The Dream of the Decade: The London Novels [Paperback]

I did not grow up in London, so I cannot talk of recognizing personal experience, but growing up in London is in no way an essential condition in order to enjoy the book. The themes and the characters are not limited to London. The characters are not stereotypical characters of the time described in the novels; one can recognize exactly these characters today, they are very much with us in today's society.

Another fact that I found particularly interesting is the author's dealing with politics. He sees politics in everything, it is a fascinating observation, and I personally liked it a lot. He manages to write about politics without turning his book into sort of political advice. He writes about politics in a very careful way, and he does not want to force the reader on a certain opinion or a way of thinking. He does not try to correct the system endlessly, as many other modern writers want to do in their works. He writes about politics in an amazing way. This is a quality I highly admire, a quality, many other writers today simply don't have.

While reading the book I constantly felt the current meaning of the themes. Especially the second part seems to touch the current situation. The terrorism scene described remembered me strongly to the current terrorism threat. It might be the author's background that makes one think so, but there might be other reasons, too. One way or another, he manages to develop a very interesting atmosphere throughout the book.

His style of writing is amazing, the book is written brilliantly.

It was a great pleasure to read this book!

It's always difficult for a new novelist to break through the household literary name strata. And, often, more difficult for the aspiring writer is answering questions as to what their work is about. J. D. Salinger would have found it difficult to describe immediately why the plot of "Catcher in the Rye" was inherently interesting. Norman Mailer would have had trouble with "An American Dream".

There are hooks in Afshin Rattansi's debut novels, four of them published in one volume and all loosely connected, not least that they centre on life in London. The first book is about the growing divide between rich and poor just as balsamic vinegar was becoming fashionable amongst the new yuppie class. There follows a book on how Londoners respond to a terrorist bomb scare and another on how property prices began to dominate life in London. The final book focuses on disinformation and 24 hour TV news. What unites the quartet is an ineluctable quality of the writing.

The first chapters of the first book were written at a time of resurgent Commonwealth writing. Rattansi, himself, worked on stories about Salman Rushdie during the Satanic Verses affair when he was on Tariq Ali's groundbreaking Channel 4 series, Bandung File.

The prologue begins with one of the lead women characters of the books, now settled in marriage, relocating to the site of the 2005 Asian Tsunami. It is as if the person who most embraced the new opportunities that privatisation and a city that encouraged entrepreneurship is most shattered by its consequences.

Rattansi sees politics in everything. He worked as a chief risk analyst at the insurers' Lloyd's of London after they had lost billions of pounds. His expertise was in catastrophe analysis, both environmental and political. But the books are in no way political tracts.

"One of the most moving letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald is the one he writes to his daughter, urging her to read Marx. His novels may be liked by criminal conservatives like Jeffrey Archer but whether a novel is political one way or another is in the eye of the beholder.

"What animates the title novel, I hope, is that I was part of a generation which was convinced that the social fabric that was ripped apart by Mrs. Thatcher would take a long time to mend. It was a time when one section of society leapfrogged at the expense of another."

Despite looking in his later twenties, Rattansi is on Jonathan Coe's eighties' territory about the post-punk, post-New Romantic time of The Smiths and the Orgreave battle of the Miners' Strike. But The Dream of the Decade is much more international than Coe.

"I always envisaged that the four main themes or even obstacles that the characters would have to circumnavigate were class, political terrorism, property and the media. They are vague but actually impact on everyday life. Well, at the time, terrorism didn't impact on daily life and the book rather explodes the myth that it does. But certainly, property does. As for the media, its place is an education system for adults - a dangerously flawed education system. I actually wrote a novel about education but it wasn't up to scratch."

Rattansi's first job was at The Guardian and he has a younger brother who followed him into journalism, now anchoring world news from CNN in the U.S.

Rattansi was born in Cambridge but has lived all over the world, covering wars and political stories and just writing. Among the places he's lived in are Vancouver in Canada, in Los Angeles and in Havana and Caracas. In Dubai, for two years, he headed up the developing world's first 24 hour English language news station, devoted to an incredible remit that at times, according to Rattansi "made Al Jazeera look like Fox News."
From there, it was out of the frying pan and into the fire. Returning to the BBC where he had worked as a producer for a number of years, he found himself at the Today programme just as the question of Weapons of Mass Destruction led up to unprecedented resignations by the Director General and Governor's Chairman of the BBC.

Apart from the final novel, which reads as a Scoop for the twenty-first century, Rattansi's characters are usually doomed in love, either because of distances, class or the overpowering pressures of life in London. But this isn't Bridget Jones. There's a real anomie in the characters - whether they are drinking champagne or sitting injured in cardboard boxes - which recalls Beckett as much as F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Christopher MacLehose, the publisher of Richard Ford, Haruki Murakami, Georges Perec and José Saramago, said that he could still feel the force of "The Dream of the Decade." The evocation of London is as palpable as in Peter Ackroyd's biography of the city. Sometimes, it is to the capital city as Bukowski's prose was to Los Angeles - indeed the Barfly himself read it and found it uplifting. At other times it is strictly Waugh. Whereas most journalists' fiction demonstrates that being a hack is an Enemy of Promise, Rattansi creates big characters who we feel for because he examines the minutiae of their emotions. But, as one would expect from someone who covered the fall of the Berlin Wall and who worked at the controversial Arabic satellite TV station, Al Jazeera, the themes are far from small.