BOOKS/MUSIC: Triptych - The Manic Street Preachers' The Holy Bible

“The album was written with an almost academic discipline... We sat down and gave ourselves headings and structures, so each song is like an essay." - James Dean Bradfield

“If the Holy Bible was meaningful to you then I wouldn’t recommend spending six months thinking and writing about it” - Daniel Lukes (co-author of ‘Triptych’)

Triptych is a book published earlier this year comprising 3 dissertations on the Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible.  If any album deserves a book like this it is The Holy Bible.  The Manics always invited analysis of their lyrics, but The Holy Bible is the only album that demands it.  Richey Edwards’ words are dense and just listening to the words isn’t enough because it’s too much to take in with the speed of delivery.  

It’s a powerful album, critically acclaimed and compelling. The album’s subject matter takes in prostitution, political extremities, anorexia, the Holocaust, nostalgia, self-mutilation, a yearning for innocence and the morality of the death penalty.  And it mainly manages to get it right - done badly, an album covering these subjects would have been immensely embarrassing (‘Revol’ doesn’t get it right and has always been embarrassing).

I came to the Manics long after Richey’s disappearance - I heard ‘Design For Life’ played alongside contemporary Britpop singles from Blur, Oasis, etc then immersed myself in its parent album.  We had a ritual in my family of going to the library every couple of weeks to rent CDs for 20p a pop and taping the ones we liked.  I saw the The Holy Bible and we played it in the car on the way home.  It was a little bit different - my Dad hated it.  My Mum, who always encouraged getting into different things like The Prodigy and Joy Division, probably wasn’t keen on the music but was reading the lyrics in the passenger seat and said they were very good.  I’ll always remember that first exposure to the confrontational nature of the album for everyone and the way it demanded an immediate response.  It wasn’t, and isn’t, background music.

‘Triptych’ is confirmation of the importance the album holds over people.  Rhian E Jones, in the first essay, compares listening to the Manics now to thinking of embarrassing exes, which I very much relate to.  That said, she goes on to say that in a world where our generation is the first to be poorer than the previous one adolescent angst shouldn’t be confined to adolescence.  Her essay is the most personal, using her own experiences to make sense of the album; it’s also the most straightforward, putting it in a post-Thatcher, pre-Blair context and examining the political obsessions of the day.

Daniel Luke’s chapter is extremely interesting, and in theory a good idea - to read all the books that inspired Richey and Nicky’s lyrics. This includes sections on The Waste Land, Sylvia Plath, Hubert Selby Jr - the Richey Edwards reading list.  The obvious downside to this from his point of view is that it takes a lot longer to read pages and pages of bleakly themed books than it does to listen to 50 minutes of an album. By the end of the chapter, understandably, he seems worn down by the task he has set himself and it peters out, finally beaten by trying to ‘get’ Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition in the incongruous setting of waiting to pick his daughter up from ballet.  

The third essay by Larissa Wodtke which deals with Derrida’s notion of ‘the archive’ I will have to re-read to understand, as I began to feel out of my depth.  That’s not a criticism - it’s rare that reading a book about a rock album makes you feel stupid. I liked the way that instead of cutting off after Richey’s disappearance and ignoring the Manics’ post-Bible work, she examines its effect on their later career.  It ends with her seeing their 20th Anniversary shows for the album, where the book returns to its opening approach of personal experience.

Most bands only get one album in their career where everything they stand for is coalesced into a whole if they’re lucky, and for the Manics’ The Holy Bible was undoubtedly their finest hour.  The first two authors admit to growing out of the Manics, which is something that happened to me - a band that meant a lot just stopped being crucial at some point.  I started by saying it’s a powerful album, and it is, but anyone not in their teens who really related to it I’d actually be vaguely concerned about.  Having said that, the point raised by Jones mentioned above bears repeating - given the current political climate, the insecurities and everyday emotional instability we experience as teenagers are not necessarily things most of us leave behind when we become adults these days.

BOOKS: Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of The Rock Stars by David Hepworth

It’s obvious from David Hepworth’s book that he is a big 70’s guy. His other recently published book, which i haven’t read, is about 1971.  He is definitely the kind of person (I can just picture it) who would say “music isn’t what it was.”  That’s effectively what this book is.

