If you can remember the 60s, the saying goes, then you weren't there. The problem is the reverse with the 70s. It's the decade that no one who lived through can seem to forget. The era of three-day weeks, Abba and skyjacking has become a myth-decorated sanctuary from the present, a magnet for nostalgia junkies, ironists, romantics and cultural historians of various prejudices and stripes. For frustrated ideologues and all those who think everything went wrong in the world the day that Margaret Thatcher came to power, it represents a period of radical possibilities, the last time educated people could speak of "revolution" without joking. For those who tend to trace social change to the pop charts, it was the period in which punk replaced progressive rock and flares went straight.
The Seventies have inspired a host of documentaries, films, articles, fashions and books. Many of these have focused on the overfamiliar, but in recent years there has been a revisionist movement of sorts that has set out to combat cliches. Howard Sounes's Seventies: The Sights, Sounds and Ideas of a Brilliant Decade was a riposte to the view that Love Thy Neighbour and the Austin Allegro were typical of the times. And recently Andy Beckett's When the Lights Went Out sought to rescue progressive politics from the image of suicidal industrial disputes.
Now, before the gloss has had a chance to dry, along comes Francis Wheen with what amounts to a blowtorch and an industrial sander. Wheen has no interest in playing down the turmoil that rent the country during the years of energy blackouts, strikes and urban terror. He summons up an atmosphere of almost surreal resignation, as captured in Tony Benn's diary entry of 23 December 1973: "Three more IRA bombs in London. I tidied the office and wrapped Christmas gifts."
Benn's diaries come in for a number of citations because they are such a fertile source of the emotion that for Wheen best characterises the era: paranoia. The book's subtitle is "The Golden Age of Paranoia" and certainly when it came to insecurity, suspicion and fear, the Seventies had little to learn from the cold war tensions of the Fifties.
Wheen begins his assessment with that exemplar of paranoia, Richard Nixon. With his "ineradicable inferiority complex", fixation on the enemy within and obsession with secretly recording all his conversations, the disgraced president embodied the anxiety that afflicted not just the establishment but the counterculture too. Wheen's portrait of Tricky Dicky is sharp and amusing and he comes across as about as well-balanced as a drunk on a unicycle. "Bob," Nixon requested of Bob Haldeman, his chief of staff, "please get me the names of the Jews, you know, the big Jewish contributors of the Democrats could we please investigate some of these cocksuckers?"
Yet if a lunatic was running the asylum, that didn't make the other inmates sane. The CIA kept 500,000 files on US citizens, even if some of them were, well, worthy of suspicion. Wheen notes, in passing, that Jane Fonda's former husband, Tom Hayden, lived on a commune devoted to the North Korean dictator, Kim Il Sung, where they sang, to the tune of "Maria" from West Side Story: "Kim Il Sung, Kim Il Sung, Kim Il Sung. Say it loud and there's music playing; say it soft and it's almost like praying."
Wielding a magpie mind and an anteater's nose for dirt, Wheen is a rare hybrid beast in British letters. He combines genuine intellectual curiosity with deliciously humorous irreverence. A seasoned connoisseur of the bizarre and scurrilous, he provides here a feast of startling and droll anecdotes, featuring Harold Wilson, Idi Amin, Tariq Ali, Carlos the Jackal and Uri Geller. Page for page, it will doubtless rank as one of the most entertaining books of the year.
But at times, the selection can seem a little random. "Slice the Seventies where you will," Wheen writes, "the flavour is unmistakable a pungent melange of apocalyptic dread and conspiratorial fever." But the slices would be more revealing and the book more coherent, were they to create a recognisable shape.
One grows impatient for a unifying thesis to emerge, some overarching idea or explanation that will tie all the disparate characters and scenes together. It's fascinating to learn that Carlos, the high-living urban guerrilla, sent a letter admonishing the Guardian "my daily since 1966" for giving him nickname of "the Jackal". "Jackals are cute, fox-eared predators which hunt in large family groups," he complained. "I have observed them in the wild." And it's sobering to be reminded that, after he resigned his premiership, Wilson thought of himself, in his own words, "as the big fat spider in the corner of the room", directing investigative journalists to "kick a blind man standing on the corner [of Charing Cross Road]".
But what links these two situations and what do they tell us about the era beyond the warped outlook of the two individuals involved? Does the symptom have causes or is symptom itself the cause, paranoia breeding further paranoia?
Perhaps it's missing the point to look for a big answer. After all, it's the need for a totalising pattern, the notion that everything is connected, that is the hallmark of paranoia. As Wheen writes: "A belief in conspiracy as the motive force of history can give you nightmares, but by detecting a grand design in the most random events and thus creating some kind of order from chaos it also offers a solace that others find in religion." He goes on to argue that paranoia is "a solipsistic pathology, bestowing a sense of grandiosity and self-importance". This is a truth that deserves to be universally acknowledged. It's also true that I could have done with Wheen indulging in a tad more solipsism.
He inserts himself, very briefly, into the story in two or three tantalising episodes, first as a 13-year-old chorister meeting a tight-fisted Edward Heath and later as an aspiring hippie who's just missed the love boat. These glimpses are rich with self-deprecating wit, but they also offer a wider-eyed contemporary perspective that reaffirms the wisdom of retrospection. A more generous helping of this youthful innocence might have been sprinkled on his sage observations without risk of self-importance.
Ending in 1979, Strange Days Indeed is a kind of prequel to Wheen's previous book, How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World. For anyone who savoured that elegant savaging of nonsense thinking, this is essential reading. But more than that, it's a timely reminder, in this age of 9/11 "truthers" and reborn conspiracy theorists, that paranoia illuminates nothing so much as itself.
Andrew Anthony is the author of The Fallout: How a Guilty Liberal Lost His Innocence (Vintage)
