Will Self

The 20ft-high statue of brave Achilles that stands at the southern end of Park Lane, beside Hyde Park, wears a curious aspect. The first male nude statue to be erected in London since the Roman era, it was cast from captured French guns and dedicated by “the women of England to Arthur, Duke of Wellington and his brave companions in arms”. The women of England turned out when, in 1822, Richard Westmacott’s statue was conveyed through the streets to its plinth; however, it isn’t recorded whether they were abashed or amazed by Achilles’s, um, classical proportions. The critic Leigh Hunt described the statue as “manifesting the most furious intentions of self-defence against the hero whose abode it is looking at”. And indeed, the great bronze warrior cowers to this day, shield upraised, as if Apsley House (aka “No 1, London”, the nearby house given to Arthur Wellesley by the grateful nation) were about to rise up into the heavens and drop on his head.

Whenever I drive up Park Lane and see craven Achilles it makes me feel naked and vulnerable – and that’s before I’ve clapped eyes on the rest of the so-called public art cluttering up the median strip between the Hilton and Marble Arch. Over the years we’ve had upturned horses’ heads, an anodised Fiat 500, Gordian knots of extruded steel and God knows what other botched attempts at realistic figuration, subjective expression, or conceivably both.

I blame the women of England: before Achilles began his (to date) 193-year-long flashing incident, statues were first and foremost hieratic, either expressing the sacerdotal nature of power or emphasising the power of the sacred. Just like the nobs who commissioned them, the nudes of the 18th century only gradually came creeping out of country-house salons and into the landscaped garden – but by the mid-19th century there were all sorts of bizarre statues being plonked down hither and thither.

That certain mega-figures became asso­ciated with their respective cities only goes to show … Well, what? I’ve ridden the switchback railway up Corcovado in Rio de Janeiro; standing at the summit was Christ the Redeemer, performing a benediction while wreathed in clouds. He didn’t look very happy – and nor was I. On the flanks of the mountain, and spreading away inland, are Rio’s favelas, where the homicide rate is such that more people have died in the city since the beginning of the First Intifada (1987) than have perished in the whole of Israel-Palestine. If Jesus Christ is Rio’s genius loci then He is not the milquetoast depicted in the New Testament but one of the manifestations of Olodumare, the creator-deity of the Brazilian Candomblé religion, a syncretism of Catholicism and Yoruba beliefs whose adherents believe not in striving to be moral, but in fulfilling their individual destiny whatever the consequences.

The figuration of the Roman goddess Libertas that stands, torch upraised, on a plinth-island in Upper New York Bay formed by the shells of myriad extinct bivalves could be viewed in a similar light. This touchstone of the Enlightenment is the default destination for all benighted tourists. I took the boat trip round the statue for the first time last year. It was the climactic day of the week-long Gay Pride celebrations in Manhattan, and, dragging my offspring through overcooked streets crammed with revellers, I began to feel a certain – wholly unjustified – heterosexual resentment. It looked to be cooler out in the Bay, but in fact we were treated to a wittily bilious hour-long commentary by a woman from Queens whose native New Yorker pride was offset only by her animus towards Wall Street’s deluded Masters of the Universe.

In his poem “For the Union Dead”, Robert Lowell anatomises the memorial that stands in the north-eastern corner of Boston Common, featuring a bas-relief of Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the first volunteer force of African Americans raised to fight for the north. Lowell writes:

William James could almost hear the

bronze Negroes breathe.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone

in the city’s throat.

I’d argue that all such monuments – godly or temporal – stick in cities’ throats. In Straw Dogs, his chapbook of aphorisms, John Gray notes: “In cities, persons are shadows cast by places, and no generation lasts as long as a street.” An aperçu that makes of every civic dignitary an Ozymandias, drawing a bead on us through the gunsights of Time.

This isn’t at all reassuring, because I don’t think I can bear the thought that some (if not all) of the tat that passes for public art in Britain will long outlast me. It’s just as disturbing as the inverted scenario whereby an ancient statue of great beauty – such as the Bamiyan Buddhas – is destroyed within one’s lifetime. Yet it is chilling to picture some survivor of the apocalypse clambering through the rubble of St Pancras and coming upon the sightless eyes of Paul Day’s crappily kitsch giant lovers. Will they see the statue as evidence of a long-gone civilisation populated by cartoonish humanoids? Or will they set to excavating the rubble from the embracing figures so as to find out whether the male one has a more impressively thrusting sword than … Achilles?

