Gaza - TL:DR (That's Long, DID Read)

a plea for comparative rudeness

I had already started writing this, but about half an hour ago the point I want to make was violently reinforced for me. I was waiting for my order in a café, where a radio was on in the background. A senior political figure – not a member of the current government but an elderly-sounding member of the House of Lords who was a veteran of the diplomatic service, I didn’t catch his name – was being interviewed. Before I demonise him too much, I should point out that, even if he did represent the British government, he would have no real power over the situations he was invited to discuss. In a way, that actually makes it worse, because it means he is in a position where he can openly speak his mind and presumably, this was his mind.

George Grosz – The Pillars of Society (1926)

He was being asked about two situations that are more similar than is often portrayed in the media, though one is significantly bloodier. That is, two invasions which are attempted annexations or land-grabs by political leaders with ideological agendas. In the political discourse on the left you hear a lot about how differently the invasions of Ukraine and Palestine are being treated by the political and media establishments (and to a degree the British public), but although there is truth in that, to be fair to the interviewee, he barely differentiated between the two.

When asked about the latest meeting between the Presidents of the United States of America and Russia to discuss the fate of Ukraine – just writing that highlights the essential absurdity of it – the interviewee was reasonable, measured, but oddly wry. While he was clearly concerned about Ukraine and the Ukrainian people, the general tenor of his response was a kind of verbal shrug – a dryly amused ‘what-can-you-do-with-these-guys?’ tone that characterises the way that many of the more serious figures in the British political and media spheres engage with the current administration of the USA and, to a lesser extent (because there’s no need to pretend that he’s an ally) with the government of Vladimir Putin. Moving on to Israel/Palestine/Gaza there was, similarly, some concern about the people currently being attacked, plus a bit of ‘what about Hamas?’ waffle that I don’t think was disingenuous in this case, as it so often is. Because from the point of view of a career diplomat, there is a question about what happens with Hamas after the slaughter stops. It’s a problem that’s been made a much worse and much more unavoidable by Benjamin Netanyahu’s much-publicised funding of Hamas which essentially neutralised any chance of a moderate Palestinian government – but regardless of how they got there, it’s not a situation that will suddenly be resolved, whichever way (to put it coldly) the invasion of Gaza works out.

But when asked about Netanyahu himself, and the actual current Israeli policy, that shrug returned; ‘what-can-you-do-with-these-guys?’ Well, it’s doubtful that a British diplomat, or even a member of the British government can do much to influence someone like Netanyahu – at least not while he has the backing of the US government – but one thing they can do and should do with any rogue politician from any country is to stop acting as if behaving in a consistent, predictable, true-to-character way is the same as behaving in an acceptable way. Given that the UN does have rules, guidelines and standards of conduct, acting as though the leaders of some of its nations are unfathomable forces of nature rather than political figures making conscious policy choices is not helpful, either to the world or to the UN itself, which is only as effective as world leaders make it.

John Heartfield – The Meaning of the Hitler Salute: Little Man asks for Big Gifts (1932) A photomontage made while Hitler was wooing the 1930s equivalent of big tech companies to fund his ideological aims

It would of course be nice if our political/media figures were bluntly critical of despots and would-be authoritarians – but if not, they could at least stop being indulgent towards them or nice about them. There are people who think that diplomacy is, by its nature damaging and wrong, but though it certainly can be, I believe in it, when used appropriately. It’s hard not to believe in it, if like me you grew up during the final phases of the Cold War. That decades of aggressive brinkmanship and paranoia should have ended peacefully with virtually no bloodshed was a barely-credible relief at the time and, given the mental state and emotional temperature of world leaders in the 21st century, it now seems almost miraculous. And that resolution really is a testament to the leaders, and particularly Mikhail Gorbachev, whose sober unflappability wasn’t shared by many politicians then, and doesn’t even seem to be a desired trait among the political class now. There are many times and many situations where sober, reflective diplomacy are desirable.

