The Economist October 30th 2021 Books & arts 95BritishfictionSmoke and mirrors
B
ritishnovelistsexcelatcapturingthe
cut and thrust of a newsroom in a genre
perhaps best described as the hack pica
resque. Evelyn Waugh is its standardbear
er. His novel of 1938, “Scoop”, follows a man
of modest means mistaken for a foreign
correspondent and sent to a fictional
country in east Africa. The tale is an out
standing satire of the media’s mores and
its insatiable hunger for titbits and gossip.
“Making Nice”, Ferdinand Mount’s new
novel, is clearly indebted to “Scoop” but
updates its setting to the modern informa
tion age. Here news stories are written
about socialmedia posts. Any middle
aged oldschool reporters who aren’t
dreaming up clickbait for meagre salaries
have been tossed onto the slag heap, along
with their obsolete fax machines.
The book’s protagonist is Dickie Pente
cost, a diplomatic correspondent who has
recently been made redundant. Like
Waugh’s hero, William Boot, Dickie is
swept up in a series of misadventures, this
time in a digital world. Ethelbert (“Ethel”
for short), the eccentric and mysterious
panjandrum of Making Nice, a publicity
agency, hires Dickie to participate in va
rious schemes involving a corrupt African
leader in exile, a Trumplike American pol
itician and a pompous British mp who
presses Dickie into service to ghostwrite
his memoirs. The operating principle:
make the greedy seem altruistic, and trans
mute tyrants into humanitarians, all in the
name of “reputation retrieval”.
Mr Mount has a great ear for corporate
doublespeak, used by Ethel to justify his
company’s online skulduggery. When
Dickie inquires about the company’s
name, Ethel tells him that his mission is to
“transform the System into a game you
can’t help falling in love with”. Sure
enough, Dickie’s daughter Flo is seduced
by Ethel’s dazzling pitches and takes to
writing fake positive reviews for clients
(known as “astroturfing”) at his behest.
“Making Nice” lays bare how lies in the
internet age have poisoned the truth and
suggests everyone is more susceptible to
nuanced spin. This would all be horribly
depressing were it not for the book’s light
touch. Mr Mount has written a satire to be
consumed inone sitting, a pointed cri
tique of the modernworld delivered with
pluck and verve.nMaking Nice.By Ferdinand Mount.
Bloomsbury Continuum; 256 pages; £16.99Europeinthe21stcenturyCrisis
management
“W
hat has happened”, wonders
GeertMak,“inthese 20 glorious
yearsofglobalisationandthefreemarket?”
Youcantellbythewaythathephrasesthe
questionthattheanswerisnotgoingtobe
pretty.Sureenough,eventhemosthard
enedmiserabilistwillfindplentyinthis
latest Europespanning investigation by
MrMak,a Dutchjournalistandhistorian,
todeepenhisorhergloom.Thingsthat
have gone right (Mr Mak admits that there
are some) would have made for a much
slighter volume.
It all started out so well. “The Dream of
Europe” opens where the author’s previous
megavolume, “In Europe”, left off, at the
end of the last century. Mr Mak flits from
city to city, recounting what New Year’s Eve
felt like in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Kir
kenes in northern Norway, Vasarosbec in
southern Hungary. It was a time of vast op
timism after a century of unimaginable
upheaval. The 1990s had been a golden and,
in retrospect, deceptive decade. The Soviet
empire had bloodlessly evaporated; the en
slaved countries of eastern Europe were
heading for the European Union; even Rus
sia thought of joining nato. America ruled
supreme, and only Sinologists cared much
about China.
Yet how quickly it all turned. Mr Mak
unfolds the debacle in a series of medita
tions, each pegged to a theme and a date
but discursively wandering in time and
space, introducing a cast of characters he
frequently returns to (a Hungarian mayor,
an Iranian refugee, a pair of Greek shop
owners, a Catalan journalist) as his rough
chronology unfolds.
The progression of disasters is familiar:
the attacks of September 11th 2001 and the
terrorist reactions it triggered in Europe;
the global financial crisis, followed by Eu
rope’s own eurozone crisis; the migration
crisis of 201415; the Brexit crisis; the co
vid19 crisis; populism of right and left;
American isolationism. Digressive, itiner
ant and philosophical, Mr Mak’s style
might not suit everyone and it certainly
makes for a doorstopper, but it is mostly
compelling and readable. Anecdotal nug
gets sparkle on every page.
The nature of the European Union is the
central mystery that runs through the
whole book. Is the eu a ramshackle, secretive,undemocraticoutfitthatisdestined
to melt away like the Habsburg empire? Or
will it cohere into a durable statelike poli
ty, as Mr Mak’s Netherlands did? Perhaps
sensibly, he does not attempt a definitive
answer, punting the question to a mythical
reader in 2069. But the glimmers of hope
that the author does discern point, im
probably, to success. The eu flounders
when faced with a “polycrisis”, but it mud
dles through. It invents new instruments,
which live on, and over time it gets better
at invention, too. The economic response
to the coronavirus pandemic was far faster
than to the eurozone crisis.
The other broad thread that runs
through the book is sympathy. Not just for
the desperate migrants drowning in the
Mediterranean, or the legions of unem
ployed in southern Europe. Mr Mak shows
a real understanding of people whom you
might expect him to dislike: those who vot
ed for Brexit, for example, or Russians who
mourn their vanished glory. He under
stands what drives people to suspicion of
outsiders, or to take refuge in a past that
can only be recovered in the false dreams
of demagogues.
There are irritations. In the course of
his chapter on Brexit, Mr Mak recounts just
how much the people of Wigan hate
George Orwell, who went there in 1936 with
a preformed agenda and duly saw awful
ness everywhere. Yet he seems unable to
see how much he suffers from the same af
fliction. He writes of the “devastation” of
Wigan (though he earlier describes a city
where everything is “clean, impressive,
beautifully restored”.) Globalisation is al
ways a curse, never producing benefits.
The fantastic increase in living standards
in much of eastern Europe gets far less at
tention than the anxieties that have
emerged. But if you want abroadsweep of
the past 20 years in a baffling, teeming
continent, you can get it here. nThe Dream of Europe.By Geert Mak.
Translated by Liz Waters.Harvill Secker; 592
pages; £25Sunny days, oh, where have you gone?