Talking Politics: Best Political Novels

Recently I sat down in Cambridge for the Talking Politics podcast with host David Runciman and fellow guest Kasia Boddy, and it was as grand a conversation I’ve had in years - now online here. Being a long-time admirer of the podcast I felt much as thrilled to be part of it as I guess pop groups used to feel about getting asked onto Top of the Pops.

Our subject was Political Fiction, and that is dear to me, of course. I got to talk about the making of Crusaders and The Knives, and a host of memories returned in the process. Both are political novels, to be sure. 

Crusaders got its title from Harold Wilson’s famous and incorrect assertion that the Labour Party is a moral crusade or nothing, and it addresses the ideas of Christian Socialism and Methodism-over-Marx as elements of Labour thinking and history. Tony Blair appears in it, and the central character, Reverend John Gore, is, if you squint, maybe an image of what Blair might have become if he'd gone into the Church instead of politics.

 

The Knives is more expressly about the practice of politics – how make policy and law about identity cards or domestic violence, say, or why sign a police surveillance warrant – but also, in its conflicts between characters: about ‘politics’ as a bunch of things in which people believe, and which influence their personal behaviour e.g. my fictional ex-army Home Secretary Blaylock and his human rights QC ex-wife.

In terms of other political novels I love, it wasn’t the right place but I would have liked to put in one more word for After the Banquet by Yukio Mishima, which drew so effectively upon real Japanese politics that Mishima was hit with a lawsuit. Mishima’s alarming political postures in life tend to overshadow the intelligence of his fictions; and in After the Banquet he used a brilliant device – the female proprietor of a restaurant popular with senior government officials – as a means to enter ‘the whirlpool of politics.’

The ‘timeliness’ or otherwise of fiction in addressing our times is always a slippery business. Crusaders was much concerned with Thatcherism and New Labour, two ideas that, judging by the conditions of Conservative and Labour parties in 2019, feel like they have moss growing over them in some tomb. With The Knives, which I finished in early 2016, I still think a lot about the scene in the novel where Blaylock goes to Brussels and ponders the whole game as a fairly thoroughgoing Eurosceptic who, in the ‘real world’, would nonetheless certainly have voted Remain.

Is our current moment, then, good or bad for political fiction? It had better hang on a bit yet: I have another political novel in the works. Spy writers of a certain age clearly miss the Cold War era, unlike most of the rest of us. Cultural veterans of the 1980s might well remember how useful Thatcherism proved to their store of ideas and convictions. In 1939 Brecht pronounced that it was ‘a bad time for poetry.’ It certainly was, as John Willett puts it, ‘a bad time for humanity.’ But German literature had just gone through an extraordinary efflorescence, and that continued, for Brecht and other contemporaries. Whether or not poetry makes anything big happen, the tragedies of our times very obviously bring forth great writings that survive and sustain us.

Momus: This charming man...

1988 probably isn’t rated a banner year in the history of culture but I don’t think I’ve ever since read as many challenging books, seen as many slightly risque foreign-language movies, listened to as many Central European string quartets as I did over those twelve months. It was all to do with being 17, and the early stirrings of avidity for all things arty, the slight vertigo you get in starting to understand the real depth and breadth of what’s already out there in the world.

When you’re that age, though, you need encouragement, someone to give you a lead to follow. In this way I’m reminded of Nicholas Currie, the Scottish-born singer-songwriter who has for 25 years now written and recorded and engaged in all manner of superior cultural production under the name of Momus. In 1988 I discovered his early albums Circus Maximus, The Poison Boyfriend and Tender Pervert; and for a boy who was studying Ancient History, imagining what Japan was really like, and beginning to alphabetise his Penguin Modern Classics... well, it was a revelation to discover a songwriter who knew how to mix high culture, esoterica/erotica and intimate personal confession with such well-turned scurrility.

I wrote Currie a number of fan letters to an address printed on the back-sleeve of Tender Pervert, all of which he replied to very patiently and amiably, and the effect of all my gauche questions for him was that he pointed me in the direction of an awful lot of good reading and looking and listening that was hitherto alien to me. Certainly it was at his suggestion that I read Gide and Bataille, looked at Picabia and Dix, heard Schoenberg and Jacques Brel and The Threepenny Opera.

