Last update: 10 October 2008
One of the best things about the book is its even-handedness: the author is sympathetic both towards the hordes of young people who just wanted to have a good time and towards the police who were charged with containing and suppressing what the government saw as a serious threat to civil order. And he's not afraid to point out that, wherever there are drugs, the criminal underworld soon follows; it's more than a little depressing to read how the initial euphoria repeatedly turned ugly when drugs gangs started taking over the clubs. The story of Leah Betts, too, is here, treated with commendable sympathy, as is the appalling treatment by the police of the itinerant "travellers" at the Battle of the Beanfield.
The book is not without its flaws, however. Throughout it there's always the suspicion that the author is trying to make the culture out to be more important or significant than it actually was; there's only the briefest acknowldedgement of Britpop and none at all of grunge, both of which arguably supplanted acid house and rave as the principal choice of British youth in the Nineties. And it's certainly hard to agree with the author's contentions at the end of the prologue that the events he describes were "the peak of human experience", or that the music was actually any good without the drugs. While the book is a win overall, several pinches of salt are still necessary for those wanting just an objective history or an understanging. The last word must go to Jarvis Cocker, whose lyrics for "Sorted for E's and Wizz" memorably begin with "Oh is this the way they say the future's meant to feel? / Or just twenty thousand people standing in a field?"
The book is mainly concerned with the music and would read perfectly well without the politics, but the political side adds context and certainly deserves attention; see, for example, the knighthood given to Mick Jagger, of whom Blair famously used to do onstage impressions. The musical story centres on Suede, Blur, and Elastica, whose updating of distinctively British musical idioms fuelled the upsurge in British popular culture in the mid-1990's, not to mention Oasis, who - their debut album excepted - were largely responsible for the eventual replacement of the smarter aspects of the music by "a very moronic form of revivalism", and Pulp, whose classic "Common People" is given its due place in history as "the era's most elegantly angry record". Then there are the drugs: the cocaine which "fell like snow" on London in 1996 and was responsible for the bombastic hollowness of Oasis's third album, and the heroin to which many musicians turned to cushion the comedown and which - in the book's scariest episiode - led to the downfall of Elastica.
Finally, there's the aftermath, when industry-assembled vocal groups like the Spice Girls arrived on the scene to reclaim the front covers of the pop magazines and the Britpop also-rans were dropped from their record companies in the wake of falling chart positions. The fallout - the near-demise and neutering of the once-vital independent sector and the consequent lack of political engagement and spirit of musical adventure from contemporary musicians - isn't skimped on either. The whole story makes a terrific soap-opera which at the end becomes something like a requiem for this country's last great musical era, and there's an exhaustive list of recommended listening and a "What happened next?" finale to round things off.
Again, the book has its faults. It focuses on the main players so much that many of the second-division Britpop bands hardly appear; Supergrass and Sleeper are among those making only brief appearances, and the more introspective fringes exemplified by the likes of Radiohead are similarly slighted, although the story of the excerable Menswear does add a touch of farce. And, as with Collin, the author's critical judgement has to be called into question sometimes: for example, Blur's "This is a Low" is a great song, but many will dispute the assertion - made no less than three times - that it ranks alongside the best British music from the sixties.
MacDonald's great strength - aside from his obvious intelligence and depth of knowledge - was that he wrote from a position of detachment and distance, something missing from both Collin and Harris, which enabled him to place his subjects in their appropriate social, cultural, musical, and historical contexts without losing focus. Thus Jefferson Airplane get savaged in "Not a Revolution", while the overview of Chic in "Elegance and Alienation" is intriguingly at odds with their status as purveyors of funky disco music to the masses. Among many other fine works are "The Artistry of Laura Nyro", which puts its titular subject in her rightful place at the summit of the female singer-songwriter genre, and interesting commentaries on subjects as diverse as classic 60's albums (Love's Forever Changes, The Band's Music from Big Pink) and the milennial Pink Floyd collection, perceptively pointing out that "this deeply resigned music" is the "heart music of Middle England".
Other pieces of note include the long essays which begin and end the book: "Wild Mercury", about Bob Dylan; "Exiled from Heaven", a detailed look at Nick Drake in which the depression which led to the author's suicide is palpable; and rather dimissive discussions of Minimalism, electronic music, and the steady mechanising and automation of the production of popular music. Most interesting and provocative, though, is the assertion - made briefly in discussing Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, and elaborated on in the penultimate title essay - that there are three ways (musical, lyrical, and tonal/stylistic) of responding to popular music, and that it is a rare individual who responds with all three equally. [My personal responses are largely musical, occasionally lyrical, and very rarely tonal/stylistic.]