Therefore, this book on the rise and fall of Rock Gods is at its most enthusiastic in its first half.  Rock Gods of the 80s onwards are treated with less interest.  Kurt Cobain’s suicide is dealt with intelligently but briefly, almost dismissively compared with the longest chapter which is on the rise of Bob Dylan who Hepworth considers the ultimate Rock God.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with that although it gives more than a clue to what Hepworth considers the golden age of rock music.

Really, the nature of the book, although interesting, has less depth than the title promises.  The introduction starts promisingly but the book itself is really just a chronologically ordered list of potted biographies of famous musicians based on a year in their lives.  The book very quickly moves away from analysis of what a rock god is or was and becomes more concerned with anecdotes and trivia - interesting trivia, but still.  Example: the chapter about Jim Morrison focuses a lot on the year he got done for getting his cock out onstage but doesn’t really explain why I should care, or how it contributes to the rise or the fall of the Rock God. Likewise the fact that Little Richard's 'Tutti Frutti' was originally about anal sex is funny but essentially pub quiz level information.

The ‘event in the year in the life of’ approach rarely works for me.  Without context such a narrative relies either on the reader already knowing the context or not caring about it.  The death of John Lennon works better than most; but this could well be because The Beatles have several chapters devoted in this book.  Elvis gets two, everyone else just gets one year, usually the year they made it or the year they died.  

Likewise the list approach is always highly subjective.  My main query is the inclusion of Ian Dury, who was great but a relatively minor player looking back. Considering there’s no chapter on Sid Vicious from the same period seems an odd choice, Vicious being the ultimate anti-Rock God.  The conclusion I draw from this is that Hepworth isn’t interested in 70s punk and so chose someone he liked to write about.  Nothing necessarily wrong with that, it is his book after all - but this points once more to this being more like a list of favourite artists than historically influential ones.  Another quirk is the end of chapter lists of important singles and albums from the year in question, which sometimes omit songs from the artist you’ve just been reading about.

The overarching narrative is that the concept of the Rock God relied a lot on their mystique and ability to seem different to their audience in a special way.  According to Hepworth this went out the window with the arrival of us living, in his words, in a hip-hop world, which he seems to class as the opposite of rock somehow.  It’s true that In the 21st century, it’s not hard to find out what people in the charts have for breakfast or where they shop, which makes them less mysterious and more directly boastful. Instead of hiding away in a Gothic ruin pretending to be an occultist like Jimmy Page they will show off their bling on Instagram at will.  Considering there are chapters on Elvis and Michael Jackson, this doesn’t sit right with me.  They’d be straight on Instagram showing off their latest expensive diamond encrusted toilet roll holder or whatever.  The fall of the Rock God is more likely due to the fact that Rock Gods lost their novelty and that Rock as a genre ground to a natural halt.  

The mid-90s is a good place to stop - it was at this point that rock slowly became more derivative, with Oasis and Blur pinching bits of the 60s, Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party pinching bits of the Post-Punk era, and the original bands themselves reforming to do on the whole uninspiring Greatest Hits/grab the money and run nostalgia gigs.  The Rolling Stones are for instance are technically still going, but I’m sure people who see them now are either on a nostalgia trip or are curious to hear them play their old stuff live - and they give those people what they want.  Go on, name their last album without googling it - or in fact one of their albums from the last 20 years.

It is, however, premature to write off rock as a genre even if Rock Gods have in fact gone for good.  There’s always exciting indie stuff out there, as well as a lot of dreck admittedly - but that has always been the case, even in Hepworth’s day - for every Beatles there would have been a hundred Gerry and the Pacemakers.  Music is fashion, and fashion goes in cycles.  The 80s were on the whole a dry spell for guitar bands in the mainstream, but things turned around in the 90s through to the early 00s and then turned around again.  What Hepworth really means are that his Rock Gods are dead.  Music stardom still exists, and there’s nothing to say that guitar music won’t become culturally dominant again (although it’s true to say that there’s nothing to say it will either).

This is not a bad book, and is well written for what it is - if you enjoy music from the period covered (and I definitely do) you will find it very enjoyable.  But don’t expect more than some interesting facts from the past.  The future has no place in Hepworth’s obituary of the Rock God.

