here. Life: alcohol, protocol, on call
which could have been written for Charley Fortnum)
The Honorary Consul
Graham Greene
The Bodley Head (1973)
fool’s gold
January 8, 2010Fool’s Gold author Gillian Tett is an assistant editor at the Financial Times, and is generally credited as one of people who predicted the global financial crisis well before it happened. She has a background as an anthropologist which has helped her to understand and communicate how finance meshes with culture and society.
It was this broad view that led her to study and write about credit default swaps (CDS), beginning in 2003. Fool’s G0ld tells the history of CDS, by following the team at JP Morgan who invented them in 1994. Her book is divided into three sections: Innovation, describing how CDS were invented and sold; Perversion, where CDS spawned further derivative products that moved outside the traditional financial trading areas; and Disaster, which tracks the global financial crisis from the first stirrings of crisis at Bears Stearns through the free fall of markets in 2008.
Some of the book is heavy going, because derivatives and CDS are complicated and difficult subjects. Tett’s choice to use the adventures of the JP Morgan team to explain the history of these products stops the book being too dry, but can also be distracting. At times it’s not clear whether she’s more interested in telling the CDS story, or the history of JP Morgan. It’s interesting at the end how most of the JP Morgan team still insist that CDS and derivatives are good things, and that, to paraphrase the book’s subtitle, the catastrophe was unleashed by unrestrained greed that corrupted the dream of perfect risk allocation.
Overall, this book was reasonably interesting, and is probably worth reading if you feel you should understand what the hell happened in the latter half of 2008. But it’s not compelling.
Fool’s Gold – how unrestrained greed corrupted a dream, shattered global markets and unleashed a catastrophe
Gillian Tett
Little, Brown (2009)
why some books remain unread
January 7, 2010Beth Carswell on the top ten reasons why books remain unread
7: the siren call of the bargain bin
When we’re standing right there, and a book costs $2, and it has a UKRAINIAN SPY with an OMINOUS MOUSTACHE, and a TORRID LOVE RHOMBUS and a SUSPICIOUS DASCHUND in it, it’s difficult to not grab it on the spot – after all, it’s cheaper than a fancy coffee. And oh man – suspicious daschund. Good times guaranteed. Even the covers tempt me. A woman in a silver leotard, draped unconscious in the arms of a swarthy astronaut, while the rings of Saturn loom behind? How can it NOT be good? And such a steal! But when you do this a lot – and Lord, I do this a lot – it’s amazing how quickly they build up, and sit there, judging you, accusing you, when you walk down the hall.
mcmafia
January 4, 2010To write this book, Misha Glenny spent three years investigating international organised crime. The result is on of the best non-fiction books I’ve read in a long time, by turn horrifying, humourous, and bizarre; factual and completely compelling.
Glenny is less concerned with long-established organised crime groups, such as the Sicilian and American Mafias, and more with the comparatively recent emergence of a new globalised form that has grown to an estimated 20 per cent of world GDP. He links personal stories of major and minor participants, victims and law-enforcers into a wider narrative, crossing Europe, Africa, the Middle East, the Sub-continent, the Americas, and East Asia.
He begins with the fall of communism and the opportunities this opened up for enterprising people in Eastern Europe. Different Eastern Bloc countries developed different strengths in organised crime, stemming from geography, tradition, and human resources. For example, the Balkan countries’ proximity to Italy made them ideal for smuggling cigarettes in small boats; while the Czech Republic’s road links to Germany and Austria made it an ideal base for prostitution; and Bulgaria’s human resource base in chemical processing made it an ideal base to manufacture drugs.
Common to all forms of organised crime that arose in the Eastern Bloc was the participation of former secret police forces. Under communism, these groups had dominated typical activities such as smuggling; and Glenny argues that the rise of East European gangs can be better understood as just another privatisation of a formerly state-run enterprise (in this case, more successfully that many others). He also argues that these organised crime groups played a crucial role in maintaining some stability during the transition to capitalism: in the absence of property rights, and with a police force traditionally devoted to combating political rather than property crime, criminal gangs offered some degree of protection that the transitional State was unable to provide.
