Shadow Play (19 page)

Back to the present. We were both cosy under rugs on opposite couches when for the umpteenth time I began my explanations, still hoping someone would actually discuss the paragraphs in between the sound-bites. Sharon was right: everybody had snipped off only what suited them, the “friends” as well as the implacable foes of my poor little book. There were the baffled literary guys, and the even more bemused
Wall Street Journal
people (not to forget the incandescent lefties), none of whom could quite fathom this socio-spiritual macro-economic tract they were compelled to review. Yet it was plainly argued, and ordinary readers seemed to have no problem comprehending the point in its entirety.

‘Sharon, you know it was a simple book, essentially non-serious, a few suggestions by a non-specialist. Perhaps that's the best way to leave things.'

She was obviously annoyed by my last-minute coyness, and even placed her glass of wine on the side-table, so that her outburst wouldn't stain my sofa.

‘Don't go soft on me after all I've been through to arrive at this point, no slight intended. It was a serious book because you took the trouble of having it published. And I agree with you that the argument has been misrepresented, numerous times, ok? Happy? But I'm your best chance for a full-on hearing, followed, I guarantee, by an all-inclusive rendering, on this, on the terrorists, and on any sundry matter you've put your foot into recently.'

She was so amusing I wanted to give her a chance. I was already looking forward to being let down by her full-length ‘impressionistic' article.

‘All right, here goes, keep in touch. I'm not even sure I agree with myself any more. I actually regret making it seem like a thesis.

‘Anyhow, there were a few points at the heart of it. First, and most categorically, it was not “pro-capitalist”, though that has become the standard tagline for it. On the contrary, the opening chapters do nothing but attack the false claims, inconsistencies and hypocrisies of contemporary capitalism that many better qualified writers have made me aware of. It's a simple book, a human book, perhaps exactly the wrong-headed sort of economic and political book you'd expect from a flaky novelist.'

‘Then why did you write it?'

‘I don't know. I suppose I wanted to challenge that very idea, that artists are too dopey to offer anything specific or useful
to society's other debates and preoccupations. I guess that's an original aspiration, huh? I merely added another gravestone to an already crowded cemetery.'

Sharon was biting her upper lip to hold back a smile, her head tilted away from me. ‘There is another way to interpret this trajectory. After all the charges of being a sucker for hype and celebrity, you wanted to recapture your social credentials, prove you were still politically engaged? Run with me: it's more fun if I play the d's a.'

‘It wasn't anything as grand as that, so I'm simply going to ignore your bait. You know what I was really attempting? I wanted to ask in a new way what a novelist's options are if he's interested in exploring structures and systems along with the stories of individuals.'

‘Then what made you defend giant corporations of all things?' She disappointingly parroted the same stale charge every reviewer had picked up on during the past six months.

‘This is the hilarious bit.
Power and the Person
was an essay in eight parts, three of which raised these issues. Less than half the book, yet that's what everyone has chosen to highlight out of context. But I'm too long-suffering to mind. I am a powerless person. I will valiantly restate the rather more subtle point I was making. First, there was no defence of contemporary capitalist practices intended in my book. Will you please please please quote that, and then at least a bit of what I'm about to say?

‘Once we accept – and by now only loonies on the extreme left and right don't – that a six-billion-strong integrated society is here to stay, inter-related in most things, with amazing benefits as well as victims, we also must concede that vast quantities of capital are required to fund the goods, services
and projects this population demands. And whoever controls the strings administering that capital, be they private investors or government departments, automatically gather power to themselves. Mass societies need huge flows and pools of money to get things off the ground, and this inevitably creates hierarchies of power.

‘Not for a moment am I holding this up to praise. What I would ask my anti-globalization friends to contemplate, before they shut the door on me, are the energies and the inventiveness represented by capitalism. Have these really achieved nothing other than to make certain classes rich and powerful? Have there been no comparable benefits to offset the tremendous costs?

‘Capitalism embodies an onrush not just of colossal waves of desire but also of creativity and dynamism. The money never stands still, unlike the era of our inbreeding forefathers on their feudal estates, who could only think of using it to preserve stagnant hierarchies, or to wage senseless wars. Today they've come up with so many angles for multiplying money, that they don't even need to build factories or produce things any more. The markets generate money on the promise of money backed up by the distant mirage of money, none of which has come into being yet. There's a lot wrong with that model. Who is it set up to serve? How much of that loot ever really “trickles down”? What about the volume of legal “leakage” that disappears each year into the world's various tax havens?

‘Nevertheless, even acknowledging its crazy history and all its ongoing excesses, I feel there's an energy there that should be harnessed as fuel, because what are you going to have instead? Are you foolish enough to make an enemy out of such inventiveness rather than dam and channel it to new ends?
Because it's not just money: it's ideas, and people. Aren't
we
entrepreneurs of a sort, you and I, having this fiery conversation in London, far from where we were supposed to vegetate and die, precisely because we were allowed to make the most of our minds? To me, one kind of dynamism is bound up with another, and to watch them sizzle together is wonderful. The problem arises with the fundamentalist notion that we can have no collective objectives other than the short-term profit-centred fulfilment of such energies, and when you hold the survival of the planet hostage to these singular aims.'

Despite the recorder, I realized she'd been scribbling. Perhaps objections, perhaps questions. It really pleased me, the flare in her eyes as she responded.

‘And this is all you implied: harness the energy but inspire it to new ends. This beautiful, simple message.'

‘Pretty much. I confessed to a shameful vice, that actually I deeply admire some of the achievements of advanced capitalism, whilst being aware of their tremendous cost. Have you ever been to a major port and watched the containers being offloaded? What about the freeways and their beautiful spaghetti intersections, and those long trucks that can transport twenty cars at a time? Or even the bear-pit itself: have you visited an old-fashioned trading floor, shaking up billions all around the world? Is there nothing to marvel at in these feats?'