BOOKS: So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

Social Media doesn’t have to be a scary place – but it can wreck your life.

That is the main feeling I came away with after reading Jon Ronson’s ‘So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed’, a book which illustrates the perils of (amongst other things) having an ‘online presence’.

Here he looks at public shamings, which since the advent of Twitter (and to a lesser extent Facebook) have become a massive part of society again.  One of the many cases explored in SYBPS is Jonah Lehrer, a writer who turned out to have used invented Bob Dylan quotes in his book.  After the initial controversy died down, he gave an apology speech, accompanied by a live Twitter feed.  That is the modern equivalent of being jeered at in the stocks, and serves as the perfect visual metaphor for what this book is about .  Social Media doesn’t accept apologies, partly because there are too many people out there who love sticking the boot in, and people find it hard to defend themselves against such overwhelming attack.  A judge from the American Deep South is interviewed for the book.  He’s known for using public shame in many of his sentences (drunk drivers have to hold signs by the highway proclaiming their crime - that sort of thing).  But he argues that the people he subjects to shame are at least found guilty first.  Who is in charge of finding people guilty on Twitter?  No one, obviously – or perhaps everyone.  We all just act as part of one big algorithm that surges wildly every now and then over specific incidents.

In the book, it is pointed out that, especially online, our reputation is everything.  And to lose it can be incredibly traumatic.  Justine Sacco is probably the most famous of the recent Twitterstorm victims, and Ronson gives a précis of the affair (and some others mentioned in the book) in this video made for The Guardian.

Justine Sacco probably naively thought the only people who would read her tweets were some of her 170 or so followers.  She thought she was making a point in a satirical way but as she says when interviewed in the book, she is not a comedienne or a character on South Park.  Her joke wasn’t funny, and because it wasn’t just an ill-judged text to a friend you could later apologise to but was a tweet it lingered in cyberspace as a potentially offensive statement waiting for people to take offence at it. 

Sacco lost her job (at a PR company of all places…).  I don’t know for a fact, but I imagine that she wouldn’t have immediately lost her job for saying the exact same sentence at work even in front of her manager.  She definitely would have had a disciplinary, possibly even been suspended, but she probably wouldn’t have been fired on the spot.  The guys at the tech conference who got fired for making a sexual innuendo about a dongle definitely wouldn’t have been fired if Twitter hadn’t been whipped up into a frenzy.  But Twitter was whipped up into such a frenzy on that occasion it meant that the person who originally complained lost her job.  I mean, no one is a winner here, are they?  As it happens I do think that Adria Richards overreacted regarding a conversation she overheard two strangers have at a conference.  I do think it was right to call her out on that.  But obviously before too long Twitter had in turn overreacted to her overreaction and there were calls for her to be raped and liberal uses of the C-word and all the other nonsense that shows Twitter at its worst.  So even Twitter loses in this case, as in similar cases (#GamerGate anyone?) where its users make it seem as if it is exclusively populated by swearing misogynists obsessed with rape.

Did these people really deserve to lose their jobs and effectively have post-traumatic stress syndrome just for making a bad call on Twitter?   I don’t think so.  I think employers will have to develop more sophisticated ways of dealing with internet indiscretions than simply firing people, because these incidents are going to keep on happening.  Ronson points out that we often like to think that when the Twitterstorm dies down, the person at the centre of it all will be fine really, but his book proves that it doesn’t really work like that.  The people he speaks to in his book all show similar signs of post-traumatic shock and depression for at least a few months after it ‘all dies down’.

Jon Ronson is an excellent journalist who is adept at taking a subject and making it accessible, without dumbing down.  He investigates a subject and lets you in on his investigations rather than just feeding back the results, which gives his books a novelistic and compulsive quality.  And at the very least, this book will definitely make you consider a few more seconds before pressing send on a tweet.

BOOKS: 1984 and A Clockwork Orange

Nineteen Eighty-four – you just can’t get away from it.  Culturally it’s become more than the sum of its parts, like Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band you don’t need to enjoy it (or even have fully read it), you just need to know it well enough to be able to appear credible.  

