Letters From London

  Over the last five years, we have learned new things about the speed and communicability of international outrage. When the House of Chanel recently apologized to Muslims for the Koran-embroidered bustier worn by Claudia Schiffer in its latest summer collection, the protest had come not from some street march in the Rue de Rivoli but from the Muslim community in Jakarta. The affair of the Satanic Breasts, as it became known in France, could be seen as a comic analogue of the Rushdie case were it not for the chilling presence of fire, as promised by Chanel’s chief executive: “The three dresses and the texts will be destroyed by incineration.” We have also learned that The Satanic Verses is not a one-off blasphemy but, rather, one among various categories of thought which fundamentalists seek to eradicate. The English newspapers may not have got a shot of the Rushdie-Major encounter, but there were pictures enough of the five thousand or so Muslim fundamentalists who met in Dacca last December to demand the death of the thirty-one-year-old poet and feminist Taslima Nasreen. Two months previously, a group of clerics had pronounced a fatwa on her and offered the paltry fee of £850. Nasreen had, inter alia, denounced Bangladeshi men for keeping women “veiled, illiterate, and in the kitchen;” and the women certainly don’t seem to have enough status to take part in this heavily bearded protest. Then there is the recent misfortune of the Muslim actress from Bombay, Shabana Azmi: she was threatened with a campaign of “severe action” for the “un-Islamic and un-Indian act” of kissing Nelson Mandela on the cheek while presenting him with the Newsmaker of the Year award in South Africa.

  Rushdie argues strongly that his own case, while the most publicized, is not egregious; it exists in a specific intellectual and political context. In the West, we tend to be picky about individual cases, and unwilling to countenance the idea of a general punitive movement. According to Rushdie, most journalists were not interested in the deaths of seventeen writers and journalists in Algeria between March and December of last year: “It happened in Arabic.” He points out that when the Western nations pooled their intelligence about Iran a couple of years ago, every expert agreed that Iran now has an extensive terrorist network in place across Europe. And the assassins-in-waiting are not, we can be sure, all there in case Rushdie does a signing session in the nearest town. This generality of threat is, apart from anything else, one answer to the sneery little charge against Rushdie that he “knew what he was doing.” Did the others—the Algerian writers, for example? What is it that suddenly, worldwide, makes Iranian dissidents, antifundamentalists, novelists, and journalists of various ideological stripes decide that they simply must throw themselves upon the enemy’s sword? Or could it be the sword that is moving?

  Toward the end of the Oxford fund-raiser, Rushdie read the scene from Midnight’s Children in which the ten-year-old Saleem, pursued by school bullies, loses the top third of his middle finger by having it shut in a door. Then the evening closed with a Brahms violin sonata, and we all trooped back to the greenroom. The litterateurs offered congratulations to the musicians, but they weren’t having any. “The Brahms was not good,” said the pianist self-reproachingly. “I’ve never before failed to play two whole notes of the opening chord.” The violinist admitted that she had also had problems. They did not like to imply blame, but one minute they were listening to Rushdie read a line about “the top third of my middle finger lying there like a lump of well-chewed bubble-gum,” and the next they were applying digits to ivory and gut while trying to ignore the whistling afterlife of the novelist’s image. It seemed a local but appropriate reminder of the basic truth: words count.

  February 1994

  The rest of 1994 passed without any visible sign that the British government was “leading from the front.” There were more signs of life from Mr. Rushdie, who published a new collection of stories. In July 1994 I interviewed Tony Blair, the new Labour leader, and asked where he stood on Rushdie. “Fully supportive of him…. I absolutely one hundred percent support him.” When I pointed out that the Labour Party had had its problems with the case, he replied, “There were some people who had problems with it. But you can’t muck around with something like this at all. I mean, you can’t have someone having a death sentence passed on them because they happen to have written a book people don’t like. I mean, that was supposed to have gone out many centuries ago in this country.”

  14

  Froggy! Froggy! Froggy!

