it’s weeks after i gave up on it and im still sitting around feeling angry about Slippery Creatures

if you want to write a spy thriller inspired by John Buchan in 2020 it’s not enough to just make the heroes gay social democrats and emphasise that your anarchist villains are being manipulated by a shadowy cabal of mysterious global capitalist elites. it really isn’t.

John Buchan’s stories would explicitly use this kind of framing to have characters theorise that the shadowy elites manipulating anarchists are... Jewish people.

So when reading the book I was like, uh this seems like it’s structured uncritically around a dog-whistley antisemitic conspiracy theory and that not enough is being done to dismantle that.

I didn’t finish it! Maybe the book does end with it being explicitly dismantled! It’s very hard to do that but maybe it did! I don’t know. Probably it didn’t.

Also I’m extremely tired of anarchists being trotted out as the baddies, in this case unwittingly in the service of capital. And the love interest is a reformed “bolshevik”, essentially an ex-communist who has seen the error of his ways and is now likely a centre-left democrat

It’s very hard to write a romance that’s not small-c conservative, in that romances as a structure, like many other forms of story, are not about revolution but about stability, even if that stability requires some drastic change in the service of a stable ending.

But John Buchan was a right-wing author using the spectre of anarchism as a villain for *political ends*. I don’t think it’s enough to just soften that a bit. I mean, I am invested, I do identify politically as an anarchist communist. However.

Reading this book at one of the most exciting times in political building, political action and political dreaming I can remember... it felt very, very flat. Writing into antisemitic tropes and away from anything that might actually challenge order.

Anyway that’s my take, as someone who couldn’t finish it because I found it too frustrating.

The racism in Buchan isn’t aberrant. It’s a key part of his world. You take the explicit racism out and you still have a racist structure. You need to properly subvert it.