It is a clumsy read in places.  Winston Smith, the protagonist of the piece, is a cipher.  He represents Orwell.  When Winston tries to connect with the proles in a pub one suspects this is how the Eton boy Orwell felt trying to bond with the working class he tried to connect with but ultimately couldn’t (“Wanna live like common people?”)  Orwell’s politics aren’t seamlessly woven into the text but spelt out in marker pen. We read pages of the diadactive subversive book Smith gets his hands on, a shockingly crude technique for a book with this reputation.  

From the first chapter onwards you are waiting to see how Winston will be caught and what will happen to him.  You don’t care because you are concerned for the character of Winston – you care because you want to find out what happens in the Ministry of Love, where the bad things, and therefore the interesting things happen.  This isn’t a book that expects its readers to care about it’s main focus of attention, but to learn about life in Airstrip One.  There’s no humour in the prose but sheer exposition…

George Orwell at work in Room 101...

And that leads me to something I’d never noticed before.  The appendix linked to the book, which is written as a supposedly dispassionate history of Newspeak linked to the main text – a page from a history textbook– contains one line where it mentions Winston Smith by name.  This is jarring.  This implies that the main part of the novel has been used as a primary source for the unknown historians of Newspeak.  But the main text of the novel is not written in the first person (it is not, for instance, Winston’s diary).  So if this third-person account of Winston’s life is being used as a source whose voice is it?  Is it a dossier in the Thought Police’s files?  When you notice this it calls the authorial voice of the novel in to question, and creates an even deeper sense of unease.  Who are we when we read Nineteen Eighty-four… are we not seeing Airstrip One life through Winston Smith’s eyes after all, but through the dispassionate eyes of The Party?  The lack of humour in the prose tallies with this reading.  Nineteen Eighty-four is a record of life according to The Party in 1984.  The reader is a member of the Thought Police, and probably not a very high ranking member.  Orwell has created quite a rare thing – the unreliable third-person narrative.  This is the best way to read the book now - as a creepy, perverted, curiously emotionless report.

Anthony Burgess (who we last mentioned patronising The Beatles) calls out Nineteen Eighty-four in his book 1985.  The most interesting point about Orwell Burgess makes (and the most obvious one once it has been made) is that Nineteen Eighty-four is about 1948.  Burgess was an almost-contemporary of Orwell.  Certainly he remembers 1948, and points out a lot of the parallels between Airstrip One and post-war Britain – all of a sudden the USSR was the enemy after having been our staunch ally against Nazi Germany, in much the same way that Eurasia and Eastasia alternate as the enemy in the never-ending war in Nineteen Eighty-four.  The poor quality Victory cigarettes Winston smokes were the same brand British troops were given.  The rationing of everything was, if anything, worse than it had been during the war – the razorblade shortage in Oceania would have been all too familiar to contemporary readers.  Big Brother was part of an advertising slogan of the time and, perhaps most comically, Room 101 was where Orwell worked in the BBC.

Nineteen Eighty-four, the godfather of dystopias, isn’t a predicition of what will happen.  Dystopic stories are the author’s present concerns turned up to 11.  Nineteen Eighty-four can be read as a Thought Police dossier of life in 1948 – and is therefore destined to date.

A Clockwork Orange; Burgess’ legacy whether he wanted it to be or not is different.  It doesn’t describe society in any structural detail; it just describes one where there are violent young men.  If it comes to pass that we live in a society without youths being violent then the book will immediately become irrelevant.  But for this reason, A Clockwork Orange will never become irrelevant.  

The iconic cover to A Clockwork Orange

Nineteen Eighty-four is ‘about’ society, but mainly 1948 society.  A Clockwork Orange is interested in the individual.  Burgess’ book is concerned with morality and its place within any society.  The main difference between these two famous dystopias is that, if in Nineteen Eighty-four we have a possibly unreliable third person narrator that is faceless and disturbing, in A Clockwork Orange we have an unreliable narrator that is seductive and exuberant.  It’s easy to forget, if you’re familiar with the film, how much more of a little shit Alex is in the book.  He’s arguably only a manslaughterer in the film but in the book he’s a stone cold killer when he commits his murder in prison.  