She raised her eyebrows in exasperation. ‘Considering I worked for the
Financial Times
for five years, it'd be highly irregular if I wasn't familiar with these places. Don't forget, I'm not and never have been a literary critic. I only own two of your novels, and one of those was a birthday present.'

‘Wow, you really clarified things there. I'm sorry, all of a
sudden I realize how irrelevant most of the afternoon has been for you. I didn't read your card and never asked for a background check. Nor did I Google you when you called. That is why I wasted so much time pronouncing on the soul.'

‘Hey, easy on the insults. I thought we financial types also embodied immense creaturely potential. Finance isn't the dictionary antonym for feeling, you know. And I told you, this interview is intended to be personal.'

‘Yes, I recall your exact word. Impressionistic, you said. I thought it odd at the time. Now I see it was your soul peeping through.'

She stuck out her tongue at me before resuming. ‘So explain to me – because I'm slightly baffled, and beginning to believe that the
Wall Street Journal
understood you correctly after all – how any of this is different from what the hard-right is saying. Leave all solutions to the market. Trust our genius. Let's treat this century as a Hollywood cliff-hanger, a race between those melting icecaps you bleeding-hearts blather endlessly about, and our ability to invent miraculous new technological solutions. That would be the way of
real
men.'

This had been the pre-eminent accusation against the book, and I raised my hands in weary surrender. ‘Look, all I pointed out was that it's been amply demonstrated that entrepreneurialism works reasonably to exceptionally well in many areas and for certain purposes. At the same time, how can a society premised upon a fundamentalist conception of pure capitalism ever achieve any of the broader objectives we might share as human beings rather than as profit-psychopaths?

‘And there were two final points I wanted to leave people arguing about. The first is an obvious truth that's worth restating: we are a monopoly planet. There are no other producers or
consumers in the solar system. If we get together and resolve not to undercut our neighbour in a race to the bottom to attract investment at any price, then the guys holding our Third World balls right now will have to wake up to the painful fact that there's no other planet to do business on. The denominator will be raised around the globe. Of course, for this to happen, the class that controls the government in each country has to somehow refrain from betraying its own population in favour of colluding with its counterparts worldwide in narrow self-interest, and my dishonourable presence at places like Davos is solely intended to work towards persuading them of this bigger picture.

‘Second, wherever we go, let us preserve the best of modernity to assist us in our challenges. I believe that money and education have been the great secular fuels of the modern world. It is education that keeps money from pooling in a few hands, by generating new ideas, new possibilities, players, products, and markets.'

As I spoke, I noticed she wasn't looking combative any more, but seemed strangely relaxed and yet alert and taut. The recorder lay on the table between us: she was sitting on the couch opposite, rug flung off, legs curled underneath her, leaning slightly forward, hands by her side, not unlike a starter's crouch before a sprint. But she didn't seem aware of her body at all. At this point it was all words, fast and flashing, heat and light, in the air between us.

‘And especially for us in the global South, despite our mistrust of Western history and its dreadful track-record of violation, let's not lose sight of that original emancipating potential Adam Smith was excited about, because wherever money and learning show up, they set the static world in motion. You can hope to
die differently from the way you were born. In between you can think different, want different, make and buy different. Others who cling to older convictions, about the primacy of place, birth, blood, race, or faith, remain baffled, desperate and angry. This was the real legacy of the industrial revolution, not that they abolished elites, but that the rules for entering elites were altered forever. Of course things aren't….'

‘You know,' she interrupted as if finally at the end of her tolerance, ‘it surprised me to hear you deliver that oration in the book and it surprises me all over again – coming from you, an Indian, a child of the unwilling – is there a better word for it? – anus of early capitalism, jolly-rogered for two hundred years, with the famines and the opium and everything else.

‘Anyway,' she continued, slumping suddenly, as if the effort had been excessive (it was also quite late, she'd been here since early afternoon), or was it from some subtle disappointment? ‘I must leave soon, and I have more than enough material on
Power and the Person
. If I could quickly get a few clarifications about the 7/7 article – was that written out of sympathy for those you just mentioned, the ones with convictions about faith and blood and race, who have nothing now but their desperation and bafflement?'

‘I don't know where that emerged from. I was powered by an instinctive anger. About everything, from the lies they told us about Jean Charles de Menezes to the new laws that redefine our right to public debate: which actions we can approve of, and which ones it is unacceptable to “glorify”. It's all in the piece, but I admit my anger might have confused some about its sympathies.

‘Once when there was a war, this city endured a five-year blitz. That was expected. Today we're taken aback at the smallest
sign of retaliation that disrupts our daily life, even though there are aggressions being prosecuted in our name in countries around the world. All I wanted to ask was: people who are more aware of these actions than we are – because it is their homes that are flattened, their oil that is stolen, their despots upheld and relatives murdered – do they have a right to a response? Are they more heinous because they didn't come at us in uniform with warnings? Doesn't it speak of their desperation that they wage war in such hopeless ways?'

‘How does that last argument apply to British Muslims? Raj, someone in your position can't afford to be angry when writing. It's counter-productive, and you confuse the issues.'

‘Ok, fair point, but it was one piece. It amazes me that people have forgotten everything else I've written over the years. But then, journalistic memories are expediently short, unless you go on to surprise me.'

She picked up her recorder and switched it off, and started looking around for her bag. I offered her one for the road, but she declined. She gathered her stuff and went to the bathroom to fix herself up. I realized how drained I felt myself, and acutely dehydrated.