Conversely, when faced with the actions of hysterical, erratic, devious and capricious idiots or their cynical, opportunistic enablers and hangers-on, or coolly calculating monomaniacs, the kind of reasonable, statesmanlike professional on the radio this morning is at an immediate disadvantage. Acting according to the norms of your profession with people who have no respect for those norms is pointless at best. Even then, that doesn’t negate the whole profession of diplomacy; when meeting with powerful, impetuous morons, being calm and professional is a given and, for many reasons it’s the right thing to do. But to do more than that – to act like the terrified child who wants to appease the bully, or the substitute teacher who wants the scary kids to think they are cool – is a mistake that politicians, unless they happen to be in the final twilight of their careers, will live to regret.

Wyndham Lewis’s 1934 portrait of the highly principled left-wing diplomat Sir Stafford Cripps, originally one of a pair of portraits, the other (now lost) being the leader of the British Union of Fascists Sir Oswald Moseley

Wherever there are tyrants, authoritarians and powerful reactionaries, there is never any shortage of people willing – even against their own interests – to defend and promote them. But we are currently at a strange point in history where these people are so brazen and shamelessly open about their own actions that media commentators and politicians – occasionally with no special vested interest (but often with a financial one) – who do see the shame in those actions are willing to make claims on the behalf of their idols which go beyond any statement made by the perpetrators themselves. I would expect this to be a right-wing problem, because I’m a prejudiced left-winger, but it seems to be more of an ideological problem than one specific to either end of the spectrum. And so, even though on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin himself gave a long speech on Russian TV, where he ranted at length about historical grievances, denied Ukraine’s right to exist at all and talked about restoring the old Russian Empire, never once mentioning NATO, British commentators on both the far left and right have repeatedly justified Putin’s actions with reference to the threat to Russia’s borders posed by NATO expansion and so forth. It doesn’t seem that Putin has asked them to legitimise his actions – he doesn’t seem to think his actions need justifying at all, beyond the simple fact that he thinks Russia should own Ukraine – so why embarrass yourself by making claims on his behalf?

Similarly, members of the Israeli government have been blunt about their desire to remove the Palestinian people from Gaza one way or another. Those of us with memories going back a few months may even remember discussion, involving the US government, about turning the area into a resort. There are photos online of members of the IDF standing in ruins holding the banners of real estate companies, there are videos shared by IDF fighters where they laugh as they rake through the underwear drawers of Palestinian women in their deserted houses, where they joke about using children for target practice, And as the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé has discussed, it’s not like these kinds of debates on what to do with Palestine are new or unusual. So why would any western politician or media spokesperson feel the need to frame the situation as a war between two equal states, or talk endlessly about the hostages that the Israeli government seems not to care about? But what about Hamas? Well, no doubt they have their own gloating social media presence, glorifying their inhuman acts, but they aren’t an everyday part of normal, Western social media and however much the Israeli government like to frame all criticism of themselves as antisemitic Hamas propaganda, I haven’t so far seen a single mainstream politician online or on TV criticise Israeli policy without also condemning Hamas and calling for the freeing of those Israeli hostages. That those hostages are important and should be prioritised should go without saying, just as the fact that almost everyone living in a Western democracy is fundamentally opposed to a repressive theocratic organisation like Hamas should go without saying; and yet it has to be stated again and again because of the way the events – in reality barely a conflict, let alone a war – are being presented.

So, yes, there is definitely a time for diplomacy – it’s both necessary and desirable when negotiating the different cultures, belief systems, nationalities and identities that make up the modern world. And while it would be nice – a relief even – to hear a senior British politician not just commenting on or blandly ‘condemning’ the words or actions of any rogue regime, whether our supposed allies or not, nor just or urging them to change their ways – but launching a scathing tirade against them, taking legal action in international courts and cutting all unnecessary ties with them, nobody can realistically expect that, It’s just not how politics work. But, as our successive governments have managed to coexist for decades alongside ideologically opposed countries like China or North Korea without the constant threat of war and without feeling the need to openly pander to and flattering their leaders, then it shouldn’t be too much to ask that they do the same with governments whose values are not supposed to be so far removed from our own. Speaking as a citizen of the UK, if the core values of our country really are what we say they are – democracy, tolerance, compassion and all that – then at some point, coming up against the opposite, diplomacy should only go so far.