A Clockwork Orange is not (like Nineteen Eighty-four) about a man in a dystopic society who feels, vaguely, there could and should be something better – oh, if only he had some subversive literature to read!  A Clockwork Orange is about a boy in a dystopic society who doesn’t know any better and doesn’t particularly care.  It puts the id under the microscope.  Alex destroys, for fun.  The book puts the liberal reader in an uncomfortable position and shows no mercy to values – if you want a free society you have to accept the possibility, the inevitability of an Alex.  Otherwise you don’t want a free society and are just as reactionary as the novel’s government.  What side are you really on?  Fuck with society or fuck with the individual?  Neither is attractive but…  What’s it going to be then, eh?  The freedom Winston Smith craves is available in abundance in Burgess’ world –  but Alex is young and hates virtue for its own sake – and so isn’t virtuous.  And virtue isn’t something that can be drummed into someone via traditional kickings or via the ‘humane’ Ludovic Technique.  Virtue doesn’t mean anything in any society unless it comes from the heart

A Clockwork Orange stands up as a much more complex examination of a dystopic society than Nineteen Eighty-four because it is by its nature concerned with the eternal individual, not an inverted present that has moved on.  This is not to denigrate its achievements but to recognise that its achievement is within the world of social satire and has dated somewhat – as social satire does.  Alex finds a road to redemption in A Clockwork Orange, and a potential life.  Winston Smith finds a love of Big Brother and death.  Winston Smith is Orwell’s pawn, used to show a world and discarded.  Even Oceania shows more concern for Winston Smith than Orwell.  Burgess shows how someone can be the worst kind of product of a fucked up society and still make good – because Alex would exist in any society.  A Clockwork Orange is concerned with the nature of humanity. Nineteen Eighty-four is concerned with the Britain of 1948 taken to its extremities and is by default less powerful than A Clockwork Orange because we are further away from 1948 than we are from being human.  

BOOK: Alice In Wonderland and Lewis Carroll's Biopic.

Lewis Through The Camera Lens

They’re making a biopic of Charles Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll).  But before we talk about him, let’s talk about Alice.  

‘Alice in Wonderland’ is one of those rare stories; not only do you not need to have read the book to know it, you also don’t need to have seen the films either.  It is a story that it just known, deeply rooted in popular culture worldwide. 

And it absolutely deserves that status – it is legendary in a literal sense; ‘Alice In Wonderland’ is a legend that can be interpreted and re-interpreted over and over again to different creative effects.  The famous Disney cartoon places the story firmly in fairy tale territory; Tim Burton takes the idea into darker territory.

The rampant dreamlike happenings of the story (and that of its superior sequel, ‘Through The Looking Glass’) lend themselves well to visuals both in film and illustration.  John Tenniel’s

Alice & Friend

original drawings are testament to that, and are perhaps still the best (although I think Anthony Browne’s Magritte inspired pictures give Tenniel a run for his money…)  Perhaps because the story started as part of the ‘oral tradition’ style of telling tales it allows it to be flexible and fluid; Carroll no doubt had to incorporate interruptions and questions into the story as it went along.

Of course, because the story was told before it was written the magic of the Alice books really lies in its use of language and absurd ideas. All of the wordplay, nonsense poetry and parodies of nursery rhymes, unanswerable riddles (“Why is a raven like a writing desk?”), anthropomorphic characters, playing cards painting flowers, murdering time, babies turning into pigs, disembodied smiles left hanging in the air…  Everything is possible, especially when it shouldn’t be.  It is anarchic in every sense – there are no rules to what happens.  This is why, I believe, the Alice books still have the capacity to terrify children; there are no genre tropes here where the heroine will be fine after defeating the villain/discovering the treasure/winning the game, etc.  The lack of rules or objectives is completely disorientating, and children can find this troubling (it terrified me – my Mum had to give up during the second chapter apparently). 

And where is Carroll actually going with all of this?  It goes nowhere of course; it ends with that most clichéd of dues ex machina endings – Alice woke up and it was all a dream.  It’s a complete admission on Carroll’s part that his anarchy doesn’t have a conclusion or a ‘point’ to make – it is there to be enjoyed, and then it isn’t.  It’s notable that this is exactly the same way the sequel ends, and was not seen as something from the first book that could be ‘fixed’ this time round.  It’s also notable that no one complains about either of the books having weak endings.

