The End of the New

THE NEOPHILIACS by Christopher Booker. 414 pages. Gambit. $8.95.

What on earth do the Beatles, Harold Wilson, Twiggy and Kenneth Tynan have in common? In their variously fashionable ways, all have been trapped within "the bubble of compulsive up-to-dateness." They are Neophiliacs--lovers of "the new"--and they are doomed to live out the damnation of all ultramodern men: "Keeping pace with pace."

Thus speaks Christopher Booker, a repentant Neophiliac himself, onetime scriptwriter for That Was the Week

That Was. With all the eye-rolling horror of an ex-sinner, Booker, 32, looks back on the English scene of the past 15 years or so as a case history in the "collective psychosis" of Neophilia. If the reader can make allowance for the author's own hysterical anti-hysteria, Booker's survey makes a fascinating study of what he regards as a national epidemic of self-deception.

His approach is based upon some reasonable assumptions and several perhaps questionable corollaries. The first assumption: "No breeding ground for fantasy is so fertile as a society in a state of disintegration and flux." Postwar England was just that. The core fantasy of postwar Englishmen, as Booker gloomily sees it: a tendency to mistake disintegration and flux for the throes of rebirth.

In the beginning, Booker concedes, mod England made a pleasant enough dream, set to music by the Beatles and costumed by Mary Quant. It all seemed a carnival of wit and style. At moments the carnival even appeared to have direction. Plays like John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, novels like Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim, revues like Beyond the Fringe seemed to be acts of ruddy good health against a moribund Establishment. Old England was dead. Long live new England.

Even swinging London, that myth invented by journalists, was harmless enough fun--pink frosting for a cultural revolution. Or was it? Booker does not think so. Behind the charming impudence of miniskirts and rock music, behind the justified indignation of Angry Young Men, he detects a less presentable motive: the "thrill that may be derived from sensing a sudden violation of tranquillity or order."

Booker's conclusion is that fantasists ultimately pay. For every dream there must be a nightmare. Grimly he records how the good times began to go away. The theater of anger turned into the theater of cruelty. Satire declined into a kind of invective. Britain's suicide rate soared. So did crime. From 1956 to 1965, illegitimate births doubled. The money spent on gambling increased fourfold. Hard-drug usage--heroin, cocaine--multiplied ten times over. Gradually the plot of history and the quirks of society grew nastier--Suez, Profumo, the 1966 Moors murder trial. Today, Booker judges, the Great Freak-Out is over. Reality has caught up with fantasy, and the spirit of collective hangover lies upon the land.

What was best in the dream--the idealism of the Ban the Bomb movement, a general exuberant impulse toward freedom--finally went mad. For this, perhaps too conveniently, Booker mainly blames the communicators--the fad-conscious journalists, the telly talkers, the trendy film makers--who turned Neophilia into an industry.

Part of the time he was writing his survey, Booker shared quarters with another ex-Neophiliac--and Christianity's prickliest recent convert--Malcolm Muggeridge. The spirit may have been catching. For Booker ends up, rather to his own surprise, preaching a sort of Jungian Christianity. Sitting amid the double rubble--first of the Establishment and now of the anti-Establishment --he looks at all the broken pieces and vainly yearns for some master myth to help put everything together again.

The bias of an anti-Neophiliac has driven Booker to underrate some genuine and rather remarkable cultural achievements. But that same bias has given him the insight to diagnose a fever behind the vitality of England during the past decade and a half.

His message is also for export. Chorusing Kenneth Tynan's epigram ("Life begins tomorrow"), Booker addresses to Neophiliacs everywhere a sad cautionary tale out of Ecclesiastes: "There is no new thing under the sun."

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