If you haven't read the first book, this one can be enjoyed as a stand-alone. Chances are, you'll read the other one as soon as you've finished this one, anyway.
Extract:
The news on Allan’s black tablet had the curious habit of being both big and small. Mostly big, unpleasantly enough. Allan sought out the small and charming but got the rest of it into the bargain. It was impossible to see the molehills for the mountains.
During his first hundred years of life, Allan had never reflected upon the bigger picture. Now his new toy was telling him that the world was in a dreadful state. And reminding him of why he had, once upon a time, rightly chosen to turn his back on it and think only of himself. He recalled his early years as an errand boy at the gunpowder factory in Flen. There, half the workers had devoted their free time to longing for a red revolution, while the other half was horrified at the threat from China and Japan.
Their understanding of the Yellow Peril was nurtured by novels and booklets that depicted a scenario in which the white world was devoured by the yellow one. Allan did not care about such nuances, and he continued along the same path after the Second World War when brown shirts made brown the ugliest colour of them all. He noticed this as little then as he did the next time people converged around an ideological expression.
This time it was more a longing for something than away from it. Peace on earth was in, and so were floral VW buses and, frequently, hash. Everyone loved everyone else, except Allan, who didn’t love anyone or anything. Except his cat. Not that he was bitter: he just was.
The flowery era of life lasted until Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took over in their respective realms. They thought it was more practical to love oneself and one’s own successes. But if you insisted on disliking someone it should be the Russians. Essentially there were no other threats, and when Reagan killed Soviet Communism simply by talking about sending missiles from space, it was peace and joy for all, except the half of humanity who had no daily food and the several thousand British miners who no longer had a mine to go to.
The new view was that there was no reason to care about your neighbour; it was enough to tolerate him or her. And people did, until the winds of change blew once more. A bit unexpectedly, perhaps, the brown-shirt ideology made a comeback. Not by way of Germany this time, at least not fi rst and foremost. Or even second and middlemost.
But in a number of other countries it was in. The United States wasn’t fi rst among them, but it soon became the most noticeable, thanks to its recently elected president. It was impossible to say how much he really believed in it: that seemed to change from day to day. But the old adage about doing something yourself if you want it done right wouldn’t suffice: it was time to point out external threats to the white Western lives we all deserved to live.
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