So, that’s my opinion of the Alice books.  Written by Lewis Carroll…

… but then Lewis Carroll didn’t exist in real life.  Charles Dodgson existed in real life but we don’t know very much about him.  Or rather, we don’t know very much about the part of him that wrote the Alice books, which are the only relevant bits for us.  It is worth little to us now to know that he was a good but very dull maths lecturer.  His biographical details are largely uninteresting apart from the aspects of Dodgson’s life that converged with Carroll’s – namely the nature of his relationships with children.  Nevertheless, they (‘they’ being Hollywood) are planning a biopic, called 'Queen Of Hearts'.  Hmm.  It's being talked about on industry sites, and the one sentence synopsis is as follows: "Oxford instructor Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) tells stories to the dean's daughter, Alice, and her sisters, while falling in love with the dean's wife."

Now, it may seem unfair to judge an unmade film on a tagline, but this already sounds a bit lame.  The emphasis sounds like it’s on completely the wrong thing.  The story of Carroll/Dodgson doesn’t have anything to do with falling in love with a Dean’s wife (something which maybe, possibly, might have happened but which is in the end pure speculation based on some missing diary pages).  No, the only story to tell about Dodgson’s life worth telling is about his love for Alice Liddell.

What form that love took is quite unknowable.  There are the posthumous accusations of paedophilia, but no direct evidence for them.  He shared a typical Victorian taste for over-sentimentalising children, and girls in particular (see also Little Nell and most of the rest of Dickens).  But I don’t think he wanted to sexualise children.  He comes across in biographies as a man who wasn’t particularly interested in sex, and was probably frightened of it, and I think it more likely that he enjoyed the company of children because they represented to him a retreat from the sexualised world of adults.  Which is undoubtedly still rather messed up; but then he lived in the Victorian era, which had a very messed up code of ethics and morals about most things.  There’s something of the ‘Old Peter Pan’ about his character, someone who shouldn’t have grown up but did.  Perhaps that explains the reoccurrence of time as a concept in all of his books.  And perhaps that’s why there’s also an air of sadness and of violence amongst all the comedy, expressing a sense of frustration with the tediousness/emotional responsibilities of the adult world.

Charles Dodgson

This aspect of his character is the only part worth examining, frankly, because that’s the only bit we know that links directly to the work we remember him for.  If the rumours (and I think even ‘rumours’ is too strong a word) that he was having a fling with the Dean’s wife were true then you’d still just have a dull melodrama set in Victorian Oxford.  You can say what you want about her importance in his life, but he didn’t write a book for her, he wrote one for her daughter.  The complex bit of his character, and therefore the interesting bit, is his attitude to childhood and his relationship with children; his relationship with adults just doesn’t sound very interesting. 

Even if the film is a good piece of drama about a love triangle – and it could be a very good piece of drama – that’ll probably put Alice in more in the background which is… well, fine I suppose – but it would seem a bit perverse to make a film about the relatively unremarkable life of Charles Dodgson instead of the more enigmatic Lewis Carroll.

BOOK: The Heretics - Adventures With The Enemies Of Science by Will Storr

HERETIC n. a person believing in or practicing in religious heresy.

            A person holding an opinion at odds with what is generally accepted. (OED)

Will Storr’s book is an exploration of the ideas that people believe in and the people that

believe in ideas, with the emphasis changing from chapter to chapter.  It seems from the start that the book could involve laughing at people with odd ideals (Creationists, homeopaths, UFO spotters all feature amongst many more fringe groups), a sort of ‘Walking With Crazies’, but ends up being a subtler discussion and therefore more interesting.  The idea of having passionate ideas is examined and not just anti-science ones.  The Skeptics and James Randi are also investigated and we are invited to see people in some ways as dogmatic in their approach as those they seek out to debunk. 