  In Flaubert’s Botward et Pécuchet, there is a scene in which Pécuchet, who has temporarily turned geology student, explains to his friend Bouvard what would happen if there were an earthquake beneath the English Channel. The water, he maintains, would all rush out into the Atlantic, the coastlines would begin to totter, and then slowly the two landmasses would shuffle across and reunite. On hearing this prophecy, Bouvard runs away in terror—a reaction, we are invited to conclude, not so much to the idea of cataclysm as to that of the British coming any nearer.

  On Friday, May 6, 1994, after more than a century of dreaming, fantastical planning, botched beginnings, enthusiasm, and paranoia, the Channel Tunnel was officially opened, creating a fixed link between Britain and France for the first time since the Ice Age and fulfilling Bouvard’s worst nightmare. Yet few ran away in terror as the Queen and President Mitterrand inaugurated the Tunnel—twice, as if to make doubly sure after all this time. They opened it first at the Coquelles terminal outside Calais, where low cloud choked off the fly-past; and then, after a refreshing fish lunch, at the Cheriton terminal near Folkestone. At Coquelles there was a pleasant symbolic moment when two enormous Eurotrains, each carrying a head of state, approached, one from London and one from Paris, on the same line of track, and drew slowly to a halt close enough to kiss cheeks. Then President Mitterrand, as host, hopped from his carriage first and waited on the platform for the various high British dignitaries to disembark: Her Majesty in a vivid fuchsia ensemble (clashing horribly with the sodden red carpet underfoot), John Major (clashing horribly with current electoral opinion), and Baroness Thatcher (clashing horribly with the whole idea of European fraternity).

  At both Calais and Folkestone, there were the traditional salutings and stiff-necked language, accompanied by Lord Lieutenants and bechained mayors. But the Queen and M. Mitterrand were in fact presiding over a fairly untraditional—indeed, postmodern—inauguration. For no sooner was the Tunnel “opened” than it was closed again, and it won’t reopen for business until various safety tests have been passed and operating certificates obtained. The last months saw a blur of constant rescheduling in which the only things not to be derailed were the regal and presidential diaries. Still, Her Majesty did the decent democratic thing and tried out for the rest of us the two different transport systems that in due course will operate through the Tunnel. For her outward journey, from Waterloo Station to Calais, she used the swanky new Eurostar passenger train. For her return journey, like any other Francophile punter back from the Dordogne, she put the old Rolls-Royce Phantom VI on the car transporter, known under the nasty macaronic of Le Shuttle. This drive-on, drive-off service, which targets the cross-Channel ferries, may not enter its full turn-up-and-go glory until next spring, but will be available before then to those described as “opinion-formers.” These consist of travel operators, piqued Eurotunnel shareholders who must by now be wondering when they’ll ever see a return on their money, and those bold optimists who back in January actually laid out some cash for a booking on this temporarily notional service. It is indicative of the public mood that, although the proposed timetables were widely advertised and plausibly detailed, although first-day fever strikes here as elsewhere, and the nation seethes with transport buffs and train spotters, a mere hundred tickets for Le Shuttle were presold.

  Such wariness was typical of the response on the Tunnel’s northern shore. The British attitude was one of phlegm and skepticism. The French, meanwhile, were much more openly celebratory, with Calais voting itself nine days of heavily subsidized festivity (bands, midnight dances, the traditio
nal carnival giants of northern France, the National Orchestra of Lille playing a hymn of peace). You might have expected things to be the other way round, since in statistical terms Britain seeks Europe much more than Europe seeks Britain: figures from the ferry companies show that eight out of ten Channel crossings currently originate in Britain, while a profile of Tunnel-users-to-be indicates that only a measly 7 percent of them are expected to be French. But this rare joint venture (the first major Franco-British collaboration since the Concorde) has accentuated one of the profounder differences between the two countries. The French have a taste for and commitment to what they call grands projets: large public endeavors, backed by government money, that revel in the latest technology and add luster to the nation. Recent examples include the TGV express-rail network, the Louvre Pyramid, the Grande Bibliothèque, the Beaubourg, and the Ariane rocket. The British are temperamentally more suspicious, or shy, about expressing the national spirit through such means; in addition, they have had for the last decade and a half a government ideologically opposed to large capital projects except when funded by the private sector. Our spirit of muscular self-deprecation also seems to ensure that the running news about such few projects as exist is usually depressing: underfunding, overspending, delays, and cock-ups. One of the last British grands projets, the Humber Bridge, was opened by the Queen in 1981. It cut fifty miles off the journey from Grimsby to Hull, replaced an ancient ferry system, and was designed to bring prosperity to a moribund region. But the bridge itself has now become a symbol of failure: the fifteen thousand vehicles that cross it each day pay off only 25 percent of the interest charges on the bridge’s debt, which is currently £439 million and rising at the rate of £1.42 a second. Similarly, there has been scarcely a single upbeat report on the new British Library over the last decades. In 1993, the proposed shelving, all 186 miles, was found not to work for the dismal and basic reason that the books fell off the end of it.

