"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 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.
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.
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."
Fromthere, 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.
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 José 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 which 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.