16 ★ FT Weekend 4 April/5 April 2020
with the minimum of text. Graphic nov-
els, a growing genre within fiction,
already do this, of course, but they are
not subject to constraints of space. They
can devote several panels to the
illustration of a character’s expression,
for example, or to the teasing out of aSpectrum
Many Republicans
follow Trump in
endorsing a choiceunimaginable in
Europe: riskingdeath for the Dow
The corona gulf
dividing Europe
and America
D
onald Trump’s handling
of this crisis wasn’t merely
predictable — it was
predicted. In March 2016,
Art Caplan, bioethicist
at New York University, published a
blog about an imaginary pandemic
under the then almost unimaginable
Trump presidency.
Caplan got many details right. He
has the virus jumping from animals in
Chinese markets to humans with a
“lethality [not] seen since the Spanish
flu outbreak of 1918”. People are urged
to “stay home, wear masks”. Then
President Trump leaps into action,
closing borders and screening
passengers on international flights.
“Many pointed out that these
measures did not work and that the
mutated virus was already in the US,”
writes Caplan. But Trump “noted that
immigrants often brought disease”, and
suggested the pandemic was “part of a
conspiracy”. A “political battle [erupts]
between Trump, recalcitrant governors
in many states, [and] his own CDC
amidst catcalls from the international
community”. Eventually, Trump gets
distracted by a “trade war with China to
punish them for allowing an epidemic”.
In a crisis, you discover who people
are, and what countries are. We already
knew who Trump was, but what does
the current situation reveal about the
half of the US that he represents, and
about Europe? Both regions start with asad set of similarities. Neither the US
nor Europe (except arguably Germany)
could tame this pandemic through
early tracking and testing, as South
Korea and Singapore did.
Both Europe and the US are wrecking
the planet to enrich their people, yet
cannot even enrich most of them.
Only this winter did British average
wages briefly regain their pre-crisis
level of 2007. Now other European
countries may drop below that bar. The
average income of the bottom half of
Americans had stagnated at about
$15,000 for 40 years even before the
pandemic, calculates Thomas Piketty
in his new bookCapital and Ideology.
Neither region is now showing much
cross-country solidarity. Trump
stopped flights from Europe without
warning Europeans; northern
European countries continue to block
proposals for shared Eurobonds,
pushing grieving Spain and Italy into
a new era of austerity. Donations of
masks and protective kits, and
Germany treating a few dozen French
and Italian patients, can’t disguise that
failure. Brexiters needn’t have worried:
there is no European superstate.
But on other life-and-death matters,
Europe and American Republicans
diverge. The latter are sticking with
Trump in a suicidal course that has
no European equivalent. Until this
pandemic, there was an “only joking”
quality to Trumpism. ManyRepublicans used it
as a way to stick it to
coastal elites rather
than a practical
ideology. They could
dismiss climate
scientists and other
experts without
suffering immediate
harm.
Yet even now that
their own lives may
depend on it, most
Trumpists continue to believe the
leader, disbelieve experts, value the
economy over life and regard blue
states as the enemy. Trump’s approval
ratings among Republicans remain
above 90 per cent. If he becomes the
new Thabo Mbeki — the former South
African president whose denialism
during the Aids epidemic made him
culpable for 365,000 d eaths, according
to a Harvard study — Republicans will
be complicit.
France and Italy are packed with
anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists.
But almost everyone in these countries
is now listening to health experts and
staying home. By contrast, in US polls,
far more Republicans than Democrats
dismissed the pandemic as a hoax,
even while medical experts warned
Covid-19 was heading for red states too.
Still, it’s no wonder these Americans
distrust medical science when it has
given them (at great expense) theopioid crisis and, in 13 Trump-voting
states, average life expectancy below
7 8, lower than any country in western
Europe. Many Republicans are also
following Trump in endorsing a choice
that is unimaginable in Europe: risking
death for the Dow.
Authorities often prioritised business
over life in long-ago pandemics, Richard
J Evans, history professor at Cambridge,
told theTalking Politics podcast.He cites
the example of Hamburg’s merchants
trying to hush up the 1892 cholera
outbreak. It’s just surprising this
tradition coexists with modern medical
knowledge. The common Republican
argument that people die in recessions
is only true because the US makes it so.
