Book Notes: Bothelford’s Gone by Edward McLaren

~ Clarissa ~ 8 Comments

I’m a literary critic. I can’t like a book if it’s not well-written. There’s no consideration of political usefulness or ideological affinity that can vanquish my desire to read beautiful texts. This is why I am happy to report that in Edward McLaren’s novel Bothelford’s Gone I finally found a right-wing text with artistic value.

Bothelford’s Gone is not a political manifesto or a propaganda screed. It’s a work of art that is as complicated as the world it describes. It’s a Bildungsroman whose teenage protagonist tries to grow up in a world that ditched the idea of growth in favor of mindless, aggressively pursued change for its own sake.

McLaren’s diagnosis of Britain’s (and, by extension, the West’s) ills is neither shallow nor simplistic. The writer correctly intuits that what the Right urgently needs is a philosophy of the times. We need to explain the degradation of our reality, from the devastation of the natural world to the fraying of social bonds, in ways that eschew both convoluted conspiratorialism and superficial sloganeering. The novel is promoted as the first literary portrayal of Muslim rape gangs in Britain, and it is absolutely that. It is also much more.

Bothelford’s Gone portrays Britain as being profoundly spiritually unwell. Families fall apart, culture disintegrates, and meaningless licentiousness overpowers people who are glued to their screens in search of pornified titillation. Before Jack and Agatha, the novel’s teenage protagonists, were brutalized by foreigners, they were betrayed by their own self-indulgent and careless parents.

The novel leaves you wanting to think deeply and obsessively about the reality it portrays. This is how real art works. It becomes part of you. You go into the world, carrying it inside you and touching others with the traces of the art that transformed you. The concept of shared culture has disintegrated into volitional content with everybody consuming—and what a word this is!—their own, highly idiosyncratic list of cultural products. We don’t vibrate in sync because we don’t hear the same music of words, images, and rhythms. Whoever manages to overcome the isolating tendency of our times will win the future. Culture is only that if it is shared. We need to come together over real art.

Bothelford’s Gone is a good place to start.

The Fastest Battlefield Gain

~ Clarissa ~ Leave a comment

Once again, thank you, Elon.

It was really dire before he got involved and shut down Russians’ comms. I was completely desperate in early February. I thought Ukraine wouldn’t survive the month. And then there was this dramatic improvement.

Another Quote from Bothelford’s Gone

~ Clarissa ~ Leave a comment

Please enjoy another quote from Bothelford’s Gone by Edward McLaren. Jack Grundon is a teenage boy who becomes a pariah after attacking the Alawite rapist of his classmate Agatha:

His father: what did he have to say about his father? The man had secured a livelihood without maintaining a marriage; in any other historical context but the modern one, Jack wondered, would it have been conceivable that his life was something other than a failure, a shame? And now that shame had deepened because of Jack, his actions, and because John Grundon, his father, was no longer himself anymore but the one responsible for raising him: Mad Jack, the undesirable lunatic who had squandered, all in one go, his serious chance of getting into a good university and due to striking Basil, the reputation of his entire family. Even if all the accusations of his assault on Agatha were cleared up, that stain would linger. ‘Funny how everyone pretends that
honour doesn’t exist’, Jack thought to himself, ‘but as soon as you embarrass yourself in the wrong way—not by molesting a girl, but by acting against the one inconveniently responsible—suddenly it’s the Victorian Age again…’

Travel with Kids

~ Clarissa ~ 6 Comments

People are discussing on social media whether it’s possible to travel internationally with small children. And yes, it’s possible but a more important question is whether it’s necessary. Children don’t need it. It’s done exclusively for adults. We’ve traveled internationally with Klara. She tolerated it as a form of eccentricity in which her parents engage for incomprehensible reasons. I don’t experience any need to pretend that she benefitted from it in a way she wouldn’t have from spending that time at home with her parents.

I’m fairly well-traveled but I don’t see why people turn travel into some sort of a meaning-conferring activity.

The World Belongs to the Lonesome

~ Clarissa ~ 11 Comments

There are enormous benefits to being an unsociable curmudgeon. For one, you can’t get cancelled for hanging out with people. Because you don’t hang out with anybody.

There was no need for the old dude to go anywhere and stand next to any women. Whether he did that innocently or not, his memory is now tarnished and his scientific discoveries are downgraded. I hope he enjoyed standing next to the prostitutes for 3 minutes because at least it should be worth it.

Neoliberalism promotes self-indulgence but punishes for it severely. Only the self-control of a sincere medieval monk promises comfort in a neoliberal world.

Q&A about Entertainment Debates

~ Clarissa ~ 4 Comments

No, I never heard of these people. I can say, however, that high culture has always been the purview of a tiny minority, and that is absolutely fine. It might feel like the number of stupid people with terrible taste is growing. But it’s not growing. We simply see them more often because of social media. The number of people who can understand and enjoy the novels of Anthony Trollope was always small. The number of those who can understand philosophy is even smaller. What changed is that reading Trollope is a superior form of entertainment because it requires a higher IQ and a better organized brain.

Quote of the Day: Progressive Leftism and Market Liberalism

~ Clarissa ~ 9 Comments

The progressive left that has seized so much of the heights of Western culture is not some radical threat to the establishment. It IS the establishment. Progressive leftism is market liberalism by other means. It enables the spread and growth of machine society by launching an all-out war on any cultural norms that remain to us in the 2020s, norms that act as a brake on the spread of machine values. The Left and corporate capitalism now function like a pincer. One attacks the culture, deconstructing everything from history to heteronormativity to national identities. The other moves in to monetize the resulting fragments.

Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine

By the machine, Kingsnorth means the ultra-digital surveillance apparatus produced by the merger of the corporate world and the government in neoliberal societies.

A brilliant statement from a serious philosopher. Zygmunt Bauman would love Kingsnorth.

The Rhode Island Tragedy

~ Clarissa ~ 3 Comments

At a hockey game in Rhode Island, a shooter opened fire, killing two people and injuring three more. Then he shot himself.

The shooter’s wife had left him several years ago because he started posing as a woman and even had transgender surgery. Now he took his revenge, murdering her.

The Voters that Matter

~ Clarissa ~ Leave a comment

The simple truth is that you don’t win the Dem nomination without African Americans voting for you en masse. In 2020, African Americans gave the nomination to the geriatric Biden because he’d been Obama’s VP. For 2028, African Americans already have Kamala. All of the other candidates are wasting their time. But they got to keep trying and in the process they’ll descend to such depths of BLM-style lunacy that it will feel like the Summer of Floyd on steroids.

Quote of the Day

~ Clarissa ~ 7 Comments

I wanted to post this quote from Bothelford’s Gone. In this scene, Jack, a teenage British boy, visits a local abortion clinic:

Jack felt like he was visiting a foreign dictatorship with grey but clean streets, and that he had gone and entered the massive prison system that enabled those streets to remain clean in the first place. This clinic, Jack felt, was the place that ultimately made all the club nights in Bothelford possible, all the accidental products of one-night stands, marriages, and other sexual pairings, followed by more play, more partying, rather than an accounting of sorts. It was interesting in its own way. How would he put it if he had to give a presentation on it in class? The clinic was a secondary contraception in case the pills, condoms, and IUDs failed. The disintegrating sense of fun that the bars and nightclubs bred instead of children relied on the of this bland, hidden core. It was filled with unhappy people and, supposedly, a few rooms above, all kinds of surgical tools.

Edward McLaren, Bothelford’s Gone

Just so you are prepared, this is one of the lighter, less emotionally draining part of the novel. Not because there’s anything cute about the industrial-scale abortioneering it describes but because the rest is even harsher.