Introduction to Firing the Cathedral
The circling, elliptic dialogue was also of its moment, grown in the same Ladbroke Grove edifice basements as the looking-glass exchanges of Performance, in which Fox and Jagger lip-synch the sardonic, cryptic quips of vanished David Litvinoff. (Cornelius family associate Taffy Sinclair would, for reasons of his own, later deliberately confuse and conflate Litvinoff with the vanished inhabitant of the Princelet Street synagogue, another disappeared David, but that’s a different story.) The resonant and somehow menacing Cornelius non-sequiturs would be, before the century’s end, a language every television set and media personality was talking. Zeit-bites. Verbal stun-grenades. Bomb mots. Spin doctors flung into political oblivion by the centrifugal force of their own language.
And then, of course, there were all the supporting players, the outrageous fever-dream grotesques, all the impossibly exaggerated jet-black satires, as we then fondly imagined them to be. The seedy, sentimental backstreet arms-dealer, or the sleek Indian nuclear physicist. The monstrous sticky-fingered Bishop and the crackhead-blueprint brother. Whitehall and Westminster ice-queens that preceded Stella Rimington or Margaret Thatcher. Storming, psychopathic U.S. Generals amok in Europe. Creatures such as these were nowhere to be found in life, or science fiction. This was not, could never be the human future, where we had been promised jetpacks, robots, space migration, ways to skip out on the consequences of our history and leave the black mess of our past behind. The horror circus, the global psychosis promised in the pages of New Worlds was surely nothing but the product of embittered, cynical neurotics, talking up their own arrested-adolescence paranoia as pretended vision, as attempted literary movement, as another spurious Onew wave’. Why was John Sladek wasting time on texts that seemed obsessed with codes, as if encryption had some part to play in human times to come? Why couldn’t J.G.Ballard just stop going on about how tower blocks shape psychopathologies, about celebrity car crashes as emergent icons, bloodied obelisks erected in the new group mind? What had this to do with science fiction, with the future, with the price of fish, with anything?
By 1980, Jerry seemed as obsolete as any other glittering exotic piece of wreckage that originated from that now alternately reviled and sentimentalised decade, the 1960s. He would rarely stick his head outdoors. A Tank Trapeze here, a Swastika Set-Up there, but you could tell he wasn’t having fun. A gloomy Gus, and could you blame him? Norman ‘Never Trust a Hippy’ Tebbit, unacknowledged architect of Punk Rock, had already named the ’60s as the source of the insidious blight responsible for all subsequent social ills. Experimental fiction or indeed experimental anything was, we now realised, merely another paving slab along the path to chaos, hell, and other impediments to a Free Market economy. Martin Amis himself had confidently dismissed William Burroughs as ‘boring’. Sixties. Even the word became a curse, a judgement. The styles and language of the times, worn like a strawberry-mark, became a stigma, became fashion suicide. If you could admit to being there, you weren’t there. Jerry, with his haircut, with his Cuban-heeled elastic-sided boots and dandy mannerisms, clearly never stood a chance. All washed up, he could feel the ’90s and Laurence Llewellyn Bowen bearing down on him. He knew he had to cut his losses, get out fast, go underground, or end up travestied. The decade’s very light conspired, it seemed, to make him look his age, to look less than the man he’d been when we first met him.
