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The World’s Most Dangerous Place: Inside the Outlaw State of Somalia by James Fergusson (2013)

Caado la gooyaa car alle ayey leedahay
(‘The abandonment of tradition calls forth the wrath of Allah’, Somali proverb, quoted in The World’s Most Dangerous Place, page 398)

James Fergusson worked on this book with help from a grant from the Airey Neave Trust, a charity whose objective is to promote research ‘designed to make a discernible impact and to contribute in a practical way to the struggle against international terrorist activity’ (p.447). So at least one of the book’s aims is to provide a background to, and history of, the rise of Islamic terrorism in the Horn of Africa.

But it also explains something else, which isn’t immediately obvious, which is that the book is in two halves and only the first half (parts one and two) are set in Somalia (part one in and around Mogadishu, part two further afield, in Puntland and Somaliland). The entire second half of the book (part three) is not set in the most dangerous place in the world at all, but in the West, first in London, then in Minnesota, then back in London again.

This makes it different from your average reporting-from-Africa book because Fergusson is less reporting from Africa than investigating a problem (Somali Islamic extremism) which has both an African dimension (obviously) and, less obviously, ramifications for the Somali diaspora in the West.

So the title is a little misleading because over a third of the text is not from the most dangerous place in the world but from West London and the American Mid-West and, although he meets lots of politicians, soldiers and locals in Somalia, it is in London and Minneapolis (and, right at the end of the book, in France) that he has his longest and most thought-provoking conversations with Somali emigrants.

Contents

The locations, dates and themes of the book are conveniently indicated by its chapter titles:

Part 1: Living on the Line

  1. An African Stalingrad: the war against al-Shabaab (Hawl Wadaag district, Mogadishu, March 2011)
  2. At the Bancroft Hotel: America’s proxy war (By Aden Adde International Airport, March 2011)
  3. The field hospital: What bombs and bullets do to people (AMISOM HQ, March 2011)
  4. Aden’s story (AMISOM HQ, March 2011)
  5. The failure of Somali politics (Villa Somalia presidential complex, March 2011)
  6. What makes al-Shabaab tick? (Hodan District, June 2011)
  7. The famine (Badbaado refugee camp, Dharkenly district, June to July 2011)

Part 2: Nomad’s Land

  1. In the court of King Farole (Garowe, Puntland, August 2011)
  2. Galkacyo: Pirateville (Galmudug, August 2011)
  3. Hargeisa Nights (Hargeisa, Somaliland, July 2011)
  4. How to start a border war (Taleh, Sool, June 2011)

Part 3: The Diaspora

  1. The Somali youth time-bomb (London, July 2011)
  2. The missing of Minneapolis (Twin Cities, Minnesota, September 2011)
  3. ‘Clanism is a disease like AIDS’ (London, February 2012)
  4. Operation Linda Nchi: The end for al-Shabaab? (Besançon to Nairobi, March to June 2012)

Postscript to the paperback edition (Edinburgh, November 2013)

Fergusson’s enduring interest in Islamic affairs

Prior to a spell working with the UN, Fergusson was a journalist with a special interest in Muslim affairs, reporting from Algeria, Bosnia and Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. After serving in several administrative positions (press spokesman for the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia, 1998 to 2000) Fergusson returned to journalism and wrote a run of factual books including:

  • A Million Bullets (2008), a critique of Britain’s military engagement in Afghanistan
  • Taliban – Unknown Enemy (2010), a plea for greater engagement with Nato’s Afghan enemy

This present book follows on from those two, evidence of his long-term engagement with Islamic warriors and terrorism. As Fergusson says in his introduction, it was triggered by the rise of al-Shabaab in the Horn of Africa. Members of al-Shabaab came from the same kind of poor, neglected societies as the Taliban, and some of its leaders had fought alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan, so it felt like a natural progression to move from covering an Islamic insurgency in one country (Afghanistan) to a closely connected new one (al-Shabaab in Somalia).

Out of date

This book is, alas, 10 years old. A lot of its predictions i.e. that Somalia was turning a corner, the peace deal might stick etc, turned out to be hooey. Somalia now (2023) has an official government but continues to be mired in violence. Al-Shabaab are still there, killing people.

Why do I keep reading these out-of-date books? Well, a) because they’re cheap and the most up-to-date books about these countries are in hardback and very expensive, but b) because there aren’t that many popular journalistic accounts of these countries and conflicts available.

Fergusson’s book is very people-focused. It goes long on the people he meets and interview and hangs out with and gets to know, from as many walks of life as he can, from as many parts of the country as he can. I really liked Paul Kenyon’s book, ‘Dictatorland’, because it includes interviews and whatnot in it, but each chapter is focused on just one country, and pared back to give you the essential info. Fergusson’s is much more chatty, diffuse and long, at 464 pages including index.

Somalilands

It’s important to understand that ethnic Somalis live scattered across five countries, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Somaliland, Somalia and northern Kenya, and that, during the colonial era, there were no fewer than three colonies named Somaliland. At the north-west was the small French colony of French Somaliland. This won its independence from France in 1977 and called itself Djibouti. Next door to it was British Somaliland and, in the territory containing the actual Horn of Africa and then round to the south, was Italian Somaliland.

British Somaliland was granted independence in June 1960, with the name of Somaliland, and promptly united with the former Italian Somalia to form the Somali Republic. However, at the overthrow of the Somali dictator Siad Barre in May 1991, representatives of the leading clans and Somali National Movement proclaimed Somaliland an independent state. Almost no other states accepts it as an independent nation; the West, the United Nations etc all regard it as an autonomous province of Somalia.

Spanning the actual Horn of Africa is another statelet, the province of Puntland, which has its own elections, assembly, prime minister and president, but remains a part of Somalia. Spanning the Horn, Puntland is the epicentre of Somali piracy, as Fergusson discovers when he goes to meet the president, and then is introduced to actual pirates via local fixers and contacts.

As to the Somalis across the border in Ethiopia, in 1977 Somalia’s dictator, Siad Barre, invaded the Ogaden region of eastern Ethiopia in a bid to claim it and its ethnic Somali population for Somalia, but was badly defeated by the (Marxist) Ethiopian regime, backed by the Soviet Union.

Tension between the two neighbours remains. In 2006 Ethiopia, with the backing of the US, invaded Somalia in order to overthrow the Islamic Courts Union. This, as you would expect, triggered a wave of Somali patriotism, which the newly formed al-Shabaab exploited to the full. The war lasted from 2006 till 2009 when Ethiopia withdrew, having thoroughly destabilised Somalia, yet again.

When Fergusson goes to America to explore the largest Somali community there, sited, incongruously enough, in wintry Minneapolis, he finds a lot of anger at how America supported Ethiopia in invading their country, and at the three years of fighting which left Mogadishu even more destroyed and displaced hundreds of thousands. All things considered, it seems to have been a very bad move.

So, the complex colonial heritage of badly conceived administrative regions has been a central contributor to Somalia’s collapse.

Somalia’s clans

Somali culture is dogged by its clan system. Every single Somali is born into a clan, sub-clan and sub-sub-clan, and these have been at war with each other forever. There are an estimated 140 clans, sub-clans, and sub-sub-clans, but there are five major clans which sit at the top of the tree:

  • Hawiye, 25%
  • Isaaq, 22%
  • Darod, 20%
  • Rahanweyn, 17%
  • Dir, 7%

This map gives a good sense of how the Somali people and clans spill over the borders imposed by European colonialism and inherited by modern states.

(However, in London Fergusson interviews the founder of the Anti-Tribalism Movement, and makes the point that the younger generation of Westernised Somalis consciously reject the tribalism of their elders and tradition, p.379.)

The Somali civil war

Nobody agrees exactly when the Somali Civil War started. It grew out of resistance to the military junta which came to power in 1969, and came to be dominated by General Siad Barre, resistance which grew during the later 1980s. Numerous rebel groups formed, generally structured around Somalia’s very strong clan structure. The Siad Barre regime fell in 1991 and no central authority replaced it, instead the start of a multi-sided civil war.

In the chaos of civil war, during the 1990s, local Islamic courts were established amid the chaos to enforce basic law and order. When warlords attacked them, they united in around 2000 to form the Islamic Courts Union (ICU). Although fractious and disagreeing among themselves, the Islamic courts offered pretty much the last remaining source of authority and justice in a ruined society.