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Postscript: on the day I started writing the final version of this, I heard that radio interview. This morning, as I finished it I saw three news stories that all made this mild call for bluntness seem worse than ineffectual: in one, the Israeli government had targeted and wiped out an entire Al Jazeera news crew. While UK news talks about ‘collateral damage,’ IDF spokespeople have talked proudly about removing “Hamas terrorist” Anas al-Sharif, who neither they nor anybody else believes was a Hamas terrorist, because he demonstrably wasn’t. In the USA, the President, while deflecting questions about the files of a dead paedophile that was once a friend of his, is talking openly about forcibly removing city administrations to ‘re-establish law and order’ in areas which seemed to have no special law and order issues until he created them. Finally, I was watching footage of an old, blind man, a woman in her eighties and an elderly military veteran being arrested by the police for holding placards at a peaceful protest while, elsewhere in the UK the police impassively watched a mob of people screaming racist abuse at a hotel where refugees from war zones are being housed, and stood casually by as the leader of an admittedly moribund political party danced around and made Nazi salutes. There is no single correct response to these events, but empty diplomacy from the country’s leaders has nothing to offer in any of them.

notes in may

May-appropriate art: William Roberts – Bank Holiday in the Park (1923)

This is just what it says*: I intend to post something at least once a month but in lieu of any finished articles, here are various notes I made during May that never got developed into anything more substantial, some of which will probably seem mysterious later since I don’t think I’ll bother to explain the context.

*tragically, that title is a kind of pun though

“Let them eat space travel”

Publishing light-hearted articles that debate whether AI deserves “human rights,” while not covering the erosion of actual human rights because you don’t want to be ‘political’ is political.

The pressure to make politicians and news agencies use the word “genocide” to describe the Israeli government’s attacks on Gaza are understandable (because they are committing genocide, by the normal definition of the word: the crime of intentionally destroying part or all of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, by killing people or by other methods Cambridge Dictionary) but it’s also kind of self defeating. The focus on a word that represents their actions, rather than the actions themselves creates an instant response which, given the nature of genocide, should be horror, but is more often dismissal; “Genocide? Oh, you’re one of those ‘Free Palestine’ people.” A more important question to ask politicians and the media is possibly, if what is being done to the people of Gaza isn’t genocide, is it therefore somehow okay? Would any non-psychopath presented with an estimated death toll as high as 62,000 Palestinian people since October 7th 2023 think “oh well, it’s a lot but at least it isn’t genocide“? The word is important for moral, legal and factual reasons but at this point it seems as likely to distract from the reality that we are seeing every day, rather than to really bring it home.

Even if the climate emergency is allowed to escalate with no serious attempt to alter it for another decade (which would be, or just as likely, will be, disastrous), it would still be infinitely easier to prevent the Earth from becoming an uninhabitable and Mars-like wasteland than it would to make Mars into a habitable and Earth-like home – especially for any meaningful number of people. Those who are most determined that colonising Mars is a good idea are essentially not serious people, or at least are not serious about the future of mankind. ‘Conquering new worlds’ is just a fun, romantic and escapist idea that appeals more than looking after the world we have; it’s a typical expression of the political right’s obsession with the welfare of imaginary future people as opposed to the welfare of actual human beings who exist.

Just MIT confirming that the problem with solar energy is there’s not enough profit in it

It’s becoming ever more obvious that the UK has a media problem. For a decade now, a particular politician (don’t even want to type his name) with a consistent track record of being unpopular and not winning elections – not, so far coming third or even fourth in a general election – has been foisted on the public to the point where he’s an inescapable presence in British culture. He’s on TV, in newspapers and online on all of the major news outlets, far more than the leader of the official opposition, let alone the leaders of the third and fourth largest parties in the country. By this point, this obsession has seriously started to shape public discourse. It’s fuelled essentially by fact that the small group of very wealthy people in charge of the traditional media are his peers – they support him and his views because they belong to the same millionaire class and milieu. This was the group that made Brexit happen, portraying it as a movement of ‘the people’ when the real impetus for it was the fact that the EU was closing tax loopholes for the millionaire class.

