A Bloody Arrogant Power /Death by Decent Society by Malcolm J. Wardlaw-Review & Interview
IMPORTANT: A BLOODY ARROGANT POWER was re-written and relaunched in July 2020 under a new title and series: DEATH BY DECENT SOCIETY
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ABOUT THE BOOK: Release Date August 7, 2019
The Public Era collapsed seven decades ago. Generations have grown up in what came after. They think it’s normal.
Donald Aldingford is lucky. A barrister, he is trusted by the ruling elite of sovereign landowners. He neither knows nor cares what goes on outside the Central Enclave of London.
Then he starts to care. A young woman from the slums enters his life. For the first time, he travels outside the Central Enclave. He sees discharges perish on the public drains. He sees glory trusts bombard the slums. These sights force him to question the rule of the sovereign elite.
But he must keep these doubts to himself. Should his sovereign masters even suspect him of disloyalty, they would despatch him to the Nameless Gone.
And then revolution breaks out. Whose side will he take?
To find out, follow the twists and turns of this intricate dystopian mystery.
••••••••
REVIEW:A BLOODY ARROGANT POWER is the first instalment in Malcolm J. Wardlaw’s SOVEREIGNS OF THE COLLAPSE dark, dystopian series following in the aftermath of the ‘Glorious Resolution’ of 2038-2040.
Told from several third person perspectives including barrister Donald Aldingford A BLOODY ARROGANT POWER is a character driven story line that looks at the fascist-type governmental control between the have and the have nots in the former United Kingdom. The year is 2106, and barrister Donald Aldingford is approached by a woman who claims his younger brother Lawrence has been sentenced to work in the slave labor camps on trumped up charges against the sovereign elites. As Donald begins to investigate the claims, he soon discovers the real world beyond their cloistered existence in the Central Enclave of London. From the genocide-like massacres of the ‘surplus people’ to the absolute rule of the all powerful sovereigns, Donald is caught between two worlds that will ultimately come to battle for power and control.
A BLOODY ARROGAN POWER is a sociological study of the ‘isms’ that looks at the suppression of the masses using any means necessary including murder, starvation, and ethnic cleansing. From the time of the Glorious Resolution, those in control (the powerful elite and self-appointed sovereigns) continue to gain power, while the proletariat, and ultimately the ‘surplus’ people are left struggling to survive with the potential of another revolution on the horizon. No one is safe; everyone is suspect; a well-placed lie could mean termination of one’s liberty and life. A dystopian world where gold and silver are the currency of choice but a life bargained for, is ultimately, a life lost to the powerful few.
A thought-provoking, gritty and dramatic look at the potential and frightening possibility of the economic and political collapse of the world as we know it. Malcolm J Wardlaw uses detailed exposition and complex language to bring A BLOODY ARROGANT POWER to life. A Bloody Arrogant Power ends on a cliff-hanger, you have been warned.
Copy supplied for reivew
Reviewed by Sandy
TRC: Hi Malcolm and welcome to The Reading Café.
Congratulations on the recent release of A BLOODY ARROGANT POWER.
Thank you!
We would like to start with some background information. Would you please tell us something about yourself?
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Malcolm: I’m Canadian by birth, but get dual British nationality through my parents. At the moment I’m based in Edinburgh, UK, where I’ve lived since 2002. Before that I moved around quite a bit: Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, London, New York, Switzerland, Germany and back to the UK to live in Glasgow for a while. I’m an engineer by profession, so I tend to roam about according to where there’s work for a guy who designs industrial plants. I’m 56 years old. Besides writing, my other big interest is bicycling. I have published research over the years that corrects various damaging myths about bicycling (not that this stops the perpetuation of those myths). I also read a lot of history books.
TRC: Who or what influenced your career in writing?
Malcolm: The basic influence was being a natural born scribbler. I’ve been a scribbler since I was about 7 when I wrote my first biography (of a cuddly toy cat called Passy, who is still around somewhere looking rather mangy). Up until I was about sixteen I scribbled reams and reams of trashy war stories – never with the least ambition to get published, just for the hell of it. After that, ah, other interests took over until I was in my late twenties, when I wrote a novel about a bored engineer living in a crappy industrial town in Yorkshire who gets on his motorbike to find adventure. It was so bad. I put it at the bottom of a box. I scribbled more novels through my thirties – perhaps ten of them. I did hope to publish something, but I could never figure out how to take a raw draft and re-craft it up to a decent standard. This stumped me for many years until I resolved to slog away to the bitter end, allowing myself no pity. A Bloody Arrogant Power was the eventual result of so many redrafts and edits that I long ago lost count.
