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Welcome

I started this blog in 2013 to share my reflections on reading, writing and psychology, along with my journey to become a published novelist.​  I soon graduated to about twenty book reviews a month and a weekly 99-word story. Ten years later, I've transferred my writing / publication updates to my new website but will continue here with occasional reviews and flash fiction pieces, and maybe the odd personal post.

ANNE GOODWIN'S WRITING NEWS

Nationalism satirised: Miss Laila, Armed and Dangerous & Perfidious Albion

15/1/2019

4 Comments

 
I’ve recently been reading two satirical novels about nationalism and social media, the first set in India, the second in the UK.

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Miss Laila, Armed and Dangerous by Manu Joseph

On the day that Hindu nationalists triumph at the polls, a campaign veteran watches a video of a prankster on YouTube. Akhila Iyer specialises in embarrassing the leaders of the left, but is her project art, comedy or politics, and if the latter are hers a threat to his?
 
Meanwhile, Akhila shows up at a collapsed apartment building in Mumbai. When the military detect signs of life beneath the rubble, Akhila, a medical student and fitness fanatic, is the only person suitably small and qualified to crawl through a narrow tunnel to attend to him. Through his delirium, the trapped man seems to have information about an imminent terror attack.
 
In a third strand, an intelligence agent trails a terror suspect as he drives north towards Gujarat. The agents are waiting to trap the man, but there’s a complication in the form of his unexpected passenger, nineteen-year-old Laila.
 
Told with intelligence, humour and wit, this is an important story about not only the dangers of nationalism, but also the smugness of activists who take the moral high ground. While the latter made me squirm a little, I loved the voice and appreciated learning more about Hindu nationalism, having first encountered it thirty-odd years ago in a village in Maharashtra on Christmas Day. (Naïvely, I attributed benevolent motives to the visitors distributing lengths of cloth to the villagers in exchange for attending a lecture, but my fellow volunteers, students from Bombay, soon put me right.)
 
But I was a little disappointed in what the publishers, Myriad Editions, who provided my review copy, describe as the “ingenious twist” tying the three strands together. Nevertheless, an engrossing and thought-provoking read.


Perfidious Albion by Sam Byers

Tension is mounting in the small town of Edmundsbury, a microcosm of Brexit Britain, and it’s not clear yet who the winners will be. Voice-of-the-people Hugo Bennington is making and breaking alliances to secure a seat in parliament for his party, England Always, while nice-but-naive blogger Robert Townsend is finding fame or notoriety as his posts slide towards the right. Poor chap, all he wants is to expose the conditions in Larchwood, a housing estate in deliberate decline, and glean a few Likes. Such a pity that the elderly white man he gets to interview hates everyone who doesn’t look like him.
 
Meanwhile, another Larchwood resident, Trina, remotely manages the microtaskers at a tech company, whose work is organised in a way to keep them permanently anxious and unable to congregate for support. Green, the company she works for, has big plans for worming its way into the town’s infrastructure, of which Trina is unaware. But will the group of masked men calling themselves The Griefers, threatening to make public a random resident’s digital data thwart this plan?
 
The plot is enticing, but it takes Sam Byers pages and pages of real-time dialogue, reflection and exposition to introduce the players and the issues involved. I found myself skim-reading in the middle, although I did enjoy how he pulls it together in the end. Yet the set-up is different enough from the world as we know it to require a huge amount of world building, and the underlying message too similar to what we can read every day in an op-ed piece in a decent newspaper, I was left disappointed. Nevertheless, thanks to Faber and Faber for my review copy. Apologies to the author for borrowing his character for yesterday’s flash.
Thanks for reading. I'd love to know what you think. If you've enjoyed this post, you might like to sign up via the sidebar for regular email updates and/or my quarterly Newsletter.
4 Comments
Charli Mills
15/1/2019 11:10:58 pm

Manu Joseph is a book I've been waiting for because I've also had my eye on the literary renaissance coming out of India and was looking for an important literary work to grab a hold of all the changes and modern impact they collectively have. This is one I'll be adding to my shelves.

I'm not surprised to see Brexit Britain feature in a novel, too. I wonder how long until we see a serious novel set in Trump America.

Geoff initiated a discussion a few years back noting that we need to give events time to become history before we can really see what happened in a current event. I wonder if we are going to see more books tackling the current events of the past three years.

Reply
Anne Goodwin
17/1/2019 09:40:46 am

There have actually been a few Brexit novels already, but I don’t think any of them can quite capture the embarrassment of the current chaos. As many are saying, if the government were running a business rather than something as trivial as a country they’d be sacked – although I suspect, as many chief executives of failed businesses have done, they’d be leaving with million pound payoffs! Meanwhile the idiot who set us off down this path says he has no regrets about calling the referendum. At least with Trump there’s a chance of someone sensible in the White House next time.
I should say about Ms Laila that some Indian reviewers on Goodreads seemed to have similar reservations to mine about Perfidious Albion regarding the mishmash of fiction and social commentary. They actually recognised the real-life events it was based on, while it was all story to me.

Reply
Charli Mills
21/1/2019 09:56:18 pm

Why is that those who cause the chaos seem immune to it? What a way to keep power. I think you are right -- too many execs do run companies this way and politics has caught on, or maybe when politics were more secretive, this is what they taught to companies. It's all out in the open.

Interesting observation from comments on Goodreads.

Anne Goodwin
22/1/2019 08:26:57 am

Indeed, this mess we’re in is all about holding onto power, or gaining it. Yes, politicians should seek promotion as with professionals in any job, but you’d still hope they were equally driven by a public service ethic.


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