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| Swastika Night: Nineteen Eighty-Four's lost twin While Orwell's dystopia is embedded in our culture, an equally powerful novel exploring parallel themes is almost completely unknownThis week's Berlin Wall ceremonies marked a golden moment in the history of that most benighted of cities. They also reminded us of the incredibly enduring power of Nineteen Eighty-Four: it's almost impossible to write or think about totalitarianism without slipping into that chilling Orwellian lexicon. Big Brother, Newspeak, Thought Police, unperson, Room 101 … Nineteen Eighty-Four has percolated through the culture, language and collective mind with a thoroughness and absoluteness O'Brien would be proud of.Berlin, of course, is unusual in that it felt both edges of the totalitarian sword: the leftist dictatorship of George Orwell's nightmares, and Nazism. Which prompts a timely question: why are the concepts and characters of Nineteen Eighty-Four so culturally iconic, so deeply embedded, while the equally great Swastika Night is unheralded in the pantheon of classic dystopian novels?Orwell's book is one of the most famous in the English language, with perennially enormous sales, film adaptations, introductions by Thomas Pynchon. Hardly anybody has ever heard of Katharine Burdekin nor her novel, published under the pseudonym Murray Constantine in 1937. My copy was reissued by the Feminist Press after a hiatus of decades.And yet in many ways, Swastika Night can be seen as a companion piece to Nineteen Eighty-Four, exploring the other side of the totalitarian coin with equal insight, prescience and humanity. Both were written in the same era; both offer forensic dissections of the psychopathology of power; both are masterful imaginings of a possible future drawn from the dreadful but logical conclusion of these insane ideologies. There are even specific similarities between the two: a hero slowly awakening in consciousness, the cult of political leadership, the rewriting of history, a secret text which reveals the truth, a photograph on which the plot twists. While Nineteen Eighty-Four is perhaps more elegantly written, these books can be considered equals; and in some ways Swastika Night is an even more remarkable artistic and intellectual achievement. The book takes places seven centuries after the Axis won the second world war (now called the Twenty Year War). Germany now dominates Europe and Africa, Japan everywhere else. "Inferior races" have been wiped out, the few remaining Christians are persecuted. The Nazi realm – a weird, retro-futuristic feudal society – is based on extreme militarism, conformity and patriarchy, and a bizarre quasi-religion based on a divine Hitler, who literally exploded from the head of God the Thunderer. Hitler was seven foot tall with long blond hair, and almost single-handedly won the war. Also, a sickening misogyny has been given legal force: rape is no longer a crime, and women exist merely to breed the next generation of Teutonic supermen. They are cowed and brutalised, hunchbacked, literally herded together. Muscular boys and men are considered beautiful; women are soft, stupid, disgusting. An Englishman, Alfred, visiting a friend in Germany, meets one of the ruling knights and learns a potentially fatal piece of information: far fewer female babies are being born. For so long told they are non-people, women are now subconsciously breeding themselves – and the Aryan race – out of existence. Thus begins his slow recovery from the disease of hatred and ignorance, and towards a denouement which hints at a more hopeful future.Though a huge leap of imagination, Swastika Night posits a terrifyingly coherent and plausible alternative history. And considering when it was published, and how little of what we know of the Nazi regime today was then understood, the novel is eerily prophetic and perceptive about the nature of Nazism: its violence and mindlessness; its irrationality and superstition; its emotional immaturity and cod-mysticism; the mundane, stifling horror; the way it ultimately dehumanises and destroys everyone, even the powerful; most importantly, the inextricable link between misogyny, patriarchy and fascism. A ferocious but subtle and brilliantly controlled "j'accuse" against misogyny, Swastika Night is one of the few fictions to emphasise this key element of the Nazis: man, the world-conquering hero; woman, know thy place. Like its Orwellian counterpart, this book has the power to send chills down the spine, so vividly realised is its vision of things that were to happen and things that might have happened. Indeed, Swastika Night could almost be seen as a predictive rather than a speculative novel. Or perhaps a warning, from historic reality and imaginative truth; and as with Nineteen Eighty-Four, a warning worth heeding in a book worth reading.Science fiction, fantasy and horrorFictionGeorge OrwellDarragh McManusguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Paperback Nonfiction Top 5 at a Glance1. THE BLIND SIDE, by Michael Lewis2. FREAKONOMICS, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner3. THREE CUPS OF TEA, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin4. THE GLASS CASTLE, by Jeannette Walls5. BLINK, by Malcolm Gladwell feeds.nytimes.com |
