Booker's The Seventies

Christopher Booker, The Seventies: Portrait of a Decade. London: Allen Lane, 1980.

"If ten years is not long, ten years ago is long ago", wrote Malcolm Muggeridge in the opening pages of his superb social history The Thirties, and one residual impression of this far poorer exercise in decadology is wonder at the dizzying speed of social change and the mutability of fame. It seems hardly possible that a bare ten years ago most of us had never heard of the female eunuch and transcendental meditation, OPEC, Watergate and the rabbits of Watership Down. But what of the Seventies themselves, considered as an entity? Are they, really, anything more than the years 1970-9? Do they have an image of their own, a sufficiently firm outline to have their portrait drawn? Few would claim they do. Only two decades have retained a coherent identity in the popular consciousness: the Twenties (jazz and Huxley, Fitzgerald and Fords) and the Sixties (Vietnam, Kennedy and psychedelia). And only the Twenties and Thirties taken together, running from the armistice of one war to the outbreak of another with the Wall Street crash neatly bisecting them, have any kind of aesthetically formal shape. It was the Swinging Sixties before the decade was half done, but the Seventies have yet to gain a memorable label and probably never will. Despite his sub-title, giving some shape to the decade is a task which Booker surrenders without a fight, contenting himself with insisting, truly enough, on the period's very lack of identity, its nervous donning of the fancy dress of any and every other epoch; a tendency evident everywhere from fashion to television drama.

It must be said at once that The Seventies is in both structure and style a thoroughly bad book. Manufactured rather than written, it is a rechaufee of short polemical pieces and reviews written during the decade, now gathered into chapters, each one prefaced by a new introduction, and the whole served up as a diagnosis of the temper of contemporary Britain. Any criticism of the slackness with which this considerable task has been undertaken must be disarmed by the author's candidly introducing a section portentously titled 'Cultural Collapse' with the remark that it 'consists of little more than jottings'. It is a pity that Booker's self-consciousness did not extend to his style, which constantly strains for effect, reaches the top of invective's octave too soon and is generally of that overheated kind where illogicality always crushes, omissions glare, clarity appalls or dazzles, and dilemmas profoundly reveal something or other. So one of the unintended revelations of The Seventies is that even in these straitened times such shrill and irritable writing can still find a reputable publisher.

And yet Booker's habits of mind, jejune though they are, give his compendium an extrinsic interest beyond its catchpenny origins. There is, to begin with, the intellectual career of the author himself. Christopher Booker is himself very much a Sixties man. He has charted a course with a familiar logic - a logic indeed that is itself a cliche - from silly-clever young man to County Tory. Moving gently from public school to Oxford, from revue-writing to scriptwriting television satire to an editorship of Private Eye, he has come at last into the harbour of a rural Home Counties retreat whence he casts a baleful eye over the recurrent follies of mankind. Unable, or at least unwilling, to play more than a commentator's role, he has permitted his lashings to grow more wild and indiscriminate, his yells of defiance ever more obstreperous. It is not such a winding path from the anarchic jeering of the Eye (often very funny, to be sure) to freelance journalism for the more literate papers of the Right.

The message coming in on the Booker wavelength is an awesomely simple and sombre one. Looking about him at his world, Hamlet-Booker finds that man delights him not, no, nor woman neither. We are living, he says, at a real hinge of history. The grand experiment of western civilisation which has been going on since the Renaissance is finished; it is 'mentally bankrupt' and it is our misfortune to be living in the 'last days'. Its most characteristic product, scientific inquiry, is 'in its closing stages' and has led us all (temporarily, one assumes, given the preceding diagnosis) into 'a cosy little technological prison'. And so on and so on. All men of goodwill, culture and taste are about to go down before these new Huns, the unions, whose members are compared in a revealing passage to H.G. Wells's debased troglodytic Morlocks in The Time Machine, who live by cannibalising the sensitive, gentle (and stupid - but let that pass) Eloi. This is about the level of the book's political analysis: its quality, whatever one's political prejudices, would disgrace the editorial of a tabloid newspaper.

Now the plight of Western man and his imminent downfall is a rich lode that has been mined unremittingly this century. Social commentators have all but queued up to tell us the show is over. Max Nordau in Degeneration (1893), Oswald Spengler in Decline of the West (1922), H.G. Wells in Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945): these and the authors of all the other volumes in the dusty library of doom have been convinced that they alone bear Cassandra's mantle. Booker mentions Muggeridge admiringly and obviously their sensibilities are akin. He ought to have taken another look at The Thirties. It is a supremely dismal book; there was, after all, plenty to be dismal about. Indeed, so certain was its author in 1939 that he was present 'at the last bonfire of the last remains of our derelict civilisation' that he scarcely bothered to finish it. Nothing, he thought, could emerge from the ruins of Berlin. 'Yet emerge they did,' he wrote much later, 'to sit in the sunshine consuming huge beakers of hot chocolate mit schlag.' From this he deduced that 'men aim at projecting their own inward violence on to as large a screen as possible. When they tremble, the universe must.' That ought to have served as epigraph, and in the event serves as epitaph, to The Seventies.

Apocalyptic fancies, then, have a great pull on intellectuals, especially those of narrow sympathies and insights. But what is most striking about Booker's stance is not the despair and contempt, for they are genuine if rhetorical and oracular; it is the utter vacuity of his positive beliefs. No doubt to himself he appears as the scourge of both Right and Left, a free radical - or perhaps the inheritor of the fairly humane Augustan Toryism of Hume or Burke or Johnson, sharing their robust commonsensical revulsion from the modish and faddish. Certainly he is at his most effective in documenting the absurdities of urban planning jargon or making a last bid to save the Rothschild treasure house, Mentmore Towers. He grasps instinctively at the past for values - old houses, for instance. (But only those with old families still inside them. Converted into museums or tourist attractions they are said to become soulless. It's hard to get it right for Booker.) Otherwise he can only offer vague exhortations to be 'fully human and flow with the creative stream of the universe', which sounds exactly like one of the windy prescriptions of the Guru lampooned in one of the Eye's happiest creations as the Veririshi Lotsamoney. 'The whole hedonist, materialist view of man's existence and purpose on earth simply does not work', he tells us earnestly. But few have ever supposed it did; though that few could make a spirited case for its having added as much to the sum of happiness as any of the misty spiritualities Booker is purveying.

Nature abhors an ideological vacuum. Booker admires few people, but three he names are suggestive: the present Pope, the late Earl Mountbatten and Solzhenitsyn - namely, a highly illiberal moral theologian, an aristocrat-statesman of the far Right and a gloomy theocrat. It is not hard to discern the outline of a society in the custody of such a triumvirate. In this yearning among our late anarchs and satirists for strong rule is visible a definite and thickening strand of public opinion in the western world. If there was any appreciable swing to a new authoritarianism Booker would surely become one of its most vociferous publicists, not out of any strong belief but out of sheer nihilism. This is an old treason of the clerks in a new guise, and Booker's kind of sweeping modish despair strikes a profoundly disquieting note for the contemplater of British cultural life. Such, and such alone, is the value of The Seventies.

[Booker went on to embrace a variety of 'anti' causes: anti-global warming; anti-Darwinism, anti-children's social services . . . without having much influence. ]