In 2006 ICU forces defeated a coalition of warlords backed by the US and established a period of peace and security for the first time in a generation. This was wrecked after just six months when Ethiopian forces, backed by the US, invaded, leading to the 2006 to 2009 civil war. As a result of the war, much of the leadership fled abroad, leaving the youthful and most zealous members, who set up the party they called al-Shabaab, ‘the Youth’. These called for jihad against the Ethiopian invaders and their US sponsors, and this cry was answered not only inside the country but by small numbers of young men in the West’s Somali diaspora, notably in the UK and USA.

In 2009 a former chairman of the Islamic Courts Union, Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, became president of Somalia and replaced the Transitional Government with the Federal Government of Somalia. In 2012, the country adopted a new constitution that declared Somalia an Islamic state with Sharia as its primary source of law.

Al-Shabaab

Al-Shabaab, also known as Ash-Shabaab, Hizb al-Shabaab, and the Popular Resistance Movement in the Land of the Two Migrations (PRM). In Arabic, al-Shabaab simply means ‘the youth’ so Hizb al-Shabaab simply means ‘the Party of Youth’.

Numerous interviewees tell Fergusson that al-Shabaab’s mindset, dogmatic Islamism and violence are alien to Somali traditions. Somalis have traditionally been Sufis, a peaceful, spiritual version of Islam. They reverence their saints and build shrines to them. It is well-known that the top rank of al-Shabaab is dominated by foreigners, hard-liners from Pakistan, Afghanistan or Saudi, who impose a brutally puritanical version of Islam. For example, in areas they hold al-Shabaab has embarked on programmes of blowing up shrines to Somali Sufi saints, to the horror of the locals; but their punishments are so extreme and violent that no-one dare speak out. Fergusson meets many Somalis who says Islam is a religion of peace and forgiveness and so al-Shabaab, with its doctrine of unrelenting violence and vengefulness, are not Muslims.

Al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb

Al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb or AQIM is an Islamist militant offshoot of al-Qaeda Central that is engaged in an insurgency campaign in the Maghreb and Sahel regions. AQIM raises money by kidnapping for ransom and is estimated to have raised more than $50 million in the last decade.

Osama bin Laden put off a closer alliance with al-Shabaab. But after his assassination in May 2011, his successor as leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahari, agreed to a merger between Al-Shabaab and al-Qaeda (p.128).

Islam, identity and purpose

Fergusson cites Gerald Hanley, a British officer who spent years among the northern Somali in the 1940s, making a related and broader point:

‘Islam does wonders for the self-respect of non-white people.’ (quoted p.54)

Islam offers discipline, focus, purpose and self respect in people who feel themselves second or third-class citizens, citizens of states so obviously failed and impoverished compared to the wonderlands of the West which they can see via the internet or in the astonishing wealth of UN and Western and aid agency staff, fabulously well fed, living in air-conditioned bases and hotels, swanning round in their big white land cruisers like new imperialists.

Militant Islam offers a source of identity and self-respect in the face of all the batterings young men are subject to in these kinds of impoverished chaotic societies.

This long book contains contributions from numerous interviewees about why Islamic terrorism arises, flourishes and spreads, but this is an important one of them.

The African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM)

Fergusson’s narrative opens in March 2011. A UN-approved force raised by the African Union is fighting its way through Mogadishu, trying to restore order. Most of the soldiers came from the Ugandan People’s Defence Force (UPDF). They were fighting for the Transitional Federal Government or TFG, which was established in 2004. The AU mission as a whole was called the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM). Fighting had been fierce. AMISOM’s casualty rates were worse than those of NATO in Afghanistan.

Fergusson is effectively a guest of AMISOM, and stays in an air-conditioned portakabin on the military base at Mogadishu airport (p.37).

The problem of young men

Early on Fergusson makes a profound point which is relevant to all developing countries, to some extent all states. In his opinion, the problem with all these (developing) countries is what to do with the young men.

‘I just don’t know what we’re going to do about our young men,’ [says an elderly man, Abdulkarim, who’s been injured by a stray bullet]…Abdulkarim was expressing the despair of a patriarchal society that had lost all control of its successor generation. With the traditional bonds broken, the young men were rudderless, and now, exploited by foreigners and misled by extremists, their mad and endless violence was slowly destroying Somalia…(p.64)

Their corrupt dictators have run failing or rentier states with little interest or understanding of how to invest across all sectors of their economies in order to grow and develop them but people have kept on breeding at rates appropriate to pre-industrial societies. Lots of babies who grow up into lots and lots of unemployed young men hanging round on street corners.

(In his book The Shadow of The Sun: My African Life, Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński says that in West Africa these unemployed hopeless young men are called bayaye. He uses the example of Samuel Doe, president of Liberia from 1986 to September 1990, who started life as an unemployed peasant without a future, who trekked from a remote impoverished village though trackless jungles to the capital, Monrovia, in search of work, food and a purpose:

The trek from the jungle to Monrovia requires many days of difficult marching across roadless tropical expanses. Only young, strong people can manage it. And it is they who arrived in the city. But nothing awaited them here: neither jobs, nor a roof over their heads. From the very first day, they became bayaye – that army of the young unemployed squatting idly on all the larger streets and squares of African cities. The existence of this multitude is one of the chief causes of turmoil on the continent: it is from their ranks that local chieftains, for a pittance, often with only the promise of food, recruit the armies they will use in their struggles for power, organising coups, fomenting civil wars. (‘The Shadow of The Sun: My African Life’ by Ryszard Kapuściński, page 244)

Mind you, when I googled bayaye one of the first results is from the Oxford Dictionary of African politics, which defines it as: ‘A Bantu term that has come to refer to idle youth or ‘street thugs’ in Uganda, i.e. people who are unemployed and can be seen hanging out on street corners’. So it looks like a commonly used term across central Africa. )

The West tries to broker peace deals, to oversee ‘democratic’ elections and continues to give hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, and all the aid adverts you ever see will feature either young children, girls and women because these are the sentimental, wallet-opening faces of poverty. But no development in any Third World country can take place until you stop the fighting. And the fighting won’t stop until you give unemployed, aimless young men roles and goals which give them more dignity, self-worth and camaraderie than joining an Islamic militia.

Somalia had always been riven by clan rivalry and warfare. But over the years a system had evolved of controlling and limiting the violence, known as xeer, an ancient and sophisticated system of customary laws traditionally administered by the elders of rival clans who would meet and agree compromises and solutions to disputes and feuds. The dictator Siad Barre deliberately ran down this system while promoting his socialist revolution, thus helping to eliminate ancient ways of controlling or moderating clan violence.

In the old days, said Aden, the young men of al-Shabaab would have been brought into line by their elders and betters. The problem was that the war had destroyed that system. ‘It is not possible to convene a council of elders because there are no elders,’ he said (p.90)

Fergusson makes a striking visit to a camp for reformed or defecting al-Shabaab fighters. He expects to find ideologically hardened fanatics so is taken aback to encounter a group of boys, 15, 16 and 17 year olds, who lark around and take the mickey, pulling faces and giving sarcastic answers, like any other gang of unruly lads.

Everywhere he goes Fergusson sees ‘unemployed young men one saw in every Somali town, hanging about on street corners’ (p.220). The bayaye.

A criminologist named Daniel LeDouceur explains that the entire situation in Somalia needs to be seen through the prism of gang culture and gang psychology: the clans are really extended gangs; the pirates are formed in gangs; the people smugglers (across the Red Sea to Yemen) work in gangs; and al-Shabaab is really another congeries of gangs. So the solution is not ‘democracy’ etc etc, but the same approach to solving gang culture anywhere, which is to give young men, the bayaye, meaningful work and prospects (p.146).

‘Every man who has nothing will try something to get money.’
(Abdi-Osman who tried life as a pirate before being recruited to al-Shabaab, p.147)

Poverty

Poverty is one cause. Recruits to al-Shabaab, like recruits to the Taliban in Afghanistan, were attracted by the simple promise of pay; no matter the risks, it was better than being utterly unemployed and penniless. When the famine hits in spring 2011, Fergusson comes across three lads who were in a school classroom when an al-Shabaab recruiter asked for volunteers and stuck up their hands. ‘Why?’ Fergusson asks. Because they were paid a piece of fruit per day. That’s all it took (p.176).

Or the extended story told by Dahir Kadiye of the family who make $48 from each sheep they sell which will feed the family for three weeks, or a million dollars from one successful pirate hostage which will mean the entire family of eight never has to work again (p.401).

