Al Jazeera - The novel? Publishers of Amis, Rushdie, McEwan,
Murakami, Saramago, Ackroyd, Tremain and Theroux praise former
Al Jazeera journalist, Afshin Rattansi, for new collection of
novels published in one volume under the title “The Dream of the
Decade”.
EMBARGOED UNTIL 16 JANUARY 2006 Published by Booksurge, ISBN
1-4196-1686-2
For the first time, a journalist from Al Jazeera has published a
work of fiction - though the Arabic TV station’s detractors
might have it another way. The Dream of the Decade - a quartet
of novels - is out in one volume published by U.S. publisher,
Booksurge. It’s a big tome that charts the lives of Londoners
when the gaps between rich and poor are inexorably rising, even
as the lives of the rich are becoming fabulously wealthy.
Released on 1 February 2006, it treats the fear and loathing of
terrorism only in one novel, head on, in an account of Londoners
trapped in a bar during a bombscare. Though there is no mention
of Al Qaeda, it is the background of the author that makes one
think that the fear is post 9/11.
The book itself is praised by Dan Franklin, publisher of Martin
Amis, Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan who says that Rattansi
“captures the atmosphere of the late 1980s.” Christopher
MacLehose, the publisher of Richard Ford, Haruki Murakami,
Georges Perec and Jos?? Saramago, said that he could still feel
the force of “The Dream of the Decade.”
It’s no wonder as the ambitions of the novels are large. The
first and title novel charts the downfall of a stereotypical
working-class-made-good-under-Thatcher yuppie as he begins to
learn what British society lost as it gained. The third is about
Londoners’ - and even Los Angeles-residents’ - perplexing
relationship with property. The final novel, entitled, “Good
Morning, Britain” examines the travails of an ingenue at a big
television station, learning and prospering as he produces news
for the populace. It should be noted that Rattansi produced for
the BBC’s Today programme which was caught up in the Weapons of
Mass Destruction fiasco when Andrew Gilligan reported that the
British government has “sexed up” a dossier to persuade the UK
parliament to vote for the Iraq War.
Rattansi worked on Al Jazeera’s flagship programme, “Top Secret”
and given the Arabic language station’s ability to source
material where no media outlet has contacts, one can only
imagine what assignments the author must have undertaken. He won
a Sony Award for his outstanding contribution to media in 2002,
shortly after setting up an international 24 hour news station
in the Middle East. The quartet begins with a reflection by one
of the female characters in the book, the love of the first
novel’s protaganist, as she holidays in the Maldives ahead of
the Asian Tsunami. It is when you imagine the scope of such a
book, its themes, its politics and its emotional range allied to
the quality of writing which impressed so many of Britain’s
arbiters of literary prowess, that you begin to understand what
an event publication of “The Dream of the Decade - The London
Novels” really is.
Selected Quotes
“I can still feel the force of it, as a passing gale”
Christopher MacLehose, Collins Harvill. “I admired it,
particularly the pace and atmosphere.” Christopher
Sinclair-Stevenson, Sinclair Stevenson Ltd. “He captures the
atmosphere of the late 80s.” Dan Franklin, Martin Secker and
Warburg. “Interesting and involving.” Laura Longrigg, William
Heinemann Ltd.
Title: The Dream of the Decade Subtitle: The London Novels
Author: Afshin Rattansi ISBN: 1-4196-1686-2 Library of Congress
Number:2005909384 Category: Fiction Length: 622 pages Retail
Price: $21.95 Binding: 5.25″ x 8″ trade paperback Illustrations:
Line Art and Photographs PUBLISHED MARCH 2006
Profile and Review by Fiona Fine
NOVEL AL JAZEERA MAN
“The Dream of the Decade” comes with high praise. Dan Franklin,
publisher of Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan is an
admirer of the book and says that 30-something Rattansi
“captures the atmosphere of the late 1980s.” But with the first
British publication of this quartet, it’s easy to see that these
characters are very much living with us today.
It’s always difficult for a new novelist to break through the
household literary name strata. And, often, more difficult for
the aspiring writer is answering questions as to what their work
is about. J. D. Salinger would have found it difficult to
describe immediately why the plot of “Catcher in the Rye” was
inherently interesting. Norman Mailer would have had trouble
with “An American Dream”. It’s the “hook” books like “A
Handmaiden’s Tale” or “The Satanic Verses” that are altogether
easier.
There are hooks in Afshin Rattansi’s debut novels, four of them
published in one volume and all loosely connected, not least
that they centre on life in London. The first book is about the
growing divide between rich and poor just as balsamic vinegar
was becoming fashionable amongst the new yuppie class. There
follows a book on how Londoners respond to a terrorist bomb
scare and another on how property prices began to dominate life
in London. The final book is a very thinly disguised satire, or
what looks like a satire, on news values at the BBC. But what
unites the quartet is an ineluctable quality of the writing.
The thirty something British-born writer, whose Kenyan father is
an expert on Sir Isaac Newton and alchemy, is slightly
dismissive of the publication of the book.
“I went through two agencies, Curtis Brown and A.P. Watt and I
can’t say I was helped much and now it’s twenty years on,” he
says about to pull another cigarette from a packet on the table
and then replacing it. “I think publishers in the eighties and
earlier nineties were more interested in my Indian origin than
the subject matter of the book.”
The first chapters of the first book were written at a time of
resurgent Commonwealth writing. Rattansi, himself, worked on
stories about Salman Rushdie during the Satanic Verses affair
when he was on Tariq Ali’s groundbreaking Channel 4 series,
Bandung File.