  Of course, French grands projets have their cock-ups, too. In its initial design, the Grande Bibliothèque audaciously overthrew the hackneyed old concept of storing the books underground and putting the readers on top of them; instead, the readers were to be placed at ground level and half the books in four eighteen-story towers above. Too late was it pointed out that the last thing valuable books want is to be exposed to heat and light; and so—to the accompaniment of much Parisian mockery—the sky-high library had to be protected by a whole additional system of internal insulation paneling. But even so, the French bring more self-belief and political will to such projects, plus an intellectual chutzpah that the British tend to dismiss as pretension. Dominique Jamet, appointed by President Mitterrand to establish the Grande Bibliothèque, remarked, naturally enough, that “the primacy of the book resides in the spirit of each of us.” It is hard to imagine a library official in Britain making a comparable remark without being packed off into early retirement.

  The British affect to believe that they are stern pragmatists while the French are airy dreamers. This could not be less true than in the case of the Channel Tunnel. Honors and deadlines may have been shared in the digging and boring; but aboveground the difference is instructive. The French have their high-speed rail link to Paris already in place, the TGV Nord network having been built from scratch in only three years. They also have a chain of new stations and a glittering terminal at Lille for transfers to the rest of Europe. On the British side, there is at least a fine new extension to Waterloo Station, built within budget and opened on time in May of 1993. But there is no high-speed rail link between Waterloo and Folkestone, only a low-speed one over tracks clogged with commuter traffic; and when the high-speed link is finally in place (its cloud-cuckoo-land completion date has just been pushed back from 2002 to a probable 2005) it won’t run directly into Waterloo anyway but into St. Pancras in North London. John Prescott, as Opposition transport spokesman, declared that the Channel Tunnel was joining a twenty-first-century rail network to a nineteenth-century one; and the Eurobusinessman looking for national metaphors might unhappily find one as his Paris-to-London train gradually decelerates from 180 miles per hour in Germinal territory to a third of that in the Kentish hop fields. President Mitterrand, himself the son of a Stationmaster, could not resist a lofty professional tease: future passengers, he said as he opened another gleaming section of TGV Nord, would “race at great pace across the plains of northern France, hurtle through the Tunnel on a fast track, and then be able to daydream at very low speed, admiring the landscape.” There is a particular irony about this, given that 150 years ago it was British engineers and British navvies who laid out the first elements of the French rail network.

