London Falling<\/a>, is a rigorous, thought-provoking and moving account of this unfolding tragedy. It assembles a portrait of a lost soul and through it, a damning portrait of London itself begins to emerge.<\/p>\nAt first, it seemed like an open and shut case of heartbreaking self-destruction. Brettler appeared, after all, to jump of his own accord. Context, however, is everything. The teenager had been living a fictional life, creating a Russian persona, altering his family tree to appear like the scion of oligarchs. In reality, he was a Jewish upper middle-class kid from West London with a father in finance and a journalist mother. But he was in way over his head, it seemed, the pressure got to him.<\/p>\n
On the night Brettler died, however, another occupant of the Riverwalk flat \u2014 owned by \u201cIndian Dave\u201d, a gangland figure \u2014 had sent a text to an acquaintance: \u201cI am not fucking playing. I have just been heating up knives and clearing up blood.\u201d Records show the last thing Brettler typed into Google that night was \u201cwhat to do with skin burns\u201d.\u00a0 The police promised the Brettler family \u201cno unanswered questions\u201d. They merely created more.<\/p>\n
Radden Keefe\u2019s account has many strengths. It contains genuine insights and he has a noble duty of care towards the Brettler family, which is often absent in nonfiction. The story is gripping from start to finish, even as you swim through someone else\u2019s misery. But London Falling is not without flaws. A view from the outside can be enlightening but it can also lead to inaccuracies. The view of Eighties London suddenly rousing itself from monochrome post-war austerity is too convenient a simplification as it erases the Sixties. And the author\u2019s commendable closeness and sensitivity towards the family may have dulled his critical eye. There is also an exhausting tendency to finish each subchapter with a cliffhanger, which feels like a stylistic seepage from true crime podcasts. But these are minor qualms.<\/p>\n
A larger issue lies with Radden Keefe\u2019s worldview. He explores the criminal underbelly, quite courageously, and he intimates throughout that \u201cglitzy mercenary\u201d London is far more corrupt than many care to acknowledge. He is right to present the capital as \u201ctwenty-four-hour laundromat for dirty money [\u2026] full of crooks with pretensions to legitimacy\u201d. Yet there is something, a benevolent liberal worldview perhaps, that prevents him from fully staring into the heart of darkness. His portrait of the capital remains compelling but only partially developed because it still feels reliant on an assumption that humans are intrinsically decent and institutions are there to protect us, a view that is fading, sadly but necessarily, into extinction.<\/p>\n
The death of Zac Brettler was a singular event, yet it is an encapsulation, rather than an aberration, of how London functions. There is a chasm between the London Zac\u2019s parents thought they knew, and London as it actually is. This is a common understandable misconception in bourgeois circles. Respectability and lack of exposure can be blinkers. There is a sudden dawning when Zac\u2019s parents realize that the state isn\u2019t going to protect them or bring justice. The author is correct in noting that their earlier \u201cunexamined confidence\u201d was misplaced. Yet he does not fully examine whether this is how the system is actually built to function rather than some terrible mistake.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe death of Zac Brettler was a singular event, yet it is an encapsulation, rather than an aberration, of how London functions.\u201d<\/p>\n
The hypocrisy of the West\u2019s political and media class is demonstrated by how it \u201cothers\u201d corruption. It always belongs somewhere else, usually to the east or the south. The truth is that corruption here is so endemic it is not even recognized as corruption. We threw our doors open to Russia\u2019s oligarchs when it threw off its communist shackles; we bolstered the kleptocratic class by coercing IMF-led \u201cshock therapy\u201d of privatization on the nation. When the ex-KGB tough guy Putin gets into power, Britain offered these well-heeled thieves a sanctuary, further debasing itself by offering up football clubs, luxury apartments and private schools as investment vehicles. Once the autocratic world-boss, Britain was now reimagined as the sycophantic butler. Other places are merely more honest about their dishonesty. Here it has acceptable names \u2014 expenses, moonlighting, PFI, offshore entities, super-injunctions, non-doms, shell companies. Colossal wealth transfer takes place all the time from the public purse to private banks via opaque and unaccountable bureaucracies. This is not the exception but the rule. Legality is superfluous when those who make the laws are themselves confidence tricksters.<\/p>\n
