Andrew O’Hagan, The Atlantic Ocean: Essays on Britain and America (Faber 2008)
This book was my gift in a Book Group Kris Kringle years ago, and has been languishing on my top shelf ever since. I was prompted to read it by Caledonian Road, Andrew O’Hagan’s most recent novel – which I’ve just read for my other Book Club (blog post to come after the next meeting).
These 23 essays were first published between March 1993 (‘The Killing of James Bulger’) and February 2008 (‘Brothers’). That’s not so long ago, but the book feels as if it comes from another, ancient era. Michael Jackson was alive. 9/11 (and England’s 7/7), the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina and George W. Bush were in the headlines. Donald J Trump was barely a reality TV star; Brexit wasn’t a cloud on the horizon; a global pandemic was predicted, but with no sense of urgency.
Most of the essays were first published in the London Review of Books, many of them as book reviews. We are told the month and year of first publication, but not the details, or sometimes even the name, of the books being reviewed. We’re invited to read them as stand-alone essays, and for the most part they succeed – as memoir, literary journalism, social commentary, a general reflections on literature. There are pieces of serious long-form journalism, like ‘On Begging’ (November 1993), in which 25-year-old O’Hagan joins the beggars of London with a tape recorder in his pocket, or ‘Brothers’, the book’s final essay, in which he visits the people left behind by the deaths of two servicemen in the Iraq War, one from each of England and the USA.
Three essays illustrate the range of O’Hagan’s subject matter and the variety of his approaches:
‘The Killing of James Bulger’. In the north of England in 1993, two 10-year-old boys abducted, tortured and killed two-year-old James Bulger. The great Gitta Sereny wrote about the murder, probing the boys’ motives and challenging the vengefulness of the press, the courts, and the crowds that gathered to demand the death sentence. O’Hagan’s essay has a similar impetus but, strikingly, his starting point is to identify with the killers. He describes in unsettling detail the way, as a child in Glasgow, he and a girl friend mistreated a much younger child, and expands from there to the general normalisation of cruelty in his part of Scotland. (Shades of Douglas Sewart’s Shuggie Bain or Jimmy Barnes’s memoir Working CLass Boy. It’s a challengingly personal essay that is shamefully relevant to the place I’m in just now, as Queensland’s Liberal National Party is pushing an ‘Adult crime, adult time’ policy.
‘On the End of British Farming’ (March 2001), one of the longest essays, is a brilliant piece of investigative journalism. O’Hagan visits a number of small farmers, and gives shocking statistics on the economic pressures they are up against. Most shockingly, perhaps, is what happens when he follows up a claim by a Sainsbury representative that the retail chain has an excellent relationship with a dairy farm in Devon. On visiting the ‘farm’, he finds that in order to survive (and then thrive), the couple who run it have got rid of all their cows. Their enterprise is now is in effect a yoghurt and ice cream factory, buying milk at just above the unsustainable going rate from neighbouring farms. The essay sees the source of the problem in the subsidy policies after the Second World War. There is some discussion of the role of the EU (real, but not major, he argues). It’s one of the many moments when I would love to see an update: did Brexit improve things?
‘After Hurricane Katrina’ (October 2005). O’Hagan saw online that two men from another state were driving to New Orleans to help in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He contacted them and asked to travel with them. The essay is a literary equivalent of a fly on the wall documentary: the writer is all but invisible, making no overt judgement, authorial comment or explanation, but allowing the story to unfold mainly through the dialogue of the two men. They are rowdy, spectacularly sexist, uncareful about racism (one of them is African-American), and a weird combination of generosity and self-absorption. It reads a bit like a Carl Hiaasen novel. I could only wish that Caledonian Road had as much exuberant life.
Page 77 occurs in ‘Tony and the Queen’ (November 2006), which is part a reflection on the Stephen Frears/Peter Morgan Movie, The Queen – long since superseded in our minds by the TV series The Crown (also largely written by Peter Morgan). The page happens to include one of the passages where O’Hagan notes the influence of US culture on Britain’s. He is discussing the moment in the film and in real life when the Queen was slow to grieve publically after the death of Lady Diana:
Obviously, the elder royals and their familiars had completely missed out on the Oprah-isation of the universe. If they hadn’t, they might have learned the new first rule of successful leadership: enjoy your inscrutability if you must, but don’t ever stand in the way of a confessional heroine. If stopping Diana was something of a thankless task while she was alive, the effort would come to seem suicidal for the British monarchy in the summer of 1997, after Diana died in that Paris tunnel. William Shakespeare himself could scarcely have imagined, in the days after the crash, a royal household with more out-of-touch advisers than the Windsors had on twenty-four-hour call, each of them sharing a gigantic unawareness of the difference between a pest and a mass phenomenon. But it is said that much of the intransigence was coming from the Queen herself, who, despite all her experience, disported herself that summer like a person lumbering in a dark cave. She was somehow unable to see what the infants and the dogs in the street could see, that the old style was unsuited to the virulent new mood – and that if something had to give, or someone, it was most likely going to be the woman whose head appears ready-severed on Britain’s postage stamps.
An astute observation at the time, and probably accurate about the changing times, but it fails to imagine – and how could it – the powerful impact of the image of that same inscrutable queen sitting alone at the funeral of her husband. Inscrutability itself, evidently, can find favour in the ‘virulent new mood’, and O’Hagan’s ominous hints of decapitation to come (inspired no doubt by Scottish wishful thinking) fell very wide of the mark.
I finished writing this blog post in Ma:Mu country. My father, my siblings and I were born on this country, and I’m very happy to belatedly acknowledge the Ma:Mu Elders past and present who have cared for this prodigally beautiful land for millennia, and continue to do so..
* My blogging practice for some time has been to focus arbitrarily on the page of a book or journal that coincides with my age, which currently is 77.
Me fail? I fly! 