On 2 February a crowd of maddened professors wrote to the Guardian to protest against the government’s latest counterterrorism and security bill, which was being hustled through parliament with unseemly haste. The larval bill has now emerged from its neo-Gothic chrysalis to become a beautifully inelegant act. What the professors were so crazy about are the provisions in Section 5 that place an obli­gation on their universities to assist the police and security services in monitoring extremism. In fact, the so-called Prevent strategy has been in place and affecting universities for over a decade. It has hitherto been incumbent on universities that have been signed up to the strategy to allow the state authorities access to relevant computer data, including students’ emails and web history. Now that requirement will become universal and mandatory.

The maddened crowd of professors sought to remind our legislators that academic freedom is enshrined in the Education Act 1986, which places an obligation on universities to “ensure that freedom of speech within the law is secured for members, students and employees of the establishment and visiting speakers”. Those ludicrous Branestawms seemed to think there was some conflict between the law on the statute book and the new legislation. In fact, any British student who’s a member of a group affiliated to Fosis (the Federation of Student Islamic Societies) is almost certainly under some kind of surveillance; not – as regular readers of this column will know – that I regard this as being particularly intrusive, given that the secret affairs of HMG are more often typified by egregious cock-up than by effective conspiracy.

Nevertheless, as a Muslim student recently put it to me, “I came to university believing that I was going to be educated in the Socratic method: that there’d be no bounds on what could be thought or said, and that this was an integral aspect of the inquiry.” No, really, this is pretty much verbatim – and I was tempted to reply: “With eloquence like that at your disposal, you hardly need what passes for a higher education nowadays.” But of course I didn’t, because the truth of the matter is that although I’d heard this debate rumbling on in the background since the 7/7 bombings, I never really considered what its impact might be on young and impressionable minds.

The nub of the problem is that if the aim of Prevent is to, um, prevent young people from thinking extremist thoughts, then any course of study that encourages them to consider extremist viewpoints is, ipso facto, against the law. But if the aim of Prevent is to encourage our espoused values – such as tolerance for different viewpoints, critical thinking and democratic accountability – then precisely such a course of study must be mandated. This catch-22 epitomises our confused and paradoxical thinking about the threat that Islamist extremism represents to our society. (And I say “our society” advisedly: the threat Islamism represents to people in, say, Raqqa, is entirely different.) At a White House conference on extremism and terrorism on 18 February, Barack Obama bloviated: “We are not at war with Islam. We are at war with people who have perverted Islam,” and added: “No religion is responsible for terrorism – people are responsible for violence and terrorism.”

It’s difficult to know how to unpick this conceptual tangle, but one place to begin might be to say: OK, clearly nobody can be “at war” with an abstraction such as religion (or “drugs”, for that matter) but surely we can agree that religious ideas are present in the disturbing ideological gallimaufry of Islamist extremism? Well, no, not if you’re a western policymaker, because to acknow­ledge that religious beliefs can be a prime political mover is to lend them the very sort of credence they claim to represent. In the States, where millions of voters regard their religious beliefs as precisely that, Obama’s words must induce still more cognitive dissonance into the collective consciousness; yet for him and our own rather more secular leaders, “politicising” the militants doesn’t help either. After all, to concede that the terrorists may have political aims is implicitly to acknowledge that Muslim communities – in the Middle East and globally – may have justifiable grievances.

And so the whole sad, sorry go-round of equivocation-masquerading-as-moral-certainty continues. Fatally compromised by its own historic compromise between religion and politics (as if the two could ever be entirely decoupled), the west continues to substitute paranoia for the quality most needed to combat extremism: belief. Belief and, dare I say it, nerve. We need to believe in just those values of tolerance, openness and free speech that the new act so clearly vitiates; and we need the nerve to maintain such beliefs in the face of threats against them. Naturally, if we western secularists could admit to ourselves that our own values are articles of faith rather than demonstrable truths we would probably have more success with the young and impressionable crowd of potential jihadists. They may not all be as acute as the student I spoke to, but if there’s one thing young people detect in their elders – and one thing that repels them from their elders’ values – it’s a urinous tang of hypocrisy, such as hangs over a crowd of MPs as they rush through a division lobby.

I once ate in a revolving restaurant in Minneapolis but only because it was midwinter, too frigid to venture out, and the spinning eatery was atop the hotel I was staying in. Anyway, I alighted from the lift and stood gawping, awed, as empty tables and rigid napery sped along a horizon snaggle-toothed with high-rises and swollen over by snow clouds. Once seated, I could observe the rather skilled footwork required by the waiters as they moved from orbiting table to focal servery and back, incorporating the revolution into their parabolic course calculations. I put it to mine that the restaurant was really, um, going a bit fast; and he said that the management sped it up from time to time to keep everyone on their toes.

