She's Back

'Twas eighteen months ago that AL Kennedy announced to a stunned world that her next novel would be "a historical novel set in World War II but it will reflect the other war. It would have been about Iraq even if it had nothing to with war".

Well if 'Day' is about Iraq, both Guardian (Ursula le Guin, no less) and Indie reviewers seem to have missed it. Maybe she changed her mind.

Her Observer book-plug interview is another of those bleak, self-deprecating jobbies in which she specialises and which make you think she really ought to find some chap into hillwalking, move to a small Borders town, go to church on Sundays and have a couple of weans before it's too late for her. Maybe she just needs someone to love like the rest of us.

Still mad as a fish though. The revamped website features a host of links to lefty 'Bush conspiracy' sites, some no longer in business like 911dossier.co.uk ('Auto Insurance Quotes, Ringtones'), the overwhelming majority American. What's wrong with good old British paranoia ? Strangely, for someone who rails against capitalism, she thinks the idea that artists should pay less tax is 'sensible'.

And she's really gorn and done it now (hat-tip - Norm).

"When I look at the UK, it reminds me of the Nazi era. Blair is a deranged war criminal, and I have little hope that Brown is any better.

"And again, we are stigmatising one individual religious group, this time it is the Muslims. A section of our society is being marked out as criminals. That makes me angry."

After various politicians and Muslim and Jewish writers described her views as 'a lot of rubbish', 'absurd, repulsive and dangerous', 'childish, silly and over the top' and 'a bit extreme, to say the least' Ms Kennedy came back with a cracking one-liner.

"Did I say these things? I think I probably did but in the context of a much longer conversation. And I am not in any way comparing the situation to the Shoah. Of course there are no gas chambers or concentration camps. What we have right now, is not the way the Jews were being treated in 1940 or 1941, but maybe where they were around 1936."

If her stand-up comedy can match this she should be on TV.


UPDATE - Edinburgh blogger Rosie Bell isn't too impressed with the 1936 comparison either. Hard but fair methinks.

Your great pal Al
Is a stupid gal
Reason's enemy.
The Guardian prints
Her words of mince
A waste of any tree.
Her frothing rants,
Are total pants,
Count how many flee
From the loony dribbles
And paranoid scribbles
Of A L Kennedy.