The Drought - J G Ballard

 THE DROUGHT - J G BALLARD

Is it fanciful to imagine the occurrence of a world-wide drought? I can assure you, it's most certainly not. J G Ballard wrote his novel, The Drought, in 1965 and now just almost 60 years later it looks mightily prescient. In Ballard's book the drought is caused by a pollution-generated membrane forming over the world's oceans preventing all evaporation of surface water into the air above, leading subsequently to no clouds being formed and subsequently to no rain. It's not a sudden occurrence at all but a gradual build-up over ten years, the first major effect of it being food shortages due to seasonal rainfalls failing to materialize in important agricultural regions.

Farmlands turn to arid dust-basins, reservoirs and rivers run dry, and the world goes awry as cities are abandoned. Populations head to the coasts to be nearer to water even if it's undrinkable. Huge distillation units are constructed and run by the army before being taken over by citizens' militias as millions of people start living in cars and shacks on the beaches that turn into salt dunes from the distillation process. Water, food and guns become the currency, anything else is useless surplus apart from such things as abandoned cars which act as make-shift coffins.

The actual plot and storyline of Ballard's book isn't really up to much and although this is a bit of a problem (as well as the fact that it could have been edited a lot better) it doesn't really matter because the premise is all. Ballard is essentially imagining what it would be like if a world-wide drought was to occur, focusing on a stretch of England not more than a hundred miles in diameter. We're not just talking a seasonal drought here, it should be said, but one that stretches over a ten-year period.

Society, of course, collapses as the landscape turns to desert. There being no water means there being no crops, which means there is no livestock. The only food to be had is from scavenged canned goods and fish from the sea. Fiefdoms of various sizes are established whilst other groups eke out an existence on the peripheries.

Apart from the initial mass exodus from the cities to the coasts there is no great, uncontrolled panic that takes hold, just a gradual but inexorable slide into desperate living. There is almost a complacency about it all, an abandonment of hope against the inevitable. At times it's reminiscent of Nevil Shute's On The Beach, where against the slow but inescapable approach of mass death by radiation from a nuclear war, people tend to try and continue as normal. Taking it on the chin with grim acceptance as the surreal becomes the new normal.

So, could such a vision of the future ever become reality? That is the question. Could such a drought as described by Ballard ever happen? Could the water to our cities, to our agriculture, to our homes simply one day run out? The answer - worryingly, disturbingly, depressingly - is 'yes'.

Who could ever have imagined that one day the world's economic systems might be closed down and whole populations told to stay at home and to not venture out? This is one of the great lessons from the Covid pandemic: to not dismiss anything as being impossible and for it to be said it could never happen. Imagine the unimaginable and then with a cold, clear eye just look to see how far we might actually be from it. Or rather, how close we actually are.

John Serpico

Fight Back - Punk, Politics And Resistance - The Subcultures Network

 FIGHT BACK - PUNK, POLITICS AND RESISTANCE -

THE SUBCULTURES NETWORK

The obvious question to ask in regard to a book called Fight Back - Punk, Politics And Resistance is 'What's the point of it?' What is its intention? What is its aim? If writing about music is like dancing to architecture, then what is writing about punk as a space for political expression and action? According to the blurb on the back cover, the book's objective is 'to advance general and scholarly understanding of punk and youth culture more broadly, and to reveal the importance of youth culture as a site of political expression and to stimulate scholarly interest in the relationship between subcultures, popular music and social change.'

So it's a crash course for the ravers? A drive-in Saturday?

If approaching this book either as a reader or even as one of the contributors seeking or looking to provide an explanation of punk, then from the start you're barking up the wrong tree. If you need to have punk explained to you then it's obviously something not for you, so you might just as well spend your seed on some other more fertile ground so it might bear some fruit of actual use to you. If you feel the need to explain punk to others then you need to think twice and ponder the cliche about that which is taught by the teacher themselves need to learn the most.

That being said, what then is this weighty tome called Fight Back? What is this punk rock axe to grind? Well, without being overly dramatic, all this punk rock stuff is the stuff of life. Take away the 'rock' and what you're left with is the substance: Punk. Fight Back, then, is a collection of essays written by various academics and scholars and collated by the University of Reading-hosted Subcultures Network. And yes, it's a weighty tome but then so it should be, because it's a weighty subject it deals with. It's not a frivolous book, you might say.

If a tree falls in a forest and there's no-one around to hear it, does it make a sound? Is there any one singular meaning to life? The answer is ultimately 'yes' but when you think you know it, you're most likely going to be wrong so instead it makes better sense to be aware of multiple meanings that will bring you just as much benefit on whatever level you're looking at it on.

It's an uncomfortable truth but as ethnobotanist Terence McKenna once said 'Culture is not your friend', and once you understand this then things can start to be put into perspective and can be seen as to what is important and what is not so. This then begs the question, however, that if culture is not your friend then is subculture even less so? It's a pertinent point and it's actually here that things get interesting. 