Once they had established monopoly control of certain enterprises, East European gangs began to expand internationally, driven mostly by the need to launder money. Glenny traces this globalisation first to Israel, where many Russian and East European criminals could gain citizenship*, where the police force was concentrating more on the Palestinian problem than on general crime, gambling was widespread enough wash money clean, and where a growing and wealthy middle class spread an appetite for drugs.
However, needing to launder larger sums of money, the oligarchs soon moved east to Dubai. Bent on attracting foreign investment, Dubai did not ask many questions about the provenance of funds entering the country. With a light tax regime, it was also an ideal base for anyone seeking to import and re-export (to smuggle) high value goods, particularly gold aimed at the insatiable (and highly taxed and controlled) Indian market.
The second half of McMafia lacks some of the focus and direction of the first. It moves through a series of countries describing the different operations of organised crime within each, without there being strong links between. There’s the Indian underworld, mostly concerned with gold and drugs, Nigerian 419 scams, drug smuggling in and out of South Africa, the War on Drugs in the Americas (including some interesting statistics), and people smuggling from China to the west.
Glenny meets some interesting peple, like Lev Timofeev, the dissident Russian mathematician who now studies the economics of the drug trade; and Wolfgang Herbert, a sociologist who joined the Yakuza for his PhD thesis. He dabbles briefly in cybercrime and the darknet. In the epilogue, he argues that organised crime has flourished in the age of globalisation not only through failures in policing (particularly in countries where law enforcement is transitioning from a focus on political crime to crimes of property); but because of a failure of regulation. Tightly regulating the movement of labour and addictive and other valuable goods (whether through immigration laws, tobacco, gold, and car taxes, or prohibiting drugs) pushes the trade in these into the hands of criminals. At the same time, loosening restrictions on the flow of capital allows these criminals to function more efficiently. To really fight crime, he says, politicans need to resist the tempations of a law-n-order agenda, and show the courage to tackle the sturctuarl inequities in teh global economy which allow instability and crime to flourish.
I’m not usually into true crime, but this was one of the most fascinating and interesting books I read in 2009. Highly recommended (I would also recommend his book The Balkans, which was recommended to me by my former flatmate from Montenegro, as the only book in English on the Balkans worth reading).
An earlier article by Misha Glenny
McMafia: Crime Without Frontiers
Misha Glenny
The Bodley Head (2009)
*Interestingly, a high proportion of Russian oligarchs are Jewish, seemingly because, excluded from rising very far in the Communist system, they had worked the black economy in the USSR 70 years
thoughts on debt
December 8, 2009UPDATE: 20 December: It seems this book is the abridged published version of Margaret Atwood’s Massey Lectures, which will be repeated on radio national from 14 January 2010 at 6pm.
Margaret Atwood’s Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth is a short book about the social construct of debt: where the concept comes from, the part is plays in our culture, and how it is linked to two of the strongest human emotions: desire and fear. She explores the idea of debt from different angles and traces the concept through human mythology and behaviour.
Atwood first considers fairness, arguing that borrowing and lending could not have developed without fairness. She traces it back to the most ancient myths, such as Ma’at and Iustitia, and forward to literature, using The Water Babies as her primary example. She explores the history of the idea of moral balances and how humans in all cultures weigh up deeds and behaviours against each other. She also observes that a concept of cheating and fairness has also been observed in other animals.
In Debt and Sin, Atwood tries to answer the question ‘is it morally wrong to be a debtor’. She teases out the originals of the word debt (which was once used interchangeably with ’sin’, for example in the gospel of Matthew 6:12); but also relates ’sin’ to its origins in ideas of sacrifice, which hark back to fairness and moral balances. Much of this exploration focuses on the Christian tradition. She then brings these ideas together to establish a basis of accounting and balance sheets, pointing out their link to memory – without memory, there is no debt. She notes that the earliest written records appear to be accounting balance sheets, and notes that debt is inconsistent with oral forms of communication.
Atwood notes that, if being a debtor is a sin, then so too must be being a creditor, as one cannot exist without the other. She remarks on several clichés here, such as Polonius’ ‘neither a borrower nor a lender be’ and ‘wiping the slate clean’ – noting that both of these encapsulate the idea that a healthy equilibrium is required between debtor and creditor in a functioning society.