Ignorance

No schools and a very primitive nomad existence for the majority of the population explain the high levels of illiteracy and ignorance. (The literacy rate in Somali adults is currently estimated to be 40%.)

The root problem he [AMONO Chief Medical Officer, Colonel James Kiyungo] thought, was lack of education. ‘The fighters here learn to read the Koran, but they have no skills. There are no carpenters, no cooks, no plumbers – only the gun.’ (p.69)

Ignorant boys are easily led, specially by glamorous older boys with guns and money, and food.

The poverty and ignorance of the young which fuelled the insurgency were genuine grievances and had to be addressed. (p.178)

In fact this theme forms Fergusson’s conclusion. We need to address the problem of bored, rootless, alienated young men if we are to address al-Shabaab and militant Islam more generally, to address it in its heartlands before its violence spreads to Muslim diasporas in the West.

In Western cities, as in the Horn of Africa, sustained engagement with Somalia’s young men is the key to a better future for us all. (p.21)

Mohamed Alin

Somali politicians recognise and try to address the issue. Fergusson meets Mohamed Alin, who had returned from exile in Northolt, Middlesex, to make himself president of the self-declared autonomous region of Galmudug, a small statelet on the border between south Somalia and Puntland in the north. Alin explains that he wants to properly fund schools ‘to educate young men about the perils of piracy’, with skills training to provide livelihoods such as carpentry, electrical engineering and so on (p.226).

But such a thing requires, above all, peace, law and order: security; and then, proper funding, which has to come from abroad. And any link in the fragile chain of requirements can be sabotaged at any moment by outbreaks of clan or Islamic violence.

Thus peace remains elusive, aid donors are reluctant to give money which will disappear in corruption, and so ‘piracy’ remains a viable career for thousands and thousands of young Somali men, many of whom travel hundreds of kilometres from the drought-stricken, famine-stricken interior on the promise of rich pickings which will allow them to splash the cash, buy fancy cars, live high on the hog, take a wife and generally be a man (p.233).

Somalis in Britain

The book includes a long, deeply scary chapter about Somalis in Britain. No-one knows how many Somalis there are in Britain, maybe as many as 200,000. They have a lot of social problems. Only half of Somalis have any qualifications and only 3% have a higher education qualification. With the result that unemployment among Somalis runs at 40%, the highest of any immigrant community (p.299).

What scares various experts, educators, and Somali community leaders Fergusson speaks to is Somalis’ hyper-violence, ‘feral’ behaviour according to a teacher in a state school a third of whose pupils are Somali (p.304). Hundreds are permanently excluded from the education system because of bad behaviour and violence (p.306).

Evidence that Somali gangs have trounced white or Jamaican gangs in immigrant hotspots (Southall, Leytonstone). Some of this is down to having experienced hyper-violence in Somalia before immigrating (p.322). Many lack the restraining influence of a father (pages 306, 319) – ‘the specific Somali problem of paternal absenteeism’ (p.374). (In Minneapolis Fergusson discovers that 90% of the young men who’ve absconded to fight in Somalia grew up in fatherless households, pages 336, 348).

Mothers are failing to discipline their sons (p.307). It doesn’t help that many of these mums can’t read, write or speak English. This feeds into lack of educational achievement and a cycle of alienation and violence. According to a community worker, young Somali men are harder to reach than any other ethnic group, and often this is because they are just thick – stupid, uneducated, violent and proud of it (p.322). Fergusson comes to think it is a distinctive Somali trait, to be pig-headedly obstinate, even at your own expense (p.340)

Some Somali young men, raised in the UK, have travelled to Somalia to join al-Shabaab and become suicide bombers. Fergusson expresses the concern that homegrown Somalis will carry out terrorist attacks like the 7/7 bombings. In fact, of the major terrorist attacks carried out since the publication of his book, none involved Somalis:

  • 22 March 2017: Khalid Masood, a 52-year-old black Briton, drove a car into pedestrians on the south side of Westminster Bridge, injuring more than 50 people, four of them fatally, crashed the car into the perimeter fence of Westminster Palace grounds, ran into New Palace Yard where he fatally stabbed an unarmed police officer before being shot dead by an armed police officer. Five dead.
  • 22 May 2017: the Manchester Arena bombing carried out by Salman Abedi, a British citizen of Libyan descent, killing 22 people and injuring 1,017.
  • 3 June 2017: three men drove a van into pedestrians on London Bridge, then attacked shoppers at Borough Market with carving knives, killing eight people and injuring 48. All three attackers were shot dead by armed police. They were: Khuram Shazad Butt, a Pakistan-born British citizen; Rachid Redouane, a failed asylum seeker of Libyan or Moroccan origin; Youssef Zaghba, an immigrant with joint Italian/Moroccan nationality.

No Somalis.

Foreign aid

In the 1990s an estimated 80% of foreign aid to Somalia never reached its intended recipients, being stolen by corrupt officials or warlords. In 2010 an estimated 50% of foreign aid was being stolen by contractors, warlords or al-Shabaab (p.170).

Somali snippets

Somalia’s most famous novelist is Nurrudin Farah (p.31).

The very first novel to be published in the Somali language was ‘Ignorance is the Enemy of Love’ by Faarax M.J. Cawl, as recently as 1972 (p.269).

Somalis refer to the civil war period as Burburki meaning, simply, ‘the destruction’.

Everyone in Somalia chews qat which releases a substance which affects the brain like amphetamine i.e. gives you a speedy buzz (p.39).

Warriors of all varieties drove ‘technicals’, the nickname of pick-up trucks with a massive anti-aircraft gun bolted to the back of its load bay. Apparently, ‘the technical’ was invented in Somalia (p.135), although the idea of bolting heavy machine guns on to light trucks actually goes back to the Second World War, according to this article about technicals in The Conversation.

Western contractors nicknamed Somalis ‘skinnies’ (p.161).

Vivid description of Somali piracy (pages 213 to 233).

The ‘Somali rose’ is the nickname for the shreds of plastic that snag on the thorn bushes that grow in all the country’s abandoned urban spaces (p.224).

gaalo is the Somali word for white person or Westerner.

Grim account of female genital mutilation in the Somali community (pages 234 to 238).

Sayid Mohamed Abdullahi Hassan (1856 to 1920), a Somali religious, military and political leader who headed the Somali Dervish movement in a twenty-year struggle against British, Italian, and Ethiopian power in Somalia. Referred to as simply the Sayyid, he is often considered the father figure of Somali nationalism. Fergusson gives a biography of the great man, along with excerpts from his improbable epic poem on the death of a British officer, on a trip to the ruins of his garrison fortress at Toolah (pages 258 to 264).

The importation, distribution and consumption of qat or khat, chewing whose leaves cause stimulation, loss of appetite and mild euphoria (pages 367 to 377). marfish is Somali for qat-chewing den (p.368).

P.S. Black Hawk Down

The Battle of Mogadishu took place nearly 20 years before Fergusson arrived in Somalia. It’s the name given to the ill-fated attempt by American special forces to seize warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid, who they blamed for an attack on UN forces, on 3 October 1993. During the attempted abduction of Aidid, two US helicopters were shot down and the marooned soldiers were quickly surrounded by mobs and militias. American reinforcements went in with overwhelming force to rescue their boys, leaving an estimated 700 Somalis dead, but despite their efforts, 18 Americans were killed and some of their bodies dragged through the streets, amid cheering crowds. Home-made footage of these chaotic bloody scenes was widely broadcast with two consequences:

1. President Clinton was horrified and ordered the termination of US involvement in Somalia. Reluctance to risk footage of American boys being treated the same way underlay America’s extreme reluctance to get involved in the Rwandan genocide, which commenced just 6 months later, in April 1994, at exactly the same time that the last US forces were withdrawing from Somalia.

2. In 1999 journalist Mark Bowden published a forensic account of the disaster, titled ‘Black Hawk Down’, and in December 2001 a movie of the book was released, directed by Ridley Scott, featuring an all-star cast. Fergusson talks to people who, at the time of his visit 10 years after the movie release, claim the film had a very negative impact on the image of Somalis, painting them all as fanatical psychopaths, a charge also made by Somali community groups in the US who objected to the way not a single Somali was consulted about the script or filming, and not a single Somali actor appears in it.

Credit

The World’s Most Dangerous Place: Inside the Outlaw State of Somalia by James Fergusson was published by Bantam Press in 2013. References are to the 2014 Black Swan paperback edition.

