Best book review of 2004

The best book review that I read this year was published in the London Review of Books. In Mao meets Oakeshott, John Lanchester reviewed Mind the Gap: The New Class Divide in Britain by Ferdinand Mount.

Here's the blurb:

In this provocative and ruthlessly frank book, Ferdinand Mount argues that there is a new class divide in Britain which is just as vicious and hard to get rid of as the old one. Through acute observation - drawing on every aspect of life from soap operas, speech patterns and gardening to education and the distribution of wealth - he demolishes the illusion that we live in a classless society and shows how the worst-off in Britain today are more culturally deprived than their parents or grandparents.

I have to admit straight away that I haven't read Mind the Gap, but I found Lanchester's review so interesting that I've read it more than once.

There are just so many observations in it that ring true to me, beginning with these two sentences from the first paragraph:

Britain produces an extraordinary amount of commentary, in print, on television and on radio; so much that the production of opinion can seem to be our dominant industry, the thing we are best at and most take to.

The problem with our public culture is not that it is low-grade: it is that it is fluent, clear, coherent, often vividly expressed, and more or less entirely free of fresh intellectual content. You can go whole weeks reading the broadsheet press without encountering a new idea; you can listen to hundreds of hours of broadcast debate and encounter nothing but received wisdoms.

And then there's The crisis is related to the fact that our culture now values only two things, money and celebrity, and the poor by definition don't have either.

It's a great review of what sounds like a really interesting, if depressing, book. When I re-read it recently, however, one section in particular stood out:

Our Downers - to use Mount's preferred term for the losers in the British class system - are, by world standards, culturally impoverished. It is difficult to be precise and non-subjective about this, but there seems to be a genre of working-class life in England which has no equivalent in the rest of the developed world. The deprivation in question is not material: we're not talking about child labour, or anything which by global standards - the standards of the four billion people who live on less than $4 a day - is considered absolute poverty. It is difficult to quantify this deprivation, though Mount does have one or two good examples, such as the fact that 42 per cent of all burglaries happen to 1 per cent of all homes, principally those belonging to the poor and/or single parents: so the less you have, the more likely you are to have it stolen.

That last statement is in direct contrast to the reporting of recent events here in London. As this month's Economist London Briefing pointed out:

The murder of a respected City financier in late November shocked Londoners. John Monckton, a 49-year-old fund manager, was stabbed to death by two burglars who forced their way into his £3m home in Chelsea, a smart neighbourhood. His wife, Homeyra, was severely injured. Police arrested two men in connection with the killing on December 14th. A third suspect was arrested and bailed last month.

This was the latest in a string of violent assaults on householders in London's richer parts. In October, Robert Symons, a 45-year-old-teacher, died in similar circumstances in his home in Chiswick. And in September, a retired paediatrician and his wife were stabbed to death in a gated estate in Highgate Hill. Violent crime is worsening across the capital, particularly knife-crime in some boroughs, according to crime statistics.

So what's the lesson in all this? The less you have, the more likely you are to have it stolen; but the more you had, the more likely it'll appear in the press.