Another important point - first made in the endpiece to Revolution in the Head - is that "time and place are integral to artistic creativity", which forms one half of the author's contention that, yes, music was better in the sixties. This was a time of great social upheaval, particularly in the USA, and the popular art of the time inevitably reflected this, no more so than the popular music: social and cultural pressures, argues the author, are the nourishment for great popular art; and in their own ways, Acid House and Britpop were of course also expressions of further sets of cultural changes. The other half of the argument, which forms the backbone to "The People's Music", is that ever since the thirties the control of popular music has gradually shifted from a small cadre of professionals towards the people in general, a shift which during "the sixties" had only just got under way - hence, sixties musicians compared their own art to that created by the industry-trained professionals, a comparison not readily available to today's musicians.
Technology has played its part in this: composing, performing, recording, and distributing music have all become easier and more accessible to the general public over time; Revolution in the Head laments "the replacement of expressive skills by technical ones", and an earlier essay in the present book points out that Kraftwerk were obliged to build much of their own equipment, whereas post-1988 just about anybody could knock up a piece of dance music in their bedroom. It's significant that Collin applauds this, whereas MacDonald decries it, and this is precisely MacDonald's point: increasing accessibility of the means of production results in increasing similarity of the results and a corresponding decline in their artistic merits. Together with this goes the increasing focus on nostalgia and looking back in popular culture, something virtually unknown in the sixties; similar criticisms, as he points out, apply to other genres like cinema and television, and also to the Internet which makes it easy for people like me to churn out large quantities of stuff like this to be read by people like you.
It's persuasively and coherently argued, and makes for very interesting if somewhat depressing reading; but, of course, the question "was music better in the sixties?" is difficult to answer unless you qualify it, and I think that by "music" MacDonald was referring to "the best popular music" - unarguably, there was a lot of rubbish around in the sixties, too, as any look at the singles charts from the era will confirm. "Better", too, needs to be clarified; certainly, replacing this word by "more popular", "felt to be more important", and "taken more seriously generally" would undoubtedly produce the answer "yes". None of this diminishes the merits of The People's Music, or lessens the sadness I feel about the loss of a writer of Ian MacDonald's calibre. Requiescat in pace.
[As a postscript to this overlong review, I have personal experience of the deleterious effects of the availablity of technology on creativity. Sometime in late 1991 I auditioned for a band whose keyboard player told us of the time he, yes, knocked up a piece of dance music in his bedroom. "That's really great, you should release that", said a friend who was reportedly very impressed on hearing it - unaware that the keyboardist had created it as a joke to show how little effort typically went into creating such music.]
I first became aware of Left Behind in a double-page feature in one of Scotland on Sunday's colour supplements: "what a great idea for a story" I thought when I read about the series's defining event, the disappearence of millions of people as God calls all of the faithful up to Heaven in one world-changing instant. Further investigation with Google turned up accusations of poor writing and clumsy plotting, not to mention explicit rejections of the book's nineteenth-century Premilennial Dispensationalism by virtually all major denominations of Christianity. All of which put me in mind of Atlas Shrugged, a book which similarly polarises opinion, to the extent that I actually wanted to read the first Left Behind book, published in 1995, to see what it was really like. However, none of the several bookshops (both new and second-hand) or charity shops which I investigated seemed to have a copy, until eventually I found the entire series in the science-fiction/fantasy section of what used to be James Thin's (now Blackwell's) on South Bridge. Which is curious, because while Left Behind is certainly a fantasy, it's not "fantasy" in the publishing sense, and while it's fiction (it claims to be "fictionalised"), it's most definitiely not science-fiction.
Comparisons with Atlas Shrugged aren't difficult to find. Both books are aimed firmly at the believers, with the intention of making them feel smug and superior, and potential converts, with the intention of frightening them into converting, although Left Behind goes one step further with a wide range of spinoffs including at least two films, a board game (!), and parallel series (which runs to around 40 books!) aimed at younger readers. Both books are set in "the near future" in a version of our world which has been filtered through authorial prejudice, and the events which comprise the plots of both have transparently been contrived to support the intentions of the authors. A major difference is that, while reading Atlas Shrugged's thousand-plus pages can be likened to trudging through slowly-setting concrete while simultaneously receiving Objectivist lectures over a megaphone, Left Behind is a largely inconsequential breeze which amounts to little more than a few slaps in the face with a wet fish. And, of course, there are a great many more potential Christians than potential Objectivists.
