He's been everywhere, man

He's a rock journo turned keen observer of the critical events of our time. Andrew Mueller certainly doesn't fit the stereotype of the self-absorbed, freeloading music writer - precisely because he isn't. His new book, I Wouldn't Start From Here: A Misguided Tour of the Early 21st Century, has just been released in Australia by Picador and he returned to his native shores for the Sydney Writers' Festival, where The Blurb's David Edwards caught up with him.

Q: In the book, you talk about having vague ambitions of being a “proper, grown-up war correspondent” and that you gave those away. How do you see yourself now?

AM: I barely see myself as a proper grown-up most of the time. I see myself – and it’s an often-derided term, but it’s a term I wear with pride – as a hack. I go places and I meet people and I write down what I observe about them, and it’s a fine and noble thing to be. In the particular incident you mentioned, where my ambitions of being a proper grown-up war correspondent got metaphorically but fortunately not literally punctured, was in Ramallah on the West Bank in early 2001. I’d been to conflict zones before, but that was the first time someone had, well, if they weren’t shooting directly at me, they were shooting rather close to where I happened to be crouching. Whether I was supposed to take it personally or not, I don’t know; but I discover that I didn’t have that “thing” that you need, and that friends of mine who do this certainly have.

For someone who sees himself as a “hack”, you seem to take a very keen interest in the political situation around the world. I mean, you’re not your average rock writer.

I still am a rock journalist sometimes, in that I like to think of myself in that way because that was my grounding – such as it was – in journalism. So I imbibed the traditions that go with that, which are traditions – and it’s hard to talk about this without sounding unbearably pompous – of irreverence and iconoclasm, which I like to think I try to incorporate into whatever I write about; whether it’s travel or politics. That’s where I come from and that’s what I do. I’m still very interested in music and in the points at which music intersects with, or amplifies, the wider world. That’s something that’s still a source of fascination [for me], hence the decision in October 2001, when every other journalist I knew was racing to Tajikistan and Pakistan to try to get into Afghanistan, I instead went to New York to see U2 play at Madison Square Garden. At that moment, that seemed to me to be the thing I should be doing.

Q: The anecdotes in the book consider a considerable time period…

Yes, the entire 21st Century, in fact.

Q: How did you come to select those particular anecdotes as the basis for the book?

With a great deal of difficulty and some necessary bowing to the exigencies of space. There are plenty of places I have been and plenty of things I’ve done in that period that are not in the book. And there was a considerable amount of culling before the finished product was arrived at. The first draft, which made War and Peace look like a particularly slow edition of the Oodnadatta Evening Bugle, was quite briskly trimmed. What I wanted to be left with was stories that I thought, put together, said something about that period of the early 21st Century; and that in doing so, said something about what I’d seen of the way the world works. What I was looking for were stories that either struck me as testimony to the sort of completely unnecessary foolishness, misery and hardship that we continue to inflict on ourselves and each other; and also those stories that presented a slightly hopeful alternative as in the way the world could be if we all calmed down a bit.

It all comes from that idea of the 21st Century as “The Future”. Having been born at the tail of 1968, just before the science fiction age and the Moon landings. I grew up with this idea that the 21st Century was “The Future”, with the attendant ideas of technological and moral advancement and so on. Whenever a politician during that period harked to a golden future with technological and moral advancements, they always referred to “the 21st Century”. That’s why the book starts in Jerusalem of all place in the summer of 2000, it appeared that all that might be possible, because – by Middle Eastern standards – things were all right. Then the second chapter is New York in October 2001 when it was becoming clear that, in many depressing respects, the 21st Century was going to be similar to the 20 centuries that had preceded it.

Q: One of the things that struck me about the book is that the thread that seems to connect everything together is that sense of transition from the 20th to the 21st Century, in that there were new things happening – the fall of Communism, the rise of fundamentalism as a force in the world. Was that something that informed your choices in tying the stories together?

Not deliberately, but I’m sure that comes through as a motif, because as you say, that is one of the signifiers of out times. I grew up in a world in which there was this immense and apparently unvanquishable enemy leviathan known as Soviet Communism, which thankfully no longer exists – at least outside North Korea. But then this new monster has kind of developed in its place. It’s not an exclusively 21st Century phenomenon though. The war that’s being fought now is a war that started in Iran in 1979. There's become this idea that September 11, 2001 was the day the world changed. Which it didn't. The world on September 12, 2001 was broadly the same as the world on September 10. What happened on that day was that large tracts of America saw what the world was really like – which is that it's a dangerous, chaotic, angry place in which there's a lot of extremely foolish but extremely committed people.

The significant thing I think, as I say in the introduction, is that we've ceased to find the Internet and communications technology amazing. It's become an ordinary part of life that we can instantly communicate with anybody, in the most bizarre and unlikely places. I'm 38 years old, so I can remember travelling as a 21 year old; and I'm part of the last generation who will know what it's like to be out of contact.

