Colonialism

The New Colonials can raise our sights beyond the Channel

From our UK edition

There’s a quiet Colonial takeover of British public life going on. An Australian, Lynton Crosby is in charge of the Tories’ political strategy. A South African, Ryan Coeztee performs this role for the Liberal Democrats and the deputy Prime Minister. While a Canadian, Mark Carney is Governor of the Bank of England and, arguably, the single most economically power figure in Britain. I argue in The Spec this week that the rise of these New Colonials tells us something important about this country, its flaws and its place in the world. Crosby, Coetzee and Carney are, in some ways, the missing meritocrats. They are filling a gap in British public life created by the return of the old, and not much improved, ruling elite.

Katie Kitamura interview

From our UK edition

Gone to the Forest is Katie Kitamura's second novel, about a family and the cost of European colonization in an unknown time and place. Tom and his father live on a farm in a country that recalls, at first and most often, J.M Coetzee's South Africa. It is on the brink of civil war. The novel opens with a broadcast by the land's natives, which Tom overhears on a radio that has been left, eerily, on the homestead's verandah. The men's strained relationship is compounded when a sly young woman, Carine, comes to live with them. Their sinister dealings with each other, the other white farmers and servants expose the fissures of a hard and unforgiving society, which threaten to engulf them all. Kitamura writes with fine tension and clipped grace. Her observations are subtle and sharp.