HowlingPimPimling
13K posts

HowlingPimPimling
@howlingpim
Follower of Christ ☦️ | America first | Remigration; send them all back | pattern recognizer | TX | backup: @howlingshepard






I made the quip earlier that there is seldom a disturbance of the mind that reading does not relieve. However, one book I read earlier this year that has not left my mind in a tranquil form is Edward McLaren's Bothelford's Gone. It is arguably the most important fiction book to be published this year. Typically, it has been neglected by the publishing industry and its media mouthpieces, for it tells the truth about some of the greatest crimes to have afflicted the British population outside of wartime. Over the past several decades, many thousands of young British girls and women have been raped, prostituted and in some cases murdered by gangs of largely Pakistani men; this book is a fictionalised account of the impact this horrifying scandal has had upon the lives of those living at its centre. The story itself revolves around two young people, Jack and Agatha, who live in Bothelford, a former industrial northern English town resembling Rotherham, but it could be any number of post-industrial urban centres whose stories are of former glory and prosperity, but now a tale of decline, demographic replacement and existential despair; desolate sites of concrete decay. Jack is a teenage boy full of spit and piss against a stultifying, grey longhouse-world, reported to the authorities for wrong-think by his very own mother. Agatha, a troubled but beautiful teenage girl, is abused by the very people from institutions who were supposed to guarantee her safety. Their story, although fictional, is based on the very real events of the grotesque "grooming gangs" scandal that began in Britain in the 1960s/70s, but exploded in the last few decades and is still going on. An institutional, political and social failure - and cover-up on a criminal scale - many details in McLaren's book reflect the repulsive activities of exploitation and abuse involved. If anything, he left many of the more egregious examples out. McLaren is a sensitive enough writer to be able to draw your attention to these horrors without being wholly and unnecessarily explicit about it. What is also striking about the novel are its philosophical reflections. Modernity is totally dominated by screens. We have been subdued first by television, then by obsidian smartphones. Television pacifies the mind; phones excite it: the main route of course being pornography. There is a line in the book about how phones are just porn delivery machines with a few apps attached. And in the third world, cheap smartphones and western, predominantly white, pornographic material has created an entire class of men eager to venture over here to have what they see is their share. There is far more to the book than I can relay in this tweet, but it has been in my mind for the last few months. I recommend reading it. Though it won't be an easy read, it nevertheless is a necessary one. @Anglican_Gonzo














