The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Last words of John and Yoko
working practices – plus, according to Inkster, a rigged exchange rate, unfair trading practices, theft of intellectual property on “an industrial scale”, and ruthless exploitation of the environment. China’s growth was based on coal and it still mines half of all the coal in the world despite promises to reach net-zero by 2060. Inkster says 20% of China’s arable land is polluted by heavy metals.
But these issues don’t figure in public debate. The “glass heart” social media campaigns, combined with the so-called “wolf warrior” approach to diplomacy, has precluded critical scrutiny of rapacious Chinese capitalism even in the West. President Xi is now turning to modernising the Chinese army, already the largest in the world. China is challenging America’s military presence in the South Pacific and remains determined to annex Taiwan. This Great Decoupling, as Inkster calls it, is unlikely to end well.
An adviser to the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London, Inkster used to work for MI6. Perhaps this has coloured his view of China. The book reads more like a charge sheet than a dispassionate assessment of China’s new world standing. But the central message
– that this profoundly regimented and authoritarian country is about to achieve global economic and military hegemony – is sound, well-documented and a disturbing challenge to the West as it emerges, battered, from the Covid nightmare.
ALL WE ARE SAYING David Sheff
(Pan, £9.99)
Amazingly, 40 years have passed since John
Lennon’s murder. This was his and Yoko’s last major interview, conducted by Sheff over three weeks and completed two days before the shooting. At 24, Sheff had interviewed Jimmy Carter, Martin Luther King Jr and Albert Schweitzer, but this encounter remains a personal highlight. “We don’t need publicity, but we need to explain what we’re doing,” says Lennon, and they do so at length, discussing parenthood, gender roles, public perceptions and putting the past behind them, with their relationship inevitably at the centre of it all. It makes an interesting contrast to Jann Wenner’s book-length interview, Lennon Remembers, made a decade earlier. The Lennon Sheff meets is less bitter and more at ease with himself, though never far from a contentious outburst. The points when he talks about the future, looking forward to all the years he could have ahead of him, are especially poignant.
MEDALS AND PRIZES
John Metcalf
(And Other Stories, £11.99) Born in Carlisle and emigrating to Canada as a young man, John Metcalf has enjoyed a distinguished career as an author, teacher and editor for five decades. But, until now, he’s never been published in the land of his birth. This collection pulls together eight stories that highlight his skill and versatility. His talent for finding the right detail to deflate a character’s selfimportance, or undercut an emotional moment, is apparent from the opening to the first story, Single
Gents Only. Metcalf’s somewhat chilly view of humanity is explored more thoroughly in pieces like the bleakly comical computerdating story, Girl in Gingham. The novellalength Medals and Prizes, following the diverging paths of two boys who want to grow up to be cultivated and “mildly louche”, shows him developing character through some quite lengthy scenes. Metcalf’s meticulousness, combined with an unsentimental eye and shot through with acerbic satire, brings forth some masterful stories.
DESPISED Paul Embery
(Polity, £15.99)
The Tories’ establishment of a “blue wall” in former Labour strongholds in the General Election was just the most recent sign of the widening chasm between the Labour Party and its traditional constituency. In this fiercely-argued polemic, a Brexit-supporting firefighter and trade unionist from Dagenham examines how this schism opened up and how it might be bridged. He sees a Labour Party run by “an arrogant liberal and cultural elite” promoting “cosmopolitan liberalism” while holding their working-class constituents’ concerns in contempt. To reconnect with its base and start winning elections, Embery argues, the party has to become more economically radical and more culturally conservative. There’s a lot here Labour should take on board; but with it comes the recognition Embery is playing on exactly the same “fears of cultural erosion” and longings for a return to traditional values that a wave of right-wing authoritarians across the world have exploited with great success.