We are now in the Stalinist phase of Brexit (a funny idea, since its adherents are virulently anti-communist) where the only people who have benefitted from Brexit and continue to benefit from it are that ruling class (who still don’t want to pay taxes). As ‘the people’ inevitably fall out of love with Brexit, since it’s damaged the economy, made foreign holidays more difficult and expensive and basically failed to provide any material gains, let alone a raise in the standard of living in the UK, the Brexit ideology becomes stronger and more corrosive, emotive and unhinged. Basically, the media can’t make people satisfied with having less. but it can try to make them angry, and to direct their anger.

The media’s obsession with the views of the man who has become the figurehead for Brexit distracts from the actual views of the public, but naturally it affects them too. Not surprisingly, constant positive coverage of the man and his colleagues has made he and his party more successful – but, after a decade not much more successful, really, given how inescapable his presence has become. But every little increase in popularity is fed into the circular narrative and framed as an unstoppable rise, as if that rise wasn’t essentially being created by those reporting on it. But really, as with Brexit itself, it’s mostly about money.

All of which raises questions; firstly and most importantly, what can be done about it? The readership of even the most popular newspapers isn’t especially big now, but those newspapers are also major presences on social media and on TV. Most importantly (and quite bizarrely, when you think about it) the major broadcasters in TV in the UK still look to newspapers to gauge the political zeitgeist, rather than the other way around (or rather than both TV and newspapers looking to the internet, which would be more accurate but probably not better). The obvious response is to boycott the newspapers and/or TV, but for as long as Parliament still looks to the press barons to find out the mood of the public, that can only remove the governing of the country even further from the lives and opinions of the people. A more positive answer would be to promote alternative politics through what media is available; but again that can only work up to a point, because if politicians are still in thrall to the same old newspapers and broadcasters then, again, Parliament becomes even more of a closed-off, cannibalistic circuit, isolated from popular opinion except when a general election comes around.

Complaining to one’s MP is probably the most sensible thing to do, but unless they happen to be one of the five MPs currently representing the media’s chosen party in Parliament, then they almost certainly agree with you and don’t know what to do about it either. And yet surely it can’t be an insurmountable problem?

A less important, but more heart-breaking question is a hypothetical one; what would the country be like now if the media was obsessed with a party with a progressive political agenda (the Green Party for instance, are actually more popular than ever, and despite a few cranks and weirdos, mostly a positive force)? What if, instead of spending a decade spreading intolerance, division, hatred, racism etc so that a few millionaire businessmen could pay less tax, they had been had been pushing ideas of equality and environmentalism into the culture? Money is at the heart of it all really, and this frustrating situation actually led to me taking the unusual (for me) and pointless step of writing an email to the Prime Minister that he will never have read, part of which said;

Surely one of the most effective way to neutralise the poisonous rhetoric of the far right is not to pursue its populist talking points, but to materially improve the lives of the people of the UK? In the last general election – less than a year ago – a vote for Labour was for most people a vote for change, not for more of the same. If Britain wanted divisive rhetoric, attacking migrants and minorities, there were far more obvious people to vote for.

So anyway; hopefully June is better.

of comfort no man speak

Everybody has their comforts, but after trying to analyse some of my own to see why they should be comforting I’ve pretty much come up with nothing, or at least nothing really to add to what I wrote a few years ago; “comforting because it can be a relief to have one’s brain stimulated by something other than worrying about external events.” But that has nothing to do with what it is that makes the specific things comforting. Like many people, I have a small group of books and films and TV shows and so on that I can read or watch or listen to at almost any time, without having to be in the mood for them, and which I would classify as ‘comforting.’ They aren’t necessarily my favourite things, and they definitely weren’t all designed to give comfort, but obscurely they do. But what does that mean or signify? I’ve already said I don’t know, so it’s not exactly a cliffhanger of a question, but let’s see how I got here at least.

