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Howard Jacobson | NYT Syndicate
TOO cruel anywhere. Any attack on the innocent, whatever the location, whatever the time, and whatever the ideology it serves, offends us to our very souls. But a bomb whose target is the innocent young children leaving a concert, excitedly full of what they'd seen, looking for their parents who had come to take them home is outrage piled upon outrage.
Twenty-two are dead, at least 50 others injured, in terrorist attack at a concert venue in central Manchester. With every hour, we hear another fraught eye-witness account, learn of another father or mother in despair, another child still to be accounted for. I have family in Manchester. They are all right. But it isn't only for oneself one worries. For others, too, the heart will break.
The eruption of indiscriminate violence in a peaceful place is terrorism's purpose and our greatest dread, the horrible intrusion of menace where we had no reason to expect it, no matter how often we tell ourselves that nowhere is safe now. The unnaturalness of terrorism is its essence. It means to strike out of a clear blue sky. It means to shatter those bonds of commonality we have to take for granted or we cannot live. So, this is terrorism's perfect expression: the random massacre of kids coming out of a pop concert they'd no doubt been looking forward to and talking animatedly about for weeks, kids united only moments before in music and fun.
Manchester, my home town, is a music city, at the forefront of musical innovation for decades. When I was growing up there, those who weren't aspiring musicians themselves lived next door to someone who was. I was exceptionally unmusical, but my brother played lead guitar for a well-loved band called the Whirlwinds which, after time, morphed into 10cc. They practiced in our living room.
When they spoke of their ambitions, I cautioned them against optimism."You and everyone else in Manchester," I said.
Liverpool had The Beatles but Manchester had The Hollies, Wayne Fontana and The Mindbenders, Herman's Hermits. Later, there was punk: Something about its harsh sardonic insolence born of early de-industrialisation, low wages and even lower clouds made Manchester a congenial venue. Manchester's music scene exploded again in the 1980s and '90s, thanks in large measure to the legendary entrepreneur Tony Wilson.
All that Manchester was best at, all its versatility and unexpectedness, all its artfully concealed sophistication, found a home in Tony Wilson, who read English at Oxford, taught drama at a school in Oldham, near Manchester, and founded Factory Records and the Hacienda Club. If I had to define the soul of modern Manchester, I'd point to Tony Wilson: down to earth and dandified, of the people and rarified, all at once; sharp-tongued, honourable, hedonistic, more interested in art and conversation than celebrity and wealth. It was thanks to Wilson that Manchester became known as 'Madchester'.
And it's a city of young people. Even on the most forbidding winter nights, the young congregate outside the bars and clubs, wearing not very much. The less you shiver, the harder you are. We will hear more over the coming days about about Manchester's indomitable nature. How the city will not bend to terror. How death shall have no dominion, and the faceless men of violence neither. And it will be as true of Manchester as it can be of anywhere.
But there's a suggestion of bravado, always, about these promises not to bend. Yes, we will overcome; but that's because we have to. When those we are defying aren't listening, we might as well be whistling into the wind.
Manchester has been bombed before. In 1996, the Irish Republican Army set off a truck bomb in the centre of the city. Aiming at causing maximum damage rather than fatalities, the terrorists telephoned warnings of what was about to happen. There were many injuries but no one died. The wreckage was immense and, in the way of these things, rebuilding presented an opportunity for much-needed regeneration. It would be perverse to attribute Manchester's economic success to that attack, but the city has indeed, and with proud self-assertion, risen phoenix-like from the ashes.
What has just happened at the Manchester Arena after a concert given by Ariana Grande is another order of catastrophe. There was no warning. The aim wasn't publicity through destruction of property, but publicity through destruction of life. It is not to forgive the one to insist on how much worse the other is. Terrorists talk of themselves as soldiers, but something like spite enters acts of terrorism of this sort. Though the killing is indiscriminate, it is also personal. Life itself, and the living who exemplify life, are the targets.
There is, then, a sense in which Manchester, though it now belongs to a long list of terrorist casualty cities, can think of itself as picked out. It is a city possessed of a rare vigour. And a music arena lies close to the heart of that vigour.
So, yes, this has been an attack on the city's very vitality. But the risk we face today is universal. If we want to find some consolation, it won't be in speeches of municipal defiance, but in the stories, now coming thick and fast, of the assistance rendered not only by the emergency services, but by Mancunians of courage and goodwill who obeyed their deepest instincts in the face of danger and did all they could to comfort the injured and distraught. All is sorrow, but we still have kindness and pity.
(Howard Jacobson is the author of more than a dozen novels, including 'The Finkler Question' and, most recently, 'Pussy: A Novel'.)
