KEY POINTS:
Depending on your point of view, oceans either unite or divide the land masses that border them. Whenever I fly westwards from Britain over the Atlantic, I feel a barricade materialising in the empty air as the new continent approaches. The Gulf Stream, swooping down from Canada to protect the eastern seaboard, seems to rebuff the plane; on bad days, it resists intruders with the same grim hostility as the immigration officers who fingerprint you at JFK airport.
Those 5000km of cold, churning water are as problematic as the common language spoken in such different ways on opposite shores. Is the ocean a fluent medium of connection or a welter of mutual incomprehension?
The Atlantic lisped siren songs to Andrew O'Hagan as he grew up on the Ayrshire coast in Scotland. Lured by the stories about enrichment and the pursuit of happiness that the ocean whispered into his country's starved coves, some of his ancestors made the crossing. O'Hagan's great-grandfather, a Glasgow fishmonger, migrated to New York in 1923.
His grandfather also shipped out in 1940 as a greaser in the engine room of a merchant cruiser, though that voyage had a less happy outcome. A German torpedo hit the vessel and the elder O'Hagan didn't get to the lifeboats in time. He reposes, as his grandson solemnly remarks, "beneath the waves with all that broken metal". It's useful to be reminded that the Atlantic is a graveyard, quietly entombing stricken ships and the illusory hopes of the drowned questers who sailed in them.
The young O'Hagan, entranced by the movies, vaulted across the ocean in his dreams. America was still, for him, as F. Scott Fitzgerald called it, a land commensurate with our capacity for wonder. Once he began to travel, O'Hagan found that this open-eyed amazement was not reciprocal. After Hurricane Katrina, he accompanied two redneck relief workers on a farcical mission of mercy, listening to their ignorant blather about God, President Bush and the local supply of sex. He realised that for most of their compatriots "the world beyond America is a hidden territory of oddness, weakness and unreality".
Dismayed rather than awestruck after many transatlantic forays, O'Hagan wishes the ocean was wider. His essays deplore America's warping of Britain's foreign policy and its stealthier poisoning of culture.
It all began when Margaret Thatcher, pandering to the competitive frenzy of Reagan's America, announced that there was no such thing as society. A permanently unemployed underclass, kitted out in shiny trackies and fluorescent trainers, has responded by dramatising its dysfunctions on talk shows.
We may be indifferent to whoever happens to be in government, but we race to spend $1 a minute voting for an idol or scapegoat on a reality TV show. To shop and to holiday in exotic locations have become the only democratic rights that matter. Tony Blair, an adept "culture-surfer" who beatified Princess Diana and hobnobbed with Bono, flourished for a while because of his ingratiating populism.
But Blair's political career was only the prelude to the consumerist rampage that has followed his abdication. He and his wife have spent the last year buying houses, selling their tacky and spiteful reminiscences and travelling for free on the fast train to London's Heathrow Airport.
In a survey of celebrity memoirs, O'Hagan argues that the screens on which we watch the world have become mirrors of our own glamorised faces.
If it's not the mirror we're gazing at, he adds, it's the tabloid newspapers that are responsible for an infatuation with talentless show-offs, emblems of the spendthrift narcissism that is now Britain's main occupation. He writes finely about the American models for this new existential phenomenon, a fictionalised life "entirely concocted of private fears and public desires".
An essay on Marilyn Monroe describes the pathos of her empty dresses, flogged off by Christie's in New York in 2004; he is less compassionate about Michael Jackson, "a person who wants to unperson himself" by surgically reconstructing his nose and altering his pigmentation. In Dallas, O'Hagan visits the warehouse from which Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK with a rifle whose telescopic sight had the word "Hollywood" stamped on it.
O'Hagan's observations of America are acidly satirical, but he broods over polluted, corrupted Britain with a more painfully tender sense of what has been lost or negligently discarded. The Atlantic Ocean, despite its maritime title, is a pastoral elegy, a lament for a country that in aping America has pulled itself up by the roots. An essay on the trade in flowers follows the scent of "that other England, that place of communal worth", and finds that gardening has been outsourced to baking sheds in the Israeli desert; the lilies that are flown in are "postmodern flowers", sheeted in cellophane.
Other essays inspect the detritus of consumerism. At a landfill site in Buckinghamshire, O'Hagan peers into a gulf of sludge; in Glasgow, Scotland, he travels down the Clyde on a cargo ship that takes pensioners along for a free knees-up while it dumps tons of sewage. Once the open sea is reached, the vessel defecates and the water around it turns a thick, viscous, rusty brown. The Atlantic is a privy as well as a cemetery.
O'Hagan is a novelist whose essays often scourge the fiction-mongering of our leaders: he mocks George W. Bush for mimicking the swagger of movie cowboys and Pope John Paul II for promulgating sanctimonious falsehoods.
But at his most impressive, O'Hagan demonstrates that fiction can compel us to redefine reality, as when Hurricane Katrina, tossing hotels and casinos through the air and wrapping chandeliers in Spanish moss, transforms the grotesque fantasies of Southern Gothic into "a form of social realism".
Lies dribble from the slack mouths of politicians; if we want to know the truth about the false world we live in, we need to consult the writers of fiction.
The Atlantic Ocean: Essays on Britain and America
By Andrew O'Hagan (Faber & Faber $59.99)
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