By David Hare

‘The good and the bad ... From the triumphs of Athens to the horrors of Baghdad... annual review of the year’, The Observer, Sunday December 19 2004

It has been a curious year. Those of us who opposed the invasion of Iraq from the outset on the grounds that it was unnecessary, illegal and premature – and that no good cause could possibly entail so much lying – have been waiting grimly as our once-controversial convictions became orthodoxy.

Even those well-meaning observers who originally sought to mount a compassionate defence of a military solution to the iniquities of Saddam Hussein now speak in despair about the brutal incompetence of its execution. Faced with the civilian body count – or rather its official non-existence – and the explicit racism of the Rumsfeld/Bremer viceroyship, the whole world, it seems, has been forced to turn anti-occupation. Only the apocalyptic wing of the Republican Party remains defiantly pro. But working ourselves into a state of indignation about a second Bush administration driven by militant illogic gets us nowhere.

There is a far more pressing question for those of us who have witnessed the needless killing of tens of thousands of civilians, the raining of bombs on the heads of the innocent. That question is: what the hell do we do next?

Many of us find ourselves these days living in a sort of habituated impotence. You might even say it’s the defining mood of the early 21st century. We are certain of our views. After everything that’s happened, we are hardly likely to revise them now. And we are also sure of our contempt for a political class which is disconnected from the people it claims to serve. But, sadly, we are far less sure of the direction from which any encouraging change is likely to come. Just as remarkable as the emergence of a lawless American government is the absence of an oppositional leadership equipped to take it on. When, in the autumn, the BBC briefly stirred itself from its sullen consumerist slump and showed a series of documentaries by Adam Curtis, then the viewer turned astonished and exclaimed ‘Wow!’ The Power of Nightmares argued that leaders who had once made it their job to offer electorates hope now competed for office by painting hyped-up fantasies of catastrophe, in which politicians were able to represent themselves not as facilitators but as saviours. For once, as lucky licence-payers, the audience were being treated as if they had brains. Television programmes were finally being aired which did not simply lay out an over-familiar litany of facts (‘This happened, then this’). Images and words were being powered by an original theory. In front of our grateful eyes was a gifted filmmaker willing to step beyond the routine practice of portraying terrible things. Curtis aimed instead to penetrate to their cause, and to suggest a perspective from which we could henceforth begin to look. He made the subject fresh.

You might not think, in an ideal world, that it would be such an unusual event to stumble across an artist who actually has an analysis. But, my God, how few there are! It is as if the collapse of a belief in political ideology has led to an overall lowering of our sights, both in our arts and in our journalism. Do we no longer feel it possible to interpret the crazy drama of zealotry, subjugation and violence in which we live? Are we content merely to describe it? We are standing to one side, apparently powerless, watching a grotesque parade of events set in train by religious fundamentalists of every stripe: Christian, Islamic, Jewish. Political opportunists, both in the East and in the West, are, in a ghastly mirror image, using each others’ excesses as an excuse for agendas of their own. In this atmosphere of decisively limited expectations, it is all the more remarkable, then, to find writers, filmmakers, artists or reporters who have some grasp of the new and shifting context in which they will now have to carry out their work.

It is for this reason, among many others, that so many people have come to admire Arundhati Roy. Looking at her, it is hard to resist the feeling that, in my profession at least, she is way down a road which the rest of us will one day have to follow. Although Roy became known by writing a novel – it was called The God of Small Things; it won the Booker prize – she does not, in fact, regard novel-writing as an aim in itself. Roy is comfortable with the possibility that she may never write another. To her, it would not be important. Since she began her campaign to stop the devastation of rural Indian lives by the building of hydro-electric dams, Roy has laughed off the term ‘writer-activist’ as being no more eloquent than the term ‘sofa-bed’. ‘It’s a comment on the reduction of the meaning of being a writer, you know. Why should it be that I have to be an “activist”? I’m actually a writer and this is what writers do and have done through centuries – commenting on the societies in which they live.’

Roy sees writing as, by chance, the thing she’s good at, but also as only one of the many means by which she will defend the interests of the poor against the rich. She sees the world as a fight between power and powerlessness. When I picked up a copy of the Australian magazine The Bulletin, I found a quoted passage which has haunted me for months. It is, in its quiet way, as devastating as the famous Orwell image of the future as a boot landing over and over again on a human face. Arundhati Roy’s description of the scene in a road in the Indian capital could only have been written by someone who has an analysis and who uses that analysis to see more clearly than she could without: ‘Every night outside my house in Delhi I pass this road gang of emaciated labourers digging a trench to lay fibre-optic cables to speed up our digital revolution. They work by the light of a few candles. That is what is happening in India today...’

Later she adds: ‘Everywhere the poor are packed like lice into every crevice of the city. People don’t see that any more. It’s as if you shine a light very brightly in one place, the darkness deepens around it. They don’t want to know what’s happening. The people who benefit from this situation can’t imagine that the world is not a better place.’ The woman who wrote that is my hero.