Dead Air

It’s a strange time to be reading  book about 9/11.  Revealing just how backlogged I am with the blog; at the time I’m writing this, it has just been revealed that Andreas Lubitz deliberately crashed a plane full of people into the side of a mountain.  Of course, it’s far too early for rational judgement or comment on the events, so naturally the internet’s full of ill-informed opinions and comparisons of the two events.  As fun as it is interacting with the news and minor celebrities on Twitter, 140 characters probably aren’t enough to give a well balanced view on such a delicate issue.  This is relevant.  I am getting to the point.  Dead Air, with its grimly punning title is more about the reaction to the World Trade Center attacks than it is the event itself.  And naturally, the response is shock- and then business as usual. 

I’m not going to pretend that the terrorist attacks of September 11^th didn’t have some pretty far reaching political and cultural ramifications and, although I was still quite young, I do remember the immediate aftermath.  In the UK, at least, it seemed to be the case of being bombarded with that footage (you know the stuff I mean, the moment the planes fly into the towers) while going about our daily lives.  Accordingly, Iain Banks’s protagonist is more concerned with starting a punch up with a Holocaust denier on national television and carrying on an affair with a gangster’s beautiful wife than he is with Osama bin Laden.  This makes it a better book.  Yes, Ken Nott has the political awareness but his day to day life is ruled by more practical concerns.  It’s kind of hard to care about Islamism when getting kneecapped because of who you’re shagging is a very real possibility (preaching to the choir, I know).  This makes him all the more honest and believable as a person.  It also allows the book to be hilarious.  There’s an entire chapter dedicated to Ken breaking into the gangster’s house which is just brilliant.  Banks had this fantastic knack for balancing farce with thriller and it’s wonderfully exercised here.  There’s a similar moment in The Wasp Factory after the main character becomes convinced his father is a woman, which is as laugh out loud shocking as it is funny.

Dead Air is also an interesting read as it’s a satire of our recent past.  There are jokes made that, in light of today’s culture seem almost prophetic.  At one point, just after the Towers fall, people start asking, “’Where’s Superman?  Where’s Batman?  Where’s Spiderman?’ ‘Where’s Bruce Willis or Tom Cruise, or Arnie, or Stallone?’”  The answer, we now know to all of these questions is that they are back on our cinema screens.  I studied a bit of contemporary film theory at university, and one of the main contributing factors to the re-immergence of the superhero and the muscle-clad action hero is generally thought to be America’s need to know that someone is in control.  There is an all American hero and he will protect you.  Banks, it seems, pegged this is around 2002. 

The differences in culture too are shocking.  This is a pre-social media novel and the press seem antiquated.  Things are so close to being similar that the differences are all the more apparent.  I half expected Ken Nott (as a popular DJ) to start Tweeting his views.  There is only one reference to the internet in the entire book (that I noticed at least) and this sounds like the conversations I have with my mum about her tablet.  She always seems torn between being shocked about just what technology can do and amused by the shear novelty of it all.  It’s not even a good tablet.  (Although that is a step up from the dis-trustful glare her mother levelled at the thing).

This is another book that I don’t want to say too much about plot wide because I want people to read it.  The boook’s cover quotes describe it as a thriller but I disagree.  The story’s too involved with cultura satire to be proper edge of the seat stuff and referring to any books that blurb is so concerned with 9/11 as a thriller invites those unfortunate Bruce Willis comparisons.  I found it a touch jarring.  It is about the landscape and time in which I became socially and politically aware and yet so much has changed that it’s mostly a dim recollection.  It’s almost a comfort when the characters start debating our position in Europe; that I recognise.

I’ve just started on Philip Roth’s The Human Stain.  It’s shaping up to be as serious as his other works.