Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia. Francis Wheen

held that schizophrenics and paranoids were the only people sane enough to see that the world is deranged. The Hofstadter paradigm was shattered, and has been irreparable ever since. ‘Since the assassination of John F. Kennedy,’ Norman Mailer wrote in 1992, ‘we have been marooned in one of two equally intolerable spiritual states, apathy or paranoia.’ The Illuminatus! Trilogy, that key to all mythologies of the early Seventies, features an anarchist sect called the Crazies whose political position is deliberately unintelligible but seems to encompass worship of Bugs Bunny and study of the Tarot as well as ‘mass orgies of pot-smoking and fucking on every street corner’. One of the Crazies explains: ‘What the world calls sanity has led us to the present planetary crises and insanity is the only viable alternative.’

Despite the foreignness of that era to twenty-first-century eyes and ears, we are its children. (Literally so for Sam Tyler in Life on Mars, who meets his six-year-old self in 1973.) And in the first decade of the twenty-first century, just as the nation succumbed to a craze for genealogy, British novelists suddenly began scrutinising this forgotten ancestor.^* ‘Just think of it!’ Jonathan Coe writes in The Rotters’ Club (2001), which pioneered the fictional fashion. ‘A world without mobiles or videos or Playstations or even faxes. A world that had never heard of Princess Diana or Tony Blair, never thought for a moment of going to war in Kosovo or Afghanistan. There were only three television channels … And the unions were so powerful that, if they wanted to, they could close one of them down for a whole night. Sometimes people even had to do without electricity. Imagine!’ Towards the end of Sebastian Faulks’s Engleby (2007), having progressed from the 1970s to the present day, the eponymous anti-hero protests at this new fascination even though the book itself exemplifies it: ‘Eventually I stopped reading the coverage. I couldn’t stand another article about 1970s fashions, ABBA or tank tops. This kind of decade-drivel used to be the territory of Chick’s Own or Bunty but has now run through whole sections of serious newspapers.’ And serious novels, one could add. Here is Engleby’s description of his student room at Oxford in 1973: ‘As well as the Quicksilver Messenger Service poster, there is one for Procol Harum live at the Rainbow, Finsbury Park. I have on my cork board a picture of Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips, taken from a magazine; one of David Bowie with Lou Reed and Iggy Pop …’ Ah yes, I remember it well: I queued all night on the pavement outside the Rainbow that year with my friend Nick Rayne, son of the Queen’s shoemaker, for tickets to a gig by Pink Floyd and Soft Machine. Our hippy credentials took a plummeting nosedive at about 8 a.m. when the Rayne family chauffeur pulled up beside us in a Rolls-Royce and asked if he should bring some breakfast for Master Nicholas and his companion.

      Like Howard Sounes, the novelists season their texts with titles of sitcoms and rock albums for period verisimilitude, but they also essay a rough impression of the social and political mood. ‘People were always on strike,’ Hanif Kureishi writes in Something to Tell You (2008). ‘The lights crashed almost every week … there were food or petrol shortages, along with some sort of national crisis with ministers resigning … Then there’d be an IRA bomb.’ In The Partisan’s Daughter (2008) Louis de Bernières gives this thumbnail sketch of Britain’s winter of discontent in the early months of 1979: ‘The streets were piled high with rubbish, you couldn’t buy bread or the Sunday Times, and in Liverpool no one would bury the dead.’

      The world we now inhabit, and often take for granted, was gestated in that unpromising decade. The first call on a handheld mobile phone was made on 3 April 1973 in New York City by its inventor, Martin Cooper of Motorola, who had been inspired by Captain Kirk’s portable ‘communicator’ in Star Trek. The first personal computer, the MITS Altair, appeared on the cover of Popular Electronics in January 1975, prompting a nineteen-year-old Harvard student, Bill Gates, and his friend Paul Allen to design a Basic operating system for it. Their partnership, initially called Micro-soft (sic), had total earnings that year of $16,005. (By the end of the century, its annual revenue was more than $20 billion.) On April Fool’s Day 1976, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak unveiled their Apple I computer.

      The gestation occurred partly because we inhabited a world that could no longer be taken for granted, or indeed taken at all. Throughout the Seventies there was a rising hubbub of discontent, a swelling chorus of voices saying it couldn’t go on like this – whether ‘it’ was a sclerotic Soviet bureaucracy, a jackbooted Latin American dictatorship, an enfeebled British corporatist democracy, or merely the quotidian headache of trying to make a phone call without a mechanical chorus of clicks, wheezes and crossed lines, as of a thousand boiled sweets being unwrapped simultaneously during a tuberculosis epidemic. Even the steady drip of small daily frustrations felt like torture, as in this litany from Douglas Hurd’s diary during the autumn of 1971, when he was the British prime minister’s political secretary: ‘All the mechanics of life crumbling around us – heating, cars, telephone etc … Telephone mended, light fuses blow. No progress on cars or heating … Demented by no progress at all on selling car or repairing heating … The bloody paper fails to insert my ad … Still getting nowhere on central heating … Finally we have two cars which work, and boilers, taps and radiators ditto. This has taken three months.’

The frustration seemed almost universal.^* You can hear it in the howl of Peter Finch’s messianic TV anchorman in Network (1976) as he exhorts viewers to lean out of their windows and yell: ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more!’ Or in the New Statesman’s front-page headline on the day after the fall of the Labour government in 1979: ‘NO CONFIDENCE. This time, something’s got to give.’ Something did: the British elected Margaret Thatcher, the Americans installed Ronald Reagan, and within little more than a decade much of the creaky but apparently immovable furniture of the old world had been consigned to the bonfire – South American military dictators, the Soviet bloc, even prices and incomes policies.

      Which brings me to the starting point of my earlier book, How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: that although 1979 may not have the same historical resonance as 1789, 1848 or 1917, it too marks a moment when a complacent and exhausted status quo reached the end of the road. That book began in 1979; this one recounts how we got there, and what a bizarre journey it was. Fasten your seatbelts: it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

* Whitlam’s premiership was itself snuffed out by Her Majesty the Queen’s representative in Australia, Governor General Sir John Kerr, who sacked him in November 1975. In true Seventies fashion, some furious Whitlam supporters claimed that Kerr had acted on orders from the CIA.

* ‘This particular house on the sea had itself been very much a part of the Sixties, and for some months after we took possession I would come across souvenirs of that period in its history – a piece of Scientology literature beneath a drawer lining, a copy of Stranger in a Strange Land stuck deep on a closet shelf – but after a while we did some construction, and between the power saws and the sea wind we got the place exorcised.’

* Baader-Meinhof members waged war against West Germany’s ‘performance society’, claiming that it induced mental illness in its citizens. Perversely, they seemed to think that the remedy was to terrorise the nation into a state of paranoia instead, through a campaign of bombings and assassinations that revived memories of Nazi methods in the 1930s. Jillian Becker’s study of the group, published in 1977, was titled Hitler’s Children.

* In 1946 Hunt was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to finance the writing of his novel Stranger in Town, beating two other up-and-coming authors who applied for the same fellowship. ‘The only thing Truman Capote and I have in common,’ Gore Vidal said, ‘was Howard Hunt beat us out for a Guggenheim.’

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