In the summer of 1990 I made a pilgrimage to the Edinburgh Festival to see a rare production of one of Mishima’s modern Noh plays, directed, if I remember rightly, by the great Yukio Ninagawa. I remember how not particularly surprised – though very pleased – I was when I clocked that Momus was sitting in the row in front of me. (Even in the dark his profile was very distinctive.) I went up to him afterwards and said hello – something of a miracle, as all through my adolescence you could hardly get a word out of me without using pliers – and he was very pleasant, as you want people to be when you’ve admired them from afar.
Momus has kept on writing and recording and getting up to all sorts. He blogs at iMomus. In this interview on YouTube he gives an interesting account of his career against the shifting backdrop of independent music labels over the last three decades. The promo clip below is a rather Neil Tennant-ish number that was probably the closest Momus came to a hit record in the UK.

Cosmopolis (UEA): In academe's grey groves...

Good sport at the UEA Cosmopolis events last Saturday. I enjoyed my platform on fiction and politics with the eminent Giles Foden, chaired with some panache by Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, author of What If Latin America Ruled the World? Giles said some especially intriguing things about thinking his way into Idi Amin's head for The Last King of Scotland. At Giles' prompting Oscar tasked both Giles and I to propose how we might fictionalise a) the Israeli Gaza flotilla debacle, and b) the BP oil-spill debacle. (My responses were, a) in the voice of a ghost, or else an IDF soldier slipping down a rope, and b) in the voice of a seagull...) Otherwise, I enjoyed expounding as always, on such beloved subjects as Mailer (his 'left conservatism'), George Steiner (poetry after Auschwitz, and Hitler depicted in his Portage to San Christobal of A.H.), and Brecht (the idea of pageant as 'illuminated history', offering a take on 'the truth behind it all.')
I also ended up chairing a fun session with the film/TV producer Judy Counihan, on the subject of how to pitch one's film script/idea to market, a concern on which I personally have begun to feel the pressing need for advice from someone of Judy's calibre...
Norwich itself struck me as a nice spot on my first visit. UEA is a campus college, and funnily enough I'd never been to a real campus before. But it was all very familiar. As the literary agent and novelist Derek Johns remarked to me and others in surveying its brute-concrete/dry-grassland aspect - 'Y'know, James Lasdun's dad did all of this...'

Bertolt Brecht: 'Our love is just begun'