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Posted by Simon on November 27, 2023

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SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard (2015) – 1

SPQR is a long book – including the notes and index, it totals a chunky 606 pages. I picked it up at the British Museum’s Nero exhibition, my mind fired up by a couple of hours looking at exhibits illustrating all aspects of ancient Roman life in the first century AD.

Mary Beard’s ubiquity

By the bottom of page one I was disappointed. Dame Mary Beard DBE FSA FBA FRSL is a tiresomely ubiquitous presence across all media:

  • she has a regular column in the Times Literary Supplement, ‘A Don’s Life’, columns which have been gathered into not one but two books
  • she has fronted seven TV documentary series – Pompeii: Life and Death in a Roman Town (BBC 2), Meet the Romans with Mary Beard (BBC 2), Caligula with Mary Beard (BBC 2), Pompeii: New Secrets Revealed with Mary Beard (BBC 1), Mary Beard’s Ultimate Rome: Empire Without Limit (BBC 2), Julius Caesar Revealed (BBC 1), she wrote and presented two of the nine episodes in Civilisations (BBC 2) and she hosts a new BBC arts programme Lockdown Culture
  • she regularly appears on Question Time and other BBC panel shows
  • she is very ‘vocal’ on her twitter account and has been ‘controversial’ enough to trigger a number of twitterstorms
  • she’s written nineteen books and countless articles and reviews

To churn out this huge volume of content requires compromises in style and content, especially when making TV documentaries which have to be lucid and simple enough to appeal to everyone. Listing her enormous output is relevant because it helps to explain why this book is so disappointingly mediocre. What I mean is, SPQR is a readable jog through all the key events and people of ancient Rome – and God knows, there are thousands of them. But it contains few if any ideas worth the name and is written in a jolly, chatty, empty magazine style.

Compare and contrast with Richard Miles’s book about Carthage which combines scholarly scrupulousness with teasingly subtle interpretations of ancient history, propounding interesting and unusual ideas about the cultural struggle waged between Rome and Carthage. Well, there’s nothing like that here.

On the back cover there’s a positive review from the Daily Mail:

‘If they’d had Mary Beard on their side back then, the Romans would still have an empire!’

and this jolly knockabout attitude accurately captures the tone of the book. Beard is the Daily Mail‘s idea of an intellectual i.e. she’s at Cambridge, she knows about a fairly obscure subject, and she can speak a foreign language. She must be brainy!

And she’s outspoken, too. She’s what TV producers call ‘good value’. She can be relied on to start a twitterstorm by being outspokenly ‘controversial’ on statues or black lives matter or #metoo or any of the usual hot topics. Indeed Beard first came to public notice when she wrote in the London Review of Books in the wake of the 9/11 attacks that America ‘had it coming’, an off the cuff remark which prompted a storm of abuse. More recently she sparked ‘controversy’ through with her apparent defence of Oxfam workers practising sexual exploitation in Haiti, and so on.

Like so many other people on social media, Beard mistakes being provocative for actually having anything interesting to say; in which respect she is like thousands of other provocateurs and shock jocks and arguers on social media, all of whom think they are ‘martyrs to the truth’ and ‘saying the unsayable’ and ‘refusing to be silenced’, exactly the kind of rhetoric used by Tommy Robinson or Nigel Farage. She is the Piers Morgan of academia.

Mary Beard’s reasons to study ancient Rome

The superficiality of her thinking becomes horribly clear on page one of SPQR where Beard gives us her reasons why ancient Rome is still relevant to the present day, why it is important for us all to know more about the history of ancient Rome.

As a lifelong specialist in Classics you’d hope these would be pretty thoughtful and persuasive, right? Here are her reasons, with my comments:

1. Rome still helps to define the way we understand our world, and think about ourselves.

No it doesn’t. I imagine you could study economics and international politics, biology and geography, climate science and sociology and psychology without ever needing to refer to ancient Rome. Marx, Darwin and Freud go a long way to defining how we understand the world. Cicero a lot less so.

2. After 2,000 years, Rome continues to underpin Western culture and politics.

No, it doesn’t. Brexit, Boris Johnson’s current problems, Trump’s popularity, modern music, art and design; all these can be perfectly well understood without any knowledge whatsoever of Roman history.

3. The assassination of Julius Caesar… has provided the template… for the killing of tyrants ever since.

Has it?

4. The layout of the Roman imperial territory underlies the political geography of modern Europe and beyond.

Well, yes and no. Italy and France and Spain are undoubtedly similar to the Roman territories of the same name and many cities in western Europe have Roman origins – but everywhere north of the Rhine or Danube was untouched by the Romans, so the borders and cities of modern-day Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Czech republic, Slovak republic, Hungary, Serbia, Romania and Croatia have bugger-all to do with ancient Rome. It’s a tendentious fib to say ‘modern Europe’ owes its political geography to Rome.

5. The main reason London is the capital of the United Kingdom is that the Romans made it the capital of their province of Britannia.

Well a) after the Romans left in 410 London, like all other British cities, fell into disrepair. The reason London slowly rose again as a trading centre during the early Middle Ages has more to do with the fact that it is the logical place to build a major city in England, being close to the continent and at the lowest fordable point of a major river which reaches into the heart of the country and is thus a vital transport hub; b) London is capital of the United Kingdom because of political developments vis-a-vis Wales, Scotland and Ireland which took place a thousand years after the Romans left.

6. Rome has bequeathed us the ideas of liberty and citizenship.

This is true, up to a point, although these ideas were developed and debated in ancient Greece well before the Romans came along, and have undergone 1,500 years of evolution and development since.

7. Rome has loaned us catchphrases such as ‘fearing Greeks bearing gifts’.

It was when I read this sentence that I began to doubt Mary Beard’s grasp on reality. Is she claiming that ‘fearing Greeks bearing gifts’ is by any stretch of the imagination a ‘catchphrase’ which anyone in Britain would recognise, who hadn’t had a classical education?

She’s closer to the mark when she goes on to mention a couple of other catchphrases like ‘fiddling while Rome burns’ or ‘bread and circuses’, which I imagine a large number of people would recognise if they read them in a magazine or newspaper.

But lots of people have given us comparable quotes and catchphrases, from Shakespeare to the Fonz. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations includes over 20,000 quotations. Citing just three quotations as the basis for persuading people to study an entirely new subject is far from persuasive. If the number of quotations which a subject has produced is taken as a good reason for studying it, then Shakespeare would be a hugely better relevant subject for everyone to study, to understand where the hundreds of quotations which float around the language deriving from him come from (Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo? To be or not to be? Is this a dagger I see before me? All that glitters is not gold. The be-all and end-all. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.)

And then came Beard’s showstopper claim:

8. Gladiators are as big box office now as they ever were.

Is Mary Beard seriously claiming that ‘Ancient Rome is important’ (the first sentence in the book) because ‘Gladiators are as big box office now as they ever were’? Let’s ponder this sentence and this argument for a moment.

Can Beard possibly be saying that actual gladiators, trained professional warriors who fight each other or wild beasts to the death in front of huge live audiences, ‘are as big box office now as they ever were’? I wish she was. I’d definitely pay to see that. But of course she isn’t she must be referring to the entertainment industry. I’m guessing it’s a throwaway reference to any one of three possible items: the television show Gladiators, which started broadcasting in 1992, some of whose expressions became jokey catchphrases (‘Contender ready! Gladiator ready!!’); to the 2000 movie Gladiator, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Russell Crowe, that was very successful and won five Oscars; and possibly to the 2010 American TV series Spartacus. Two TV shows and a movie about gladiators in 30 years. Hardly a deluge, is it?

Beard’s argument appears to be that, because a successful game show, movie and TV series have been made on the subject of ‘gladiators’ that is a sufficient reason for everyone to drop everything and study ancient Rome.

a) That’s obviously a rubbish argument on its own terms, but b) it ignores the wider context of modern media, of the entertainment industry, namely that there is a huge, an enormous output of product by film and TV companies, all the time, on every subject under the sun. If your argument is that, because a subject has been chosen as the topic of immensely popular movies or TV shows this proves that we must study that subject, then we should all be studying the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The reality of modern media is that it chews up and spits out any subject which it thinks will make money. In the last twenty years I have been dazed by the enormous explosion in the number of science fiction movies and TV shows, about alien invasions and artificial intelligence and robots and androids, which have hit our screens. Does this mean we should all study artificial intelligence and robotics? No. These are just entertainment products which we may or may not choose to watch.