TRC: What challenges or difficulties did you encounter writing and publishing this story?
Malcolm: In writing it? The biggest challenge was starting off without any real idea where I was going, and hoping for the best. This made the writing process haphazard in the extreme, but against that, I would not have been able to build an economically and socially coherent world simply by thinking about it. It required dramatic exploration to enable me to see how a new world will likely develop on the far side of the last financial armageddon to come.
As for publishing the story, the biggest challenges arose from there being so many skills and so much know-how required to take even the first step as an Indie writer. To begin with, every accomplishment is a mistake. You have to go back and do it again, and again, and again. Very frustrating! But at length, some competence sticks.
TRC: Would you please tell us something about the premise of A BLOOD ARROGANT POWER?
Malcolm: This answer is rather long, but it’s important to understand A Bloody Arrogant Power has a serious basis.
Our global economy is foredoomed to collapse due to inherent flaws in the nature of legal tender and the social contract of affluence. A Bloody Arrogant Power imagines the world on the far side of this terminal disintegration.
Considering legal tender, in our system money is created when banks issue debt. This means that as the economy grows, debt must also grow. The debt can never be paid back, since to do so would suck money out of circulation and cause a depression. That means our economic system is actually a constant race to stay ahead of our own debt. We can do this provided we can lay our hands on cheap resources, in particular cheap oil. However, as the quality of oil reserves declines, the extraction costs go up. This means the world has to borrow more and more to make up the difference.
Concerning the social contract of affluence, this is based on a simple formula: houses + cars + easy credit + cheap foreign holidays = social calm. Every society that has achieved affluence has used this formula. It is simply the real-world action corresponding to the debt-based legal tender. The purpose of the social contract is to pacify the people whilst the top crust of oligarchs harvest immense wealth off the “farmyard” of industry. Mrs Thatcher openly admitted as much to General Pinochet back in the 1980s. Democracy adds to the illusion of a “fair and representative society”.
Now, you can appreciate that all is hunky-dory provided the economy keeps growing at least as fast as debt. The people are happy with their houses, cars and cheap holidays abroad, and the banking system holds together. But if that balance breaks down, then society muct eventually suffer a crisis.
Unfortunately, our system has been in progressive decline since the early 1970s as debt has grown and grown. Today, the only thing keeping the global system going is its own momentum, a temporary glut of Asian savings and the terrifying consequences should the tower of debt collapse.
It’s a perilous situation that all politicians ignore – they keep it right out of public discourse. But at the back of any thinking person’s mind is the certain knowledge that the situation is only a reprieve. There is no way out. It’s only a matter of time before a last, terrible crisis erupts.
A Bloody Arrogant Power is set seventy years after “The Glorious Resolution” that ended our times (the Public Era). Generations have grown up in the new world, knowing nothing else. The fantastic technical achievements we take for granted today are viewed in complete bafflement by those inhabiting a largely de-populated, simple, peaceful, callous world.
TRC: Do you have plans to write a series based upon your post-apocalyptic world? If so, how many books do you anticipate?
Malcolm: I plan to write a series of four. In addition, I will write two prequels.
TRC: What kind of research/plotting did you do, and how long did you spend researching /plotting before beginning A BLOOD ARROGANT POWER?
Malcolm: As noted above, I did no research or plotting, and paid a high price in spending years fighting my way out of a mess. Despite this, I believe the world of A Bloody Arrogant Power is more richly imagined than if I had tried to work it all out beforehand. It’s not the kind of thing you can just work out on paper. You have to get into the world and think about the detail of specific daily situations. How do they surface roads without abundant oil? (England has very limited onshore oilfields) What happens to the motorways in a society built around secretive private landowners who feed trespassers to the pigs? How are cars made if rolling mills no longer exist to make (cheap) sheet metal? How are carrier pigeons flying across private land shot down? How do people cope in the total absence of mains water, gas or electricity?