I suspect this was apocryphal, but one thing was true: despite the subdued lighting, the inoffensive dark-leather banquettes, the plain white tablecloths and the bland cuisine (when in doubt about anything in the Midwest, order steak), I felt utterly nauseous. I tried fixing my eyes on the horizon, or looking only at my immediate surroundings, or following the lolloping waiters with my sluggish gaze – but it made no difference. Man, I concluded, has not evolved to digest in a giant orrery; and so I resolved never to eat in a revolving restaurant again.

Not only that, I began to look upon the Provisional IRA in a rather more kindly light. True, its members were murdering, terroristic bastards but at least they’d bombed the Top of the Tower, London’s only revolving restaurant, which occupied the 34th floor of the then Post Office Tower between 1966 and 1980. It seemed a curious target choice. At the time (1971), people wondered if the Provos were making some sort of anti-heliocentric statement, but I think their ASU (active service unit) ate there and had a bad experience. Nowadays they’d probably just leave a snarky review on TripAdvisor.

Still, resolutions, like ceasefires, are made to be broken, which was why, on a chilly, smoggy day in January this year, in Jaipur, Rajasthan, northern India, I found myself dismounting from Ricky’s tuk-tuk, breasting the Heraclitan flux of the traffic on MI (Mirza Ismail) Road and entering the Om Tower, which has a revolving restaurant atop its lofty 14 storeys. True, I’d resolved never to become a human rotisserie again but a revolving restaurant in a provincial Indian city? This wasn’t a case of a “real meal”, more one of a “really meal”. As in: “Did you really eat in a revolving restaurant in Jaipur?” To which the only possible reply is: “Well, yes, I did, and it was right tasty.”

That goes for both the food and the decor, because although to someone of my generation the concept of a revolving restaurant still seems utterly modern, the truth is that in their relentless go-round, these gustatory equivalents of the DeLorean DMC-12 simply convey us back to a future imagined in about 1971. From the exterior, the Om Tower even looked like the Post Office Tower – a concrete yoghurt pot on top of a concrete milk carton. Once inside, I thrilled to the expanses of wood-veneer-effect MDF, the dusty-leaved rubber plants, the mercurial mirroring, the greasy pile carpets and the halting progress of the lift as it oozed up to the 14th storey. Time, as any post-Einsteinian knows, is a relative concept, so when I was seated at the window, looking out over exhaust-shrouded domes and minarets towards the nearby park-your-ox-and-ride stop, I had the curious sensation of straddling several decades at once.

It was a sensation that only increased in intensity when the smiling waiter, executing some nifty dance steps, brought me my Revolving Special Thali, which was a snip at 540 rupees. It helped, I suppose, that the thali is a circular, flat-bottomed aluminium dish that put me in mind of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, because although there was no sign of the elephants and the turtle underpinning that fabulist’s cosmology, the conjunction of all these revolving circular bodies implied a syzygy.

Moreover, although I could see little of Jaipur through the smog, I knew that somewhere down there was the Jantar Mantar, the bizarre celestial observatory built by the Rajput king Sawai Jai Singh in the early 18th century. As I tipped out the little aluminium pots – or katori – and filled the thali with a sludge of dhal, rice, curds and vegetable curries, it occurred to me that were I sufficiently attentive I might be able to make some interesting observations using this foodie instrumentation. After all, the instruments at the Jantar Mantar are huge, solid structures of marble, stone and bronze, which are still used to calculate auspicious ceremonial times. Surely I could pull off something similar with my lunch crockery? Especially considering that I, unlike Sawai Jai Singh (and possibly the IRA), have no conceptual problem with the idea that the planets revolve around the sun.

Such speculations entertained me as, like some interstellar traveller in a Christopher Nolan film, I described an arc through space-time that took me, oscillating, between Jaipur and London, 1971 and 2015. My speculations were so absorbing that I forgot I was eating in a revolving restaurant until the bill came. I paid up, tottered across the greasy-carpeted empyrean, felt suddenly nauseous, found the gents and vomited copiously. The moral is: you can put the boy in a revolving restaurant but you can’t keep a good meal down. Or something like that.

Will Self is going to be reading from his work and reflecting on the art of fiction at Goldsmiths Writers’ Centre on 11 March 2015, from 6pm to 7.30pm. For free tickets, visit the New Statesman here