And Then There Was No One полностью

It seems, by the way, that Slavorigin’s two initial choices of title, for the essay, not the book as a whole, were ‘Come, Friendly Planes’, a paraphrase of Betjeman’s still mildly infamous line of verse ‘Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough’, and ‘Small Atrocity in New York – Not Many Dead’, which aped the memorable winning entry in a New Statesman competition for the most boring newspaper headline imaginable.|| Naturally, his publishers vetoed both gags as just too outrageous, although somebody somewhere nodded, for both still feature in the text itself. As he elsewhere writes, however, ‘Let us have no excessive piety in the face of individual horror, for individual horror is the supreme constant of human history.’

The thesis of the essay is, in brief (and ‘brief’ is the word, since it is by far the shortest of the collection, a mere eight pages): notwithstanding the eschatological glamour of September 11 (‘Ah, those images, how we gorged on them, how we feasted on them!’), notwithstanding the undoubted and, as Slavorigin concedes, understandable shock to the nation’s system, a shock he compares not to that of the Pearl Harbor bombing, frequently referenced in this context, but to the sinking of the Titanic and the extinction of all the plush Edwardian complacencies which sank along with it, it was, from the loftiest of overviews – I repeat, this is Slavorigin speaking – a relatively minor atrocity, boasting (his word) fewer than three thousand victims and causing the destruction of a pair of skyscrapers of scant architectural distinction, leaving scores of others intact.

What followed was an abject and disastrously ill-judged ‘poetic’ description of the event itself, from which I decline to quote. Then a few, very few, words in memory of the victims, a gesture immediately subverted by a phrase I never thought to see in a text published by a reputable house (and for letting which pass, neither diluted nor deleted, some poor copy reader who had doubtless been terrified of crossing so touchy and temperamental an author, was sacked), ‘But, after all, they were only Americans.’**

Slavorigin concluded thus: ‘For what was, I repeat, a middling massacre, on the human and urban scale alike, when compared with the genocides of Rwanda and Darfur, the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and East Timor, and the hundreds of thousands of deaths in occupied Iraq itself, to have been exploited by such excrement as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and that pallid fall-guy Colin Powell, with the overt or tacit support of virtually the entire population of the United States, in order to justify the invasion of a secular country which could not conceivably have played a role in the jihadist attack on the World Trade Center – that was the true atrocity of September 11.’

It was, in short, a polemic deliberately designed to stir up controversy. Nor did the argument, indefatigably inflammatory as it was, possess any real analytical depth or sophistication. And, probably to Slavorigin’s own disappointment, the furore he had so obviously sought quite failed to materialise in the British media. Aside from a rave review from a single diehard Slavoriginite, the book received mostly mixed and muted notices from the national press, the principal criticism being of the untethered bombast of its style. It did, however, become an instant bestseller, a rare distinction for such a ragbag of undisciplined musings, and the ‘Out of a Clear Blue Sky’ essay itself was reprinted in the London Review of Books.

It was, instead, on the other side of the Atlantic that the scandal finally erupted.