A Teacher's Review

Hugh McCarthy on South of Market

My good friend, and former Headteacher, Hugh McCarthy, has sent me a review of my new novel, South of Market. It’s particularly gratifying to get a review from Hugh given his unrelenting campaigning for the rights of children over the last 5 years. Hugh was a vocal - and effective - critic of school closures, masking policy in schools, and doctrinal ‘gender identity’ nonsense on the school curriculum.

South of Market attempts to convey some of the angst faced by all of us when the governments here in the UK - and most of the Western world - implemented a corporatist originated agenda against the people. In 2020 the manifestation of this was COVID lockdowns. But now it’s Digital ID, moves towards digital money, and the creation of a surveillance panopticon. The characters in South of Market react in the ways we all reacted. I know this because I created them - and they each convey, via character-narrated chapters, their attempts at resistance.

I met several people in Edinburgh last night (at a Common Knowledge event) who had also read the book. They seemed to enjoy the narratives and commentary about the COVID era from the characters.

As Hugh puts it, “I had a very clear sense of the person - of Rahul or Anna or whoever was narrating - and I was interested in the story-line and what was going to happen. A good central concept - using the characters to express our views, and the dilemmas our side faced, and using them to describe the world they found themselves in.

“I enjoyed the analogy of the loss of freedoms to the limited movement of an electric car, and how the nonsense of man-made climate change was dealt with. I also liked the idea that there is no such thing as government, only a system or process.

“The novel also dispels the myth that our so-called democracy values free speech. But the fact is that everything was ready for lockdown, panic was orchestrated by the authorities, and the characters observed the loss of ability of people to think for themselves - preferring to outsource their thinking.

“In short, Big Tech is the government.

“South of Market does a good job conveying how debt and orchestrated scarcity are the ultimate instruments of control, and that democracy is an illusion.

“I thought that the vaccine debate was well articulated and the involvement of old-money oligarchs controlling everything. But I especially enjoyed the paragraph on page 206 - part of Mark Carlisle’s podcast interview with Anna - where he makes clear that there is a battle for truth to be won:

The difficulty we have is that each and every person has to reach that conclusion for themselves. We cannot impose our world view - even if we had the wherewithal to do it. You’re right, though, that this is a battle for truth. I have no religious faith, but over the last few years I’ve come to appreciate the battle that is also being waged on those who do. We all arrive at our understanding of what it is to be human from a variety of different directions. In my case I benefitted from parents who cared for me and loved me. For me that made me - for want of a better word - good. The rules of life that my parents gave to me were good rules. They encouraged me to be kind, because, they said, kindness is always rewarded. They encouraged me to travel, because, they said, travel enriches the mind and allows us to meet strangers who teach us things. They encouraged me to love my life with people who loved me in turn. These were the things that they held as their basic, fundamental laws of life. Good laws.

“Our strategy (as the resistance) is to provide the foot soldiers with the information they need. Their strategy, with digital identity, is collecting everything they need to know about us.

“I also picked up other themes in the book: loss of faith in mainstream media; people not questioning/challenging; the use of alternative media by the controllers; cancellation of dissenting voices; the manipulation of the financial markets for the benefit of a few; debt as the means of control; governments now defining our culture, our loyalties, our freedoms and telling us what is good for us.”

“But perhaps the main message from South of Market is this: the real virus is the government and its media.”

If you’d like to read the book, here’s more information about how to buy.