Savage Gods Read online

  My wife, Jyoti, had it different. She was born in Darlington, but from a young age she lived in Leamington Spa, in the same 1930s semi where her mum still lives. Her mum is a Punjabi Sikh, as was her late father and gran. The family moved from India to Britain in the late 1960s, invited by the government to plug the gaps in the British labor market; a fair exchange for a few centuries of colonialism. We occupied your country—now come and drive our buses! Jyoti’s family moved across half a world, but now they’re more settled than I am. She still has a family home. I wish I had a family home. I can remember when I had one. I couldn’t wait to get away.

  4.

  My plan went wrong almost immediately. When I first arrived here, instead of feeling liberated, I felt like crying. I had loved the little town we lived in, where my son was born, where my daughter went to school, where I joined the fell running club and labored up and down mountains every Tuesday night then went to some small rural pub for sausages and beer. I had felt more at home there than at any time in my adult life. I wrote my first novel there, which I could afford to do because Jyoti was a psychiatrist who earned actual money. But psychiatry was killing her, her role was not to cure people but to medicate them, to stick plasters on the wounds the Machine had gouged into the people at the bottom of the pile. There was nothing she could do about the wounds, and they kept coming. We had always talked about owning some land, moving to a smallholding. Jyoti thought about her mum’s village in India, where her mum had tamed a wild mynah bird, where her granddad was the village wise man, where her gran milked the family buffalo, where there were bombardments of morning birdsong that would wake you from your sleep on the flat roof. I thought of little farms I had seen and camped in on long walks with my dad over the hills of Britain as a child and how they represented something to me that was very different from the flatness of the suburbs. I thought about sheepdogs and hens and lambs and the still of the tangled banks. The green stillness. In Cumbria, only the rich can afford their patch of the green stillness.

  We left Cumbria because we weren’t millionaires, but we also left because I was driven by my severance, my lifelong companion, and I needed to push away, as far away as I could push from everything I had known. I was getting complacent. I was starting to enjoy myself. I had friends and hobbies and a hometown I liked and this was intolerable. I could see myself getting fat and cozy and staying in the same place forever and this vision filled me with horror. I had to go because I was starting to get comfortable, and I have always run from things—houses, towns, jobs, girlfriends—when they started to make me feel comfortable. Until I was 35, I ran away from being at home, and then I wanted to be at home. Don’t ask me to explain this. How would I know how to explain it? I’m a writer, not a therapist.

  5.

  Maybe that does explain it. I’m a writer, and to me this has always been a calling, a duty. It has always been my guiding light, my personal mythology. I have built my life around it: what the writing needs, the writing gets, and all else is secondary. Maybe this sounds pretentious or affected, but I can’t help that. It’s what I’ve believed and cleaved to for longer than I can remember. I am a writer. Writing has controlled me and now perhaps it has become me. Writing has been put, always, before everything else, because if you don’t pay obeisance to the god then the god will abandon you.

  And so I have always run, or so I’ve told myself, because the writing needed me to. The writing needed me to stay on the edge, to stay burning, to stay ahead. The writing needed me, at some level, always to be unhappy. If I settled anywhere and got too comfortable, I would soften around the edges and the fire would die. I would end up writing bland memoirs or ghostwritten books about cats. ‘You must stay drunk on writing,’ advises Ray Bradbury, ‘so that reality cannot destroy you.’ Alice Thomson goes further, saying art that doesn’t come from pain is just entertainment.

  Pain, severance: it took me so long to realize their importance, their inevitability, their necessity. The grinding wheels of opposition are where the words are milled. The creation comes from the pain of the grinding. It is the heart being ground. It is the longing that creates the art, or the attempt at art. For that to happen, you need always to not quite be who, or where, you are. You need always to be under pressure, like a layer of sedimentary rock or a steel girder holding up a skyscraper. From the pressure, from the pain of the contradictions you carry and embody, from the wrenching of the oppositions that tear you, comes the energy that bursts into words, comes the flood, comes the pouring. You must always be not quite where you want to be, and you must never quite know where you want to be, and nothing must ever be enough to bring you contentment. Contentment is your deadliest foe. The fruit must always be just out of reach, and the world you walk through must always be a shade greyer than the one you can make yourself from what lives hidden in your heart.

  In your multiplicity, in your contradictions, in the pulsing thrum of all your wanting and all your loss is your chance to make something that might matter; is your chance to capture the pure, intense moment, in all its light and rage, as if time were cast away from it forever.

  6.

  These are the people that I am. I want to sit with my tribe around a fire for all eternity, telling the stories my ancestors told as they listen over my shoulder, feeling at home, among my people, comforted. In the precise same moment of time I want to sit up on the mountain, looking down discontentedly at all these idiots around the fire, irritated by their stupid, comfortable complacency. I want to sit always outside the ring of people and observe them, alone. That’s what writers do: we sit outside and we observe, alone. It is not a choice, and there is nothing to be done about it.

