Dear Readers,
Unless one of our subscribers numbers among the Taliban, then this has been a very grim week of news for all of us. Lawrence Osborne is perhaps the prime interpreter of the perverse ironies of the present moment, and we are extraordinarily lucky to carry an interview with him, which has been conducted by long-time friend of The Fence, critic and author Clement Knox. We have our usual bag of tips, titbits and featurettes; but first, we carry a dispatch from the Afghan capital.
You Have the Watches, We Have the Time
Sweeping into the metropolitan heart of Kabul in their Toyota Hiluxes, it seems even the Taliban shocked by the totality of their victory. We spoke to a UK national embedded with the British military to find out more. Our insider, who left this July, was there to train, advise and assist specialised units within the Afghan National Army. They were at pains to relay the skills of that now defeated force, ‘they were good soldiers, really decent in fact, and we had very decent working relationships with them which dated back over more than a few years.’
So why were they defeated so quickly? As reported elsewhere, the ANA was reliant on NATO technological know-how to support them, and crucially, to update and maintain existing weapons systems. Our source was also keen to point out the variety of topography in Afghanistan, and that shuttling a Kabul-based armed force to areas where they were unfamiliar with the landscape was doomed, inevitably, to fail without the overwhelming air support that NATO forces had supplied for the past decade.
Back in 2016-2017, British and American special forces had fought a successful campaign against ISIS, who had waged a war that would make the phrase ‘scorched earth’ seem extravagantly inaccurate. It seems that the Taliban had learnt a lesson in observation. In our source’s telling, the Taliban would approach the ANA with an offer: they would let them go, without a shot fired, if they handed over their weapons and uniforms. The Taliban would then proceed to the local prison, where they would free their jailed brethren. In so doing, they added to their manpower, armoured their existing forces with a powerful, western-funded arsenal and were able to position themselves as arbiters of gladly munificence to the tribes of a country scarred by the forever war.
When we asked about the fate of the interpreters that our source worked with, they averred: the subject is too raw. They told us that what is going on inside and outside Hamid Karzai International Airport is very difficult to verify. There are reports of stand-offs between British troops, keen to rescue UK nationals from downtown Kabul, and the US soldiers who are nominally in charge of the airport. All the while, the Taliban have seized control of the checkpoints surrounding the transport hub.
So, what’s next for Afghanistan? Our source tells us that ‘the medium-term anxiety centres on the power vacuum.’ The country is embedded with a trillion dollars of minerals, and we don’t use hyperbole. China, which shares a border with the country, is primed to take advantage, ‘peer adversaries will be looking at what we did wrong, looking at other approaches, and that’s likely to come through building infrastructure.’
Afghanistan has seen off invasions by Soviet Russia and America in the last 40 years. You can imagine that Xi Jinping and his strategists will be planning their approaches meticulously.
On Java Road
As Robert Grieve, the protagonist of Lawrence Osborne’s novel Hunters in the Dark, mulls shedding his skin as a Sussex schoolteacher, he realises ‘how much he hated where he came from… [and] that he didn’t want to go back.’ While on holiday in Cambodia, the prospect of a total severance of ties and a reinvention in a foreign country proves too much to resist. Grieve, like many of Osborne’s characters, would be classified by sociologists as WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) and his hatred of home is typical of his caste. ‘Westerners, especially liberal westerners,’ Osborne told me, ‘have a virulent self-hatred, which is interesting, because it’s so detached from their actual circumstances.’
Suavely, discreetly, Osborne has taken his place amongst the first rank of novelists working today. In the last decade, he has published seven novels, five of which are being adapted into films, including The Forgiven, which is due out late this year, starring Ralph Fiennes and Jessica Chastain. As a larger audience is introduced to his work and, with any luck, find their way back to his novels, more and more people are going to be unnerved by his stories, all of which circle around the problem of this encounter between the WEIRD – who the Thai in The Glass Kingdom refer to as the farang – and the locals.
For although we live in a moralized mediascape, modern stories are not much interested in exploring morality. And when put in Osborne’s terms, it’s easy to see why that might be the case. ‘Moral complexity is the acknowledgement that you cannot politicise your way out of the human condition. This latter belief is the supreme contemporary delusion. It’s easy to moralise – extremely easy. It puts you in harmony with large crowds and platforms, it makes you belong. It’s also pointless. You are usually moralising to people who already agree with you and what is the point of a literature which does that?’ But does not the current state of the literary landscape speaks for itself? ‘I feel alone, I must admit.’ Osborne says, when I asked whether there are any other contemporary novelists working in the same orchards.
Though many writers, especially those starting out, are incentivised to take the path of least resistance. Witness the reaction to Jeanine Cummins’ 2020 novel American Dirt which was excoriated for the sin of cultural appropriation. Osborne, whose novels take the reader inside the minds of all sorts of characters who are not white, male, or British, is sceptical of this trend. He reckons ‘it would be a bit wimpy to not even try’ to inhabit the worlds of people who aren’t exactly like him. The act is central to his work because the WEIRD can’t see how weird they really are. It is only through the eyes of the outsider that their worldview can be held up to scrutiny and its certainties tested.
