Radicals: Outsiders Changing the World by Jamie Bartlett review – The Guardian

Environmentalists protest in Medellin, Colombia, in March, after authorities declared an emergency due to high pollution levels. Photograph: Raul Arboleda/AFP/Getty Images

Its often been said that most nonfiction books are really magazine articles blown up to enable publication. But that analysis is increasingly anachronistic. Magazines, with a few honourable exceptions, no longer run the kind of articles that form the basis for expansion to book-size.

Jamie Bartletts new book is a case in point its a collection of disparate pieces that could, in a previous era, have been published as long magazine articles. In fact, some of them have appeared in newspapers and magazines in much shorter versions, but the only way to do them justice nowadays is in a book.

Bartletts uniting theme, as his title suggests, is radical approaches to life today. To this end, the author hangs out in Las Vegas with transhumanists those who seek a hugely extended life expectancy by upgrading the human body with technology with free love evangelicals in Portugal, anti-Islam protesters in England and Germany, and psychedelic drug users in Holland, among several other groups who dont conform to mainstream thinking.

Bartlett defines these very different groups as radicals because theyre all looking for an alternative path in politics and life. Im not sure that this is a particularly helpful definition, simply because in theory it includes everyone from animal rights advocates to Salafi jihadists, from Mormons to neo-Nazis. Which is to say that it provides such a broad umbrella as to be almost meaningless, except, perhaps, for enabling some kind of comparative study of the type of personalities that are drawn to reject social norms.

As Bartlett demonstrated in his previous book, The Dark Net, which examined the illicit world of the web, he is an accomplished journalist: careful, dispassionate and willing to put the time in. And once again he does the work, spending time with people whom less committed reporters might wish to avoid. And he does so with a degree of sympathy that is as impressive as it is rare.

However, hes not a great stylist when it comes to bringing people alive. This is partly, I suspect, because he wants to be fair. When other writers might be tempted to mock or create comic caricatures, Bartlett takes a gentler, more open approach. Staying at Tamera, a German polyamorous commune in Portugal, he nobly resists several golden opportunities to satirise the oddball behaviour of some of the inhabitants. Instead, he allows the absurdity to speak largely for itself.

It pays dividends up to a point, particularly with Heike, a caretaker of the commune, who believes herselfable, like Doctor Dolittle, to talkto the animals. She is so convincedby her fantasies that its just a matter of recording her speech accurately. But elsewhere this passive stance falls victim to narrative inertia. The book opens with Bartlett joining abus carrying a gang of transhumanists from California to Vegas. It was a selfconscious nod by the organisers to the legendary road trip made by Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, immortalised by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. But nothingmuch happens on this trip thats worth reporting. Ostensibly, thejourney is to promote the self-styled transhumanist leader Zoltan Istvans (illegal) bid to become US president in breach of the countrys arduous Federal Electoral Commission criteria. But Istvan is an underwhelming figure everywhere but in his own head.

You can almost feel Bartlett willing something interesting to take place. But its at moments like this that the reporter has to find other ways to tell the story, otherwise the material is only as strong as the events it describes. And everything Istvan and his hapless followers do is a failure. In the hands of a younger Martin Amis or a Geoff Dyer this could make for a hysterical odyssey of disappointment. Here, as things pan out, you wonder why Bartlett chose it as his opening chapter.

That said, all of the chapters contain thoughtful and intelligent reflections on the position of outsiders who, as Bartlett reminds us, could well be proven by history to be ahead of their time. After all, he argues, the past is littered with people who seemed mad or mavericks in their own era, but by todays norms would seem conventional. Its also worth remembering that history is full of fruitcakes who have grown no less nutty with the judgment of time.

Bartlett started writing the book in 2014. Since then, the world has changed quite a bit: Brexit and Donald Trump were once marginal cases that didnt fit into the Overton Window of acceptable ideas. So were Brexiters and Trump supporters radicals who have now shifted to take control of popular terrain? Although these unexpected outcomes help make Bartletts book more timely, they also expose the problems in collecting non-mainstream beliefs in such a seemingly random manner.

Neither Trump nor Farage are radicals in any meaningful sense of the word: theyre opportunists whose particular reactionary agendas happen,for various reasons, to be enjoying theirday in the sun. By the same token, most of the subjects of Bartletts notebook, including the egregious Tommy Robinson, founder of the EDL, as wellas the short-lived Pegida UK, are not promoting political beliefs that have any real shelf life in a fast-changing world.

You sense that Bartlett knows this, and its the touching futility rather than any pragmatic utility of their beliefs in which he is most interested. I wish hed focused more on the deluded and desperate aspects of what drives people away from mainstream ideas. Because if true radicals inherit the future, then too many of the occupants of these pages are haplessly trying to recreate an idealised past.

Radicals: Outsiders Changing the World by Jamie Bartlett is published by William Heinemann (20). To order a copy for 15 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over 10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99

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Radicals: Outsiders Changing the World by Jamie Bartlett review - The Guardian