Collage: Eye Spy / The dystopian catastrophes are upon us! / Anthony Burgess' One Hand Clapping

RTomens, 2022

Inflation, cost of living, energy bills, heatwave, floods - soon we'll all be starving and homeless. The media loves a crisis so what better for them than to have several, specially manufactured to create mass hysteria, fear, panic and plummeting morale - oh, I left out the war in Ukraine. 

War, drought, floods, poverty...political persecution...your favourite sci-fi writer of dystopiana couldn't write better. They could add a touch of comedy by featuring a president who needs his wife to help him put on his jacket but who would believe that was possible?!

RTomens, 2015

Meanwhile, next to me outside the café, a woman is informing the world that nurses at the psychiatric hospital inserted an electronic tag up her 'private parts' and called her 'an old bag' - and you think you have problems. Oh, she also claimed to have been J. K. Rowling once upon a time. She should write that dystopian novel - a cross between Philip K. Dick, Burroughs and Ballard, I imagine. Filmed by Cronenberg, naturally. 

Surfacing for air (if you've read it, you'll know what I mean) from Insatiability by Stanisław  Witkiewicz having read the first part, I turn to One Hand Clapping by Anthony Burgess. He said he  'cannot think of it as much more than a jeu dashed off to make a hundred pounds or so' but that does it a disservice. OK, it may not be a weighty as his later novels but it could still be read as a fascinating experiment around the idea of what instant wealth does to ordinary people.  Apparently it was held up in Eastern Europe as a lesson in the evils of capitalism; well, they would say that. What it actually does is examine the stresses placed on two working folk once the cash starts rolling in. It's told first person from the wife's perspective as she observes the changes in her husband and their lives. Burgess has some fun at the expense of trendy teachers and game shows, berating the brave new modern world as if to prick the bubble of the pop 60s era before it had barely begun. He would critique teen terrors far more radically in A Clockwork Orange, of course. I enjoyed One Hand Clapping a lot.