There is no certainty in Osborne’s world – although Naomi, the ‘left-wing millionaire’ heroine of his novel Beautiful Animals, thinks there is. Summering on Hydra, she stumbles across Faoud, a migrant washed up on the shores of the island. Naomi instantly incorporates Faoud into her own political narrative, namely, her compassion for the victims of the migrant crisis and her horror at Islamophobia. She decides to help him, for the decision is an obvious one. ‘It was a simple thing to do and a moral thing to do, and being both moral and simple it was an easy thing to do.’ At first she brings him food and toiletries. Then she strikes upon an elaborate plan: she will arrange for Faoud to burgle her wealthy parents’ house, take their credit cards, passports, and car and make a bid for Italy. When Faoud balks at the plan she tells him not to worry because ‘everything is insured.’ When Naomi’s father discovers him in the act, Faoud kills him and his wife. Faoud then goes on the run and ends up killing another man, some Italian policemen, and himself. Naomi’s simple moral outlook has unleashed chaos.
What’s so daring about Osborne’s novels is his refusal to make the non-western characters any more noble than the farang. At the end of The Glass Kingdom, Pop, the homely janitor of the apartment block where Sarah lives, spikes her drink, steals her money, and leaves her to be eaten alive by a monitor lizard. Not for Osborne, then, a world of western villains and virtuous subalterns. Osborne is disdainful of those who try to explain human behaviour by reference to abstract systems of power. ‘I am an enemy of ideology. Ideology is a mental world of templates, diagnoses, the long-term belief in the supremacy of ideals.’ The problem is that ideals have very poor predictive powers. Reality is flux, confusion, error, caprice. This becomes glaringly obvious at the level of the individual – which is the only level that Osborne cares about.
The quest for an overarching framework – call it religion, call it ideology – is part of the WEIRD inheritance. Osborne derides this universalist impulse (‘Universalist ideologies are the route to hell on earth. Also, to boredom on earth, which is maybe even worse.’) He recognises that it is part of a peculiarly western tradition stretching back to the Sermon on the Mount. ‘But there's something dubious and difficult about it.’ That something is individualism – that other peculiarly western pathology.
This distorting tension between individualism and universalism exists everywhere in Osborne’s work. His western characters toggle between extremes of selflessness and selfishness – a neuroticism that only becomes apparent when the WEIRD interact with the non-WEIRD. The simple stories westerners tell themselves then get exposed. Western guilt and lassitude, it turns out, do not lead to better moral outcomes, and can rapidly devolve into narcissistic posturing. As Sam, the foil to Naomi in Beautiful Animals, remarks: ‘Why the determination to make a stranger into a moral cause? You could help a stranger without making him into a cause.’ Osborne is surely making a sly joke when he has Naomi and Sam dine at a restaurant called Xenophilia – the antonym of Xenophobia – at the conclusion of the novel, at a time, when, as Naomi says, ‘everyone is dead’ as a consequence of her misguided altruism. In Osborne’s novels the clash of worldviews proves the superiority of neither. Rather, as he has one of his characters think, ‘everywhere is dangerous… everywhere where human beings exist and multiply and continue to breathe.’
Thank you to Clement Knox for writing this piece. Clement is the author of Strange Antics: A History of Seduction. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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Giles Coren, the Bard of Kentish Town
News of a novel corenavirus (geddit?!) has swept through north London, as a certain broadsheet journo has returned from his Cotswolds eyrie. After Coren was forced to pause his outbursts on his Twitter account, after jubilating in the premature death of Dawn Foster, his address was leaked on the internet.
Now, we are not snitches, but we couldn’t help but look up what three columns a week gets you in NW5. And we were also amazed to discover that, contrary to this interview, that The Bull and Last is categorically not ‘his’ local. Coren’s local is not an identikit gastropub on a main road; it’s actually The Southampton Arms, widely regarded as one of the best pubs in London, if not the best. Of course, The Southampton is unfussy, tasteful and quietly confident: everything that the Times’ restaurant critic most assuredly is not. We can only wonder why he chooses not to bless it with his custom. After all, it’s only round the corner.
For Our Next Season
In an Instagram post to accompany a feature in the first issue of Vogue Scandinavia, Greta Thunberg has aimed both barrels at the PR spiel of the fashion industry, claiming that ‘Many are making it look as if the fashion industry are starting to take responsibility, by spending fantasy amounts on campaigns where they portray themselves as ”sustainable”, ”ethical”, ”green”, ”climate neutral” and ”fair”. But let’s be clear: This is almost never anything but pure green washing. You cannot mass produce fashion or consume ”sustainably” as the world is shaped today.’
But it’s not just the mega-corporations who should get their house into order. There is a panoply of London-based companies who have centred ‘sustainability’ at the heart of how they self-fashion as fashion brands. There are a handful of critically lauded designers who mislead their customers about the provenance of their materials, breaching not only the excesses of good taste; but also, perhaps, the boundaries of the Trade Act.
If any young and enterprising journalist wants to push further into the matter, then we suggest looking at ‘deadstock’ and the brands who claim that they use that matter as their prime source of material.
In Case You Missed It
The anxiety of trying to be an influencer: Emma Garland tots up the true cost of appearing on Love Island.
‘We are the least woke people you can imagine.’ Sam Knight reports on the furore around the decolonisation of the English country house.
Wally the walrus sets up home in Clonakilty.
President Pacquiao? The Filipino boxer is limbering up for his biggest fight yet.
Tarpley Hitt has the lowdown on Current Affairs: a leftist bimonthly magazine where all the staff have just been fired for unionising.
And Finally
A ‘Jane Austen TikTok’ sounds like a punchline in a dirge-like Edinburgh fringe show. This gem-like piece, however, is one of the finest and funniest uses of the platform we’ve encountered so far. Charlotte Lucas is the tragic heart of Pride and Prejudice: stuck between a life of uncertain spinsterdom or a marriage to the repugnant Mr Collins, she has an unenviable choice to make. But just like plain-faced members of the Regency gentry, 2021’s 27-year-olds are faced with a life with ‘no money and no prospects’.
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