Moving on to a chapter called Debt as Plot, Atwood returns to the idea of debt and memory, and that a debt is essentially a narrative, caused by a string of events and actions over time. She traces some classic plots that use debt as a plot device overtly (Scrooge, Vanity Fair) and covertly (Dr Faustus, Madam Bovary. She uses these to talk about non-monetary debt, how it can be conflated with monetary debt (through the idea of sin), and how we choose to ‘pay’ for our sins and bargains; and notes how, especially in 19th Century literature, debt (either money or behaviour) is a governing leitmotif of Western storytelling.
The fourth chapter is called The Shadow Side, and looks at what happens when the power equilibrium between debtor and creditor is upset – loan sharks and criminal syndicates, liquidation, rebellion and revolution, and also revenge. She notes how our cultural understanding of debt and fairness can be used to stir up hatred, using examples like Idi Amin’s expulsion of ethnic Indians from Uganda, and the experience of Chinese immigrants in various Asian countries; but also how it can be used against oppressors, such as the anti-colonial uprising around the world that have centred on tax.
In the last chapter, Atwood moves away from the non-fiction essay style of the previous four, and writes a fictional piece about Scrooge and a Spirit of Earth Day Past who appears to him; and how his ‘payback’ may have been different under the debt constructs of the modern world. I didn’t finish this chapter because I found it annoying.
The last chapter aside, this is an interesting and thought-provoking book. It is always healthy to explore ideas that we tend to take as given, and to understand where in our culture they come from and how we are influenced by deep-seated cultural factors in making decisions.The book was published around the time of the global financial crisis, and while it doesn’t tell you why residential mortgage-backed securities and CDOs are bad or good things, it helps to explain some of our reactions to the events of the past year.
Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth
Margaret Atwood
Bloomsbury, 2008
thoughts on obscenity
December 4, 2009Five Dials is a literary magazine published monthly by the Hamish Hamilton publishing house. Each edition explores a theme, and includes a few unrelated articles. I recently downloaded and read issue 6, Obscenity.
This issues features interviews with John Sutherland, John Mortimer, Ann Mallieau and John Calder exploring the change in British Culture brought about by the relaxation of censorship; and the relationship between censorship, obscenity, power and control. There is also an archive article from Richard Hoggart, a witness at the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Art Spiegelman, Jello Biafra, and Jerry Heller are also interviewed and talk about censorship around art, music, and the relationship of these to the media in the USA.
There are two articles about obscenity as well, one from Patrick Neate about teenage boys and identity, and a rather overwritten and over-wrought one from Arundhati Roy (who is currently facing obscenity charges in Inida) about Gujarat.
The remainder of the issue is an odd mix: an obituary for Lux Interior, a longish piece about watching the Obama inauguration, an article by Alain de Botton, and a piece on Muriel Spark.
I’m not entirely convinced by Five Dials . Hamish Hamilton have a fine stable of authors to call on for content, but the magazine needs a more selective editor to make the themes work. I like the idea of a literary magazine in pdf form, and it’s probably worth a look every so often. And it’s free.
“I think it’s highly inequitable that the talented should be permitted access to erotic fields denied to the clumsy, talentless majority. We should not only… defend to the death other people’s right to say things with which we disagree; we must also allow them to do it in abominable prose”
John Mortimer
Five Dials Number Six: The Obscenity Issue
Hamish Hamilton
don’t point that thing at me
December 1, 2009One of my pet hates is lazy reviews that use the syntax of two well-known and unrelated authors connected by an unexpected verb and/or location (eg ‘Jane Austen goes drinking with Raymond Carver in a Turkish whorehouse’ or ‘____ is the love child of Andy Warhol and Mariah Callas filmed by Wim Wenders’).
But I can’t think of a better way to describe Don’t Point That Thing At Me by Kyril Bonfiglioli, than ‘the lovechild of Bertie Wooster and James Bond on a romp through Texas’. It’s the first of four stories about anti-hero Charlie Mortdecai, an art dealer involved in dubious deals. Mortdecai is aristocrat come down in the world, amoral, degenerate, devious, epicurean, hedonistic and completely gutless. Accompanied by a thuggish manservant (echoes of Jeeves), he pursues a stolen painting across the US, trying to stay one step ahead of other people who want the painting, and a corrupt torturing London copper who wants to nail Mortdecai once and for all.
