Anti-Vietnam war protestors on Grosevenor Square, March 17 1968
It appears that in recent years novelists have become increasingly prone to choosing similar topics for their novels. Probably the most famous example of this is what David Lodge has called "The year of Henry James", a reference to Lodge and Colm Toibin both publishing, in 2004, biographical novels about James. "The Master" was also a key inspiration for Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, which won the Booker the same year, and alongside David Peace's GB84 contributed to another of 2004's tendencies - setting novels in the 1980s.
A similar instance of writers choosing the same theme can perhaps be seen in a cluster of books published in the last three years - Johnny Come Home by Jake Arnott, My Revolutions by Hari Kunzru, and Be Near Me by Andrew O'Hagan. Although these novels differ greatly in style, they share an interest in the events of May 1968 and their legacies. O'Hagan and Kunzru's novels are set in 2003 and the late 1990s respectively, but both include the famous protest against the Vietnam war in Grosvenor Square on March 17 1968 as a central event in the development of their first-person narrators. Johnny Come Home moves slightly forward, to 1972, with the trial of the Stoke Newington eight (accused of the "Angry Brigade" bombings) a central part of the plot.
To coincide with the 40th anniversary of the protests, there have been a series of celebrations and reassessments of the events and legacies of that year. It's possible that, like the rash of biographies which inevitably accompany the centenary of a writer's birth or death, these novels were written with this spike in interest in mind. But none of the novels were actually published in 2008, so what is at stake in choosing such topics, 38 or 39 years on?
A simplistic answer would highlight the campaign of terrorism ongoing in the West at the moment, not to mention a series of high-profile war protests; maybe the novelists are allegorising these events. An otherwise charitable review of Kunzru's novel in Private Eye suggested that if he actually wanted to write a truly relevant novel about terrorism, then he should have tackled the al-Qaida attacks head-on. But both Kunzru and O'Hagan are actually interested in what happens, over time, to radical beliefs.
David Anderton, who marched against Vietnam, views the Iraq war with some sympathy in Be Near Me, and Mike Frame in My Revolutions treats his young radicalism with a degree of ironic detachment, spending a good deal of his time leafing through old pamphlets, ostensibly looking for evidence as to the whereabouts of one of his former co-conspirators but in reality indulging in some very passive nostalgia. Arnott is somewhat different - his novel is a subversion of some popular myths about the politics, and in particular the sexual politics, of the time, with acts of terrorism presented as almost accidental.
It would again be too easy to suggest that these novels are entirely concerned with the impulses behind radicalism (explored at length in all three books, with upbringing emerging as the most important factor). There can probably never be a conclusive answer to unite all three novelists in a common goal in their writing recent historical fiction about 1960s student radicals, but a clue to their motivation might be found in Arnott's focus.
The most attractive character in Arnott's novel is not the radical writer, O'Connell, nor the feminist campaigner, Nina, nor the rarified artist, Pearson. It is "Sweet Thing", a rent boy with an uncertain future. His philosophy on life - an amoral mixture of proto-punk aggression and amoral capitalism - is one which would come to dominate the country in the late 1970s, and arguably continues to this day (witness Hollinghurst's recent claim that the Thatcher government "led to huge changes in British society and changes which I think we are still living with now".
These novels are not simplistic allegories of contemporary terrorism and political protest. Instead they are designed to at least in part explain how we got here, and how events that lurk in the national subconscious might still retain an influence on the world of today.