Punk was originally a subculture that following the Bill Grundy/Sex Pistols debacle became an overnight mainstream culture, entering into public discourse. With this transformation a lot of the nuances, subtleties and contradictions within the original punk idea were lost, to be replaced by much more simple and much more easier to communicate messages and signals. Due to punk's very contradictory nature, however, those nuances and numerous unresolved contradictions though hidden, remained like honey at the core. Like essence rare.

Punk in the cultural mainstream needed to be played out and its main players to crash and burn for the nuances and contradictions to take root. They needed to be left alone and shielded to allow them to grow and even flourish, to be later explored and encouraged. In one respect, this explains the later rise of the New Punk, Crass, and Oi! scenes.

And yes, there it is: the dreaded Oi! word. The subculture within punk culture that still to this day has - as Matthew Worley points out in what is one of the best essays in the book - resisted assimilation into the 'respectable' narrative that now binds punk more generally into the nation's cultural fabric.

Oi! is the bete noir of punk, politics and resistance because of its confrontational adherence to its working class origins, and why this has caused such a problem speaks volumes. Much to his credit, Worley approaches Oi! with an open mind and in doing so concludes 'meanings have been projected onto Oi! rather than drawn from it' and that in actual fact 'Oi! was far closer to what its adherents claimed it to be than it was to what its critics accused it of being.'

And what did Oi!'s critics accuse it of being? Racist, sexist, homophobic, violent and parochial. An incubator, essentially, for Right-wing ideology. The same Right-wing ideology spewed day in day out by the Daily Mail and the Telegraph to their middle class readerships but did you ever see a so-called Nazi bonehead reading these newspapers? No. Their chosen source of news would always be The Sun and the Daily Mirror, and whilst The Sun was always Right-wing it was on a comic level and never as insidious and mean-spirited as the Daily Mail, and never as humourless and straight-faced as the Telegraph. Worley concludes that the way Oi! was castigated is an early example of what is nowadays labelled the 'demonisation of the working class', which is basically the editorial policy of the Right-wing press. All in all it's a very good essay and one that needed to be written.

So too for Peter Webb's essay on 'Crass, subculture and class' if only for the fact that any book on 'punk, politics and resistance' that doesn't include Crass is either ill-informed or in denial. Essentially, Webb describes the milieu created around Crass that enabled people from different class backgrounds to come together and creatively work towards a shared though very individualistic transcendentalism. What the essay does as well - if even inadvertently - is to highlight that the areas in which Crass were strongest such as in their promotion of pacifism and their rejection of class were also their weakest - their Achilles Heels. 

The issue of class had always been a thorn in their side from the start but it was the Falklands War that brought it to a head. Rather than chastising themselves for being too slow off the mark for not including anything about the Falklands on their newly released album at the time, what Crass missed was that it was working class boys (on both British and Argentinian sides) who were being killed. That it was working class boys who were sacrificed to protect the ship that Prince Andrew was on. Come the miners' strike of 1984, it was working class mining communities that Thatcher was destroying, not 'classless' enclaves in leafy suburbia.

To Crass, class may have mattered less than not eating meat but in the end it was issues around class and the way to deal with them as in violently or non-violently that tore them apart. In hindsight, Crass were hoisted on their own petard and if not slain were mortally wounded by their enemies because they didn't understand their enemies. Taking on Thatcher, for example, without understanding that Thatcher was out to destroy working class power (in the form of unions) and working class ethics (such as helping your neighbour and community solidarity); replacing these things instead with an accent on the individual (as in 'no such thing as society') and greed being good, well - Crass politically were on a hiding to nothing.

For all that, Peter Webb's essay is useful and somewhat important in regard to culture and resistance because it gives rise for such questions on the significance of class to be considered. It's often like opening a can of worms, it should be said, but it's also something that shouldn't be shied away from.

At another tangent, Jonathyne Briggs in his essay questions why punk initially failed to take off in France, and actually it's a really interesting question. All the right ingredients were there for punk in France to become huge: Geographically it was just across the water from the London punk explosion, just a bit more of a distance in fact as that between London and Manchester. It was only 9 years after the events of May '68 so there should still have been elements and remnants of revolutionary zeal in France, embers still glowing and just waiting to be blown to life again by a fresh wind. The Pistols, The Damned and The Clash went over to France to play in the very early days of punk, before they'd even played a lot of places in England. Metal Urbain from France recorded a version of Anarchy In The UK and were the first band to have a record released on the Rough Trade label. And of course there were all the Situationist slogans adopted by Jamie Reid for the Pistols. 

With all this, punk should maybe have been even bigger in France than in England? So why didn't it happen? Briggs puts it down to any development of a French punk subculture being hindered due to being unable to find its own identity, becoming instead a caricature in terms of fashion and musical conventions. I'm not sure this is completely true but it's an interesting notion, particularly as it begs the question if whether 'the perception of conventions that govern subcultures also confound their movement?'

Giacomo Botta's essay on the other hand suggests the complete opposite, that punk represents a complex set of ideologies and practices that transcend any specific national culture, an example of this he cites as being the Colettivo Punx Anarchici of Torino, in Italy.