Placed in the broadest context of western cultural products, then, gladiators, or even the overall subject of ancient Rome, pale into insignificance. Ancient Rome is just one of half a dozen hackneyed historical settings which TV and film producers return to from time to time to see if there’s some more profit to be squeezed from them, up there with Arthur of the Britons, Henry VIII and the Tudors, Regency-era dramas like Bridgerton, Dickens adaptations, the Wild West, not to mention the perennial subject of the two world wars which never go out of fashion.

If you base your case for studying an academic subject on its TV and movie ratings (‘Gladiators are as big box office now as they ever were’) then it follows that a) subjects with higher ratings are even more necessary to study (the Edwardian society of Downton Abbey, say) and b) low ratings for the subject you’re promoting undermine your argument. My son told me about an HBO series titled simply ‘Rome’ which only ran for two series (2005 to 2007) before it was pulled due to huge expense and disappointing ratings. Maybe ancient Rome isn’t as popular a subject as a professor of Classics likes to think.

Summary

Anyway, the eight sentences I’ve listed above constitute the list of the reasons given by ‘Britain’s leading Classicist’ for studying ancient Rome.

Not very persuasive, are they? Every one of these instances sounds plausible enough at a first glance, if you read it quickly, skimming over it as you skim over a magazine on a plane flight or listen to the script of a big budget documentary about Pompeii you’re half paying attention to.

But stop and ponder any of the eight arguments for more than a moment and they disintegrate in your hands. They are all either factually incorrect or laughably superficial, and they strongly indicate the fluent but facile nature of the mind which selected and wrote them.

Missing obvious arguments

In passing, it’s odd that Beard misses several obvious arguments from her list.

Because I’m interested in language, I’d say a good reason for studying Classics is because Latin forms the basis of a lot of contemporary English words. If you grasp a relatively small number of principles about Latin (such as the prefixes e- for ‘out of’ and in- for ‘into’ and ab- for ‘from’) it can help you recognise and understand a surprising number of English words.

Easily as important as Rome’s impact on political geography is the obvious fact that three major European languages are descended from it, namely Italian, French and Spanish. That’s a really massive lasting impact and people often say that studying Latin helps you learn Italian, French or Spanish.

In fact, having studied Latin, French and Spanish I don’t think it’s true. The main benefit of studying Latin is that it forces you to get clear in your head the logical structure of (western) language, understanding the declension of nouns and the conjugation of verbs, the arrangement of adjectives and adverbs – in other words, it gives you a kind of mental map of the basic logic of western languages, a mental structure which then helps you understand the structure of other languages, including English.

My son studied Latin at school and remembers his teacher trying to persuade his class that Latin was a ‘cool’ subject by telling them that the Chelsea footballer Frank Lampard had studied it. Beard’s efforts t opersuade us all to take ancient Rome more seriously are on about the same level.

But maybe I’m missing the point because Beard is talking about history and I’m talking about languages.

Once we got chatting about it, my son went on to suggest that arguably the most obvious legacy of ancient Rome is its architecture. All over the western world monumental buildings fronted by columns and porticos, sporting arches and architraves, reference and repeat the Architecture of Power which Rome perfected and exported around the Mediterranean and which architects copy to this day.

But again maybe I’m missing the point talking about architecture when Beard is determined to focus very narrowly on the history, on the events and personalities of ancient Rome.

Then again, having discussed it with my son made me realise that how narrow that focus is. If we agree that the biggest legacy of Rome was its political geography, the founding of important towns and cities in western Europe, its ancestry of widely spoken languages, and its hugely influential style of architecture, then this places the actual history of events, long and colourful though they may have been, in a relatively minor role – in terms of direct enduring influence on our lives, now.

Feminists can be boring old farts, too

Just because she makes a point of not wearing make-up and makes a big deal on the radio, on TV, in the TLS, in countless reviews and in all her books about being a ‘feminist’ doesn’t make Mary Beard any less of a privileged, out of touch, Oxbridge academic than hundreds of fusty old men before her. She attended a girls private school, then the all-women Newnham college Cambridge, and went onto a long and successful academic career at Cambridge, rising to become Professor of Classics.

This is all relevant to a book review because I am trying to convey the powerful impression the book gives of someone who is fantastically pleased with themselves and how jolly ‘radical’ and ‘subversive’ and ‘outspoken’ they are and yet:

a) who is apparently blind to the fact that they are exactly the kind of out-of-touch, white privileged media figure they themselves have expended such effort in books and articles criticising and lambasting

More importantly:

b) who mistakes sometimes dated references to popular culture or trivial ‘provocations’ about gender or race on twitter, for thought, for real thought, for real deep thinking which sheds new light on a subject and changes readers’ minds and understanding. As the Richard Miles’ book on Carthage regularly does; as this book never does.

Facebubble

A Facebubble is what is created among groups of friends or colleagues on Facebook who all befriend each other, share the same kinds of values, are interested in the same kind of subjects and choose the same kinds of items from their newsfeeds. Over time, Facebook’s algorithms serve them what they want to read, suggesting links to articles and documentaries which reinforce what they already know and like. After a while people become trapped in self-confirming facebubbles.

It is a form of confirmation bias, where we only register or remember facts or ideas which confirm our existing opinions (or prejudices).

Again and again Beard’s book confirms your sense that, despite her rhetoric about making the subject more accessible and open, she is in fact addressing a relatively small cohort of readers who are already interested in the history of the ancient world. The oddity is how she again and again gives the impression of thinking that these already knowledgeable readers are somehow representative of the broader UK population.

Of course this is true of more or less any factual book which addresses a specific audience for a specialised subject – it assumes a tone of general interest. What makes Beard’s book irritating is the references to the notion that ‘we’ are ‘all’ still fascinated by ancient Rome, that ‘everyone’ ‘needs’ to be engaged with the subject. That ancient Rome ‘demands’ our attention. Those are the words she uses.

But no, ancient Rome does not ‘demand’ our attention and no ‘we’ are not ‘all’ fascinated by ancient Rome. My Chinese postman, the three Albanians who put up my new fence, the Irish labourers who took away the wreckage of the old fence, the Asian woman on the checkout at Tesco, the Jamaican guy who blows leaves out the road for the council, the Turkish family who run the delicatessen round the corner – are they ‘all’ fascinated by ancient Rome? Does it ‘demand’ their attention? It feels as if she’s writing for a white, middle class, university educated Radio 4-listening public and badly mistaking them for representing the big, complex, very diverse population of modern Britain.

On page two she tells us how:

SPQR takes its title from another famous catchphrase, Senatus PopulusQue Romanus (p.16)

Is this a famous catchphrase, though? Roughly how many people know what SPQR stands for? What percentage of the population do you think could translate Senatus PopulusQue Romanus? Maybe people with degrees in the humanities, particularly in the arts and literature, probably ought to. And anybody who’s been to Rome as a tourist might have noticed the letters SPQR appearing on letter boxes and manhole covers. I know what it stands for and what the Latin means because I happen to study Latin at my state school and went on to do a history-based degree, which is precisely why I bought and am reading this book. But I have the self awareness to know that I represent a fairly small, self-selectingly bookish percentage of the total population.

Myth busting

On page 3 of the introduction, Beard says her book will set out to smash some of the ‘myths’ which ‘she, like many’ grew up with’ (p.17). These are:

  1. that the Romans started out with a plan for world domination
  2. that in acquiring their empire the Romans trampled over peace-loving peoples
  3. that Rome was the thuggish younger sibling of classical Greece

Are these myths which you grew up with? Is it very important that ‘we’, the British people, have these ‘dangerous’ myths corrected? No, not really. They are only remotely important in the mind of someone who specialises in the subject.

All this rhetoric of ‘need’ and ‘must’ and ‘demand’ builds up an impression of special pleading, defined as when someone ‘tries to persuade you of something by only telling you the facts that support their case’. Beard is a Professor of Classics. Her job is to teach students Classics. She has taken it upon herself to make Classics more ‘accessible’ to a wider public, which may well be admirable. She tries to persuade us that everybody ought to know more about the history of ancient Rome.

But the arguments she uses to do so are weak and unconvincing.

I am not attacking Beard or her subject. I am critiquing the poor quality of her arguments.

First impressions

All these arguments and my responses to them occurred in the first few pages of the book. I hope you can see why, before the end of the 5-page introduction to SPQR, I realised that this was not going to be a scholarly book, and was not going to show much intellectual depth. It is a long, thorough and competent Sunday supplement-level account of its subject, stuffed with interesting facts, with some novel spins on things I thought I knew about (for example, the latest thinking about the legend of Romulus and Remus).

