Interview: Julian Gough Pic by Phil Rose esq on ‘The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble’ [novel extract]
‘Well, I was very interested in economics and
one thing I was fascinated by over the last few years was the huge speculative
bubble in America in the new technology companies. It was quite clear,
even to an amateur like myself, that companies that didn’t have
any profits, and didn’t have any products in a lot of cases, and
were just guessing about the future, couldn’t possibly be worth
several billion dollars. But the stock market was deciding that they
were! And I thought, ‘This is a beautiful, classic speculative
bubble!’ and I wanted to write about it in the novel I was writing.
But my book’s a sort of comic satire, so I didn’t want to
write about it directly. Did you live in Africa? ‘I’ve never been to Africa in my life! It’s
all made up, but I don’t think making things up about other countries
is nearly as difficult as people think it is. Once I had that little
anecdote, I did what you can do nowadays which is look stuff up on the
internet, and I found lots of little websites set up by people in Somaliland.
‘I’m not an economist at all! But I’ve
been writing this book since 1997 and one of the things that came to
fascinate me was economics and I’ve learned an enormous amount
about it just for pleasure. I like economics for aesthetic reasons,
so I tend to pick up on aspects of economics that are useful to me as
a novelist rather than useful in running an economy! I have some specialised
areas but I wouldn’t put me in charge of your economy if I were
you!
‘No! Jude is actually the hero in the book; he plays a fairly minor role in the piece because he’s listening to Dr Ibrahim Bihi tell the story. Jude is both completely made up and entirely autobiographical in the way that happens in novels. I’m not an orphan but Jude is certainly aspects of me when I was younger. And the orphanage is definitely – well, anyone who went to Nenagh Christian Brothers Secondary School in Tipperary in the 1970s and 80s would probably get flashbacks reading the orphanage scenes in the book!’
‘Well, I love the language of economics because it has ferocious precision in its terminology and yet, of course, the things that the language maps onto are utterly, you know, human and chaotic and unpredictable. And I think that one of the reasons why economic language is so precise and sharp and Latinate and crisp is in a desperate attempt to force order on the world by naming it precisely, and that’s never worked and it never will. So I love the disjunction. And then of course, by setting it in a dung-heaped goat market, it maybe brings out the absurdity of trying to control things by naming them. Economics would love to be a science, and it mimics the language of science in its attempts to be a science. But it can’t be because it’s about the economic behaviour of human beings. So economics becomes a lovely metaphor for the human urge to control and understand, and how charmingly and sweetly deluded we are sometimes when we think we’ve understood it all.’ ‘I mapped the American experience of the dot com
bubble onto goats in Somaliland and the UN mission in Somalia. So that’s
the obvious and direct satire. But I think in some senses, it’s
not quite satire. It’s more an exploration. I use a lot of the
tools of satire but I’m not necessarily using them the way a satirist
would to strongly attack a particular folly and by implication exhort
its opposite. I think I’ve got slightly more affection for the
human race! So even at the end of my piece, I put in some things that
I got from talking to an acquaintance who’s involved in the world
of economics. I put in some of her points which were, that the people
that drive these crazed speculative bubbles are in some ways brave visionaries
who think the world can get better and better forever, and that is in
some ways a noble quality. And there is something meritocratic about
the free market capitalism in some ways – it is actually possible
to make your fortune from scratch, with a lot of luck and risk taking.
In some ways, the drawbacks of capitalism are not to do with the free
market, globalisation, open trading aspect of it that western protesters
often protest against. The problems of capitalism are often the very
old problems of massive inherited wealth to which you don’t have
access if didn’t go to the right school or the right university
so you can’t meet up with the right bankers to get the venture
capital to set up your business. If you’re a farmer, for example,
in Somaliland, and you’ve got a really great idea for a business,
you’ve got no access to global capital, you can’t go to
a bank because there isn’t one there, and you can’t get
the £5,000 loan or whatever pitiful amount it would take, to get
your business up and going. So the problem is not necessarily globalisation
and free market capital, it’s actually the way in which that isn’t
fully available to everybody. We should be trying to get the global
banks to extend access to money (in order to make more money) down to
the women who are sewing pillowcases in their homes, because if they
could just buy a sewing machine they could make ten times as many pillowcases
and put their kids through school. COPYRIGHT INFORMATION: All the materials
on these pages are free for you to download and copy for educational
use only. You may not redistribute, sell or place these materials on
any other web site without written permission from the British Council. I hope you all feel educated having read this. Phil Rose esq
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