  I want to do all of these things at once—be a called writer, be a rooted family man, be a tribal elder, be an outcast shaman— and this is ludicrous, impossible. Art that doesn’t come from pain is just entertainment. And what does that mean for a man with a young family and three acres of land, a man with responsibilities and a burden of ideas in his head which he has just realized do not serve him anymore, and may not do so again?

  7.

  For five years or more, Jyoti and I talked about where to go. I favored the extremes: Chilean Patagonia, the French Pyrenees, Romania. The writer was pulling me, kicking me, playing with me, I think now, though it didn’t occur to me then. I only knew that something in me wanted to be thrown onto the rocks, utterly alien, far from the world I knew. Jyoti, without saying much, had other ideas. She knew the gulf between my desires and what I’m actually capable of. Ireland, though, seemed workable. We had friends there, we liked it. It was across the sea, but practically so. It was still an adventure, and a new start. We could afford it, just. I worried that it wasn’t radical enough, but time was pressing. Time is always pressing. Nothing presses harder, or is so relentless, so unforgiving.

  So I wrenched myself away and when I got here, I wanted to cry. I had thought I felt like this for a few weeks, but Jyoti recently informed me that it was more like a year. I was angry with myself for running, for breaking what I had had. Maybe it had been necessary, but that didn’t make it painless. I was English; I had always lived in England. It was my home, it was where I came from, and I was attached to it. This was an unfashionable attitude, but what was I supposed to do about that? I’d even written a book about that attachment, and yet I was still surprised to find that, when I left it to move abroad, my insides felt wrenched. Suddenly I felt I had made a terrible mistake. I felt homesick. This wasn’t my place. I didn’t belong here. What was I doing? I was a fucking idiot! This would not be the first time that my Romantic dreams had screwed up my life, and those of others around me, but it might end up being the most serious.

  Something I’d been writing about for years, in that book and elsewhere: human cultures come from places. They arise from them, curl out of them like smoke from hot ash. People do too. We’re not free actors. We can’t just skip from peak to peak, buzz from city to city with no consequences. I knew this, s
o why didn’t I know it? Cultures come from places. My culture comes, most recently, from the southeastern suburbs of England. It’s a culture of hard work, of ‘getting on,’ of English Protestantism channeled into secular ambition. It’s about settling down and having a family, contributing, progressing, climbing up; not bad things, necessarily, not for a lot of people. But it’s also about selling up, moving on, about property ladders and career ladders, about staking your place on the consumer travelator that represents progress in a burning world. It’s about feeding the Machine that rips up the people and rips up the places and turns them all against each other while the money funnels upwards to the people who are paying attention. This is the crap our children are learning. There is not much sign at all that the tide is turning.

  There’s a story I’ve told a lot in recent years. I told it in my first book, which was written 15 years ago, and then I forgot about it. Recently, though, it has returned to me, and has been hovering about. It wants something, I think.

  It’s a simple story. I was in the Highlands of West Papua, in New Guinea. I was 29 years old and had snuck into the country undercover, disguised as a tourist, because journalism was prohibited and I didn’t want to spend time in an Indonesian jail. West Papua was—still is—occupied by the Indonesian military, and its tribal people and culture are being systematically wiped out and replaced with the culture of its mostly Javanese occupiers. I was spending time with people from the Lani Tribe, who were telling me stories of military executions, corporate land theft, the destruction of the forests by loggers, and the poisoning of the rivers by gold mines.

  Three or four men were walking me through the mountain forests from one tiny collection of thatched huts to another. We were going to meet someone who could tell us stories about what the military had been doing beyond the world’s gaze. The men walked in front of me, spears over their shoulders, occasionally pointing out the call of a bird-of-paradise or offering to scramble up the trees and catch one for me. (‘Good feathers!’ one explained, as I tried not to look horrified.) Then we reached a break in the trees. Looking out through the gap, I could see a great sweep of ancient forest rolling off towards the blue horizon. Green, blue: there was nothing else. Everything could have been here at the Creation.

  The men lined up, then, with their spears over their shoulders and they sang, in a language I would never know, a song of thanks to the forest. It was all very matter-of-fact. They didn’t do it for show, they didn’t explain it to me—I had to ask them later what had happened—and when they had finished we just kept walking. That song must have sat within me for years until I was really ready to hear it. Only recently have I rediscovered it and started to examine it.

  What does that incident carry for me? Only this: some sense of reciprocity between a people and the place they live in. Some sense of belonging. That first book of mine, written when I was a young, fiery activist, dedicated to bringing down global capitalism and ushering in a regime of worldwide economic justice—it turned out to be a little misleading in the end. It was supposed to be a travelogue, a series of visits to the heartlands of resistance to economic globalization. But I kept moving the goalposts, widening my search so that I had an excuse to spend time with people like the Papuans, or landless Brazilian farmers, or Indigenous people in southern Mexico. The middle-class Europeans blockading summits and waffling about Negri and Fanon bored me to tears. They were rootless; they were as lost as me. They came in by plane or train from some other European city, they put on their black masks and Palestinian scarves, shouted at some fat cats, got tear-gassed and then went home. Empty gestures, empty words, and I was empty too. But in the Baliem Valley in Papua or the Lacandon jungle in Mexico I found something else; something older, deeper, calmer and very much more real. I found people who belonged to a place. I had never seen this before. Where I grew up, there was nothing like it. It had—it still has—more meaning to me than any other way of human living I had seen. I wanted to know: what would that be like? And could I have it?