But it is disappointingly magaziney, features article-y, lacking in real depth. Instead of really unsettling and disrupting your ideas, of opening new vistas of understanding, as Richard Miles’s book does, Beard’s ideas of ‘controversy’ are on a disappointing twitter level – telling us that ancient Rome was a very sexist society, that its political debates about freedom versus security are very like our own, that there’s a lot we still don’t understand about its origins, that the archaeology is still much debated.

These are all ideas you could have predicted before you opened the book. That’s what I mean by comparing it to a very long magazine article which is packed with the latest knowledge and hundreds of dates and historical personages, but doesn’t really change your opinion about anything.

Very disappointing.

Credit

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard was published in 2015 by Profile Books. All references are to the 2016 paperback edition.

Roman reviews

3 Comments
by Simon on January 26, 2022  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on January 26, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/01/26/spqr-a-history-of-ancient-rome-mary-beard-1/

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick (1968)

In the irregular light the bounty hunter seemed a medium man, not impressive. Round face and hairless, smooth features; like a clerk in a bureaucratic office. (p.173)

This is the novel which director Ridley Scott made into the smash hit movie Blade Runner starring Harrison Ford at his charming, tough-guy best. The novel is a lot less glamorous, more puzzling and more worrying, than the movie.

Background

On the first page we learn that it is January 1992, as we meet Rick Deckard, android hunter and his bad-tempered wife, Iran. Within a few sentences they are discussing that central Dick topic, mental illness, depression and despair. It’s what his wife woke up feeling. Being a modern couple they have a Penfield Mood Organ on which they can dial any number of moods or feelings which the machine instantly stimulates the hypothalamus in their brains to make them experience.

Aha. What is ‘real’? What is ‘reality’? Another major Dick theme.

Oh, and a few years back there was a nuclear war which devastated large parts of the country. The chatty TV weather forecast includes predictions for the levels of today’s fallout.

After the war a radioactive dust covered the world. Nobody sees the sun any more. As many people as possible have migrated to colonies on the other planets of the solar system, Mars being particularly popular. Those who remain undergo regular DNA tests. Those whose DNA is acceptable remain ‘regulars’. But a steady number are diagnosed with radioactive mutations, and categorised as ‘specials’. Those who have undergone significant mental damage are nicknamed ‘chickenheads’ or ‘antheads’.

One such chickenhead is John Isidore, a mental defective who works for the Van Ness Animal Hospital owned by Hannibal Sloat, himself a man falling apart due to radiation poisoning.

Mood

So that gives you a flavour of the mood. Depressed. The entire novel labours under a black cloud of radioactive dust, with people dying or being mutated by radiation, with most animals (all birds) having been killed off, with everyone depressed at not being able to emigrate off-world or at the general plight, with people using drugs to alter their mood or escaping altogether via Mercerian fusion (more on this in a moment).

The plot

So as always Dick has created a very dense and thick texture of themes and subsidiary ideas within which to embed the big central idea.

This is that in the future, despite the war and dying off of most animals etc, humanity still retains advanced technologies and in particular has been refining better and better androids – artificial humans, with human minds, intelligence and reflexes.

Mostly these are used as slaves on the off-world colonies. But a small number rebel against their masters and jump ferries back to earth where they try to hide. As a matter of law and order, and also because they can behave unpredictably and violently, these escaped androids need to be tracked down.

Rick Deckard is an android bounty hunter. He tracks down rogue androids or ‘andys’, which have escaped from one of the off world colonies, usually killing their master in the process, in order to come to earth illegally. When he finds them, Deckard ‘retires’ them i.e. destroys them. He gets paid a grand per andy.

Deckard has barely finished dealing with his depressed wife before he gets a call from his boss, Harry Bryant. Eight andys have escaped from Mars and come to earth. Deckard’s fellow bounty hunter Dave Holden ‘retired’ two of them and was in the middle of interviewing a third when it shot him with a laser blaster. (Laser blasters are tubes you hold in your hand and do what they say on the tin, blasting a hole through a body or wall, and exploding people’s heads.)

Bryant hands him the task of finishing the job, getting the one that shot Holden plus the other five, six in all.

But there’s a problem, the sophistication of modern android brains. Just recently they’ve introduced the Nexus-6 electronic brain, the most complex and ‘human’ yet. It makes the job of identifying andys – and of distinguishing them from humans – almost impossibly difficult.

The only tool bounty hunters like Deckard have is the Voigt-Kampff test. This is designed to monitor the emotional reactions of those being tested. A patch is applied to the side of the testee’s face and wired up to the testing box, while a light is shone into the pupil of the eye. Then the interviewer asks a number of rather disturbing questions, a lot of them revolving around the plight of animals. Normal humans’ skin and eyes give immediate, unconscious responses to the questions. Androids have to think about them for a few milliseconds, and sometimes miss the emotional cue altogether. That’s what distinguishes humans from androids. At least up to now. Now some andys are giving borderline human responses. It’s getting difficult to tell them apart.

Deckard’s boss sends him up to Seattle, to the headquarters of the Rosen Corporation which invented the Nexus-6 brain. Here he meets the harassed owner, Eldon Rosen, and his striking 18-year-old niece, Rachael. They were meant to have lined up a mix of androids and humans for Deckard to test, as a test both of the Rosen androids, and of the test itself.

But Eldon insists that Deckard first of all test his niece. This leads to a prolonged scene in which Deckard at first comes to doubt the test because her reactions are all wrong – and then realises, with a shock, that the ‘niece’ is in fact an android. Eldon admits as much in front of her. (We are left to think through the emotional impact of thinking you are a human being and then being told, like this, that you are in fact a robot. With a limited life span. Later we’re told they last four years.)

Deckard flies back from Seattle in his hovercar, shaken and with serious doubts about the future of the Voigt-Kampff test. His boss calls him on the vidphone and tells him a Russian cop, Kadalyi, has flown in from the WPO (never spelled out but presumably some international police organisation).

Kadalyi arrives in a helitaxi and gets into Deckard’s hovercar, but they’ve barely begun talking before Deckard realises he’s an android, Max Polokov, the one who zapped Holden. Polokov pulls out his ‘laser tube’ to kill Deckard but, fortunately, Deckard’s hovercar is fitted with a device which emits a ‘sine wave’ which ‘phases out laser emanation and spreads the beam into ordinary light’ (p.74). Handy, eh? Deckard pulls out an old fashioned handgun and shoots Polokov’s head off.

Deckard phones his wife, who has relapsed into a prolonged and profound depression. He flies on to the San Francisco Opera House where Bryant has told him the next android, Luba Luft, is working as an opera singer.

Deckard loves classical music. He loves opera. When he walks into the auditorium a rehearsal is going on and he hears Luba Luft sing an aria from Mozart’s Magic Flute. She has a beautiful voice and he is genuinely moved. He goes to her dressing room and starts giving her the Voigt-Kampff test but she objects that it’s all about sex and calls a cop. Five minutes later this cop, Officer Crams, arrives and arrests Deckard.

There then follows a genuinely weird and disorientating passage, for the Crams tells him he’s a long-time officer from the new San Francisco police station downtown. Crams says he knows all the bounty hunters and has never heard of Deckard. Deckard says this is all wrong and tries to call Bryan, who seems to appear momentarily on the vidphone but then it goes dead. When Crams calls the same number he gets through to someone who says that isn’t police HQ and there’s no-one called Bryant there.

Crams takes Deckard in his police hover car to the new Hall of Justice which is on Mission Street, which is a genuine police station, full of bored front desk officers processing drunks and crooks, uniformed cops hanging round and everything. The reader shares in Deckard’s delirious hallucinatory panic, his fear that…. maybe Deckard is the android. Maybe the entire story we’ve read to date has involved fake memories, is a delusion programmed into him for some reason. Maybe there is no police HQ where he thinks it is, maybe there is no Inspector Harry Bryant, maybe his ‘wife’ is part of the delusory programming.

This sense of vertigo doesn’t let up. Deckard is taken into the presence of Inspector Garland who is told all about him pestering some opera singer with a cock and bull story about being an android bounty hunter. Into the office comes the station’s best android bounty hunter Phil Resch. Deckard has never heard of him. Resch has never heard of Deckard. Has he stumbled into a parallel universe?

Everyone in the room accuses everyone else of being an android, with both Resch and Garland suggesting that Deckard must be. Deckard holds out but part of him is thinking: Is he?