The digested read Michael Joseph, £20Once again the beardy Guardian-reading marxists in their N-reg Peugeots at the Highways Agency have claimed the slower you drive the faster you arrive at your destination. The facts are this. There is no evidence speed cameras have saved a single life. Which brings me neatly on to the Clio, because that's the name of the eight-year-old girl I knocked down in the Lambo Gallardo Spyder while pulling 520 bhp outside a school last week. What good did speed cameras do her?Apart from being Rory McGrath or a German, surely the most pointless job in the world has to be a public relations executive. A PR woman recently questioned whether I actually wrote my own columns. Well, I've news for you. I knock them out in 15 minutes while Richard Hammond is doing his hair. That's why the format is always the same. Feed Mondeo Man with 800 words of any old non-PC crap, and then contrive a non-existent link to a car he can't afford. Which brings me nicely on to the BMW M3 CS.What's the point of Norway? On the night I stood having a cigarette outside Lillehammer's equivalent to Piccadilly Circus, I didn't see a single car. I felt like a lonely fat poof hanging around outside a public lavatory, while my friends George and Michael were inside getting it on with an Eskimo in salmon-pink, reindeer-skin chaps. And talking of which, here's the Mazda MX-5, the gayest car ever built.Fighting my way past the scores of Hungarian paedophiles and Muslims wearing waistcoats packed with explosives whom Tony Bliar and his multicultural cronies have personally invited into this country brings me nicely on to the Lexus. Here's another piece of foreign rubbish we could do without. If we filled every Lexus with Germaine Greer and her bunch of dungaree-wearing lesbians and sent them back to Japan, the country would be a far better place.It's been tipping with rain for the past few days. So much for the droughts the global warming brigade promised us. But then no one is allowed to question whether the world really is about to explode because George Monbiot has got all the gay politicians in his pocket. Well, I've news for you. There are some serious scientists out there, such as Nick Griffin, Lord Monckton and Melanie Phillips, who have proved climate change is something dreamed up by a sweaty foreigner driving with no insurance. Which brings me neatly on to the Aston Martin DB9 Coupe. Here's a car you can't refuse. It's like having Keira Knightley in your bed and not giving her a right good seeing to.Tonight on Top Gear we are going to show the footage the PC brigade wanted no one to see. To be honest I felt the same way. But it's not my fault that dwarf Richard Hammond wasn't killed in the crash. Which brings me to the Volkswagen Phaeton. With all the pizzaz of James May with a hard-on, the only thing you're going to die of in this lump of Nazi steel is boredom.I was stuck behind some centenarian war-mongering Jap doing 25mph on the A40 in a Nissan Micra as I was driving to the airport. Which brings me neatly to the Audi R8, a car with which I have fallen in love. With its 414bhp 4.2 V8 from the RS4 and priced at just £92,000, the Audi is a steal. And the drive is so smooth, you can knock other cars off the road without noticing. Just ask Mr Kamikaze.Here's a curious thing. The last few pieces in the book haven't been lifted straight from my motoring column. Here's one about me and my mate Adrian, definitely not a poof, going to Iraq. "Are you really this much of a bigot, Jezza?" Adrian asked. "Nah," I replied, setting down my copy of Gay Times. "It's an act. The morons can't get enough of it." "Me, too," Adrian smiled. "Let's kill a baboon. That should add noughts to our Sunday Times contracts." Which brings me nicely to my advance. If Penguin could just slip me a hundred grand for doing nothing, I'll be off.The digested read, digested: Driven all the way to the bank.CelebrityMotoringJohn Craceguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Celebrating the oddest of anniversaries There's a mass of round-numbered anniversaries this year but why go with the flow?At first I was sceptical when I learned that Jack London fans were preparing to celebrate the author's 134th anniversary – I'm all for a bit of White Fang and Call of the Wild when I'm in the right mood, but there's no great ring to a 134th birthday. And the London-ites aren't the only ones at it - last year Google made a big fuss about HG Wells's 143rd birthday in September - not an anniversary previously seen as being worth noting.But the more I think about these random anniversaries, the more I like them. Why should it be the roundly-numbered dates which get all the fun? So I've decided that, rather than going with the masses and celebrating Daniel Defoe (350 years since birth of), JM Barrie (150 years since birth of), Anton Chekhov (150 years since birth of), Mark Twain (100 years since death of) and Albert Camus (50 years since death of) this year, I shall be marking the lives of more arbitrarily born writers.So happy 605th birthday Thomas Malory. Happy 94th birthday Mary Stewart (I'm on a bit of an Arthurian kick at the moment). Happy 105th birthday Anthony Powell and 167th birthday Henry James. And I can't believe it's been 189 years since we lost you, Keats, or 130 years since you died, George Eliot.Let me know about any authors you'd like to celebrate this year – just make sure the date isn't divisible by 50. Although I might make an exception for Elizabeth Gaskell, who'd be turning 200, because I do like her so.Alison Floodguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
'Love Story' author Erich Segal dies Erich Segal, the Ivy League professor who attained mainstream fame and made millions sob as writer of the novel and movie Love ... rssfeeds.usatoday.com |