Fantastic Metropolis

For me, Calder’s work has echoes of another powerful symbolist and native of London, William Blake. There’s a similar despair at the inability of human beings to transcend their basic drives, desires and prejudices. In Blake’s poem “London” he lamented: ‘In every cry of every Man, In every Infant’s cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban, The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.’ And in several of Calder’s novels the denizens of Britain, the ‘Darkling Isle’, are prone to reject freedom and responsibility in favour of contented and parochial serfdom. But to what extent do these aspects of his fiction reflect a critique of the way we think and live with each other—particularly those of us dwelling in the Darkling Isle?

“They reflect, I suppose, the sense that Blakean energy—or ‘evil’, if you like—often seems sadly absent from contemporary British life. Instead of dynamism, there’s a hysterical pursuit of momentary euphoria; and there’s often a mean-spiritedness, or spitefulness, to people’s lives, that I find distressing. This tends to mean that though ‘individuality’ is enshrined, there’s very little true individualism, and this because the country has, to a large extent, been infantilised. People seem to be consumed by the twin pursuits of doing as they please while, paradoxically, pointing the accusing finger and informing on each other, like nasty children. At the same time, people are living in a constant state of panic. It’s the panic, I suppose, that interests me most. I’ve long been fascinated by hysteria, and particularly mass hysteria: alien abduction, satanic ritual abuse, the ‘stranger’ in our midst who is a threat to our children (and the child in our midst who is a threat to us), recovered memory, chronic fatigue syndrome, Gulf War syndrome—all of these concerns seem to be part of a larger, hysterical plague sweeping across Britain, and indeed, the world. We are living in an age of grand paranoia.”

So does Calder believe British culture to more authoritarian and intolerant than that of other countries in which he’s lived?

“A few years back, a poll conducted by Index on Censorship revealed that most British people want more censorship, not less. Authoritarianism often works from the bottom up, and the infantile nature of mass society seems to predicate Big Brother. No accident it’s the name of the UK’s most popular reality television programme. Britain is a very censorious society. We tend to think it’s not, because we all tend to be free to do as we wish so long as what we do doesn’t matter. We live, today, in a kind of two-way panopticon, eternally watched and watching, caught up in a cycle of victimhood and accusation—players in a piece of sadomasochistic theatre whose true nature we choose to remain ignorant of.

“Somewhere, in The Twist, the narrator says something along the lines that there is ignorance, and there is wilful ignorance, that the people amongst whom she lived chose to be ignorant. It was not that they had low IQs or were disadvantaged in any meaningful way; they were stupid because they liked being stupid, in the same way that pigs like rolling in their own shit; it suited them. It made them feel good. Ignorance, for many, is a life-style choice. And ignorance, moreover, is aggressive, not passive. It seeks to convert. It is evangelical. If knowledge is power, then ignorance is power, too, because ignorance is a form of knowledge, that is, it is an interpretation of the world.”

I put it to Calder that his awareness of the authoritarianism of his native land has been intensified by his time outside the country. I ask if he has come to feel something of an outsider in his native land, and to what extent this impacts on the way he looks at the place?

“I do feel like something of an outsider in Britain and I think, now, I always will. You stay abroad too long and it becomes difficult to readjust, to re-integrate yourself back into what was once familiar. You have to accept that things will never be the same, that the old life will never, perhaps, be truly available to you, and that your own country has, in many ways, become a foreign country. I must admit to feeling a certain melancholy about this.”

“But I’m not the complete misanthrope that I sometimes appear. I love London, and am glad to be here. I’ve had some problems with ill health, which living in the tropics either caused, or exacerbated—and medical treatment has certainly been one reason for being in Blighty, where, I believe, hospitals sometimes even go to the trouble of sterilising surgical instruments, if not their wards. But I really don’t know how long I’ll stay. If I love London, I love the romance of travel and living abroad, and I particularly love the mad, bad Far East. Maybe I’ll be back abroad in the not-too-distant future. Who knows?”