A celebrated film director of my acquaintance keeps a framed photograph of Brecht (not unlike the one to your left) on the wall of the rustic kitchen in his English country cottage. On first noticing said portrait during a visit, I remarked to said director that I hadn’t ever suspected he was such a Brecht fan. ‘Oh I don’t know that I am’, came the reply. ‘I just like to have him around. How could you not?’
Here’s a quick rundown of my own limited but much savoured form in the study and appreciation of BB:
- In 1985 I saw a production of Brecht and Weill’s Happy End mounted by the RSC and presented on tour in the sports hall of a fairly grim ‘leisure centre’ on the outskirts of Belfast. I hadn’t previously seen such a joyous piece of live theatre in all my life; and that evening would still rank right up there in the annals for me.
- By my desk as I write is a humble cassette recording of the cast of The Threepenny Opera from a 1954 staging of Marc Blitzstein’s book and lyrics. I bought that tape in 1988 and it’s travelled everywhere with me in the 20 intervening years. Threepenny is by some distance – i.e. miles and miles – my 'favourite musical'.
- In 1998-99 I was so fortunate as to spend a bit of time in the company of the late John Willett, consummate collaborator, English translator and critical interpreter of Brecht – the sort of laconically brilliant, easily witty man who’d make you proud to be English. My copy of his Brecht in Context is inscribed with John’s small, precise hand, and its introduction, wherein he charts the history of his passion for Brecht, offers repeated proofs of the sangfroid I’m talking about:
‘I had left school early to go to Vienna and spend six months studying the cello… Almost incidentally I became fluent in the [German] language… In the autumn of 1936 I moved on to Oxford to learn politics, philosophy and economics [Love that ‘learn’]… The war came, as we knew it would, and for five and a half khaki-clad years all I was left with was my addiction [to Brecht’s work]… There was in fact only one point of sharp conflict between Brecht and I, when I said I thought war between Communist states was by no means inconceivable. That, he snapped, was ‘eines Gymnasiasten Ansicht’, a schoolboy’s view…’
Superb, eh? Passing through the garden gate of John’s Hampstead cottage and stepping into his book-lined sitting room was for me an experience full of magic that I’ll not forget.
- From the late 1990s through to the mid-2000s I was a not infrequent visitor to Los Angeles for work purposes. And just as most literary-minded visitors to Prague find it impossible to keep Franz Kafka from their minds for long, I would defy any booklover to pass more than a few days in LA without making recourse to Brecht’s diamond-sharp poetry about the city – a place full of ‘houses built for happy people, therefore standing empty / even when lived in.’
- But Brecht’s poetry wasn’t all scathing, which is why my wife and I picked the Sonnet #19 (‘My one requirement: that you stay with me’) as a reading at our wedding ceremony in 2004.
- My all-time favourite Brecht quote, at least with regard to theatre composition and technique, comes in his famous discussion of Coriolanus where he argues that his mission as a dramatist is both to have the pleasure and to convey the pleasure of dealing with what he calls ‘illuminated history’: the dialectic experienced as drama – and not in any rarefied, high-flown way but, rather, where the play has a direct audience appeal and could be enjoyed even in passing at a country fair… because it’s a good old familiar story of the rise and fall of the mighty, the cunning of the oppressed, the hidden potentials of men.
- Brecht's celebrated stage plays haven't always worked the same charm on me as his poems, his musicals, even his handful of movie scripts (chief among them Kuhle Wampe). I enjoy the plays endlessly on the page, less so in performance. Today, though, I dropped into the Olivier auditorium of the National Theatre to see a matinee of Deborah Warner’s staging of Tony Kushner’s adaptation of Mother Courage and Her Children. Such are the perks of my current writing attachment at the National Theatre Studio, and I had a fabulous time. This is a rambunctious, wrenching, endlessly lively piece of theatre. The stagecraft might be of a higher order than Brecht would have thought necessary, but the audience are the happy beneficiaries of all this merry, mauling invention. In the lead role Fiona Shaw is a phenomenon, as usual. I’m not such an ardent fan of hers as are other theatregoers of my acquaintance, but days like today make me feel slovenly in that estimation. Warner’s production derives a big boon from the new arrangement of Brecht’s songs by the Northern Irish singer/musician Duke Special, who also performs in the piece with his band, his contributions deeply treasurable throughout. I noticed Deborah Warner herself at the back of the house, showing a commendable level of immersion in her project to be observing its condition on a Wednesday matinee a month into the run. I don't doubt she's finical about this stuff, but I trust she wasn't too worried...

‘I’m all for the donkey, in spite of everything.’

Brecht is said to have kept a small stuffed-toy donkey on his work-desk; around its neck a hand-lettered sign saying, ‘I, too, must understand.’ Quite often, I feel like I am that donkey.

‘I’m all for the donkey, in spite of everything.’ Thus Prince Myshkin enthuses to the giggly Yepanchin girls in The Idiot. Such is the Prince’s idea of sitting-room small-talk with young ladies. Kafka had to persuade Max Brod that Dostoyevsky's characters were not all lunatics but merely ‘incidentally mad’; and Myshkin is perhaps the maddest, if only because of his purity. I imagine readers like myself who love Myshkin and The Idiot do so in much the same way as the Prince was ‘awfully fond’ of the ‘good-natured and useful’ donkey.

Robert Bresson, too, was very good on the ‘exquisite sensitivity’ of certain animals, and so was very taken with The Idiot, in particular the profound communication that Myshkin claims to hear in a donkey’s braying. ‘Absolutely admirable’, Bresson declared, ‘to have an idiot informed by an animal, to have him see life through an animal, who passes for an idiot but is of an intelligence.’ He went on to take the novel as his template for Au Hasard Balthazar.

My daughter spent much of last week puzzling over Disney’s Pinocchio, a fine bit of work, if a tad perplexing (also a tad unsettling) for a 3-year-old, in respect of its complicated fantasy-morality: one of the high points of which is the forced metamorphosis of a pack of juvenile delinquents into a herd of pack-mules, carted off to a life of hard labour for their sins. Yes, a donkey’s lot can be a source of great pathos. One would like to think that at least some of Pinocchio’s mates ended up on sandy beaches wearing straw hats and giving pleasure rides to little kids.