But then we have another essay concerning Czech punks and skinheads where the authors suggest that subcultural identity is, in part, determined by the nature of the dominant society in which it's situated and it's relationship to subcultures that differentiate against one another.

In another essay concerning punk in East Germany, the author declares that 'punk does not exist outside of the society but within an existing framework of values, expectations and social norms'. Which is probably more like it, if not indeed very true.

All of this and more goes to show that punk is a lot more than just heads down no nonsense mindless boogie, though it should be said that Fight Back isn't going to be for everyone due in the main to it being academic and the essays presented in that typical thesis style with lots of footnotes to back everything up. The foreword to the book is written by Steve Ignorant and call me a cynic but I don't believe for one moment that he actually read the whole thing. I mean, why should he? And if he did, then he would have spotted some of the glaring mistakes in one of the essays concerning the Crass and Small Wonder labels.

The afterword, however, is an interview conducted by Matthew Worley with writer Jon Savage, presented in a typical, fanzine-style verbatim question and answer format where Savage discusses the cultural impact of punk. It's a very good interview, full of interesting and thought-provoking ideas - and it's accessible. I'd wager, in fact, that if any of the book it would have been this part that Steve Ignorant read and if he didn't then he should have done because in it Savage heaps a lot of praise upon Crass.

Above all else, however, the important thing is that Fight Back is food for thought, and in an age of oven-ready Brexit deals, post-truth Trumpian world views, and of culture wars waged by neo-conservatives in free fall, this can only be a good thing.

John Serpico

Pincher Martin - William Golding

 PINCHER MARTIN - WILLIAM GOLDING

Have you ever been a castaway and stranded on a rock in the middle of a vast inconceivable ocean? Of course you have. You're here on Earth, aren't you?

William Golding's first published novel was Lord Of The Flies in which he depicted the effect upon a party of boys on being abandoned on a coral island somewhere in the Pacific. Pincher Martin is almost a continuation of this same theme but boiled down to its most base level and then some. The whole of the first chapter describes a man drowning. That's not just a few paragraphs but a whole chapter describing everything going on in what is probably in actuality just a few moments.

As you read it becomes clear that the drowning man is a sailor whose ship has been torpedoed by a German U-boat and whilst all number of thoughts race through his mind, the prevailing one is that he must survive - that he must not die. Survive he does and he finds himself washed up onto a rock projecting through the vastness of the ocean. 'Where the hell am I?' he asks, and how many miles from dry land? It is here at this point that the story really begins or rather, it is here that it ends and the descent into madness begins.

Even though every detail of the rock is described meticulously it's still hard to gauge the actual size of it but then you come to realise it's not something that actually matters. It is instead the fact that the rock is barren though by some miracle it does hold a small amount of rain water trapped in a crevice and there is food albeit only in the form of mussels and limpets. What matters above all, however, is that the man is alone and that his one and only end desire is that he be rescued. To this end the bare minimum is that he keep his body going and that the thread of life remains unbroken.

His only weapon to aid him in this is his intelligence and so he knows that at all times he must be visible and to only sleep at night and never in the day so he might spot any passing ship and vice versa. He knows too that he must maintain to the best of his ability his health though being exposed to the elements he fully anticipates himself falling sick. And just as importantly he knows that he has to watch his mind and not let madness creep up on him. He expects to hallucinate but he knows he must not succumb to hallucinations though in the end it is on this where the real battle is to be fought. 

The apparent reality of the present collides with and weaves in and out of memories of the past; fear and anguish entangle with jealousy and guilt, whilst faith in the divine duels with spiritual apathy. The man is both Prometheus chained to the rock and Atlas holding up the sky but at the same time he's a Bedlamite, a poor mad creature clinging to a rock in the middle of the sea, bearing witness to black lightning.

Pincher Martin is a tale of terror and in this respect is an existential nightmare that if read with earnest attention has the power to disturb. How long the man is on the rock for is central to the whole story as there is no way to discern if it's for just one day, a week or months - or even if he is there at all?

Before he took up writing, William Golding served in the Navy where he saw action against submarines, aircraft and even the Bismark. He was also present at the D-Day landings so he was obviously an authority on what it is for a man to drown and no amateur when it came to facing death. For all that, you can but wonder if when writing Pincher Martin did Golding have the whole thing plotted out in his head in advance or did he simply follow where the writing took him? I'd hazard a guess that the story developed as he wrote it and that he bore down on the intensity of it with each agonizing sentence wrought from his pen.

Whatever the process, the end result resonated with Arthur Koestler - a writer who himself was no stranger to the subject of solitary confinement having been imprisoned by Franco during the Spanish Civil War - who selected Pincher Martin as the Novel of the Year, that year being 1956.

Pincher Martin isn't a masterpiece but its power to disturb the reader is something that many books have attempted but with very few succeeding. It is this power to disturb that makes Pincher Martin stand out - above and beyond.

John Serpico