  8.

  My family is from the lower middle class, the most derided class in England. Not callus-handed and romantically oppressed like the working class. Not classy or rich like the gentry or the aristos. Not possessed of degrees or home libraries or big wine glasses like the haute bourgeoisie. Not exotic and in need of stout liberal defence like the migrants. We are the class snickered at in Roald Dahl books. We come from suburbs and have family cars and watch the telly in the lounge and live in medium-sized towns in unfashionable places and have never been to the theatre and regard the Daily Mail as a good newspaper. I’m not speaking personally. I don’t regard the Daily Mail as a good newspaper, though I do think it has quite a fetching logo.

  And anyway, I escaped. My great grandparents were policemen, housewives, snipers on the Somme, union men, Methodists, proper old inter-war socialists in cardigans who lived in tiny terraces with outside loos and never touched a drop. My grandparents were shopkeepers, postmen, train and bus drivers, immigrant workers in camera factories, members of reserved trades, weekend coarse fishermen, allotment gardeners, rosette-winning attenders of dog shows. My dad left school at 16, became an engineer’s apprentice, and set out to prove his own dad wrong. My mum met him at school, left at the same age, became a comptometer operator (look it up), then a school classroom assistant, a housewife, our mum, the still point in a not-often-still home.

  Me? I’m an Oxford University graduate who writes books for a living. Look! I’ve worked in the jungles of Borneo and the villages of Mexico. I’ve done book tours of Australia and the USA. I don’t have any money, but I have—no, I had—my father’s ambition and I know how to look like I’m one of them. You know: one of the kinds of people who also have all these things but who somehow, unlike me, feel they have them by right. Who grew into them, or who always had them, or who grew up surrounded by people who did. At Oxford I would see these 19-year-old boys in tweed jackets, who wandered about full of louche, angular confidence, and they didn’t seem any smarter than me but they seemed a lot more sure of themselves. I knew nothing about the world, or myself, or how to behave, and I didn’t know what I was doing there, or anywhere else. But they did. They were all confident, while I was not. At least I thought they were. Now that I write this, I realize I’m not so sure. Maybe they were looking at me the same way. Where did this chip on my shoulder fall from? I think my dad must have dropped it as he was passing. It’s not attractive. I wonder if I will pass it on to my children. I am trying not to.

  This is me: a wanderer through words and through the world. A wanderer who is often sick of wandering, who is not a natural at this, who wants to put down roots, or feels he would be a better and more whole and more productive member of society if he did, and who was brought up that way. At the same time I am someone whose soul drifts like a cloudbank, someone who feels sick at the very notion of being productive, someone who wants to be anything but a member of society, thinks society stinks and has nothing to do with him. There is the battle, maybe within us all. The West battles the East, the old battles the new, modernity battles tradition, inside all of us, all of the time. It’s exhausting, don’t you find?

  This is the battle I have used my words to document for so many years. Now, suddenly, something is happening that I never expected or prepared for. All the words are dropping away.

  9.

  Three years ago, I arrived here, in my new green stillness, in a land that had been stripped bare for centuries by people from my land, and I started to fragment. I felt like I was falling apart. After the first few weeks, the initial anxiety dissipated, but I still felt the scales dropping off my skin one by one. All of my comfortable certainties looked less comfortable. Surrounded now by people of different origins, classes, ages, backgrounds, I saw more clearly than ever that for most of my adult life I had been hanging about with people like myself: middle-class graduates, liberal-leftish, urban, left-brained, intellectual, floating, disconnected. That stuff wouldn’t was
h here. Suddenly it all seemed painfully self-conscious and individualist, and so did I. In the city, in the town even, there was no real need to talk to your neighbors if you didn’t want to. I had never really learned how to do it properly; I was not good at talking to people at the best of times, which was probably another reason I had become a writer. But out here, everybody knew your business, especially if you were a blow-in like me. You had to talk to your neighbors, and they felt like neighbors, not just people who happened to be living in the next house along for now, before they moved on to something and somewhere better.

  The position I had painfully staked out in the world began to fragment. I began to fragment. I am still fragmenting, I think. Sometimes it scares me, sometimes it excites me. You have to come apart to be put back together in a different shape. You have to be reformed, or you rust up, and all your parts stop moving.

  Soon enough, my writing began to fragment too, because the kind of words you create to speak to the urban crowds of the alienated West don’t come from places like this. This old land out in the west, this ground will not give you what you need in that regard. It has no intention of helping. I mean that. I think, more and more, that words come from places, that they seep up into you and that places like this will not give words to people like me that speak to the things I used to be and used to believe. The words that come from this place, that bubble up from it, don’t even always make sense to me. I don’t know what they are trying to say or what they want. But they want something, and it is not what I once thought I came here to do. All I know right now is that my words don’t work the way they used to. I used to think words were my tools. Now I think it might be the other way around.