Quoted without comment

How Ian McEwan validates his novels before publication:

Fans of McEwan’s novels will be interested to learn that before he finishes any book he has it read by three friends – Amis firmly not being one of them. “I don’t want a novelist reading my work, thank you very much!” McEwan says.

The three are the Oxford historian and Guardian columnist Timothy Garton Ash, the poet Craig Raine, and the philosopher Galen Strawson. Garton Ash persuaded him to drop the “An” from the title of his novel An Atonement. Raine berates him whenever he slips into cliche, as he once did with the phrase “flickering log fire” – they now have a running joke of marking f.l.f. in the margins of each other’s work.

The spirit of constructive criticism is not always happy. When they met to discuss The Comfort of Strangers, Raine told McEwan: “Listen, love. It’s complete crap, and you should put it in a drawer and forget it.” McEwan refused to speak to him for almost two years.

McEwan is of course the author of Saturday, recently reviewed here.

Excusing police murders

An old and noble tradition amongst the Law’nOrder set, where the shooting of a Brazilian electrician on the way to work or IRish looking guy on his way back from the pub carrying a tableleg in his bag is excused on the grounds that their murderers though they were a suicide bomber, or were carrying a sawnoff shotgun and besides, don’t you know how hard their job is? Case in point, little Nicky Cohen’s column in The Evening Standard, as excerpted by Aaronovitch Watch:

In the hubbub a simple point is being lost. I don’t want to defend the Met’s mistakes but it is blindingly obvious that when the police think they are confronting suicide bombers they will shoot first and ask questions later.If they didn’t, and a terrorist detonated a bomb on the Tube, they would be denounced by the very people who are shouting loudest about the death of poor Mr de Menezes.

He also mumbles something about how the left was pleased to see De Menezes killed, so they had something to blame the police for, a standard Cohen projection, as witnessed by his own delight at the 7/7 bombings and how that showed up the left. Disgusting as that is, it isn’t new. More interesting is that belief that the police should be allowed to kill people as long as the cops sincerily believe that they’re bad people. Surely that’s just a licence to kill, as the cops can always gin up some story to justify their actions. (Or to smear their victims, as happened to de Menezes, but also to the suspects in the Forest Gate affair.)

Cohen wants to argue that the system works because there’s now an inquest into the de Menezes murder, but as I said earlier, this was explicitely set up not to assign blame, while the Crown Prosecution Services had already decided earlier to not do their job, after being blackmailed with massive police walkouts if they had. Instead there was an absurdistic health and safety prosecution agains the Metroplotian Police as a whole. No real incentive not to murder somebody there: nobody prosecuted, no careers cut short by this mistake, just a court order to one arm of the state to pay a fine to another arm. And Cohen thinks this is evidence that he’s living “in a country that takes breaches of its rules so seriously”? If so, do I have a bridge to sell him…

Disgusting as it is, Cohen’s bilge does accurately state the gut reflex of a lot of voters, “decenthardworkingfamilies” who like to believe they will never be the victim of police brutality themselves, but think that it is necessary to protect them, even if the occasional unfortunate accident happens. And even then the victims must’ve done something wrong to deserve it…

New Cold War ™ happy fun time with Marko and Denis

The disasters that have been Iraq and Afghanistan had sort of silenced all the humanitarian interventionists, decent leftists, war liberals and all the other surviving members of the “let you and him fight international brigage these past two years or so, but boy did the War for South Ossetia bring them back. Suddenly they have a new purpose in life, a new spring in their step: the Russians are back and everything’s all right with the world. No longer do they have to trouble themselves with tawdry, unwinnable wars in dusty countries nobody really cares about but for the oil; the Russian Bear is back and it’s happy party time for the Cold Warriors.

And nowhere more so than at the Henry Jackson Society, where Mark Attila “it’s the Serbs! The Serbs!” Hoare has been moved to ever highers flights of fancy in his descriptions of What’s To Be Done. As Aaronovitch Watch commented: “We have occasionally described the Henry Jackson Society in the past as the “I’ve got a cardboard box on my head and I’m a tank commander” element of British Decency – the breakfast cereal must be ankle deep on the floor at Peterhouse College today

But he got competition, from none other than Denis “failed New Labour minister McShamne”, exhorting us at Comment is Free to stand Shoulder to shoulder against Russia:

As Sir Roderick Braithwaite, the astute former ambassador in Moscow and a man sympathetic to Russians pointed out some time ago, Russia has done far more invading than it has been invaded. Napoleon and Hitler failed to conquer Moscow but Russian armies – Tsarist and Soviet – have occupied every European capital east of the Rhine.

[…]

President Sarkozy’s remarks that Russia had some rights in Georgia sent a chill down the spine of Baltic states which have Russian speaking citizens, installed after Stalin’s invasion of these small countries in 1940. Finland, which fought a war with Russia in 1940, shivers at what the new Putin doctrine might mean.

[…]

Putin may have thought that sweeping the Georgian pawn off the board was the end of the game. Alas, it is is only the beginning, and Britain cannot betray Poland and its fellow EU and Nato allies as Chamberlain did in the 1930s.

McShane does seem to have a talent for distilling all the cliches uttered about Russia’s “aggression” in Georgia to the purest grade of wingnuttery, doesn’t he, with his talk about not betraying Poland “as Chamberlain did in the 1930s.” It’s great stuff, but to me Marko still has the edge, as he wouldn’t make such schoolboy errors in his rants.