I get all of my news from twitter these days, and this means running commentary on stories I would used to avoid entirely. This whole business of Lauren Booth converting to Islam is a good example. To be honest, I am always a sucker for a "white woman converts to Islam" story. There's something very feel-good about the idea of someone finding peace and contentment in a tradition that is usually looked down on in the west. And I'm always happy to see Muslim women speaking out against sexism and traditions that limit what they can do. Islamic feminists are good people. World needs more of them.

So there's a lot I liked in her article. But there's a few niggling things that bother me about this story. The main thing is that while Booth presents herself as a more-liberal-than-thou feminist in The Gaurdian, she also works for Press TV, an international channel paid for by the Islamic Republic of Iran. I'm not sure how I feel about being lectured on liberal tolerance by someone who works for a state where women can be stoned to death for adultery.

On a less political note, most people who convert feel that something is missing in their lives. Religion fills a gap for them. But converts often end up blaming mainstream society for the emptiness they felt, as though everyone in society feels miserable too and just won't admit it. A lot of people manage to live contented, loving, beautiful lives without needing to swallow a whole load of millenea old dogma.

The left of the west needs to be careful of associating itself with the conservatives of another culture. It's a bad scene. Solidarity with the mad fuckers in charge of Iran will end up coming back to bite us in the arse.

The Last Capitalist: Steve Cullen

Maybe it's best to start this blog off with what I think is an important rule of how to tell a good story: stick to the conventions of your genre unless you have a damn good reason not to.

The Last Capitalist is a good illustration of this. Steve Cullen is mixing two genres in this book, he has a noir-ish private detective in a utopian future which is basically the romantic British rural idyll with Anarchists. Good idea, I think. Lots of potential there. By the end of the first page, we've already got a bisexual history nerd pretending to be a detective, an attractive mysterious stranger, and a case that needs solving. Awesome. So far so good.

Steve Cullen seems to be going for anticlimax in this book, which is no bad thing in theory. Society is threatened because someone might have a gun. There's no real crime and even the Last capitalist isn't really such a bad guy. I can deal with all this stuff. But the story would have been really improved by sticking to the conventions a bit.

Anne Riordan is a pretty good hero. But she can't carry the story without help. She needs a cast, some suspects, a love interest. More than anything, she needs an assistant. This is the oldest trick in the book. This is the oldest trick in the book because it works.

It also a pretty standard convention of utopian fiction. If you have an outsider, then they act as a great stand in for the audience. A side-kick who knows nothing about history would fit this role well. While Anne Riordan explains the past to him, Steve Cullen would be able to tell us about his future society. This would have meant significantly fewer stilted monologues about how things have changed. I do think just sticking to these two simple conventions would have made this into an awesome book. Oh well. It was 75 pages. So I don't feel too cheated to be honest.

There were other problems I guess. I don't like how people in this book basically spend their time looking back to past heroes. Anarchism is a vibrant political tradition. Little too vibrant if you ask me. If Anarchists took over, there'd be new causes to fight and new wrongs to right.

I also don't like the romanticisation of the English rural idyll. It's a conservative ideological prop. Sure, the anti-capitalist outlook goes further towards making it viable than most conservative approaches. But it feels narrow and monocultural to me, everyone but a few crazies hold the same values and life doesn't seem to differ than much from place to place. They may have local produce everywhere, but it all just sounds like the same stuff with a different brand-name.

This a utopia that needs some work. But it's a good bit of left wing triumphalism. I would read it again if I had a few hours to kill. Like I said, it's a detective story and it's quite short.