The latest Russian threat
You’ve probably seen typically hysterical newspaper reports about Vlad the Lad’s option to destroy Great Britain using his Poseidon super-torpedo, and I thought it was worth just clarifying what it is and how it works, weapons and such like being my thing.
The Status-6 Oceanic Multi-purpose System, NATO reporting name Kanyon, was officially announced by Putin in March 2018. It’s a big and heavy (around 20 metres long with a weight of about 100 tonnes) nuclear-powered super torpedo with an estimated top speed of around 70 knots, rather than the 100 knots often claimed for it. It’s submarine-launched and autonomous, navigating by an AI system supported by satellite tracking, and very deep diving, probably able to reach a depth of over 1,000 metres. Its nuclear reactor gives it effectively unlimited range and when deployed its speed and operating depth mean it would be virtually unstoppable.
That’s the bad news. The slightly better news is that Russian claims of a 100 megaton yield appear to be wholly unfounded and informed opinion suggests that about 2 megatons is more realistic, though that’s still one hell of a bang. The even better news is that although the Poseidon exists, there’s no evidence that it’s been deployed because neither of the two submarines intended to carry it are operational. The Sarov is still at the testing stage with the weapon and the second submarine, the Belgorod, has not yet been commissioned. And although it is undoubtedly a worrying weapon, it is insignificant when compared to ICBMs, which are much, much faster, carry much larger warheads and can hit targets anywhere, not just along a coast, which is all the Poseidon can do.
And if I may finish with a small plug, my novel Understrike features the Poseidon as the Russian weapon that Paul Richter is desperate to stop before it can be launched at a very specific and slightly unexpected target. A target that, if the attack were to be successful, would result in the decimation of the American eastern seaboard.
And now on a lighter note:
He can’t be any good – he comes from Bolton
In fact, I’ve got nothing against Bolton though that might, I suppose, be because I’ve never actually been there. What I’m doing is picking up on a subject that made modest headlines in the writing community a few years ago: namely, does a writer’s location or origin somehow convey a kind of extra credibility if that location is currently the flavour of the month?
There were some suggestions that this was actually the case, because at that time Scandinavia appeared to be the place from which all the best thrillers were coming. Quite apart from the Steig Larsson books – a trilogy which I have to confess I found quite underwhelming and actually rather dull – the work of Jo Nesbo was riding high. And it wasn’t just books, either. The first episode of Those Who Kill, a Scandinavian police procedural, for want of a better description, was shown on TV that month and despite the fact that I speak not a word of Danish (apart from tak and I’m not absolutely sure what that means) and was relying entirely on the subtitles, I thought it was pretty good.
It was Scandinavia then, but in the past a number of different countries seemed to produce writers who garnered critical acclaim at least in part because they were from that particular territory. For a long time, you simply had to read Nabokov and Solzhenitzyn, and by extension every other Russian writer with an unpronounceable surname. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not knocking these people, just wondering how much attention some of the minor Russian authors would have attracted if they’d been born in, say, Bradford.
Then there was the vogue for French authors, though one of the most prolific of these, Georges Simenon, was easily dismissed by the British literary establishment because he was able to write enjoyable commercial fiction – an appalling crime – at a rate that more literary authors couldn’t hope to compete with in even their wildest and most optimistic dreams.
And talking of literary rather than commercial fiction, at the time there also seemed to be a kind of assumption in this rarefied and exclusive atmosphere that work by any author from what might be termed ‘foreign parts’ is more likely to be worthy of consideration than anything knocked together by British writer. A new book by somebody named Ibn ben Sahid or Ichi Mudahyy (I am making up these names, obviously) seemed to be far more likely to reach the shelves in W H Smith rather than something authored by John Smith.
None of which, of course, makes the slightest bit of sense.
The 2012 Booker Prize
And another article published back then caught my eye for a similar reason. A talking head from one of the newspapers – a broadsheet, obviously – was metaphorically wringing his hands in abject misery, and in fact not a little anger, because he claimed it was obvious that the judges for the Man Booker Prize had completely lost the plot. They had clearly not the slightest idea what they were doing, he said, because the books they had selected for the shortlist had been chosen for absolutely the wrong reasons.
So what was the ‘crime’ that these judges were in the act of perpetrating? Had they chosen picture books? Or romances? Or westerns? Or perhaps the most unlikely category of book currently available to them: crime fiction? No, it was none of these. But it was neither more nor less than a potentially fatal body blow to the world of literary fiction: the judges had apparently selected books based upon their readability – books that people might actually enjoy reading – instead of their obscurity and difficulty.
Which did, I suppose, beg the obvious question: why shouldn’t a book be selected because it’s readable and therefore accessible? Why should a reader have to study a sentence or a paragraph two or three times before he can work out what the hell the author is talking about, or sit with a dictionary beside him to look up all the words that he’s never seen before? Why does that make the reading experience more significant? It certainly doesn’t make it any more pleasurable.
In the end, perhaps predictably, the 2012 Booker was won by Hilary Mantel with the second part of her dull and tedious Wolf Hall trilogy. That result restored intellectual peace to the literary world because that book, like everything she’s ever written, was confused, complicated and marked by over-long paragraphs and convoluted sentences that needed absolute concentration from the reader to follow and understand, and ideally a notebook and pencil to keep track of the legions of unnecessary characters who peopled its pages. It was literary fiction as its most impenetrable best, and garnered both the predictable 5-star reviews along with a large number of probably more honest one-stars submitted by people who had tried to read it and then simply given up.
So the answer to the questions ‘could it be possible that for the first time ever the Booker prize would be scooped by a novel that people actually wanted to read, rather than one that they feel they should read?’ was of course ‘no, of course not.’ No doubt a sigh of relief was heard throughout the dark and ill-lit corridors of the literary establishment when it was realised that the Booker’s reputation was still intact, and under no circumstances could a popular and readable book ever scoop the top spot.