My initial impressions of the paperback incarnation of Left Behind (hereafter, I'm talking about just the first book) were not encouraging. The book is cheap and shoddy with a very flimsy cardboard cover and reminds me of nothing so much as the cut-price university textbooks I was acquainted with long ago; it's more appropriate for pulp hackwork than what is after all supposed to be a major Christian thriller with "60 million copies sold in the series". Even generic paperback thrillers are nicer to hold - and, since Left Behind is printed in widely-spaced type with large margins, probably have about the same number of words despite being physically considerably smaller. You could comfortably read Left Behind from cover to cover during a transatlantic flight, or a bus journey of a few hundred miles.
For all that Left Behind tries to be a believable account of the "End Times", it destroys its credibility within the first twenty pages. To wit: Israel, thanks to a revolutionary new fertiliser, has become a very rich agricultural nation, and as a curious side-effect has made peace with all its neighbours, in other words ending centuries-old religious antagonisms with a kind of Miracle-Gro. Russia, understandably, gets annoyed at not being allowed to know the secret formula for this new substance, and launches its entire military and nuclear capability in a surprise attack on Israel; but the whole lot is destroyed by divine intervention, and nobody actually gets injured. In a characteristiccally cack-handed piece of plotting, reaction to what is after all a devastating assault by one of the permanent members of the United Nations is limited to little more than some Jewish leaders pointing out that these events fulfil Biblical prophecy, and Russia is subsequently revealed to have been in secret alliance with the "Middle Eastern countries" of Libya and Ethiopia. The reader may wish to pause at this point and contemplate the authors' grip both on reality and on the requirements of writing a believable novel.
Similary, the actual disappearence of all the believers and children under twelve is described rather unconvincingly in a way which might make the reader think the authors missed it, and the subsequent reactions of three of the the main characters after their plane lands seem to consist of little more than a desire to escape the ensuing carnage in the airport as quickly as possible - meeting, on the way, a doctor ex machina who is "going crazy with nothing to do". The authors consistently prefer dialogue to description, in violation of the principle of "show, don't tell", and thus remarkable political developments like Great Britain growing to include "most of Western and Eastern Europe" are dispensed with as mere asides, while the rise of the not-entirely-convincingly-named Romanian Nicolae Carpathia to Secretary-General of the UN is afforded less space than it really deserves and is far less effective than it ought to be. These events, incidentally, offer an intriguing parallel with Atlas Shrugged in the way that in that book much of the world is an assortment of People's Republics.
The book is further hamstrung by the need to explain all of the significant events (such as the Russian attack on Israel described above) as fulfilments of Biblical prophecy, without which it would lose its entire point; but even the moderately perceptive reader will soon discover that the plot thus becomes subservient to, and is bent and twisted to serve, the authors' interpretations of the Bible. Another result is that virtually nothing of importance turns out to be in any way surprising, since it's all spelt out in full; for example, the scene near the end in which Carpathia kills his main financer is robbed of any potential power and shock value by his prior unmasking as the Antichrist. Thankfully, for the benefit of people like me who don't plan to read any further books, the plot of the rest of the series is unwittingly summarised shortly afterwards. (Interestingly, at the time Left Behind was written, the series wasn't planned to stretch to twelve books, but enough copies were sold that the authors succumbed to a classic case of Creeping Jordanitis.)
Beyond the clunky plotting, the large amounts of expository dialogue in lieu of action, the thin characterisations, and the pervading feeling of being underwhelmed by the pedestrian writing, there remains the theology. Now there's lots of potential in a religious story for in-depth explorations of various characters' struggles of faith, particularly in reponse to the sudden disappearance of loved ones and to obvious instances of divine intervention; but what we get in Left Behind turns out to be less interesting and thought-provoking than, for example, Jesus's brief but poignant last words. This aside, by comparison with the relentless anti-collectivist rants which make up much of Atlas Shrugged, the browbeating in Left Behind is thankfully mild and amounts to little more than disparaging references to Ivy-league intellectuals, abortionists, skeptics, and the like - in other words, the type of bashing habitually handed out by conservative American Christians to everyone they don't like. It's true, nonetheless, that some sort of substantial debate between the believers and and the skeptics would make Left Behind much more interesting than it actually is.