Having a belief is shown to be something that comes first and that the brain then rationalises.  One of the most striking chapters shows David Irving, the disgraced British historian fruitlessly trying to prove that Hitler was uninvolved in the events leading up to the Holocaust.  He believes this fervently, and has devoted his career to finding evidence to prove it spending time in courts and prisons along the way.  It is fair to say that if someone is willing to go to prison over something like this we are in ‘passionate belief’ territory, something which isn’t necessarily related to rationalism (but as the book discusses, isn’t necessarily unrelated to rationalism either).  The chapter on Irving is the one that most explicitly demonstrates one of the central themes of the book – that in life we are all the heroes of our own narrative and are more willing to find faults with other peoples’ beliefs than our own.

Irving is of course a more extreme demonstration of this psychological bias than most of us would be.  His belief is a very specific one – he is not really a neo-Nazi (although certainly holds dubious opinions regarding race and politics). 

David Irving, holding a copy of his book 'Hitler's War',
which argued that Hitler was ignorant of the Holocaust

He now believes that the Holocaust happened but that Hitler was innocent.  Storr follows him around a tour of Polish war sites with some right-wing tourists on a kind of macabre package holiday, trying to fit in with them and avoiding them finding out that his fiancé is mixed race English-Pakistani.  As time goes on, he finds that most of the other Nazi ghouls have some form of familial connection to Germans who fought in WWII.  But Irving most certainly doesn’t, with the men in his family all patriotic soldiers, this kind of ‘real world’ reason.  Irving’s reason for his belief seems more rooted in his personality as someone who has always had the innate compulsions to go against the grain and seemingly over the years this has led to stubbornness in the face of the truth.  It comes across as more of an illness. His unwillingness to listen to reason leads to him bickering with Storr over extremely minor words in sentences from Goebbels’ diaries as being mistranslations and so on.  His Quixotic quest has distorted his world view and these are the straws he clings to to support it.

This is all very interesting but perhaps what you would expect from a book about people going against the grain.  Other chapters cover less predictable subjects.  The chapter examining the Skeptic movement tries to see the other side of the coin and questions whether they are as objective as they claim.  They have a version of truth to prove, and does this lack of objectivity in some way make them untrustworthy?  Not untrustworthy in terms of making any conscious lies or misleading accusations; but in terms of being people with a devout belief that certain things need debunking and refusing to accept that their take on the truth could be wrong?  The interview with James Randi, the world famous authority on debunking what he calls ‘woo woo’ and ‘flim flam’, surprised me by being very similar to the one with Irving with his evasive answers and contradictions.  In his quest against those he sees as charlatans and conmen, Randi has sometimes seemed to use their own methods when seeking to expose them (launching angry diatribes against people who disagree with him on his blog for instance).  He loses his temper with Storr when he is criticised over the way he has handled certain events in his past in exactly the same way Irving does.  I find Randi an infinitely more sympathetic character than Irving, and want to give him the benefit of the doubt when his version of events feels shaky. 

But if he was the proponent of Hitler’s innocence and Irving was the one devoted to exposing fraudsters: what would I think of him and Irving then?  And when the interview ends with

James Randi, scourge of the psychics

Randi admitting to being a supporter of Social Darwinsm supporting the view that smokers should be allowed to “do themselves in” because they are stupid, and that the death of people with low IQ would “clear the air” the line between the two men doesn’t seem so much blurred as invisible.

The interview takes places at a Skeptic conference, with speakers like Richard Dawkins and Randi, and t-shirts, leaflets and workshops.  It seems no different in set-up to conferences seen earlier for people who believe in flying saucers or creationism.  Tellingly, a barista in the coffee bar where Randi is interviewed is quoted as telling a customer that Skeptics are like conspiracy theorists. 

Storr ends the book by discussing our view of the world, and how we are all in the process of believing ourselves to be the hero of our own story as we walk through life – everyone is a storyteller.  He also points out that as the writer of this book he is telling a story – that the interview with Irving was based on a four hour conversation and that if Irving was to write up his version he would no doubt have picked his own quotes and written a different piece.  (This book covers many more issues and subjects than I have chosen to discuss here, and someone else would have chosen different chapters and related their own belief of what it is about)  Storr shows how we find it easier to listen to people say things that we agree with, and that we should value our heretics as people who jolt us out of our comfort zone and force us to justify our own beliefs.  It is an excellent exploration of our perception of life and how we choose to place ourselves in it.