I’ve rewritten this part so many times: but in a way that’s apposite. I started writing it at the beginning of a new year, while wars continued to rage in Sudan and Ukraine and something even less noble than a war continued to unfold in Gaza, and as the world prepared for an only partly precedented new, oligarchical (I think at this point that’s the least I could call it) US government. Writing this now, just a few months later, events have unfolded somewhat worse than might have been expected. Those wars still continue and despite signs to the contrary, the situation in Gaza seems if anything bleaker than before. That US administration began the year by talking about taking territory from what had been allies, supporting neo-Nazi and similar political groups across the world, celebrating high profile sex offenders and violent criminals while pretending to care about the victims of sex offenders and violent criminals, and has gone downhill from there. In the original draft of this article I predicted that this Presidential term would be an even more farcical horrorshow (not in the Clockwork Orange/Nadsat sense, although Alex and his Droogs might well enjoy this bit of the 2020s; I suppose what I mean is ‘horror show’) than the same president’s previous one, and since it already feels like the longest presidency of my lifetime I guess I was right. So, between the actual news and the way it never stops coming (hard to remember, but pre-internet ‘the news’ genuinely wasn’t so relentless or inescapable, although events presumably happened at the same rate) it’s important to find comfort somewhere. The obvious, big caveat is that one has to be in a somewhat privileged position to be able to find some comfort in the first place. There are people all over the world – including here in the UK – who can only find it, if at all, in things like prayer or philosophy; but regardless, not being so dragged down by current events that you can’t function is kind of important however privileged you are, and even those who find the whole idea of ‘self-love’ inimical have to find comfort somewhere.

But where? And anyway, what does comfort even mean? Well, everyone knows what it means, but though as a word it seems fluffy and soft (Comfort fabric softener, the American word “comforter” referring to a quilt), it actually comes from the Latin “com-fortis” meaning something like “forceful strength” – but let’s not get bogged down in etymology again.

But wherever you find it, the effect of comfort has a mysterious relationship to the things that actually offer us support or soothe our grief and mental distress. Which is not obvious; if you want to laugh, you turn to something funny, which obviously subjective but never mind. Sticking to books, because I can – for me lots of things would work, if I want to be amused, Afternoon Men by Anthony Powell, Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole books and, less obviously, The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson always raise a smile or a laugh. Conversely, if you want to be scared or disgusted (in itself a strange and obscure desire, but a common one), you’d probably turn to horror, let’s say HP Lovecraft, Stephen King’s IT or, less generic but not so different, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. But as you might have guessed if you’ve read anything else on this website, I’d probably all of those things among my ‘comfort reads.’

But whatever I am reading, I’m not alone; people want ‘comfort reads’ and indeed there is a kind of comfort industry; these days. Not just these days, but over the years it’s developed from poetry anthologies and books of inspirational quotes to more twee versions of the same thing. I think of books of the Chicken Soup for the Soul kind (I don’t think I made that up; if I recall my mother owned a little book of that title, full of ‘words of wisdom’ and comforting quotes) as a 90s phenomenon, but that might be wrong. But at some point that evolved into the more widespread ‘mindfulness’ (colouring books, crochet, apps), Marketing-wise there have been phenomena like hygge (as far as I’ve seen books of the Chicken Soup type, but with more crossover into other areas, as with mindfulness) and, in Scotland at least, hygge rebranded, aggravatingly, as ‘coorie.’ In this context ‘coorie’ is a similar concept to ‘hygge’ but it’s not really how I’ve been used to hearing the word used through my life so something like ‘A Little Book of Coorie‘ just doesn’t sound right. But maybe a book of hygge doesn’t either, if you grew up with that word?

People take comfort in pretty much anything that distracts them, so often the best kind of comfort is being active; walking, running, working or eating, and I understand that; nothing keeps you in the moment or prevents brooding like focusing on what you’re doing. But, unless you’re in a warzone or something, it’s when you aren’t busy that the world seems the most oppressive, and while running may keep you occupied, which can be comforting, it isn’t ‘comfortable’ (for me) in the usual sense of the word. Personally, the things I do for comfort are most likely to be the same things I write about most often, because I like them; reading, listening to music, watching films or TV.

Comfort reading, comfort viewing, comfort listening are all familiar ideas, and at first I assumed that the core of what makes them comforting must be their familiarity. And familiarity presumably does have a role to play – I probably wouldn’t turn to a book I knew nothing about for comfort, though I might read something new by an author I already like. Familiarity, though it might be – thinking of my own comfort reads – the only essential ingredient for something to qualify as comforting, is in itself a neutral quality at best and definitely not automatically comforting. But even when things are comforting, does that mean they have anything in common with each other, other that the circular fact of their comforting quality? Okay, it’s getting very annoying writing (and reading) the word comforting now.