US companies have already sacked
millions, many of whom have lost their
health insurance.
By contrast, European governments
— Britain’s Conservatives and t he
supposedly “neoliberal” Emmanuel
Macron — are paying workers’ wages to
prevent redundancies. European states
have learnt from 2008: this time they
aim to bail out ordinary people, not
banks. Once European nations emerge
from lockdown, they may have to
block flights from the next epicentre,
the US. A travel ban between these two
floundering regions would symbolise a
split in world views that probably won’t
be bridgeable even after Trump.@KuperSimon; [email protected]SimonKuper
Parting shot
may be responsible for the publication
of a full-length graphic novel version of
Marcel Proust’sDu côté de chez Swann,
painstakingly and evocatively illus-
trated by Stéphane Heuet.
Iain required little persuading, and
we set about working onTiny Tales,
which will now be appearing in the FT
Weekend paper over the coming
months. There are five tasters here of
what is to follow, each of them demon-
strating the illustrator’s acute eye for the
humorous potential of small detail.
The Turner Prize judges inConceptual
Artare perfect. The figures are small,
but look at the folded arms of one of the
judges; look at their clothing, their hair-
styles. I am not sure what Turner Prize
judges look like in real life, but I suspect
this is fairly close. One thing is certain:
they won’t wear suits. And could a Volvo
sliced down the middle really win the
Turner Prize? Of course it could. In fact,
I’m surprised a Volvo, sliced or other-
wise, hasn’t yet won it.A series needs a few regular charac-
ters, and inTiny Taleswe have Larry
Porker, a socially ambitious pig, and a
stripy feline called Stanley, whose
owner, Geoff, does his best to improve
his cat’s life. Like most cats, Stanley is
indifferent to human plans and pursues
his own agenda regardless. In the series,
we see Geoff trying to interest Stanley ina feline gym — to no avail. The limit of
most cats’ ambition is to sit somewhere
warm, even if that is a cross trainer.
Geoff ’sCat’s Strategy is about as politi-
cal as these tales get. We are inAesop’s
Fablesterritory here, but with a contem-
porary flavour. Look at the face of the
Russian cat in the second panel. Famil-
iar? And just how would one destabilise
mice? Panel three provides the answer:
fake cheese. That was the illustrator’s
addition — a lovely nod to the outcome
portrayed in the final panel, which, in
one view, might be exactly what has
happened in the real world. The mice
have been severely confused.
The illustrations inThe Saintsshow
the artist’s feeling for Scottish art’s Celtic
tradition. The figures and whirling cir-
cles are straight out of theBook of Kells.
The idea of the saints having to live
together in the next world was inspired
by my reading of a story by an Italian
author, who wrote about the saints
being irritated by the arrival of a new
and rather overactive saint. Here he is,
but not as he was portrayed in that
story: here he expresses his irritation at
the prevailing tone in heaven. And, of
course, he would not take kindly to a
suggestion that he go marching in.
These strips will be included in aTiny
Tales book due out this year. They will be
accompanied by 30 text stories on vari-
ous themes — love, revenge, cosmetic
surgery and so on — all those aspects of
life so worthy of examination.
The tone will be upbeat, because,
quite frankly, who has the desire to wal-
low in the sombre side of life at present?
We must continue to be able to smile,
even when things are dire — perhaps
especially when things are dire.
Of course we can experience regret
over what has been done or not done.
Scientific Ethics: a Crash Course, the fifth
strip illustrated here, reminds us that
we are where we are and that we can’t
undo things gone wrong. Mind you, the
man who genetically engineered this
monster fly did just that...See the back page for the first in the series
of Alexander McCall Smith’s ‘Tiny Tales’T
he latest novel from H ilary
Mantel is a comforting 912
pages long.War and Peace,
in its Penguin Classics edi-
tion, runs to a modest 1,440
pages. Trollope and Dickens were both
capable of going on at considerable
length, as was Tolkien. Novelists can
show great staying power.
At the other end of the literary spec-
trum are short stories, some of which
can be very brief. Flash fiction, the term
now used for what has previously been
described as short, short stories, has
been around rather longer than one
might imagine — and has had some dis-
tinguished practitioners.