There are two layers of society that know this Darwinian or even Hobbesian truth, and give little credence to any chatter of progress or etiquette. The working class know because they face the consequences every day (consequences, like taxes, are only for the little people). The establishment know because they reap the benefits. It is those in the middle who are oblivious, their knowledge of the world not caring to extend beyond the unreliable narrator midwittery of The Rest is Politics or The News Agents, \u201ca lot of Londoners found themselves priced out of this new version of their city, forced to relocate and commute from distant suburbs.\u201d But in fact, it goes much further than that.<\/p>\n
There has also been an asset-stripping hollowing-out of the city\u2019s soul. The cockneys are gone. The old markets closed or replaced. The nightlife is being put through a slow euthanasia. London Falling implies that these are side effects or errors when actually they are the main game: profitable for the few over the many. This is suggested in the hostility the commentariat show to anyone who points out London\u2019s very obvious decline, denying and obfuscating anything that happens outside of leafy gentrified enclaves. There is a cruelty in denying palpable concerns, especially from those upon whom the entire capital relies. There is also delusion, aided by mantras like \u201cGreatest city in the world\u201d or \u201cJust the cost of living in a city\u201d while the metropolis slowly falls apart. Crime is deemed more palatable than noticing or even experiencing crime. Multiculturalism has been abandoned in favor of exploitation and Balkanization. It is reminiscent of the scene in La Haine where a man falling from a building repeats with every passing floor, \u2018So far, so good.\u2019<\/p>\n
What makes this a particularly terrifying book, then, especially for any parent, is the societal feeling of vertigo when they start to realize no one in authority is going to protect them or their children. Faced with their son\u2019s lies, Zac Brettler\u2019s parents experience \u201ca kind of woozy vertigo, as what had previously seemed to be the solid factual underpinnings of their family\u2019s existence began to shudder and torque\u201d. The state is not constructed to protect its citizens. It is designed to protect a status quo or engineer a new and profitable one. There are numerous lines in London Falling that are indicative of the permitted degeneracy of our times \u2014 a business address with \u201cno fewer than twenty-five buzzers\u201d, a recidivist criminal serving time in 33 different prisons, no comment uttered \u201cnearly two hundred times\u201d. Britain is broken and it\u2019s by design. Wealth may not trickle down but the moral expediency of grifting does, regardless of the cost to any semblance of justice or meritocracy. It is there in the high-end funds pouring in from Qatar and the Gulf States, designed successfully to influence those in power, and it is there in the cynical fa\u00e7ade of high street candy shops and barbers, laundering money and on occasion selling drugs, at the other end of the spectrum. One is inscrutable, the other unavoidable for those with open eyes. They are however two sides of the same coin.<\/p>\n
Radden Keefe\u2019s admirable sensitivity towards the Brettler family means that he takes a soft approach to any question of whether their son was a pathological liar. If we are callous enough to ask the question, it deserves an answer. Zac Brettler\u2019s lies may have spun out of control, but they were rational. They were attempts to manipulate and gain status in a system built on manipulation and status. His mistake was not being well-connected enough to be protected in high-end circles and not brutal enough to survive in the low-life.<\/p>\n
Young Brettler may have lost his bearings, but he did not create the maze in which he was wandering. In the end, it seems that he confused different worlds, seeking sympathy (via claims of grief and heroin addiction) from people to whom it was very dangerous to show weakness or duplicity. He mistook high-stakes life and death maneuverings for a game, and lacked the protections the establishment affords. In this London, you are either a shark or a mark.<\/p>\n
Perhaps it was ever thus. Radden Keefe quotes Voltaire\u2019s view of London in 1733 where people of many different creeds flocked to the city to \u201ctransact together, as though they all professed the same religion, and give the name of infidel to none but bankrupts\u201d. We like to think garish excess and legalized profiteering are a new development, but tradition shrouds the crimes of the past. \u201cThis is what you get when you found a political system,\u201d as Christopher Hitchens noted, \u201con the family values of Henry VIII.\u201d The king was no stranger to ostentation (the Field of the Cloth of Gold for instance) or fueling his lifestyle by crippling those doing social good (the Dissolution of the Monasteries). And so it remains. Whatever the etiquette or the vestiges of tradition, power has always been a scam. Its prey, from the peasants who believed in the divine right of kings to those who went over the top in 1914 to those who vote now for their own immiseration, are always those who believe in the prevailing establishment narrative.<\/p>\n