Many of the books that I’d call my all-time favourites don’t pass the comfort test; that is, I have to be in the mood for them. I love how diverse and stimulating books like Dawn Ades’ Writings on Art and Anti-Art and Harold Rosenberg’s The Anxious Object are, but although I can dip into them at almost any time, reading an article isn’t the same as reading a book. There are not many novels I like better than The Revenge for Love or The Apes of God by Wyndham Lewis. They are funny and clever and mean-spirited in a way that I love and I’ve read them several times and will probably read them again; but I never turn to Lewis for comfort. But even though he would probably be glad not to be a ‘comfort read,’ that has nothing (as far as I can tell) to do with the content of his books. Some of my ‘comfort reads’ are obvious, and in analysing them I can come up with a list of plausible points that make them comforting, but others less so.

In that obvious category are books I read when I was young, but that I can still happily read as an adult. There is an element of nostalgia in that I’m sure, and nostalgia in its current form is a complicated kind of comfort. I first read The Lord of the Rings in my early teens but, as I’ve written elsewhere, I had previously had it read to me as a child, so I feel like I’ve always known it. Obviously that is comforting in itself, but there’s also the fact that it is an escapist fantasy; magical and ultimately uplifting, albeit in a bittersweet way. The same goes for my favourites of Michael Moorcock’s heroic fantasy series. I read the Corum, Hawkmoon and Elric series’ (and various other bits of the Eternal Champion cycle) in my teens and though Moorcock is almost entirely different from Tolkien, the same factors (escapist fantasy, heroic, magical etc) apply. Even the Robert Westall books I read and loved as a kid, though they (The Watch House, The Scarecrows, The Devil on the Road, The Wind Eye, the Machine Gunners, Fathom Five) are often horrific, have the comforting quality that anything you loved when you were 11 has. Not that the books stay the same; as an adult they are, surprisingly, just as creepy as I remembered, but I also notice things I didn’t notice then. Something too mild to be called misogyny, but a little uncomfortable nonetheless and, more impressively, characters that I loved and identified with now seem like horrible little brats, which I think is actually quite clever. But that sense of identification, even with a horrible little brat, has a kind of comfort in it, possibly.

The same happens with (mentioned in too many other things on this site) IT. A genuinely nasty horror novel about a shapeshifting alien that pretends to be a clown and kills and eats children doesn’t at first glance seem like it should be comforting. But if you read it when you were thirteen and identified with the kids rather than the monster, why wouldn’t it be? Having all kind of horrible adventures with your friends is quite appealing as a child and having them vicariously via a book is the next best thing, or actually a better or at least less perilous one.

But those are books I read during or before adolescence and so the comforting quality comes to them naturally, or so it seems. The same could be true of my favourite Shakespeare plays, which I first read during probably the most intensely unhappy part of my adolescence – but in a weird, counterintuitive way, that adds to the sense of nostalgia. Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole books are kind of in a category of their own. When I read the first one, Adrian was 13 and I would have been 11. And then, I read the second a year or so later, but the others just randomly through the years. I’m not sure I was even aware of them when they were first published, but the ones where Adrian is an adult are just as funny but also significantly more painful. It’s a strange thing to read about the adult life of a character you “knew” when you were both unhappy children. Although she had a huge amount of acclaim and success during her life, I’m still not sure Townsend gets quite the credit she’s due for making Adrian Mole a real person. Laughing at a nerdy teenager’s difficult adolescence and his cancer treatment as a still-unhappy adult is a real imaginative and empathic achievement. Still; the comfort there could be in the familiar, not just the character but the world he inhabits. Adrian is, reading him as an adult (and as he becomes an adult) surprisingly nuanced; even though he’s an uptight and conservative and in a way a little Englander and terminally unreliable as a teenager and loses none of those traits as an adult, you somehow know that you can count on him not to be a Nazi or misogynist, no small thing in this day and age.

