Andrew O’Hagan
The Atlantic Ocean
The atlantic Ocean is the name Andrew O’Hagan gives to this collection of essays about Britain and the US. It’s a collection of essays, most of them originally written for the London Review of Books, some about life in Britain, some about America, and handily collated under this title. O’Hagan writes about Hurricane Katrina, lad magazines, British farming, waste management. He also looks closely at the lives of two soldiers – one British, one American – who died in Iraq.
There are certain essayists whom one reads with dizzy admiration for their verbal pyrotechnics, their sleight-of-hand, their astonishing erudition – they are self-evidently much smarter than anyone else. Susan Sontag is in that category, as is an early Conor Cruise O’Brien. O’Hagan isn’t of that type – he’s the sort whom you read and find yourself agreeing with.
It’s not that he shoves opinions down your throat – he’s mostly just telling stories, but you pick up the inferences and you start nodding: yes, the CAP (Common Agricultural Policy for those not schooled in EU-speak) is as farcical as anything in Kafka; yes, kids, like man in the state of nature, are nasty, brutish and short, but that doesn’t mean when they do something sick that they’re the embodiment of evil; yes, Daisy Goodwin’s promoting poetry as self-help, “means poetry has a chance to survive, though it might also mean difficult writing does not”; yes, something was truly lost in all this struggle for Iraq.
You agree so often that it becomes slightly embarrassing, as if you’re weak-willed and easily-led. But what you’re responding to is O’Hagan’s ability to see to the heart of the matter, state the problem, reject the obvious interpretation, relate it to his own experience, place it in some kind of national context and then tell you how it is. He refuses to show off, but also to condescend. So he engages you in a discussion of equals, which Sontag and the Cruiser never do.
This is hugely complimentary, but also I think a facet of his politics. There is something Orwellian about O’Hagan, something of the old-school socialist. I would say that he needs to believe that his readers are as intelligent and concerned as he is, in the way that Catholics need to believe in redemption.
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