Anyway, Resch is dispatched to go and get the test these guys appear to use for detecting androids, the Boneli Reflex-Arc Test. While he’s out of the room, Garland confides in Deckard that Resch is an android, the poor sap. As Resch returns with the test equipment in his hand, Garland makes a move with his laser tube, at which Resch drops to the floor and shoots his head in half. Deckard had also dropped and now regards the scene with shock.

So is Resch a genuine bounty hunter who he’s never heard of operating out of an HQ he didn’t know existed? Or is Resch, like Garland, an android, but doesn’t realise it? While he’s worrying about it Resch says they’d better get out of the cop station – it’s infested with andys – and he pretends to put cuffs on Deckard and walks him briskly to the lifts, up to the roof, and into his hovercar.

They return to the opera house where they’re told Luba Luft has gone to the nearby museum. They go there and find her examining the pictures of Edvard Munch, standing in front of Puberty. They now jointly arrest her but she continues the bewildering confusion by accusing Resh of definitely being an android, and she should know. Resch defends himself to Luba and to Deckard, claiming that he has a squirrel, a pet squirrel, and cares for him, so he has empathic response, so surely that means he’s human, right? Right?

By this time Deckard, and the reader, really don’t know. What definitely happens is that as they accompany her to the lift Luba continues to deliberately wind Resch up into a frenzy with her accusations that he’s a robot till he pulls out his laser tube and fires. because she pulls away he only wounds her in the stomach, so Deckard immediately finishes her off. The lift arrives at the ground floor, to the horror of museum goers.

They report the killing to Bryant at headquarters and continue the bizarre conversation about whether Resch is or is not a damn android. Finally he agrees for Deckard to give him a test (p.111). To Deckard’s surprise Resch is human. Resch, for his part, is surprised that Deckard is so upset about killing Luba. Her voice was divine. What harm, was she doing anyone? For the first time Deckard doubts his vocation.

Resch gives Deckard some parting advice. He says he had trouble with Luft because he was attracted to her. Callously, Resch says, instead of retiring an andy and then being attracted to her, how about the other way round – have sex with her first, then retire her. Byee.

Deeply traumatised and shaking, the only way Deckard can calm down at the end of this pretty tough day is by going over to Animal Row, where the pet shops are, and after some (quite amusing) haggling, buying a fine black Nubian goat, making a down-payment and signing a contract for crippling ongoing monthly payments (at 6% interest!). Maybe it’s time to explain about the animals.

Rare animals

Since the nuclear war almost all animals have died out (it might occur to sensible readers to wonder how any form of food can be cultivated if all animals – including the ones vital for pollinating crops –have perished, but Dick’s books are less novels than visions, and you don’t quibble about facts or details in a vision, you let yourself be transported).

So all the characters are obsessed with owning one of the few remaining examples of each species. Deckard is extremely jealous of his neighbour in their apartment block because he owns a horse. Deckard can only afford the very second best option of owning an electronic animal, in his case an android sheep, which he pathetically pretends is real. Almost every other character has, or longs for, just one animal to own.

Dick invents a whole culture built around the trading of live animals, and the lesser market in manufactured android ones. For example, many of the characters keep a copy of the standard handbook of live animals, Sidney’s Animal and Fowl Catalogue (with monthly updates), which gives exact market prices for each species.

This is why Deckard, feeling shattered and confused, decides to blow the bounty money he’s made by retiring three androids (Kopolov, Garland – who he’s claiming, and Luba Luft) on a live black Nubian goat.

When he gets home his wife is awestruck and hugs and kisses him for the only time in the book.

Hence the title of the book – Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – is a little less fanciful than at first sight. There really is an electric sheep in the novel. And the title sort of implies that Deckard may himself be an android who owns an electric sheep. Maybe…

More plot

His wife is at first thrilled with the Nubian goat until Deckard sort of admits he didn’t buy it for her but to manage his mood, his depression (his panic, I’d have thought, after such a confusing day).

She persuades him to have a go on the empathy machine. Grasping the twin handles he is immediately transported to become one with old man Mercer, in his Biblical robe, endlessly struggling up the desert hillside. He senses all the other people who are fusing at that moment, but is caught on the head stone by one of the Enemy, and releases the handles, re-emerging into ‘reality’. Ah. I’m going to have to explain Mercerism.

Mercerism

Mercerism is a new religion which appears to have eclipsed all the traditional Western religions, which are never mentioned. Followers possess an empathy box. Whenever they need to, they grab the two handles of the empathy box and are immediately transported into the mind of Wilbur Mercer who is depicted as an old man, wearing Biblical robes, who is endlessly, endlessly struggling up a steep rocky hill in the desert, with unseen Opponents jeering and throwing rocks at him.

The follower is keenly aware that thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of other followers are experiencing the same things at the same moment. The followers’ minds are joined together and they each experience tremendous empathy with others, and relief from their own anxieties. This experience is called ‘fusion’.

The Mercer experience is repeatedly described but still remains mysterious, especially the way that the gruelling ascent is only the start of the much worse experiences Mercer has to undergo once he has reached the summit of the hill.

In a hard-to-understand sequence, when the chickenhead Isidore activates his empathy box we appear to see some of Mercer’s backstory, that he was a mutant found abandoned in a raft, was adopted, and proved to have awesome powers, capable of reversing time in order to raise the dead! This motif appears a couple of times but always in the context of mind-bending ‘fusion’ so it’s difficult to know how ‘real’ it is.

More plot

While he was experiencing fusion one of the opponents, the enemy, the killers, threw a rock at Deckard which hit him on the ear and drew blood. A peculiarity of the empathy box is that physical wounds incurred while doing it persist back into ‘real life’.

Deckard’s wife, Iran, puts a bandage to the cut ear to stop blood, then Bryant phones and says he wants the remaining three andys retired today, this evening. Dazed Deckard is reluctant, but finally agrees.

Deckard hasn’t been able to get Rachael out of his mind, the young android he had tested up in Seattle. In a throwaway remark to him, as she was walking him to his hovercar, she had said she might be able to help him track down the three remaining andys.

Deckard realises his faith in himself is shaken. He empathised with Luba Luft, and found Lesch repellent – just the opposite response than logic demanded.

He realises he needs Rachael to help him. He gets through and asks her. It’s late and she’s reluctant but eventually agrees to come and see him (it only takes an hour to fly by hovercar from Seattle to San Francisco – for most of the novel it’s easy to forget there’s been a nuclear war which has wiped out cities and animal life: the opposite – everyone seems to be using impressive futuristic gadgets as if benefiting from a highly advanced economy).

Deckard arranges to meet her in the St Francis, the last decent hotel in San Francisco (p.144). Rachael arrives wearing what appears to be a see-through top revealing her bra, skimpy shorts, and bearing booze, the hard-to-get-hold-of bourbon. They drink and they argue.

She is disgusted by the fact that she’s an android. She hates the other androids. She says one of them is identical to her, they’re no more people than identical bottletops coming off a production line. She assesses his chances against the three andys, tells him she’ll come and take out one of them, reducing his task to just two. She strips and gets into bed. He is struck by her weird shape, lean, without real breasts. He kisses her. She is cold. In the end she demands that he go to bed with her and he does. My God. This is just what Phil Resch predicted…

Later they get dressed and go to find the three remaining andys. A word needs to be said about J.S. Isidore.

The andys at the chickenhead’s apartment

This summary has so far concentrated on Deckard. But almost every other chapter cuts away to the activities of the chickenhead J.S. Isidore. There’s a minor plotline about an electronic cat he takes along to his boss at the Van Ness Animal Hospital. But the main thing is he discovers someone else living in the huge ruined apartment block where he lives in a rundown flat.

It’s a young woman named Pris Stratton. She’s living in some squalor. It takes a little while for the reader to realise this is one of the andys. During that interval there are a number of passages where we see her odd, detached android manner, though the eyes of Isidore who is himself mentally retarded. In other words, Dick makes fiction from the interaction of two deviant types of mind. Some of it is straightforward sci-fi thriller but some is weird.

That Pris is an andy is confirmed when two other andys turn up, Roy and Irmgard Baty. She short and dark, he wide, stock, eastern European looking. Isidore is persuaded to carry all their stuff up into his flat, which they’re going to use as a hideout. Vaguely he senses he’s being taken advantage of, but is mostly just happy that he’s got some new friends.

More plot

Deckard and Rachael are in his hovercar heading to Isidore’s apartment building.

