Them: Adventures with Extremists

"The first Jon Ronson piece I ever read was the Guardian Weekend’s excerpt of Them , which was his story about the Bilderberg Group, a shadowy organisation that some people think rules the world. There’s a very comic scene in which there’s this guy called Big Jim Tucker, who’s made it his life mission to expose the Bilderberg group. Jon Ronson thinks this guy is a nutter and, reading it, I assumed the Bilderberg group was just some mad conspiratorial fantasy. They go to Portugal together, to this luxury hotel where Tucker thinks they’re meeting, and it suddenly emerges that there is indeed a high level secret meeting happening the next day. They’re ordered to leave and, as they drive away, Ronson realises they’re being followed. He rings up the British Embassy, he says: ‘I’m a humorous journalist out of my depth!’ It turned out the Bilderberg group were real. It was the most hilarious piece of journalism that I’d come across and it was gripping too. I’d only been a writer, professionally, for perhaps a year and I remember feeling this enormous sense of professional horror: how the hell did he do this? It’s interesting that he never saw eye to eye with AA Gill, I don’t think, who is another big hero of mine. Ronson is almost like the yin to AA Gill’s yang. Gill was a beautiful prose stylist, he was an absolute poet, there was no one to touch him. But he couldn’t tell a story. He didn’t have to, because the quality of his prose and his skill at detail and thoughtful observation were such that you were just carried through to the end. Whereas Ronson is the opposite. I can’t think of a writer who uses more simplistic prose and yet he’s got what Gill never had, which is this absolute genius for storytelling. He has this magic thing, where he can write a paragraph and you’re in the story. You just inhale it. I’ve been lucky enough to have met Jon once or twice. I interviewed him when The Men Who Stare at Goats came out, and I asked him to give me some advice as a then young writer. He said: “Brevity.” I thought, “Oh, that’s quite disappointing advice.”’ It took me a few years to realise he was right. Not only was it good advice, but it was exactly the advice I needed. It’s also the advice I still haven’t managed to absorb – I’m always getting sidetracked in my writing. There have been lots of times where I’ve been left thinking, ‘Oh, I was wrong about that, totally.’ My most recent story was about the science behind Shaken Baby Syndrome. I pitched and perceived it was a piece about how the scientists who are sceptical of SBS diagnoses were being unfairly persecuted, and the police and prosecution were acting in bad faith, locking away all these innocent parents. But I changed my mind about much of that. Clearly innocent parents have been through hell, but the arguments put to me by the proponents of SBS were also extremely compelling. It’s only in doing the reporting that I realise why both sides are in possession of a chunk of the truth, which is why the whole area is in the mess that it’s in. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . But I think the biggest journey, actually, was in my first book, which I don’t talk about much anymore. It was about ghosts. I wrote it when I was in my twenties, and you can tell I was a keen young pup when you read it. Having been a lifelong atheist, this book begins with me hanging out with this guy called Lou Gentile. In the day he’s a heating engineer, and at nights he’s a demonologist. I thought this was hilarious and it was going to be a straightforward piss-take. But actually, it scared the shit out of me. Really. Everything he said was going to happen, happened. When I finally came back to my hotel I literally couldn’t sleep. That led to this year-long investigation, trying to find out whether ghosts exist. Then, that book led naturally to The Heretic s, which was a deepening of the general investigation about human irrationality. “By day he was a heating engineer, and by night he was a demonologist” Since writing The Heretics , I understand much more about how the mind and brain work. So I’m much more sceptical about my ghostly journey now than I was when I wrote that first book. But I am still of the view that there are events that have happened, which science hasn’t yet properly explained. I think there will be an explanation for them, of course, but I still like to think that there is a bit of mystery out there about human existence. That was a big change for me. I wasn’t expecting to write that book at all. Definitely. I hope I’m not misremembering him, but I’m sure he has written somewhere that he deliberately doesn’t do a lot of research before he goes into a situation, because he wants to capture those moments of surprise. That’s right, at the beginning of his collection AA Gill is Away . I do the same thing too. Because it’s narrative nonfiction, you want to go there and say to the person you’re meeting: ‘What’s going on?’ and, ‘Who’s he?’ and have that conversation there on the page, in the presence of the reader. You’re delivering the essential information that the reader needs, but in story form, rather than in that distant journalistic form of the newsman or the newswoman. For me, that’s much more immersive. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter For example, when I went to South Sudan: it was a war zone. I remember saying to World Vision , the people who were looking after me: ‘What’s going on? Who’s in charge?’ They looked at me as if I was an idiot, ‘What kind of journalist is this? How does he not know this?’ They didn’t get it, obviously. But those questions wound up being the opening scene of the piece: me landing at the airport saying, ‘What’s going on?’ So maybe that’s my advice. Keep the sense of unknowing."