Radden Keefe identifies Thatcher\u2019s deregulation of the City of London as the Big Bang, offering ambitious young men \u201csomething that looked like meritocracy\u201d while the Tories simultaneously laid waste to trades and industries. Simply put, instead of making things, Britain would launder money and place bets. Like the empire before it, it was extractive rather than generative, parasitic rather than wealth-creating. The ingenuity of the Industrial Revolution, the visionaries who dreamed it into being and the communities that carried it have long been betrayed, decimated by a globalization initiated by a mercantile elite who have loyalty to nothing outside the financial. \u201cTo launder something \u2013 whether it is cash or a reputation \u2013 is to mingle the dirty with the clean,\u201d Radden Keefe notes. This was true with the subprime mortgages that crashed the world in 2008. It is also true of \u201cLondon\u2019s obsequious hospitality\u201d to the global hyper-rich, regardless of their crimes. Yet to witness Keir Starmer oozing out of No. 10 to greet decapitator-in-chief Ahmed al-Sharaa, you realize none is clean.<\/p>\n
Again, they never were. A strange mirroring of the colonial age makes this abundantly clear as Radden Keefe notes, \u201cIn earlier eras, English aristocrats would occasionally throw Orientalist costume parties at which they dressed up as sultans, maharajas and other grand foreign types. Now, at Annabel\u2019s rich foreigners could dress up as English aristocrats.\u201d He reminds us that \u201cEngland has a colorful history of imposters who used to turn up [\u2026] and pose as titled aristocrats,\u201d yet it was arguably an imposture from the beginning; the \u201csilver spoon fairy tale\u201d was always a swindle by invaders and warlords from the Normans onwards, more interested in Faustian pacts than social contracts. And it always fed off the populace \u2014 from the Harrying of the North to the rookeries of Dickensian London.<\/p>\n
Admitting decline, though, is anathema to those benefiting from it. And so free speech is suppressed. Inquiries bury or soften bad news. The Official Secrets Act kicks unpleasantness into the long grass. Super-injunctions abound. The Brettler family found their case simply fade away, \u201cnobody ever told them \u2018no\u2019 explicitly, but months and eventually years went by\u201d. When they started to question, they were treated with hostility. The police are caught between infiltration from \u201cbelow\u201d by organized crime and from \u201cabove\u201d by the security services, with protected informants bridging both realms. The all-seeing eye of the state can turn blind when certain interests needed protection. An impaled fixer for oligarchs, a child drowned in a storm drain, a care home of horrors, a spy found in a holdall in his Pimlico flat, a few hundred thousand working class girls, a Jewish kid who cosplayed as a gangster. Maybe law and order wasn\u2019t ever really about justice. Now it\u2019s seemingly no longer about order either. Lady Justice is blindfolded after all. \u201cUltimately, it\u2019s all transactional,\u201d Zac\u2019s mother sadly notes.<\/p>\n
If you navigate through the flocks of tourists around the Tower of London, you\u2019ll find a strange recess under Tower Bridge called Iron Gate Stairs or Dead Man\u2019s Hole. It was here that bodies of the drowned would wash up and be displayed in a morbid form of voyeurism. Yet disappearances are worse. Unsolved crimes. Unexplained fates. Cases closed with suspect haste. Secrets still wash up by the riverside though, even if they are sent from worlds that few want to look into. The dismembered body of Zoe Parker. The chemical attacker Abdul Ezedi. The suspected ritual child killing of \u201cAdam\u201d. Welcome to the city of silences. Nothing to see here. Move along.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"They used to call it the Silent Highway. Compared to its imperial heyday, there is far less traffic…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":26918,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[26],"tags":[7690,27,12023],"class_list":["post-26919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-london","tag-corruption","tag-london","tag-patrick-radden-keefe"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116501989468189260","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26919"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26919\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26918"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}