The book is completely politically incorrect, and not for the squeamish. It’s apparently a cult classic, but ultimately it’s the sort of silly humourous romp that British semi amateur authors seem to specialise in turning out. Despite the glowing reviews on the cover from the likes of Julian Barnes and Stephen Fry, I wouldn’t particularly recommend it.
Don’t Point That Thing At Me
Kyril Bonifiglioli
Overlook, 1972
the reluctant fundamentalist
November 28, 2009Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2007, Mohsin Hamid’s second book The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a tale told by a young Pakistani to an unnamed, unspeaking, unknown American; about his journey from the American dream to political fundamentalism in Pakistan.
Changez is a Princeton graduate who wins a job at a prestigious management consultancy. For a time, he lives the high life in New York, with an expenses account and a tentative romance with an upper-class American girl, Erica. Then someone flies a plane into a building. Changez becomes an outsider in his adopted city. Erica is drawing away from him into deep depression. America attacks Afghanistan. Changez becomes obsessed with following the news from home, and can’t find meaning in his job any more. Erica disappears. Changez resigns, and leaves New York for his home in Lahore.
As this story unwinds, the tension slowly and imperceptibly increases as darkness falls around the cafe in which Changez and his American listener are sitting. Hamid is leading the reader somewhere, just as he leads his American listener back to his hotel, along a dark street where menacing shadows are drawing closer to the pair. The story ends with a threat of violence which suddenly reveals what Changez has become and exactly why the American has been so interested in his story.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist is one of the best books I’ve read this year. The story seems simple but Mohsin Hamid builds it towards a stunning and terrifying climax that left me holding my breath for the last few pages. It is also a clear and nuanced analysis of the tensions between Islamic countries and the West as they are experienced by ordinary people. It’s a short book at only 184 pages – Mohsin Hamid has said ‘I’d rather people read my book twice than only half-way through’, and I would defintely read it again. Highly recommended.
Further reading: ‘Why do they hate us‘ – Mohsin Hamid, Washington Post
The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Mohsin Hamid
Hamish Hamilton, 2007
all the president’s men
November 25, 2009Written by the two journalists who uncovered the Watergate scandal, All the President’s Men is part detective story, part political thriller and part first-draft of history. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein ended up on the Watergate story by accident, stayed on it despite personal difference, and ultimately uncovered one of the greatest political scandals the US has ever known, which led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.
The book was written and published before the full story of Watergate was known, and so it’s sometimes a bit confusing. It’s slow to start with, the significance of events and people are not clear, and the two journalists seem to uncover a lot of information that doesn’t make sense. There are a lot of names to remember, and many of these characters don’t appear again. However, these are all natural consequences of the book being an account of real events, rather than fiction. Once it becomes clear to the journalists who the major players are, the story begins to make more sense and the pace picks up.
The journalists are like detectives in the way they collect and assemble information, but unlike detectives, they can’t compel anyone to talk to them, which makes their job harder and the story more frustrating. Everything they publish has to be verified by at least three sources, and many times it’s ‘obvious’ what is going on but the story can’t advance until things are verified. The journalist’s frustration at times like these is evident.
Because the book ends before the full extent of the Watergate scandal is known, the end is a bit ambiguous and unsatisfying, I suppose because we now know what happened, and because the thread of events now looks clearer than it would have at the time.
What I found most interesting about this book was the background it gives about American politics and political institutions. To someone from a country that is at best ambiguous and at worst deeply cynical and government and institutions, the reverence that Americans (even investigative journalists) have for the office of President seems strange. For a reader used to the Westminster system, the executive system of government looks opaque and ripe for cronyism.
The other interesting aspect of the book is the window it gives onto the world of investigative journalism and news in the days before computers, mobile phones, and internet. The journalists meet with sources in person, they use ingenious things like reverse telephone directories to track down people, and records (both the journalists’ and those of their investigative subjects) are all single-copy paper documents that can disappear quite easily. On the other hand, their sources in government are happy to talk on the phone from their offices – obviously the days of manual switchboards, untraceable calls, and office doors rather than open plan layouts made it safer.
All the President’s Men is a good read, and highly recommended. I’m keen to see the movie and perhaps read Woodward and Bernstein’s other Watergate book, The Final Days.
All the President’s Men
Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
Bloomsbury, 1974