TRC: Do you believe the cover image plays a deciding factor for many readers in the process of selecting a book or new series to read?
Malcolm: It’s fundamental. I had great difficulty choosing a base image for the cover of A Bloody Arrogant Power. My problem was that this world does not feature the usual dystopian/post-apocalyptic tropes. There is no nuclear war or pandemic. There is no oppressive state, because there is no state at all, and there is no police force in the sense we understand it. There are no laws as such, just unspoken rules everyone is indoctrinated to obey if they wish to survive. In many respects it is a medieval world, and yet in other respects it is not: they have contraception, aircaft, motor ships, trucks, armoured cars and radar-guided long-range artillery. It is probably closest to the Nazi economy of late in ww2, when slave labourers built ballastic missiles. But it’s very hard to get across such an esoteric message on a cover (without giving the impression it actually is about some Nazi world). I am not entirely satisfied with either the cover or the title, but will stick with them for the moment.
TRC: When writing a storyline, do the characters direct the writing or do you direct the characters?
Malcolm: Ummm. What a tough question. Perhaps the best way I can put it is to say I drop the characters in a predicament, and the characters devise their own plans for getting back to safety. It means unexpected things do happen, and I have to revise my general plan of how I wish to push events to a climax.
TRC: The mark of a good writer is to pull the reader into the storyline so that they experience the emotions along with the characters. What do you believe a writer must do to make this happen? Where do you believe writer’s fail in this endeavor?
Malcolm: I think it involves an element of magic, to be honest. I had no idea how my writing would be received by other people until they read it. You need to be in there with the characters. You must be fired up by a genuine fascination with the scene. What are the characters standing on? How warm or cold is it? What do they think is about to happen? What emotion is ruling them in this scene? How do their plans relate to their experiences?
One of the most skilful authors I have ever read in this regard was actually a non-fiction writer describing his career as a submariner in the Second World War. His style is sparing and rarely mentions any emotion, but simply by clear description of the situation and the consequences of dangers he puts the reader down there in a steel tube deep beneath the sea (One of Our Submarines by Edward Young). Akira Yoshimura similarly has a sparing style, with a knack of capturing exactly the vivid detail that nails the experience of a scene.
If writers fail, it is because they do not capture vital details in effective prose, they smear events into lazy abstractions, they fall into the passive voice, their characters are too bland, and life is too easy for them. Effective drama is about the intensification of normal life. It’s hard, but it’s also fascinating. Without that eagerness to enagage with the drama, the story falls flat. Any writer can feel this by instinct, if they have the right instincts.
TRC: Do you listen to music while writing? If so, does the style of music influence the storyline direction? Characters?
Malcolm: No. I write in silence. Noise distracts me.
TRC: What do you believe is the biggest misconception people have about authors?
Malcolm: They don’t understand how hard it is to sustain engaging narrative. It’s taken me a long, long time just to get where I am now. My family are mostly academics. They think I’m just messing about.
TRC: What is something that few, if anyone, knows about you?
Malcolm: That would be telling!
TRC: Who is your favorite author (living or dead)?
Malcolm: I can’t give one name. George Orwell, Yvgeny Zamyatin, Boris Pasternak, Akira Yoshimura, Edward Young, Gustave Flaubert and Ernst Junger are all authors I admire enormously. I expect many will find my choice ludicrous, but there it is.
TRC: On what are you currently working?
Malcolm: Book 3 of the Sovereigns of the Collapse series. It is drafted, but needs editing.
TRC: Would you like to add anything else?
Malcolm: If your readers have got this far, I think they’ve done pretty well.
LIGHTNING ROUND
Favorite Food – Christmas dinner!
Favorite Dessert – chocolate ice cream
Favorite TV Show – I rarely watch TV, but David Attenborough’s programmes are outstanding.
Last Movie You Saw – Official Secrets
Dark or Milk Chocolate – please don’t force me to choose!
Secret Celebrity Crush – Nicole Kidman
Last Vacation Destination – Nice, France.
Do you have any pets? – No
Last book you read – The Unofficial History of the Falklands War by Hugh Bicheno
TRC: Thank you Malcolm for taking the time to answer our questions. Congratulations on the release of A BLOODY ARROGANT POWER. We wish you
all the best.
Malcolm: Thanks! I hope I’ve not written too much.
