Volume 45, Number 1 · January 15, 1998
Lost
By Neal Ascherson
As If: A Crime, a Trial, a Question of Childhood
by Blake Morrison
Picador, 209 pp., $21.00
The Missing
by Andrew O'Hagan
New Press, 208 pp., $20.00
These are weepy times in Britain. The upper lip is no longer stiff, and huge leaks have appeared in the dam of the emotional self-control that has traditionally surrounded British life. Everyone, it seems, is wading about in a salty flood of remorseful tears. The 'Diana Week,' in which red-eyed millions canonized their princess as a wronged Madonna of compassion, was only the most amazing overspill of this mood. Tony Blair's overwhelming electoral victory in May, which at the time seemed to be about angry ration- ality, has in retrospect the features of an eruption of public shame. The eighteen years of Thatcherism and post-Thatcherism, with their vulgar gospel of selfish individualism, brought the British public to a point at which they could no longer live with their own self-dislike.
Review, 2671 words
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