When I went backpacking in 1993, there would have been weeks at a stretch when people would have had no idea where to find me. If I wanted to get in touch with people, I sent them postcards. That seems like – and is – a story from another age. That will never be the case again, and we now take it absolutely for granted. It does still strike me occasionally. I was in Albania last year and my parents were on a rail tour through Eastern Europe – at that stage they were somewhere inside Russia heading for Latvia – and Dad gave me a ring to see how things were going. I answered the phone on a minibus somewhere in Albania, and I thought, on how many levels must this conversation have seemed completely impossible 20 years ago. And it's amazing how blasé we've become about that and how quickly. I mean, the fact that I can be stading on a railway platform in Belgium and check my e-mails; and find there's a magazine editor in Russia who wants me to write something. That kind of thing just seems normal now, but it's extraordinary.

Q: The tone of the book suggests you're not afraid to call things as you see them...

I would hope not.

Q: The chapter I'm thinking of particularly is the one about the Danish cartoons, and the reaction to that. Since you seem happy to give it to both sides, do you ever fear for your own safety?

No – because I absolutely refuse to. It's impossible to write anything without someone getting upset about it. I may just be crashingly insensitive, or having been born with the wrong gene, but I don't understand the concept of “offence”. I don't understand when someone says they're “offended” by something someone has written or drawn; I don't get it at all. This is a point I tried to make, with limited success I think, to Sir Iqbal Sacranie [head of the Muslim Council of Britain] in that chapter, and he was trying to say “well, how would you feel if someone said something awful about your mother”. Honestly, dearly though I love my mother, I really couldn't care less. It's somebody else's problem, not mine. If somebody wants to mock something in which I believe, good luck to them and see how far it gets them really.

I also don't understand why religion should have any special exemption. It's perfectly acceptable for me to criticise your choice of who you voted for or which football team you support; and everybody seems to think that's OK – and indeed it is. But for some reason or other, if you start questioning what people choose to believe about God, which is a far more absurd and bizarre concept than expressing fealty to a football team or a political party – which needs to actually exist and you can say “look, there it is” – people seem to get very huffy with you all of a sudden.

The reason I don’t have any particular fear in that regard is that, for all the attention that the fanatical elements of Islam in particular attract, that’s not most Muslims. Most of those I’ve met – and I’ve met a great many because I’ve travelled in Muslim countries – are perfectly willing to have the discussion. If you sit down with them and approach them in a manner that says “look, I’m trying to understand this, can you help me?” people are perfectly willing to talk to you.

I’m here for the Sydney Writers’ Festival at which the keynote speaker is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and compared to the pressures and the threat she lives under, and compared to the extraordinary bravery that she represents, it would be fairly gauche of me to express any fears on that level on my account.

Q: The other thing that’s notable about the book is that it highlights the absurdity of the whole thing.

I’m very fortunate in this being the kind of journalist I am. A straight-faced news reporter saddled with, for instance, the strange little Iraqi secret policeman I talk about in the book, would be forced to regard him as a necessary evil, and a gigantic pain in the arse. But given the kind of thing I do, if someone like that presents themselves in my orbit, I don’t have to think, “This is a colossal pain in the arse,” I can think “This is a gift from the gods; this is a great comic character who I can employ as a recurring motif in the story and his very presence tells you a great deal about what this place is like”. He was absolute heaven in that respect, as was the hapless buku I was assigned in Tunisia.

Q: Is that a way you approach life in general – to look for the funny side?

Not necessarily looking for it, but it is kind of the way I am. I do tend to instantly notice what’s funny or odd about a situation, especially when I’m thinking with my journalist’s hat on. What I think you have to be careful of is not so much what you put into it, but what you leave out of it. What I try to do is not put in something that’s funny or amusing by itself; but that’s illustrative of the wider thing. I’m sure there are parts of the book where a local who knows a lot better than me might say, “You’ve got this completely wrong”.

I was thinking about this today actually, in terms of finding a witty or illustrative thing about Sydney or Australia. I was in a bookshop in Sydney and they have that thing saying “staff recommendations” as they often do. And for reasons known only to God, they’ve got Mien Kampf up on the “staff recommendations” shelf; which just looks really funny. I’m sure whoever put it there is a thoroughly well-meaning person who thinks this is a valuable historical document that people should read if they wish to understand the nature of fascism. But if just looks hilarious.

I was just struck by the vague feeling that if I was here writing a story, that’s just the kind of thing I’d put in the story.

Andrew Mueller has one more book on his current deal with Pan Macmillan and “a couple of ideas” about other new works.

David Edwards

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Andrew Mueller

Book: I Wouldn't Start From Here
Publisher: Picador
Price: $35.00

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