Hold the front page: I’ve found a very good contemporary novel to occupy my time. Such things have become vanishingly rare, even if one is grateful for David Mitchell’s metafiction, the occasional blast from Michel Houllebecq and Ben Marcus’s engaging lunacy. By and large, modern novels lack depth, originality of form and language, political unorthodoxy (i.e. freethinking) and a vaulting fictional imagination. Where, today, would you find the J.G. Ballards, the David Storeys, the Anthony Burgesses? In the sensitivity reader’s rejected pile, I suspect.
Most modern novels seem to be written by bloody nice people who agree with each other about everything and are wondering if they should go on one of those ‘We hate the working class’ marches they have in London every month or so. They are literally bien-pensant – and hence, I would suggest, stupid. Trouble is the ‘bad’ people have been banished from fiction: we’re lucky that Henry Miller, Céline, Genet and indeed that gay-bashing, vegetarian-hating George Orwell lived before our twitchy, censorious time.
In our education system, the notion of actually knowing stuff is of no matter – in fact, it’s reactionary
Anyway, I digress. The novel in question is You Are The Führer’s Unrequited Love by the French author Jean-Nöel Orengo. It has been described in reviews as ‘unconventional’, which I think means that it isn’t about climate change. Instead, it documents the relationship between Adolf Hitler and his pet architect, Albert Speer, a relationship characterised by almost unconditional love on the Führer’s part, as well as a quasi-sexual infatuation. But the real point of it is to demarcate between hard truth and convenient lies – and wonder, with awe, at how we so much prefer the latter these days.
As Orengo says, it’s almost impossible to believe that, both at Nuremberg and once Speer had been released from prison 20 years later, we didn’t know ‘deep down’ that Speer himself knew everything – everything – about the extermination of the Jews. Given that as the minister of armaments he was in charge of Jewish slave labour, as well as being Hitler’s closest confidante, how could he not? But Speer’s absolutist and brilliant re-imagining of himself as a penitent Nazi who knew nothing about the really horrible stuff allowed him not merely to escape the noose but also to become fabulously rich from memoirs that weren’t simply unreliable, but were works of ‘radical’ (as Orengo puts it) fiction.
Speer, it should be added, did not hate Jews like his knuckle-dragging dullard colleagues. He just didn’t care and looked the other way. And we all (Gitta Sereny partially excepted) bought into the fiction of the good Nazi. Hell, even Simon Wiesenthal became Speer’s friend after his release and the publication of his bestselling Inside the Third Reich (which is also worth reading as an example of autofiction). How we all yearned to believe that clever self-absolution written with confected candour and delicacy in Spandau prison upon, fittingly, toilet paper.
I was wondering about this when deciding what to talk about to a group of British Jews in Leeds next month. The comparatively easy thing to do would be to document the rise of British anti-Semitism and tie it to the pro-Islamic far left, with its roots in old Cold War divisions and the deeply anti-Semitic history of communism. All of this would be true, of course, but it wouldn’t really get us to the heart of the matter. Instead, it would be a kind of glib evasion.
The real point resides somewhere at the heart of Orengo’s story: the propensity of perfectly decent people – the kind of people who might write an angry novel about climate change, or maybe not write anything at all but just have an obsessive quasi–sexual relationship with the word ‘Gaza’ and engagingly patterned Arabic headscarves – to believe what accords in an agreeable manner with their already formed opinions, rather than with what they know, deep down, to be true.
A whole bunch of studies have shown that an awful lot of people who spend their time online have a marked preference for fabrications and fictions. This has been noted even – I say even but, God help us, that qualifier is entirely redundant – among academics, who while they might recognise findings that contradict their idiotic assumptions, will shelve those findings because they’re not ‘useful’ politically.
Down below those debauched shitgibbons are the millions tapping away on Facebook and Instagram, and in the BBC and Sky studios. Coerced by modernity and stupidity into refusing to countenance an opinion which might possibly conflict with their own, these people are pushed further and further by technology and its insistence upon a Manichean divide between my side and your side. A divide where your side is never right about anything. And not just wrong, but wicked, consisting of opinions that can only be held by the sort of people who aren’t committed to justice and who might occasionally enjoy a novel which isn’t about climate change.
Dig beneath that and you’ll find a society that considers the acquisition of knowledge not merely less important than the espousal of a political viewpoint, but an intellectual cul de sac. There is nothing to be gained by knowledge – regrettably it has in the past been fetishised as a desirable concept and often used to prevent progress. In our education system – and percolating way beyond, into the viscera of the public – the notion of actually knowing stuff from which one can then advance an argument is of no matter; in fact, it’s reactionary. The facts don’t matter You have your truth and I have mine. And mine is not only right, but unchallengeable.
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