Al Jazeera - The novel?

NOVEL TO THE JAZEERA MAN

“The Dream of the Decade” comes with high praise. Dan Franklin, editor of Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan is an admirer of the book and says that the 30-something Rattansi “captures the atmosphere of the late 1980s.” But with the first British publication of this quartet, it is easy to see that these characters live a lot with us today.

It is always difficult for a novelist to break through the layers of familiar literary names. And often more difficult for the aspiring writer is answering questions about what their work is about. JD Salinger would have found it difficult to immediately describe why the plot of “Catcher in the Rye” was inherently interesting. Norman Mailer would have had trouble with “An American Dream.” It is the “hook” books like “The Tale of a Maiden” or “The Satanic Verses” that are much easier.

There are hooks in Afshin Rattansi’s debut novels, four of them published in one volume and all loosely connected, among other things that focus on life in London. The first book is about the growing divide between rich and poor just as balsamic vinegar was catching on with the new yuppie class. There follows a book on how Londoners respond to a terrorist bomb scare and another on how property prices began to dominate life in London. The final book is a disguised satire, or what seems like a satire, on the values ​​of the news on the BBC. But what unites the quartet is an inescapable quality of writing.

The British-born thirty-something writer, whose Kenyan father is an expert on Sir Isaac Newton and alchemy, is a bit dismissive of the book’s publication.

“I went through two agencies, Curtis Brown and AP Watt and I can’t say they helped me much and now it’s been twenty years,” he says about to take another cigarette from a pack on the table and then put it back. “I think the publishers of the eighties and early nineties were more interested in my Indian origin than in the subject of the book.”

The first chapters of the first book were written at a time of the revival of Commonwealth writing. Rattansi himself worked on stories about Salman Rushdie during the Satanic Verses affair when he was on Tariq Ali’s groundbreaking Channel 4 series, Bandung File.

Dressed in trendy jeans and a black T-shirt, Rattansi is sitting in a Chateau Marmont seat after being interviewed by Los Angeles’ most progressive radio station, KPFK. On the same show was the now-deceased activist and former co-founder of the notorious Los Angeles band Crips, Stanley “Tookie” Williams, whose pleas for mercy did not prevent him from being injected with Pentothal sodium.

“Los Angeles has always fascinated me and it was Mike Davis’ book, City of Quartz, that enlightened me so much as to why. While London is two organisms, the center and the suburbs, Los Angeles is a myriad of directly opposite entities. It has a sophisticated left, a developing world-class population, a strong port union, fabulous colonies of wealth, and creates right-wing propaganda. And natural disasters have repeatedly shocked and devastated the area. “

The prologue begins with one of the female protagonists of the books, now married, who moves to the site of the Asian tsunami of 2005. It is as if the person who most took advantage of the new opportunities that privatization and a city that fostered entrepreneurship were more shattered by its consequences.

“There is even a theory that the reason Diego García was not affected by the tsunami was because there was no commercial shrimp fishing there. In Sri Lanka and Aceh, the increasing commercialization of the shrimp industry destroyed the protective reefs.”

Rattansi sees politics in everything. He worked as a chief risk analyst at Lloyd’s of London for insurers after they lost billions of pounds. His experience was in the analysis of catastrophes, both environmental and political. But the books are by no means political treatises.

“One of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most moving letters is the one he writes to his daughter, urging her to read Marx. Criminal conservatives like Jeffrey Archer may like his novels, but if a novel is political in one way or another It is in the eye of the beholder.

“What animates the novel’s title, I hope, is that I was part of a generation that was convinced that the social fabric that was ripped apart by Ms Thatcher would take a long time to repair. Perhaps it is hard to remember for those in su In the 1920s, there was a time when music and politics were incredibly sophisticated and polarized. Well, maybe popular music is still so polarized. And it was a time when a section of society took a leap forward. expense of another “.

Despite being in his early twenties, Rattansi finds himself in Jonathan Coe’s ’80s territory on the post-punk era, post-New Romantic The Smiths and the Orgreave battle of the miners’ strike. But The Dream of the Decade is much more international than Coe.

“I always imagined that the four main issues or even obstacles that the characters would have to circumnavigate were class, political terrorism, property and the media. They are vague but they actually have an impact on everyday life. Well, on that one At the moment, terrorism does not impact daily life and the book rather destroys the myth that it does. But certainly, property does. As for the media, its place is an adult education system, a dangerously flawed educational system In fact, I wrote a novel about education, but it was not up to the task. “

Rattansi’s first job was at The Guardian and he has a younger brother who followed him into journalism, he now presents CNN’s world news in the US.

The novels have a distinctly American flair even though they capture the London texture, something many editors commented on when they received their reject sheets. Rattansi was born in Cambridge but has lived all over the world, covering wars and political histories and just writing. Among the places he has lived are Vancouver in Canada, Los Angeles, and Havana and Caracas. In Dubai, for two years, he ran the developing world’s first 24-hour English-language news station, dedicated to an incredible tenure that, according to Rattansi, at times “made Al Jazeera look like Fox News.”

“It was a station dedicated to issues of globalization and international capital except ‘from below’ and the brother of the Crown Prince of Dubai was paying the bill. Someone obviously told someone that this station was not in the Bloomberg mold and the station It was closed. Sometimes I feel as if my approach as the editor of the channel is the same as it was when I started writing the novels. “

From there, it got out of the pan and into the fire. Returning to the BBC, where he had worked as a producer for several years, he found an editor, Rod Liddle, on the Today show, who resigned and then no editor, just as the issue of weapons of mass destruction arose. to unprecedented resignations by the BBC’s Director General and Chairman of the Governor.

“Today was a fantastic place to work. Liddle might be pretty crazy, but he was a surprisingly original editor. When I came back after being the editor of an entire station, I was scared of the Television Center. I was hoping he was fully staffed with the usual copiers. whose idea of ​​originality in journalism reached vox pop. Rod was very different and recruited staff inspired enough to face the Government’s spinning machine with delight. The whole David Kelly disaster was terrible. Even more so when we realized it how little power the Today show could, in the end, wield when it came to stopping the madness of the Iraq war. “

Aside from the final novel, which reads like a 21st century first, Rattansi’s characters are often doomed to love, be it because of distance, class, or the overwhelming pressures of life in London. But this is not Bridget Jones. There is a real anomie in the characters, whether they are drinking champagne or sitting injured in cardboard boxes, that is reminiscent of both Beckett and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Christopher MacLehose, the editor of Richard Ford, Haruki Murakami, Georges Perec and Jos ?? Saramago said he could still feel the force of “The dream of the decade.” Novels are not historical. The evocation of London, in particular, is as palpable as in Peter Ackroyd’s biography of the city. Sometimes it is to the capital city as Bukowski’s prose was to Los Angeles; in fact, Barfly himself read it and found it edifying. At other times it is strictly Waugh. While most journalists’ fiction proves that being a pirate is an enemy of promise, Rattansi creates great characters who we feel sorry for by examining the minutiae of their emotions. But, as one would expect from someone who covered the fall of the Berlin Wall and who worked at the controversial Arab satellite television station Al Jazeera, the issues are far from small.

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