Reviews…
Evasion escape, survival in the mountains as Spain disintegrates
Why did I decide to read this book? It was because the publishers pre-release copy of a new book I was reading seemed too-hard-going. I was tired and wanted something light to read, something that wouldn’t require too much thinking, something through which the text flowed like a gentle stream gurgling its way slowly downslope.
THE CONCEPT caught my imagination. A nation state disintegrates and turns on expats living there. They escape and bide their time, their future uncertain.
My search for a novel that didn’t require much by way of deep thinking led me to speculative fiction. Specifically, alternative futures. How will the probability wave collapse on being observed and how will history unfold as a consequence? That is the gist of the alternative futures subgenre. Sure, the read was easy and, sure, it didn’t require too much thinking, but it did stimulate the imagination enough to make me consider how I would cope in a similar situation to the protagonists.
I had not long ago read 2034, a specualtive fiction story that explored the real world scenario of how a conflict might develop between the US and China over China’s annexation of the South China Sea. I read that because of the novel’s probability value. Before that, I read Australian author Linda Woodrow’s 470, a speculative fiction novel about people coping with abrupt climate change and severe weather in the northern NSW region of Australia’s East Coast. With the East Coast flooding and severe weather of 2020, Linda’s book rises higher on the scale of probability. Reality sometimes catches up with fiction. Different speculative fiction books about different scenarios. All exploring timelines not too far in our future.
Unlike those books, The Brexit Brigands is not based on an event that had a high degree of probability. We know that simply because it didn’t happen. Looked at from the present time the book, published in 2016, came out over three years before Britain quit the European Union in January 2020,, a trigger event in the story. When it was written it fitted into the alternative futures genre. It is now alternative history. Such is the fate of alternative futures situated close to the present time. Time catches up.
As the book starts we are introduced to four English expat friends living in Spain as the country disintegrates into a number of autonomous states. The one they find themselves in, Nueva Andalucia, persecutes people from England in an attempt to get their property and wealth after Britain brexits from the crumbling European Union. English people are being rounded-up, whether for repatriation or for hostage diplomacy to secure the return of Gibraltar to Spain is unknown. Uncertainty breeds a perception of threat. After dillydallying for awhile the four abscond to the mountains where they hold up for the next couple years.
I prefer fiction that has a basis in reality. The Brexit Brigands doesn’t disappoint. The author tackles the issues that political refugees would face in such a situation. Evading the law, feeding themselves, getting fuel for their vehicles in a situation in which the Euro has been displaced by a new local currency that they cannot legally obtain because of their political status. Wariness of locals and the logistics of living while in hiding figure repeatedly through the book. Theirs’ become lives of concealment and evasion with uncertainty over the future maintaining a background tension through the story.
The details of their daily life were something I could identify with. Only a year before, like them, I had been living in a van alternatively on the coast and in the mountains. I wasn’t evading or escaping. My time on the road was voluntary. Food, meals that are simple to cook, shelter, dealing with rain and wind, keeping clean, keeping warm in cold weather—they were all familiar and were the same needs and challenges the protagonists faced. When it came to energy I couldn’t help but wonder why the author didn’t give his protagonists a solar panel and an auxiliary battery to charge their phones and run energy-efficient LED lights at their camps, as I did on the road.
Food and fuel. These are the key necessities of life on the road and they come up again and again throughout the story. So does evasion. Their campsites in the mountains and forests have to be well away from main roads and settlements. They must live quietly and unobtrusively, venturing into villages for food only when necessary. It is doing that where they face their greatest risk.
How realistic is author Adrian Chisholm’s description of the fugitives’ lives in self-imposed seclusion? Would it be possible to live in a country like Spain when you are not a native, when you have no local currency? Perhaps we can look for an analogous situation in the story of Christopher Knight who lived alone in the forest of the American state of Maine for 27 years. He secluded himself in a bush camp not far from where people stayed and remained undetected. He was eventually arrested for stealing food from nearby houses. Knight’s story is documented in Michael Finkel’s book, Stranger in the Woods. That someone could get away with living out of sight not all that far from civilisation suggests that Chisholm’s fictional characters could get away with it too.
When I started to read the book I thought I might tire of it. I didn’t. The author retains an atmosphere of uncertainty around being discovered, enlivened by narrow escapes and by the suggestion of one protagonist to place a time limit on her sojourn in the mountains and give herself up after that. This introduces another point of uncertainty in a story where uncertainty is pervasive.
I suppose in reviewing a book I’m supposed to say whether I found it good or bad and comment on the literary style. I am not a literary reviewer so I can talk about the book as what I am—a journalist. That frees me to discuss the ideas in the book more than its literary merits. Surely it is the ideas in a book and not literary concerns that are the main thing?
Perhaps it is to do with the respective cultures of our countries, that of the author and I, or our life experience when it comes to the difficulties the refugees face when fleeing. Their logistical problems are not problems at all from the point of view of how people here in Australia travel and live in their vehicles for extended periods. The equipment the protagonists would have benefited from is basic to people who spend extensive periods living out of their vehicles in out of the way places. I draw on my own van travels here in saying that those who live the nomadic, mobile life have already answered the problems the protagonists faced. They, however, were people who lived the more or less affluent life of more or less cashed-up expats, so other than one of them who did prepare, they weren’t ready for their time in the mountains.
