Andrew O'Hagan
Andrew O'Hagan
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When I look back at my childhood on the Ayrshire coast, I recall a basic devotion to the idea that human nature and national character are as unknowable as the weather's rationale.
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We sometimes forget that human invention can also be a subject of human invention: that might seem a modern notion, or a postmodern one, but novelists have taken time - sometimes time out from their realist fixations - to source and satirise the speech and power we rely on.
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Every literary culture has among its first bearings the 'blether' of animals who seek to make sense of human existence.
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I probably owe my political dismay to New Labour, but also my growing sense that the satirical shape of human affairs is international and historical, not glued to the tawdry ambitions of a team of politicians who represent nothing but themselves.
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When I was very young, I thought the theatre was a place where higher beings went about their celestial business, as if they knew nothing of ordinary life and its political mysteries.
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The working class of England today have no vision of society beyond the acquisitive - no version of themselves or their habits as anything other than transitional, on their way up or on their way out. The working class, at best, is a waiting room for people who aim to become middle class if possible.
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I always knew I would come to London. I loved Glasgow, but it seemed filled with echoes of my parents' lives, and sometimes you just want a city of your own.
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Events in America show the extent to which democracy there is fuelled by populism - Barack Obama's victory is a manifestation not of Washington's need for change, but of America's. That is not how democracy works in England.
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The characters in 'Be Near Me' come from a genuine place, a Britain that is more than one country and more than one ideal.
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High culture isn't what it used to be.
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We now live in the era of fake consensus, or phoney populism, a condition in which galleries and homes are seen to succeed best where they manage feelings of non-difference.
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I had always been literary, in the sense of loving poetry and discovering novels, but I found my voice, as they say, in an office full of elderly people who looked after blind ex-servicemen.
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A good nationalism has to depend on a principle of the common people, on myths of a struggling commonality.
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The working class of England take their deracination completely for granted. Disenchantment is the happy code that informs every byway of the underclass: service jobs, celebrity dreams, Lotto wins, leisured poverty on pre-crunch credit cards, it's all there, part of the story of an English people whose grandparents never had it so good.