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PRINT Holly Gash Luke Warde Habib made his name a
s a porn actor, activist, and podcaster before turning to writing. Here, he brings a radical eye to a reliable formula. Hawk Mountain Conner Habib [Doubleday Ireland] In falconry, ‘manning’ is the process of inuring a captive bird of prey to the alien world of its captor. It’s a practice with parallels in the human sphere, as we find in the pages of Hawk Mountain, this accomplished and evocative debut by Conner Habib. It tells the story of Todd, a thirty-three-year-old single father and high-school English teacher, whose choice of career seems strange in light of his own experiences: Todd was subjected to brutal homophobic bullying in school (considerably more understandable is his reluctance to place his young son Anthony into this environment, delaying his enrolment until the last possible moment). On the eve of the school year, Jack, a figure from his past, re-appears in Todd’s life, affecting an ebullience at odds with Todd’s recollections. In intervening chapters, we learn the details of the cruel treatment Todd suffered at Jack’s hands. These chapters build, it is hinted, to a mysterious climax on Hawk Mountain. The direction of the presentday narrative is less clear, as Jack manages to insinuate his way deeper into Todd’s life, but we can be certain that Jack’s presence has triggered a violent reckoning beyond even Todd’s powers of repression. This dynamic places us firmly in the familiar territory of the psychological thriller, specifically the kind known to readers of Patricia Highsmith. The suspense is heightened by the gradual revelations of Todd’s past traumas, increasing in severity. The plot is timed to a quickening beat, flitting, in short chapters, between past and present, until it reaches its promised crescendo. And the tone of impending doom is conveyed by the decadent imagery of late summer, and sustained after the school bells toll and the days shorten, as though a cosmic expression of Todd’s dwindling options. All of which is to say that the genre conventions are capably handled, but there is nothing conventional in Habib’s unflinching fusion of the erotic 54 with the grotesquely violent. At moments, he soars to the heights of a Georges Bataille or a James Purdy, even as he claims his own perch on this arcane offshoot of fiction. But for all that, the novel is grounded by its focus on the pathogenic role of certain institutions, education in particular. Todd’s story dramatises the contradiction of a system which for years restricts its charges to classrooms only to cast them on the world, at the mercy of a nature of which they can know little (including their own). Thus, the young Todd is sensitive to the absurdity of a nature studies class which takes place in a classroom engineered for the exclusion of nature. Of the books they read in English class, he has cause to ponder why ‘every one of them is meant to elicit feelings of sympathy based on… similarity’. Thus precluded from self-knowledge by open confrontation with the other, Todd is condemned, like a hooded hawk, to do unseeingly the bidding of a will not his own. Habib made his name as a porn actor, activist, and podcaster before turning to writing. Here, he brings a radical eye to a reliable formula, and excites interest in his next outing. DMG Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (and How We Win It Back) Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams [Verso ] In Hegemony now, Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams diagnose the origins of our present economic, political, ecological and cultural crises. They aren’t the first to lay the blame at the foot of what they and others call neoliberalism, but they at least do the reader the courtesy of carefully theorising this villain. As they show, neoliberalism is not a project for deregulating markets per se. Rather, its proponents attempt to ‘encase’ markets from democratic accountability through transnational government structures like the IMF. Gilbert and William’s most original contribution is probably their account of the concept of hegemony itself. Most understand this term as meaning something like majority consent, but as they show, the populations whose lives it has immiserated have shown little appetite for the kinds of policies it recommends. On their reading, the durability of neoliberalism owes much to sheer resignation; the paradigm’s most effective weapon has been reducing politics in general to little more than a choice over whether to regulate capitalism a little or not at all. In spite of this, the authors refuse a melancholy that often plagues the left. As they show, the very digital media platforms that today ruthlessly monetise our attention also facilitate new forms of solidarity. LW