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It's difficult to write a proper review of Liv Strömquist's Uppgång och Fall (in French, Grandeur et Décadence), since my reactions are so confused. First, it's a fantastically entertaining graphic novel: I literally couldn't put it down. My initial attempt, which I posted a couple of days ago, focusses on that side of it. But Strömquist isn't just trying to entertain you, she is deadly serious. This unassuming little book is, I kid you not, one of the best attempts I've seen in recent years to answer the question that's bothering pretty much everyone in the world who still has a functioning brain. You can phrase this question in many ways, some of them dry and academic in the extreme, but a straightforward way to put it would be: why is everything so totally fucked up?

Now of course I can already hear a fair number of people saying what do you mean, fucked up? Things have never been better. Guys, please try and look at the actual facts. (Remember facts? We used to think they were important). Most of the world's qualified scientists tell us that we are causing massive, irreparable harm to the environment, and that the consequences will be somewhere between very bad and utterly catastrophic. And yet the people who make the decisions are somehow ignoring these dire warnings, on the rather surprising grounds - when any grounds are even given - that said scientists are part of a massive global conspiracy to distort the truth. Well, agreed, anything is possible, but just use basic principles like Occam's Razor and cui bono. Perhaps this global scientific conspiracy exists, though it seems like a hard way to get a little research funding. Or perhaps the conspiracy is between the extremely rich people who stand to get even richer by continuing to behave in a totally irresponsible way and carrying on plundering the Earth. It seems to me that the second explanation is a whole lot more plausible than the first.

Strömquist starts off her book by telling you how mindbogglingly disconnected from reality these top decision-makers are. She has a wonderfully ironic sequence where she compares them with those Oriental sages who after a lifetime of spiritual discipline are able to lose track of past and future and only live in the present - except, as she points out, the CEOs who are busily leading the world to ruin are even better at it. And this is just the start. Having established what they're doing, she then introduces us to the official ideology that motivates so many of them, where the teachings of Ayn Rand play a startlingly important role. There's another great sequence where she gives you a quick tour of critical points in Rand's magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, which she accurately describes as a science-fiction romance about hot capitalists. I have read Atlas Shrugged, and I found it very entertaining, but I also found Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress very entertaining when I read it as a teen. If I had to take one of these books as a guiding philosophy, I'd pick Heinlein, but the right choice is obviously "neither". It is not sensible to let your life be guided by a hack science-fiction writer with weird homegrown political-ethical-sexual theories.

Continuing her rapid tour of the state of the world - Strömquist realistically appreciates that in the iPhone generation, no one is going to sit still for anything much longer than a TED talk - the next topic is how things got this way. Where do these weird people come from, who believe that the only way to run civilization is to push about half the country down to the poverty line so that they can engage in ever more repulsive acts of conspicuous consumption? Here, we have an engagingly savage attack on Chris O'Neill, the extremely rich American who in 2013 married Sweden's Princess Madeleine. People like Mr O'Neill, Strömquist tells us, come from families where the concept of love has been replaced with that of money. They have distant parents, who are never there and give them material goods instead. And when they grow up, the only way they have to try and find love is to carry on acquiring more goods. Well, I have heard less plausible theories.

I'll skip a couple of the entertaining parentheses, though the exhaustive list of all working-class characters appearing in the second volume of Knausgård's Min kamp is hilarious. What choices do we have? Segueing from her Princess Madeleine skit, Strömquist alertly points out that the people who say they want to get rid of the monarchy are a bit late to the party if they intend to come across as brave and forthright. In 2018, the monarchy no longer means anything. If these people had come out with their republican sentiments in 1518, that would have shown courage, but in 1518 they'd have been met with blank incomprehension. What do you mean, get rid of the monarchy? What other system could possibly work? And that's exactly where we are today when anyone is foolish enough to suggest that extreme laissez-faire capitalism might perhaps not be the ideal system. No one even seems to believe there is an alternative.

And finally, Ströquist gets to the central question. Again, this can be phrased in various dry, neutral and academic ways. But a direct way to put it would be: what the fuck can we do about this? Why has the left, which is supposed to act as a counter to this no-longer-even-disguised philosophy of unthinking, unrestrained greed, completely failed in its mission? Strömquist says, I think very perceptively, that they've forgotten how to be inclusive and instead allowed themselves to become exclusive. Once upon a time, if you were a worker, you were welcomed by the working class revolutionaries as a brother or a sister. That built big, powerful movements that could change things. People believed in them enough that they were literally willing to fight and die in their cause. But now, the left has become sidetracked into a wilderness of arbitrary moral judgements. If you use non-PC language, or buy the wrong kind of shopping bag, or read an inappropriate book, they want nothing to do with you. Nativist politicians have rushed in to fill this vacuum. They aren't fussy: if you're angry and white, they welcome you to the club and let you help them change the political agenda. Meanwhile, the left is posting witty comments on the internet. [Yes, I know...]

We need more people like Sister Liv. I have been corresponding with Ordfront, her publisher, and they assure me that an English edition of this book is in the pipeline and will soon appear. When it comes out, go buy yourself a copy. Maybe it'll amuse you. Maybe it'll make you angry. Maybe - who knows? - it'll inspire you to go out and actually do something.