  It was appropriate that the first of the Tunnel’s two inaugurations took place on the French side, since historically the French have shown more consistent zeal for the subaqueous link. In 1751 the Amiens Academy held a competition to explore new ways of crossing the Channel, while the first serious tunnel proposal came from the French engineer Albert Mathieu in 1802, a project favored by Napoleon. Throughout the rest of the century, an inventor’s fun pack of ideas was put forward: bridges of various sorts, iron tubes laid along the seabed, tunnels surfacing at halfway islands for a change of horses, monster ferries capable of devouring whole trains. Though exploratory borings were made on both sides of the Channel in the 1880s, lack of money and lack of plausibility scuppered most of these schemes. Just as important on the British side, however, was a toxic nationalistic mix of military caution, political snootiness, and intellectual skepticism. When the Channel Tunnel (Experimental Works) Bill was under discussion, Lord Randolph Churchill, in one of those primped declarations which easily pass for wit in political life, claimed that “the reputation of England has hitherto depended upon her being, as it were, virgo intacta. In 1882, there was a petition from 1,070 members of the Great and the Good urging that lascivious Continental hands be kept off the chaste body of Britannia. Signatories ranged from Queen Victoria’s gynecologist to the Archbishop of Canterbury and Cardinal Newman, via Tennyson, Browning, Herbert Spencer, and T. H. Huxley.

  The virgo intacta claim of Lord Randolph Churchill (who himself died of syphilis, while we’re about it) was a direct descendant of that famous piece of realtor’s spiel uttered by John of Gaunt in Richard II: this sceptered isle, this other Eden, demiparadise, this fortress against infection and the hand of war, this precious stone set in the silver sea, which acts as a moat defensive to a house against the envy of less happier lands, and so on. The hand of war has always been one of the principal British objections to tunneling: Field Marshal Wolseley turned Queen Victoria against the notion (Prince Albert had been in favor) by asserting that the British Army would have to be doubled in size to cope with the consequent threat. There have been fears of enemy borings, too: recently released documents in the Public Record Office show that in the early years of the Second World War the government had an active anxiety about a possible German tunnel. It was calculated that a speed-dig might take the enemy as little as twenty months, and at one time the Royal Navy instructed its ships in the Channel to keep a lookout for giveaway muddy water. Fear of invasion is nowadays a diminishing factor, though last-ditch advocates of the moat defensive might point to the events of May 1991. Shortly after British and French engineers had shaken triumphant hands, a hundred Parisian printers slipped surreptitiously into the Tunnel and marched on London to protest against their maltreatment by Robert Maxwell. They managed thirteen miles beneath the waves before coming up against a locked chamber, which at that time was all that protected Britain from France.

  A fortress against infection? Very much so. It has been one of this country’s justifiable boasts that rabies has been virtually extinct here since 1902. Over the last few years, however, paranoid amateur pathographers have been able to watch the disease patter northward across Europe, almost in anticipation of the Channel Tunnel’s opening. It was as if, lining up behind Mitterrand and the Queen as they cut the tricolor ribbons at Calais
were packs of swivel-eyed dogs, fizzing foxes, and slavering squirrels, all waiting to jump on the first boxcar to Folkestone and sink their teeth into some Kentish flesh. Decent publicity was therefore given to a system of defenses, ranging from stalag fencing to “stun mats,” which will protect the Tunnel entrance. (And here there was another anxiety to calm, that of the animal lover. So: no, the “stun mats” would only immobilize the rogue animal, rather than fricassee it on the spot.) Nor was this all: what about those carriers of la rage who are not so obligingly pedestrian? Well, that had been thought of, too, and it was solemnly reported that “Eurotunnel officials will mount patrols for signs of bats.”

  Even though the main risk of rabies will continue to be (as it is now) from the smuggled family pet, the chihuahua in the hatbox, Eurotunnel was quite right to treat this question gravely. A survey by the Automobile Association’s magazine of those who found the Tunnel “a bad or very bad idea” showed that, while 32 percent objected because they “liked being an island” or didn’t want to “lose the security of being an island,” 40 percent disapproved because the Tunnel would make it “easy to bring rabies into this country.” Quite why a rabid beast might find the cuttings at Coquelles particularly inviting is another matter: as Tony Stevens, of the British Veterinary Association, put it, “There’s no incentive for any animal to enter the tunnel, let alone traverse its thirty-five miles.” A psychiatric interpretation of this British obsession with rabies (which strangely seems to bite so few British tourists as they travel through Europe on their holidays) might see it as a transference: no longer permitted by social and political norms openly to hate and fear the foreigner, the frustrated islanders turn their feelings instead against the Continental animal.