Their lack of preparation as Spain started to disintegrate raises the question of why they didn’t cross the border into a neighbouring country before conditions turned against them? Even as a precaution with the intention of returning as soon as conditions made that possible. Why, as conditions for British people start to slide downhill, did they not prepare for a worst case scanario? Why didn’t they think about getting out when they could? I know that deciding just when the right time to leave is tricky. Things might start to pick up, after all. Then, again, they might not, and it is that possibility which carries the greater portent and for which you prepare. If the trend looks like it will continue to your disadvantage, setting a leave date and preparing for it is prudent. Come that date, you look at the situation and any trends it is following and make your decision: stay or go? Setting a date according to the way things are heading creates a timeline that brings a sense of direction and urgency in preparation.
Just like rural dwellers in Australia know they have to think about evacuation when bushfire approaches and have their most important things ready to pack and go, preparing for adverse circumstances is not pessimism. It is preparedness. That brings us to a practice in Stoicism called negative visualisation. You imagine what the best, the most likely and the worst thing that could happen might be, while hoping that the worst doesn’t occur. Doing that, you draw up contingency plans for all possibilities in the hope that you will never use those for the worst. Only one of the protagonists did that.
They owned vehicles. They owned houses. Evidentially, they did not lack funds. Presumably, they had access to the Worldwide Web where they could find information about preparing to bug out. Was it confusion, being overtaken by events or simple complacency and hoping things might get better that discouraged them preparing for life on the run?
In international development circles in some places, people pack a grab-it-and-run pack. It contains the basics you need to get out of a detoriorating situation — passport, cash, change of clothes, mobile phone, identification and whatever. As a thought experiment I considered how the refugees in the story could have equipped their bug-out vehicles and came up with a list of basics:
- a frequently-topped-up fuel tank never allowed to fall to less than half-full
- a means of communication such as mobile phone (and a solar-chargable battery to recharge it), tablet or laptop
- a source of energy such as an auxiliary lithium ion battery charged from the alternator and/or solar panel
- a string of energy efficient LED lights run off the auxiliary battery
- a small radio with AM, FM and shortwave bands (for tuning to international stations) to monitor the situation
- passport and other papers
- a powerful torch or headlamp
- a set of tools including a spade and a hatchet for splitting firewood
- paper maps and a compass
- something to cook on such as a small, single burner butane stove and a good supply of butane cartridges
- a few kitchen and eating utensils
- first aid kit, a supply of prescription medications, a first aid manual (and prior training in first aid)
- a multitool and knife
- pair of binoculars
- clothing for both hot and cold conditions, including waterproofs
- a pair of hiking boots as well as a pair of running or similar shoes
- notebook and pen
- a large daypack
- wash kit, towel and a good supply of toilet paper
- a supply of fresh water and a water purifier such as is used by hikers
- a supply of longlife, dehydrated or canned food.
All of this could be stored in the van as conditions start to worsen, just in case a speedy getaway is needed. It sounds like a lot, but packed in bags, pack or cargo boxes it doesn’t take up much room in a vehicle, especially a van which can serve as both transport and accommodation. I know this because I travelled for the good part of a year in both the Australian summer and winter with it all in my van.
The other requirement as a situation starts to deteriorate is not equipment. It is psychological. It is called situational awareness and it comes from monitoring a situation and maintaining awareness of your surroundings when in camp and when moving about. Required as the situation is developing, prior to getting out, is being able to filter information: What is rumour? What is factual? It also applies at a different level when in seclusion: What is the lay of the land? Where are the villages, the roads, the foot tracks? Are there people about near where you camp? When setting up a secluded camp where you intend to stay for awhile it is worth making a reconnaissance of the surrounding area to discover what is there and for sign of people passing through. Maps and satellite photos are useful in doing this and so is walking the area. Reconnaissance is worth doing at intervals as is keeping your eyes and ears open both in camp and when moving about for sign of people in the vicinity.
Additional to this for refugees is a knowledge of evasion and escape. The ability to navigate off-track cross-country, knowing how to safely cross streams, reading the landscape to pick the easiest and least-risky route, understanding what the patterns of vegetation imply about terrain, being able to forage and fish (the people in the book had a crossbow for silently hunting rabbit and deer), knowing how to light a fire in wet conditions, using a groundsheet as temporary shelter, keeping your campfire small so as not to reveal it with smoke or odour and keeping noise down—they are all useful knowledge, however the time required to acquire some of them suggest they are best learned while there is no threat.
Given enough lead time the protagonists might have scouted out escape routes when things looked like they could turn bad. If it really looked dire, perhaps they might have buried caches of longlife food, medical supplies, gas cartridges and other needs at different locations in the forest.
This is the speculation of someone who has done many of these things. Having the characters in the story do it might make their two years on the run in the Spanish mountains too easy for a story in which the challenges of living in seclusion in the wild had to be met. Best to have as protagonists people lacking the skills and some items so as to add to their challenges. This was borne out in the author’s descriptions of the hazards the refugees faced when shopping for supplies in small villages.
The Brexit Brigands was written before the UK seceded from the EU. Its setting in 2022 might reframe the book as alternative history. Either way, its a book the reading of which can make us think of how we would live were we forced from our daily life into a situation of potential threat and uncertainty. How likely is this? The unexpectedness of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Australia’s bushfires of 2019–2020 and the northern NSW floods of 2021/22 clearly demonstrate that our lives can be disrupted with little warning and might never be the same afterwards.
The story is based on an improbability. This is the stuff of speculative fiction, taking an improbable event after which life takes off along an alternative timeline upon which the author speculates.
The Brexit Brigands: Spain 2022; 2016, Adrian Chisholm; Greatspace Independent Publishing Platform. ISBN 9781541056114
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