Don’t Blame the Baby Boomers
Occasionally in the rear window of a showroom-bright 4x4 can be seen a car sticker carrying the acronym SKINS, the brazen admission that the owner has been Spending the Kids’ Inheritance for his or her own selfish ends. Such is the theme of one of Britain’s more ambitious election-season books, The Pinch, by the would-be future Conservative minister David Willetts, who argues that the whole of our baby-boomer generation has been skinning and pinching for years, taking advantage not only of our predecessors who fought in the world wars but also of our children, whom we are condemning to joblessness, punitive taxation, and impossibly high house prices. Readers and voters who feel instinctively skeptical of this charge will find both ammunition and satisfaction in the review this week by Tim Congdon, an economist and “wise man” of previous Conservative administrations who is unimpressed by this self-flagellating analysis from one of his successors. The baby boomers’ children will, he says, enjoy the benefits of far greater technological capacity and industrial know-how than the baby boomers themselves. In the 21st century, as in the 19th and 20th, the notion of large-scale unfairness between the generations will prove unfounded. In nations where the past, present, and future are emphatically a record of progress, the generations do not need to apologize or worry about each other’s well-being. They should instead get on with producing, and enjoying what they produce in the here and now.
Ian McEwan’s Solar-Powered Novel
Generational anxiety is the theme, too, of Solar, the new novel by Ian McEwan. Its hero is a Nobel Prize-winning pioneer of renewable energy whose personal life has become a distorted reflection of his ideals. McEwan’s Michael Beard represents not only science, says M. John Harrison in the TLS, but also overconsumption and the constitutional incapability of human beings to keep their habitat in order. Born in 1947, into post-war British ideals of infant beauty which reside, as the author sees them, “chiefly in fat, in Churchillian multiple chins, in dreams of an end to rationing and of the reign of plenty to come,” Beard has become, by 2009, a political cartoon. The great glory of solar power is that it will save humanity from itself “without—and here’s the important part—requiring any change of habit.”
One other aspect of the book has aroused London comment. Is it easier for scientists to impress arts students with their all-round knowledge than vice versa? At Oxford, Beard begins the “relentless, highly organized” pursuit of an English student called Maisie, who loves Milton. Beard reads “a biography and four essays he had been told were pivotal,” memorizes a bit from "Areopagitica," and in a week she is his. In his reading, he has found “nothing that could remotely be construed as an intellectual challenge.” No arts student, he realizes, “could have passed himself off, after a week’s study, among the undergraduate mathematicians and physicists who were Beard’s colleagues."
Wordsworth’s Anorexic Daughter
According to Frances Wilson, reviewing Dora Wordsworth: A Poet’s Daughter by Olena Beal, her life reads like a more complex version of the second half of Wuthering Heights, where the sickly children of Cathy and Heathcliff are doomed to repeat and repair the miseries of their parents. William Wordsworth, no longer young and romantic, is now a power-hungry patriarch consumed by memories; his sister Dorothy, no longer “exquisite,” has lost her reason and squawks like a turkey in her bedroom at Rydal Mount, while Dora, his ghost-like sole surviving daughter, starves herself “down to debility and death.” Dora takes the role—formally occupied by Dorothy—of Wordsworth’s muse and secretary, at which point she adopted the same starvation diet that Dorothy had kept during the years she lived alone with Wordsworth. “Dora you will perceive is now my amanuensis,” wrote her father. “She is as yellow as a gypsy and as thin as a lath.”
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Peter Stothard's latest book is On the Spartacus Road: A Spectacular Journey Through Ancient Italy. He is also the author of Thirty Days, a Downing Street diary of his time with British Prime Minister Tony Blair during the Iraq war.
