Al Jazeera

1. Al Jazeera Al Jazeera - - The Novel? NOVEL AL JAZEERA MAN NOVEL AL JAZEERA MAN "The Dream of the Decade" comes with high praise. Dan Franklin, publisher of Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan is an admirer of the book and says that 30-something Rattansi "captures the atmosphere of the late 1980s." But with the first British publication of this quartet, it's easy to see that these characters are very much living with us today. The Novel? It's always difficult for a new novelist to break through the household literary name strata. And, often, more difficult for the aspiring writer is answering questions as to what their work is about. J. D. Salinger would have found it difficult to describe immediately why the plot of "Catcher in the Rye" was inherently interesting. Norman Mailer would have had trouble with "An American Dream". It's the "hook" books like "A Handmaiden's Tale" or "The Satanic Verses" that are altogether easier. There are hooks in Afshin Rattansi's debut novels, four of them published in one volume and all loosely connected, not least that they centre on life in London. The first book is about the growing divide between rich and poor just as balsamic vinegar was becoming fashionable amongst the new yuppie class. There follows a book on how Londoners respond to a terrorist bomb scare and another on how property prices began to dominate life in London. The final book is a very thinly disguised satire, or what looks like a satire, on news values at the bbc world news. But what unites the quartet is an ineluctable quality of the writing. The thirty something British-born writer, whose Kenyan father is an expert on Sir Isaac Newton and alchemy, is slightly dismissive of the publication of the book. "I went through two agencies, Curtis Brown and A.P. Watt and I can't say I was helped much and now it's twenty years on," he says about to pull another cigarette from a packet on the table and then replacing it german news. "I think publishers in the eighties and earlier nineties were more interested in my Indian origin than the subject matter of the book." The first chapters of the first book were written at a time of resurgent Commonwealth writing. Rattansi, himself, worked on stories about Salman Rushdie during the Satanic Verses affair when he was on Tariq Ali's groundbreaking Channel 4 series, Bandung File. Dressed in fashionable jeans and a black T-shirt, Rattansi is sitting in a Chateau Marmont seat after being interviewed by Los Angeles' most progressive radio station, KPFK. On the same programme was the now dead activist and former co-founder of LA's notorious Crips gang, Stanley "Tookie" Williams whose clemency pleas didn't prevent him from being injected with Sodium Pentothal. "Los Angeles has always fascinated me and it was Mike Davis' book, City of Quartz, that enlightened me so much as to why. Whereas London is two organisms, the centre and the suburbs, Los Angeles is a myriad directly opposing entities world news today. It has a sophisticated left, a developing world level population, a strong harbour union, fabulous colonies of wealth and it creates rightwing propaganda. And natural disasters have repeatedly shocked and devastated the area." The prologue begins with one of the lead women characters of the books, now settled in marriage, relocating to the site of the 2005 Asian Tsunami. It is as if the person who most embraced the new opportunities that privatisation and a city that encouraged entrepreneurship is most shattered by its consequences.

2. "There is even a theory that the reason why Diego Garcia wasn't affected by the tsunami was because there was no commercial prawn fishing there. In Sri Lanka and Aceh, increasing commercialisation of the shrimp industry destroyed the protective reefs." Rattansi sees politics in everything. He worked as a chief risk analyst at the insurers' Lloyd's of London after they had lost billions of pounds. His expertise was in catastrophe analysis, both environmental and political. But the books are in no way political tracts.