Today, its natural home may be the
internet, but long before writers were
intrigued by the possibilities of the very
brief short story.Aesop’s Fablesare an
early example, but by the 20th century
the goal of telling an intriguing story in
few lines had become widely shared.
Writers such as Jorge Luis Borges,
Somerset Maugham and Italo Calvino,
all capable of spinning a lengthy narra-
tive, were nonetheless attracted by the
lure of portraying a whole world within
the space of a few terse paragraphs.
Ernest Hemingway is said to have
liked the idea and is credited — wrongly
— with the authorship of one of the most
famous ultra-short stories, the six-word
tale: “For sale, baby shoes, never worn.”
He is said to have written this on a
napkin over dinner in the Algonquin
Hotel in New York, thus winning a $10
bet. In fact, he probably did not write it
at all; other writers referred to the story
as early as 1917. Whatever its prove-
nance, this little masterpiece shows how
it is possible to conjure up a moving and,
indeed, tragic tale with the use of only a
handful of words. All the rest, it might
be argued, is padding.
I became interested in the possibili-
ties of the very brief short story in the
course of writing a serial novel for the
past 15 years,44 Scotland Street. This
series of books, now approaching its
14th volume, has been published daily,
chapter by chapter, in The Scotsman
newspaper. The chapters are short —
never much more than 1,200 words —
and I found that I rather enjoyed telling
a whole story in each one. Twelve hun-
dred words is more than enough to
develop a character, set the scene and
have something happen before ending
with a suitable cliffhanger.
When Twitter decided some years ago
to inaugurate an online literary festival,
I received an invitation to help launch it.
At that point, Twitter was even more
stringent with its word limit (140 char-
acters per post), a requirement that
would have been frankly incompatible
with most coherent attempts at fiction.
The solution was obvious: each post
would be a very short chapter, and the
whole story, made up of 20 or 30 chap-
ters, could still be fewer than 1,000words. Ulf Varg, my new Swedish char-
acter, since portrayed in the full-length
novelThe Department of Sensitive Crimes,
and in the forthcomingThe Talented Mr
Varg, started in this form, as did Martin,
his lip-reading, hearing-impaired dog.
The Sociopaths’ Ballwas another
example. It’s a story in 36 chapters, but
just 800 words. It started: “Chapter 1. In
fashionable Palm Beach there is a winter
season: plenty of charity events, fund-
raising concerts, formal balls. Chapter 2.
These events are always organised by a
committee ofgrandes dames, prominent
socialites, wealthy patrons etc. Chapter- One year they decided to have a ball
solely for sociopaths, of whom there
were quite a few... ”
Of course, a ball requires an
organising committee, and an organis-
ing committee must have a meeting.
So... “Chapter 20. The sociopaths
elected a chairman. He was called
George Fist. ‘You got a problem with my
name?’ he challenged. Chapter 21.
George Fist called the first meeting at
his apartment overlooking the ocean.
He was proud of his view. Chapter 22.
‘Some guy tried to build in front of us,’
he remarked. ‘We sorted that out.
Result: we still have the view... ’”
Very short stories are not the exclu-
sive preserve of writers. Illustrators are
also adept at the form, and it was for this
reason that I approached the well-
known Scottish illustrator Iain McIn-
tosh to see whether he would be inter-
ested in embarking on a series of
extremely brief stories. The idea was
that Iain would draw four panels in
which a whole story would be illustrated
Windows on
the world
AsAlexander McCall Smith launches his ‘tiny tales’
for the FT with Iain McIntosh, he explores the lure
for writers of creating a universe in a few paragraphs
Hemingway is credited —
wrongly — with one
of the most famous ultra-short stories, a six-word tale
Above:
Alexander
McCall Smith,
at home in
Edinburgh,
photographed
for the FT by
Kirsty Anderson
Left: illustrator
Iain McIntosh
Alix McIntoshsmall nuance of plot. These novels sat-
i s f y w h a t s e e m s t o b e a f a i r ly
fundamental human interest in being
told a story through pictures. It is this
which lies behind our earliest cave
paintings, where the events of the hunt
may be daubed on the wall, just as itHarry HaysomAPRIL 4 2020 Section:Weekend Time: 3/4/2020 - 16: 00 User: jane.lamacraft Page Name: WIN16, Part,Page,Edition: WIN, 16 , 1