Dressed in fashionable jeans and a black T-shirt, Rattansi is
sitting in a Chateau Marmont seat after being interviewed by Los
Angeles’ most progressive radio station, KPFK. On the same
programme was the now dead activist and former co-founder of
LA’s notorious Crips gang, Stanley “Tookie” Williams whose
clemency pleas didn’t prevent him from being injected with
Sodium Pentothal.
“Los Angeles has always fascinated me and it was Mike Davis’
book, City of Quartz, that enlightened me so much as to why.
Whereas London is two organisms, the centre and the suburbs, Los
Angeles is a myriad directly opposing entities. It has a
sophisticated left, a developing world level population, a
strong harbour union, fabulous colonies of wealth and it creates
rightwing propaganda. And natural disasters have repeatedly
shocked and devastated the area.”
The prologue begins with one of the lead women characters of the
books, now settled in marriage, relocating to the site of the
2005 Asian Tsunami. It is as if the person who most embraced the
new opportunities that privatisation and a city that encouraged
entrepreneurship is most shattered by its consequences.
“There is even a theory that the reason why Diego Garcia wasn’t
affected by the tsunami was because there was no commercial
prawn fishing there. In Sri Lanka and Aceh, increasing
commercialisation of the shrimp industry destroyed the
protective reefs.”
Rattansi sees politics in everything. He worked as a chief risk
analyst at the insurers’ Lloyd’s of London after they had lost
billions of pounds. His expertise was in catastrophe analysis,
both environmental and political. But the books are in no way
political tracts.
“One of the most moving letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald is the
one he writes to his daughter, urging her to read Marx. His
novels may be liked by criminal conservatives like Jeffrey
Archer but whether a novel is political one way or another is in
the eye of the beholder.
“What animates the title novel, I hope, is that I was part of a
generation which was convinced that the social fabric that was
ripped apart by Mrs. Thatcher would take a long time to mend.
It’s perhaps difficult to remember for those in their twenties
that there was a time when music and politics were incredibly
sophisticated and polarised. Well, perhaps popular music is
still as polarised. And it was a time when one section of
society leapfrogged at the expense of another.”
Despite looking in his later twenties, Rattansi is on Jonathan
Coe’s eighties’ territory about the post-punk, post-New Romantic
time of The Smiths and the Orgreave battle of the Miners’
Strike. But The Dream of the Decade is much more international
than Coe.
“I always envisaged that the four main themes or even obstacles
that the characters would have to circumnavigate were class,
political terrorism, property and the media. They are vague but
actually impact on everyday life. Well, at the time, terrorism
didn’t impact on daily life and the book rather explodes the
myth that it does. But certainly, property does. As for the
media, its place is an education system for adults - a
dangerously flawed education system. I actually wrote a novel
about education but it wasn’t up to scratch.”
Rattansi’s first job was at The Guardian and he has a younger
brother who followed him into journalism, now anchoring world
news from CNN in the U.S.
The novels do have a distinctly American feel about them even
though they capture the texture of London, something that many
publishers commented on as he received his rejection slips.
Rattansi was born in Cambridge but has lived all over the world,
covering wars and political stories and just writing. Among the
places he’s lived in are Vancouver in Canada, in Los Angeles and
in Havana and Caracas. In Dubai, for two years, he headed up the
developing world’s first 24 hour English language news station,
devoted to an incredible remit that at times, according to
Rattansi “made Al Jazeera look like Fox News.”
“It was a station devoted to issues of globalisation and
international capital except ‘from below’ and the brother of the
Crown Prince of Dubai footed the bill. Someone obviously told
someone that this station was very much not in the mould of
Bloomberg and the station was closed down. I sometimes feel as
if my approach as editor of the channel was just as it was in
setting about writing the novels.”
>From there, it was out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Returning to the BBC where he had worked as a producer for a
number of years, he found himself at the Today programme under
one editor - Rod Liddle - who resigned and then under no editor,
just as the question of Weapons of Mass Destruction led up to
unprecedented resignations by the Director General and
Governor’s Chairman of the BBC.
“Today was a hell of a place to work. Liddle may have been quite
mad but he was a startlingly original editor. When I came back
after being editor of a whole station, I was dreading Television
Centre. I expected it to be staffed full of the usual
wire-copiers whose idea of originality in journalism stretched
as far as a vox pop. Rod was very different and he recruited
staff that were inspired enough to take on the Government spin
machine with relish. The whole David Kelly disaster was
terrible. Even more so for our realising how little power the
Today programme could, in the end, exert when it came to
stopping the madness of the Iraq war.”
Apart from the final novel, which reads as a Scoop for the
twenty-first century, Rattansi’s characters are usually doomed
in love, either because of distances, class or the overpowering
pressures of life in London. But this isn’t Bridget Jones.
There’s a real anomie in the characters - whether they are
drinking champagne or sitting injured in cardboard boxes - which
recalls Beckett as much as F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Christopher MacLehose, the publisher of Richard Ford, Haruki
Murakami, Georges Perec and Jos?? Saramago, said that he could
still feel the force of “The Dream of the Decade.” The novels
are not historical. The evocation of London, in particular, is
as palpable as in Peter Ackroyd’s biography of the city.
Sometimes, it is to the capital city as Bukowski’s prose was to
Los Angeles - indeed the Barfly himself read it and found it
uplifting. At other times it is strictly Waugh. Whereas most
journalists’ fiction demonstrates that being a hack is an Enemy
of Promise, Rattansi creates big characters whom we feel for
because he examines the minutiae of their emotions. But, as one
would expect from someone who covered the fall of the Berlin
Wall and who worked at the controversial Arabic satellite TV
station, Al Jazeera, the themes are far from small.