What on earth is wrong with Ian Rankin's memory?

[tree_and_leaf]

It was fascinating to research the 1980s. I was at university then and thought myself political, yet I had forgotten so much: protests against US missiles on British soil; Greenham Common; animal rights; acid rain; global cooling; Reagan's star wars technology; the threat of nuclear attack; unrest in Ireland;* unrest in Scotland …

Or was he living under a rock? I remember all of that, with minimal prompting (certainly not research), and I was at primary school.

Although I'll admit I don't remember any unrest in Scotland comparable to the Troubles...


* How the hell can you forget the Troubles?

Comments

[sophia_gratia]

Aliens. Which is my explanation, lately, for anything I can't otherwise account for. Aliens.

More seriously, perhaps this is just a kind of affected male-intellectual pose – 'I've been too busy being a writerly writer who writes to notice the world around me.' More generously, maybe he means that he forgot what it was like to live those things – not that they happened, but the felt experience of being in that political atmosphere.

[tree_and_leaf]

Either that, or the only politics he was interested in at uni was the legalisation of drugs and he did a bit too many... (Your generous explanation may be right too, although I must admit I've always found Rankin a bit irritating).

[legionseagle]

I can get very nasty about people of about my age claiming not to remember the Troubles, though it's possible being a postman's daughter (and hence acutely conscious of the risks of parcel bombs) affected me disproportionately.

[tree_and_leaf]

The threat was, admittedly, less consciously present in Scotland (unless you lived in one of the very sectarian bits, but no-one expected the IRA to bomb the Scots), but I still remember it very vividly.

though it's possible being a postman's daughter (and hence acutely conscious of the risks of parcel bombs) affected me disproportionately.

Well, it can't have been an easy thing to live with.

[coughingbear]

I am totally stumped at the idea of a reasonably aware person (which he says he was) forgetting the Troubles. But then I was also at university in the 80s and I remember all those things. Well, possibly apart from unrest in Scotland; I do remember arguments about devolution, and the constitutional convention being set up, but I don't know if that is what he means. Also of course resistance to the poll tax, which was introduced in Scotland a year earlier than in England and Wales and is just part of the 80s.

[liadnan]

The only way I can make sense of that one is some kind of distinction between remembering in an objective way that the Troubles were at their peak then, and remembering what it was actually *like*, how it felt and what it meant on a subjective level. Not that I've forgotten the latter myself.

[tree_and_leaf]

Possibly, but it still seems like an odd thing to say, even allowing for hyperbole. It certainly doesn't make me look forward to his book as a superb evocation of the past...

[tree_and_leaf]

possibly apart from unrest in Scotland

As someone who grew up in 80s Scotland, I can't work out what that means at all. The devolution campaigners certainly don't qualify as what I'd call 'unrest', because it was all peaceful. Bits of the poll tax resistance got mildly violent (in the sense of scuffles), but it wasn't exactly representative of the decade as a whole. Sectarian football violence?

[sollers]

Living in London, I was acutely conscious - complicated reasons in the 80s but very simple ones in the 90s when I worked for two Train Operating Companies and I and my colleagues became very well known in the cafes we headed for every time the building/station was evacuated.

[owl]

I was barely in primary school in the 80s and I remember several of those. OK, the Troubles were hard to miss from where I was standing, but....

[tree_and_leaf]

I remember Greenham Common, and I was nowhere near the protests.

I admit I mostly remember Star Wars because of the name, so perhaps you would forget that if you weren't geeky.

[kerravonsen]

Heck, I wasn't even in the UK at the time, and I was aware of the IRA...
(I think it's a wonderfully British understatement to call it "The Troubles"...)

"The Troubles"

[legionseagle]

It avoids one having to commit oneself with regard to revealing one's political sympathies, also. Always handy in a civil conflict.

Re: "The Troubles"

[tree_and_leaf]

Yes, sometimes being non-committal can be a life saver.

A friend of mine was a police officer's daughter, and decided to go to Queen's Belfast. Her parents sat her down and told her not to tell anyone what her father did unless she was very, very sure that she could trust them.

[tree_and_leaf]

Although it's amazing how many Americans you run across who think the IRA were romantic freedom fighters... (But Rankin grew up in Fife, so has little excuse for having forgotten).

[kerravonsen]

Stan Rogers (a Canadian) wrote an excellent song ("The House of Orange") in which the protagonist emphatically refuses to give funding to IRA fundraisers... so I would deduce that the IRA got a lot of their funding from naïve North Americans.

[tree_and_leaf]

Yes, they did, although it's remembered in the UK (and resented) as primarily an Irish-American thing. The stereotype is of idiots in Boston and New York who had actually never been back to the Old Country and hadn't got a clue about modern Ireland and somehow managed to overlook the nastiness of kneecappings and blowing up toddlers.

[tree_and_leaf]

In an odd coda, they also got money from Libya and the PLO,* because they saw it as a way for punishing Britain for being allied to America. It's probably a good job that the IRA never organised meet and greets for its supporters...


* And possibly also from the Stasi, although that doesn't seem to be very well substantiated. The Russians, mostly stayed out of it, though they did give some weapons to the "Official IRA", who were a Marxist splinter group. After 1973, though, the only people they killed were members of the P-IRA (the Provos, usually who people mean if they say the IRA) and the INLA, another republican group. Then they ended up getting into organised crime, though they did take part in the decomissioning of weapons scheme.

[legionseagle]

Including Rep. Peter King, a member of Congress, who got himself flung out of a UK courtroom for being somewhat partisan on the side of the defendant.

The resentment is quite strong in some quarters towards the Noraid idiots.