For all the authors' claims that the theology of Left Behind is Scripturally correct, I smelt a very large rat when I realised that while some of the book's Biblical quotes are quoted with proper chapter and verse, the particularly interesting ones which are after all supposed to predict the book's pivotal events aren't. Perhaps the authors realise that Premilennial Dispensationalism is, strictly speaking, a nineteenth-century heresy which depends on a very selective interpretation of the book of Revelation, and are afraid of being found out? The theologically curious reader might further consider what happens in the final book, Glorious Appearing: according to this report fromCBS News, "[it] tells the story of an avenging Jesus who slaughters non-believers by the millions." This is not a Jesus I would want to believe in, or whose Second Coming I would look forward to.
Finally, what of those 60 million copies, an average of 5 million per book? It has been suggested that this is probably due more to a present-day paucity of decent Christian fiction than to the books' intrinsic merits; in other words, the Left Behind series fills a need which the marketplace otherwise isn't satisfying properly. However, it's only fair to judge material which is avowedly Christian-oriented in the same way as material which isn't - in other words, merely being labelled "Christian" doesn't render something immune from criticism - and while there may well be works of contemporary Christian fiction which manage to be interesting, challenging, and accessible to non-Christians, the mundane and undistinguished Left Behind certainly isn't one of them.
Afterword: if you're so inclined, try googling for excerpts from the Left Behind: The Kids series, and marvel at the quality of the writing. Harry Potter or His Dark Materials this ain't.
Leaving aside favourable reviews from believers, there's a lot of criticism of Left Behind on the Internet, of the theology as much as of the standard of novel-craft. I've no desire to link to it all, but will confine mentions here to the most worthy critiques. First of all must be mentioned the page-by-page deconstruction by slacktivist - himself an evangelical Christian - which is funny, disturbing, and thought-proking in equal measure. Similarly disturbing is this article in the Washington Post, which suggests that the popularity of the series is cause for concern. The Duck Speaks has a review of the film as well as the book.
Starship Troopers reminded me uncomfortably of Atlas Shrugged, not least in the way in which both books, in the guise of a novel, present the author's One And Only True Philosophy in conversations between people who implicitly agree completely with it, with unmistakable if implicit contempt for those who might presume to think differently; indeed, both books argue that their authors' moral assertions are logically provable, Heinlein's with symbolic logic! Both books, too, extrapolate their settings from catastrophic breakdowns in today's society which are understandable only from the authors' philosophical viewpoints; thus in Starship Troopers we have a "Russo-Anglo-American Alliance" in the "XXth century", which was of questionable plausibility even in 1959, and a worldwide "Terror" of underage lawlessness which arises from an unwillingness to punish people properly. And both books suffer from the myopic limitations of their polemic intentions, most obviously in their refusal to acknowledge the complexity of the modern society they attempt to criticize.
I was also reminded of the "religion" created by the author of Dianetics - maybe it's something to do with both Heinlein and Hubbard being Navy men turned SF writers? - by, among other things, the replacement of democracy with a restriction of the franchise to the author's favoured kind of person, here only those who are prepared to die for their country and who have undergone military service to prove it. There's something sinister and distasteful about this - it is, of course, a system designed to keep the author's favoured kind of person in power perpetually - not to mention the large amounts of indoctrination necessary for military training, and the blithe and incredibly naive assertion that the system makes revolution impossible. Fortunately, the film sees through all this, and its satire is spot on.
If Starship Troopers is treated strictly as a novel, it's essentially a coming-of-age yarn with a few battle sequences but not much actual science, aimed principally at the more impressionable kind of geeky adolescent male; if you doubt this, just consider the (wildly unrealistic) "powered armour" which allows its wearer to become superhuman (shades of Hubbard here again), or the reduction of practically all of the female characters to little more than exotic ornaments, never mind however many of them are in positions of power or responsibility. Thankfully, and especially by comparison with Atlas Shrugged, it's well-enough written not to insult the reader, and is in parts passably exciting, but in retrospect it's nothing special. As philosophy, it's supposed to make you think, but it's recognisable as a faintly risible kind of right-wing bunk; when I reached the end all I could think amounted to "so what"?
Here's a review of the film which takes a similar point of view to my own about Heinlein's literary merit and philosophy. Here's a review of the book which debunks its philosophy by pointing out that "If you [...] question even one thing, the whole thing collapses like a house of cards[.]" and "but even ambiguity is enough to refute Heinlein".