But if Frodo and Elric and Adrian Mole are characters who I knew from childhood or adolescence, what about A Clockwork Orange, which I first read and immediately loved in my early 20s and which, despite the (complicatedly) happy ending could hardly be called uplifting? Or The Catcher in the Rye, which again I didn’t read until my 20s and have been glad ever since that I didn’t “do” it at school as so many people did. Those books have a lot in common with Adrian Mole, in the sense that they are first-person narratives by troubled teenagers. Not that Alex is “troubled” in the Adrian/Holden Caulfield sense. But maybe it’s that sense of a ‘voice’ that’s comforting? If so, what does that say about the fact that Crash by JG Ballard or worse, American Psycho is also a comfort read for me? I read both of those in my 20s too, and immediately liked them but not in the same way as The Catcher in the Rye. When I read that book, part of me responds to it in the identifying sense; that part of me will probably always feel like Holden Caulfield, even though I didn’t do the things he did or worry about ‘phonies’ as a teenager. I loved Crash from the first time I read the opening paragraphs but although there must be some sense of identification (it immediately felt like one of ‘my’ books) and although have a lot of affection for Ballard as he comes across in interviews, I don’t find myself reflected in the text, thankfully. Same (even more thankfully) with American Psycho – Patrick Bateman is an engaging, very annoying narrator (more Holden than Alex, interestingly) and I find that as with Alex in A Clockwork Orange his voice feels oddly effortless for me to read. Patrick isn’t as nice(!) or as funny or clever as Alex, but still, there’s something about his neurotic observations and hilariously tedious lists that’s – I don’t know, not soothing to read, exactly, but easy to read. Or something. Hmm.

But if Alex, Adrian, Holden and Patrick feel real, what about actual real people? I didn’t read Jake Adelstein’s Tokyo Vice until I was in my early 30s, but it quickly became a book that I can pick up and enjoy it at any time. And yet, though there is a kind of overall narrative and even a sort of happy ending, that isn’t really the main appeal; and in this case it isn’t familiarity either. It’s episodic and easy to dip into (Jon Ronson’s books have that too and so do George Orwell’s Essays and Journalism and Philip Larkin’s Selected Letters, which is another comfort read from my 20s) The culture of Japan that Adelstein documents as a young reporter has an alien kind of melancholy that is somehow hugely appealing even when it’s tragic. Another true (or at least fact-based) comfort read, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, which I only read in my 40s after meaning to read it ever since high school, has no business whatsoever being comforting. So why is it? I’m not getting any closer to an answer.

Predictability presumably has a role to play; as mentioned above, I wouldn’t read a book for the first time as ‘a comfort read’ and even though I said I might read a familiar author that way, it suddenly occurs to me that that is only half true. I would read Stephen King for comfort, but I can think of at least two of his books where the comfort has been undone because the story went off in a direction that I didn’t want it to. That should be a positive thing; predictability, even in genre fiction which is by definition generic to some extent, is the enemy of readability and the last thing you want is to lose interest in a thriller. I’ve never been able to enjoy whodunnit type thrillers for some reason; my mother loved them and they – Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Sue Grafton, even Dick Francis, were her comfort reads. Maybe they are too close to puzzles for my taste? Not sure.

So to summarise; well-loved stories? Sometimes comforting. Identifiable-with characters? Sometimes comforting. Authorial voices? This may be the only unifying factor in all the books I’ve listed and yet it still seems a nebulous kind of trait and Robert Westall has little in common with Sue Townsend or Bret Easton Ellis, or (etc, etc). So instead of an actual conclusion, I’ll end with a funny, sad and comforting quote from a very silly, funny but in some ways comforting book; Harry Harrison’s 1965 satirical farce Bill, the Galactic Hero. The book is in lots of ways horrific; Bill, an innocent farm boy, finds himself swept up into the space corps and a series of ridiculous and perilous adventures. The ending of the book is both funny and very bitter, but rewinding to the end of part one, Bill has lost his left arm in combat but had a new one – but a right arm, which belonged to his best friend, grafted on:

He wished he could talk to some of his old buddies, then remembered that they were all dead and his spirits dropped further. He tried to cheer himself up but could think of nothing to be cheery about until he discovered that he could shake hands with himself. This made him feel a little better. He lay back on the pillows and shook hands with himself until he fell asleep.

Harry Harrison, Bill the Galactic Hero, p.62 (Victor Gollancz, 1965)