ESSAYS:WHEN LEFT-WING ideas are on the defensive, finding a style capable of getting a solid grip on contemporary society, through all the spangles and foam of late capitalism, poses a problem for the left-wing essayist, writes Barry McCrea
This difficulty may be particularly acute in the UK, where the boundaries between left and right have become more blurred than elsewhere, and where the market has so saturated the cultural air that many of the best-known British left-wing essayists have succumbed to an individualistic, competitive, often sarcastic rhetoric.
Whatever the anti-consumerist convictions of the writer or the subject-matter of the writing itself, their style is an inadvertent assault on the idea of an inclusive public sphere, a with-me-or-against-me tone, a tendency to use showy, jeering metaphors and aggressively informal language, that cannot but leave even a sympathetic reader feeling excluded or belittled.
The essays of Andrew O'Hagan are a dignified and robust exception to this. The Atlantic Ocean offers a clear-eyed, compassionate vision of the world we live in, a vision perfectly mirrored by O'Hagan's civilised, modest, brilliant style: democratic but never showily demotic, elevated but inclusive, gentle on his audience and on his subjects but equally demanding of both, determined to bring the reader along, but never pandering.
O'Hagan searches harder than anyone for the apt or entertaining metaphor but never - and this sets his essays apart from those by other British writers such as Amis, Eagleton or Rushdie - gives into the temptation to show off his flair or to humiliate his notional opponent.
These essays mostly started out as pieces in the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books, and they are concerned with such subjects as the practice of leaving flowers at scenes of celebrity murders and accidents, Hurricane Katrina, the Iraq war, celebrity memoirs, recycling, the Beatles. With the thoughtful introduction as an interpretive key that brings out common threads running quietly through them, these essays take on a new life, so that the whole ends up being far more affecting than the sum of the essays' parts.
The ocean of the title refers to a temporal and cultural space as much as a physical one. O'Hagan's conviction is that the story of modern British society, what Britain is now and where it came from, is the story of this figurative Atlantic, the story of how, from the 1960s onwards, the glamorous fantasy of America came back "home" to shape Britain.
Part of this process is the unhappy story of how the radicalism of the 1960s became today's Britain, with "Culture as social balm. Spite as entertainment. Desires as rights. Shopping as democracy". The Beatles are one embodiment of this complex transatlantic circulation of fantasy and fulfilment, a band who "knew something about their current moment and something about the fantasies of their audience", but whose simple answer to the questions of the world, now "acts like an unconscious mantra for generations who take their entitlement for granted, including those people whose busy, Sixties-experienced shadows begin to spread over everything from the carpets in the House of Lords to those lawns just in front of the White House".
Even when dealing with the 1960s, the essays in The Atlantic Ocean are concerned with mapping the DNA of the present. But this focus on the contemporary is a means to navigate, in a deeper way, the ocean between the here of our lived lives and the there of our desires.
Threaded through the careful political analysis and analytical portraits of individuals and their backgrounds, is a quiet, unpretentious lyrical examination of the material of human hopes.
These essays are faithful to a political ideal that really eschews celebrity culture in practice as well as in theory, avoiding cults of individuals, either as objects of veneration or opprobrium. Even when it is a question of such unbullyable, "legitimate targets" as George W Bush, the rhetoric is sharp and witty but never spills over into violence: he refers to the Bushes at the funeral of John Paul II "looking bored and slightly vexed as they always do abroad . . . scanning the middle distance for un-American mirages".
Special disdain is reserved for the painful-childhood celebrity memoir (and O'Hagan never makes a virtue out of his own tough background) since its narrative implies that success and pain justify one another, so that "fame finally gets to have an essential moral component: it is the work of self-preservation, a summit of reason, a resounding answer to the riddle of life . . .".
Indeed, the ways in which the riddle of life exceeds our era's calculus of profit and loss, its dialectic of "winners" and "losers", is perhaps O'Hagan's main theme. Brothers, for example, alternates between two soldiers killed in Iraq, one American, one English, and, moving back and forth across the Atlantic, slowly builds up a picture of the soldiers' bereaved families, backgrounds and pasts. We feel the specificity of the lost lives, and perceive the shape of the societies that produced them, one English, one American, both similar and distinct.
The essay is not a depiction of unique individuals, nor of everyman representatives of a situation; rather, it communicates a sense of how the hopes and failures of individuals, of families, communities and societies, are woven together, in conflict but also in symbiosis with each other.
The story O'Hagan tells is one of awesome wounds, but in his hands it is neither a narrative of total loss or total survival, but of the total co-existence of loss and survival.
The essay ends on a lyrical note: "It wouldn't be long before the smell of cut grass was back in the air, the smell of John's childhood returning, as fresh-seeming as the taste of Anthony's Murray Mint, to show the world that something was truly lost in all this human struggle for gain".
This prose is moving, but it glories in neither misery nor hope. It is not unbearably poignant or unbearably sad, as though to be so would betray tough truths: that all deaths are eventually accepted, that pain must finally be borne.
In The Garbage of England, O'Hagan interviews Alf, an anti-consumption activist who lives entirely on supermarket refuse. "This is England now," O'Hagan comments to Alf, looking at all the discarded food. Alf replies: "No, this is the world, bro".
For all its modesty and material detail, this book is interested not only in the specific interactions of desires and realities that produced modern British society, but also in the grand, tragic human question of how away becomes home, how here becomes there and there becomes here, how the dreams of the future are relentlessly, unstoppably transformed into the empty packaging of the present, and how the present recedes inevitably from all of us into unreachable, dead, unreality, like the radicalism of the 1960s, or the childhoods of dead soldiers.
In a culture where a mad fiction like Sex and the City is partly taken as a reflection of real life, a book like this one, dedicated to figuring out the relationship between desire and reality is just what the doctor ordered.
The Atlantic Ocean: Essays on Britain and America By Andrew O'Hagan Faber Faber, 384pp. £20
Barry McCrea is assistant professor of comparative literature at Yale University. His novel The First Verse was published in paperback by Brandon last month