(A logical flaw in the book is the way the androids are supposed to be in hiding, but Inspector Bryant simply phones Deckard up and tells him where they are. It’s just one example of the way the book isn’t really meant to be read logically or consistently. Plot logic is secondary to the puzzles about the nature of consciousness which it is designed to throw up.)

They have another big argument which takes a chilling turn when Rachael reveals that she has slept with a number of android bounty hunters and does it deliberately because after sleeping with her, they become incapable of killing other androids.

She only slept with Deckard in order to neutralise his professional instinct to kill andys. It turns out she knows Pris and Roy and Irmgard, she helped them from the start – and provoked him into calling her, and then offered to help him and generally lured him into bed in order to destroy his andy-killing capacity.

Deckard is stunned. Cold. Goes numb. He had been flying the hovercar to the apartment building but now turns round and takes her back to the hotel. The argument takes a grim turn when she asks him to kill her, right there, right now, and he reaches out to do it and she says just one shot through the occipital bone, that would do it, if you’re going to do it, do it now. But suddenly he’s overcome with disgust at how easily androids just give up.

He kicks her out onto the hotel roof, then turns and flies to the apartment building where the remaining andys have been reported. On one level, what happens is straightforward. Isidore is at the main entrance to the building and tries feebly to put him off. Deckard ignores him and uses machinery to confirm their presence, goes slowly up the stairs to their floor. Pris tries to surprise him on the darkened stairs and he zaps her with his laser tube. Then he goes on to Isidore’s apartment, knocks and pretends to be the chickenhead. They tentatively open the door and he barges in, avoiding Roy Baty’s laser gun shots, and quickly killing both Roy and Irmgard.

What’s eerie, and would be unaccountable if this were a realistic novel, is that Deckard meets Mercer on the stairs. As he walked down a dark and derelict corridor, Mercer appeared out of the shadows, told him what he was doing was wrong but he had to do it anyway, and then warned him that the most dangerous one was coming up the stairs behind him. It was Pris. It is only because of Mercer’s warning that Deckard turns, ducks, fires and kills her before she can shoot him.

But Mercer, how can he be there, how did he get there, is it a vision, or has Deckard ‘fused’ enough to have visions of Mercer almost at will? Whatever the explanation, how does the phantom of Mercer know Pris is sneaking up on Deckard?

Buster Friendly

Especially as something equally unexpected happens just before the final shootout.

Throughout the book many of the characters are shown watching the non-stop, 24/7 TV show featuring your hilarious host Buster Friendly and his Friendly Friends, with his mad laughter track and inane chatter with the same cast of c-list celebrities.

Androids was published 15 years after Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, another novel dominated by the horror of American commercial television (and, incidentally, in which the freewheeling protagonist feels he is having a transformative experience which can’t be understood by his conventional narrow-minded wife.)

Incongruously, against all the logic of the idea that Buster and Mercerism are twin foundations of this weird future society, Buster has been predicting he would make a big revelation on tonight’s show. And so he does. Just a few minutes before Deckard arrives, Buster reveals that the religion of Mercerism is a fake. That Mercer is just an out of work bit-part actor, he was hired years ago for a shoot in the desert where they dressed him up in Biblical clothing and generally shot all the scenes which followers of Mercerism ‘experience’, that even the desert isn’t real. If you close up on the so-called desert you can see it’s all a painted backdrop. They even have an interview with the actor, an alcoholic, who cheerfully admits it’s all a fake.

This comes as a shock to the chickenhead Isidore when he watches it with Roy and Irmgard and Pris, just before Deckard arrives. It comes as a surprise to me, since I have read how the experience of the empathy box is genuinely undergone by all the characters.

But it becomes plain incomprehensible that, if this man and his religion are a cheap fake, he nonetheless magically appears to Deckard in the apartment hallway and saves his life. How does that work?

Into the wastes

Deckard flies home to check on his wife but is so restless and upset at the day he’s had that he takes off again and blindly heads north, he doesn’t know why, he is at an extremity of fatigue, he flies up into the forbidden zone where there is nothing but dust and lifelessness.

He parks the hovercar and in a kind of trance stumbles up a hill and realises that… he is becoming Mercer. He is Mercer. To make the illusion complete someone, the enemy, the killers, throws a rock at him which draws blood on his cheek. But he is far gone in this transcendental religious illusion to look for the throwers… it is the intensity of the fusion with Mercer which is transforming him.

Just as suddenly he realises he has to get away, and blunders back down to the hill to the parked hovercar. He is sitting, head lolling, exhausted, half in and half out of the hovercar, when he notices movement on the ground. It is a toad! It is the first live animal he has ever seen in the wild! He carefully packs it in a box and flies back to San Francisco.

Here he carefully presents the toad to his wife who is as thrilled as he is. Unfortunately, in playing with its tummy, she discovers the clip which opens the flap to reveal the electric innards. It is a fake animal. Oh well.

Too tired to talk, Deckard lies on the bed and falls asleep. Will he dream of electric sheep?

Gizmos and consumer culture

When Deckard wants to enter one of the andys’ apartments he uses an ‘infinity key’ which fits every known lock in the universe.

Coming from reading four novels by Arthur C. Clarke whose writing is characterised by a careful attention to scientific and technical plausibility, Dick fits with the line of American sci-fi writers who, if their characters need one, just invent a gizmo to do it. Anti-gravity drives, space warps, anti-death drugs, hovercars, mood organs, infinity keys, “you wan’ it, we got it, baby”.

Dicks’ novels satirise the superficiality of American consumer culture, but the glibness of detail in his sci-fi novels comes right out of the same bubblegum, ‘do you want fries with that?’ mentality.

The Penfield Mood Organ

If you can afford one of these gadgets then you plug yourself in and the organ activates different parts of the cerebral cortex to create a wide range of moods. Each mood has a specific number. Numbers, and moods, which are mentioned, include:

  • 3 – motivation to dial a number
  • 382 – despair
  • 481 – awareness of the manifold possibilities open to me in the future
  • 594 – pleased acknowledgement of husband’s superior wisdom in all matters
  • 888 – desire to watch TV no matter what’s on

Every home should have one.

Credit

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick was published in 1968. All references are to the 2017 Orion paperback edition.

Related links

Philip K. Dick reviews

Other science fiction reviews

1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen

1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1898 The War of the Worlds – the Martians invade earth
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same London of the future described in the Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth fall in love, then descend into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps

1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – two scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, leading to a giants’ rebellion against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a passing comet trails gasses through earth’s atmosphere which bring about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Bun Hill in Kent, manages by accident to be an eye-witness to the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ until one of them rebels

1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic

1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, there to discover…

1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years
1932 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra aka Mars,

1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet’s new young inhabitants
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance

1950 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov – nine short stories about ‘positronic’ robots, which chart their rise from dumb playmates to controllers of humanity’s destiny
1950 The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury – 13 short stories with 13 linking passages loosely describing mankind’s colonisation of Mars, featuring strange, dreamlike encounters with Martians
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1951 The Illustrated Man – eighteen short stories which use the future, Mars and Venus as settings for what are essentially earth-bound tales of fantasy and horror
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces down attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the ‘trilogy’ describing the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1953 Earthman, Come Home by James Blish – the adventures of New York City, a self-contained space city which wanders the galaxy 2,000 years hence powered by spindizzy technology
1953 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – a masterpiece, a terrifying anticipation of a future when books are banned and professional firemen are paid to track down stashes of forbidden books and burn them
1953 Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke – a thrilling tale of the ‘Overlords’ who arrive from space to supervise mankind’s transition to the next stage in its evolution
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley to solve a murder mystery
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention – in the near future – of the anti-death drugs and the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1959 The Triumph of Time by James Blish – concluding story of Blish’s Okie tetralogy in which Amalfi and his friends are present at the end of the universe

1961 A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke – a pleasure tourbus on the moon is sucked down into a sink of quicksand-like moondust, sparking a race against time to rescue the trapped crew and passengers
1962 A Life For The Stars by James Blish – third in the Okie series about cities which can fly through space, focusing on the coming of age of kidnapped earther, young Crispin DeFord, aboard New York
1968 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke – a panoramic narrative which starts with aliens stimulating evolution among the first ape-men and ends with a spaceman being transformed into a galactic consciousness

1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic
1973 Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke – a 50-kilometre-long object of alien origin enters the solar system so the crew of the spaceship Endeavour are sent to explore it

1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the Golden Era of the genre, namely the 1950s

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Posted by Simon on January 10, 2019

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