Marx’s observation that history happens twice, “the first time as tragedy, and the second as farce”, is often quoted by the protagonists of Philip Hensher’s new novel. In 1982, 17-year-old Spike is undergoing a political awakening. He attends a northern comprehensive school which used to be a grammar until its purpose was “fundamentally altered by the whims of politicians” (it still has a massive Corinthian portico where its pupils like to defecate). The school isn’t the only thing that’s farcically unfit for purpose. Spike lives with his father, who works as a faceless civil servant and whose only passion is building scale models of early industrial machines; his mother left years before. The capitalist nuclear family has failed Spike. He wonders if this is where his interest in politics and “social justice, or rather injustice” comes from: politics, he says flatly, “hopes to improve individual lives”. Whether or not Hensher believes this is moot.
Spike quickly falls in with a set of self-styled radicals. There’s Percy Ogden, the argumentative group leader, the sort of logorrheic boy with a passion for argument who will be immediately recognisable to anyone who has ever been at school,and his sexpot female counterpart, Tracy Cartwright, who quotes Russian anarchists (“I love, love, love Bakunin … He’s my god”) as part of her seduction routine. Then there’s Mohammed Ahmed, in flight from his inner-city life “among the grocers, the mosque”, and Eric Milne, “who had been told by a master that he should take up sprinting, for no other reason than that he was black. Injustice was strong in him.” Quietly aggressive James Frinton, son of a failing pub landlord father and a depressive mother who self-medicates with Eartha Kitt videos, is a less easily recognisable type. Which is not to say that Hensher deals in stereotypes: he is excellent at making these familiar incarnations of adolescent rage seem fresh.
Through Ogden and his “phalanx” of teenage subversives, Spike meets a local group of twentysomethings, members of the Trotskyite Spartacist League, engaged in advancing the revolution through minor acts of civil disobedience. He is impressed by matronly, comfortable Kate, “an implausible and unsuspected hurler of bottles of piss, an innocuous painter of walls, a smooth-faced smasher of windows”, but it’s Joaquin, a charismatic refugee from Pinochet’s Chile, who becomes his lover and lifelong partner. “From now on,” announces a smitten Spike, “I resolved to devote my life to the liberation of the urban proletariat.”
We may smile knowingly, but he means it, whereas the others don’t. The novel moves easily between Thatcherite Britain and the present, by which time everyone except Spike and Joaquin has shed his or her youthful convictions. Ogden has become a journalist with a facile line in wokeness, Kate is a mediocre but lauded poet, Milne a peer and QC, and James Frinton is not just home secretary, but has turned into a Tory (though as someone points out, ‘he had to do that before he could be turned into the Home Secretary’). His onetime friends are proof, as Spike remarks, that “there is so much difference between the espousal of principles and the living of lives”. The political purity of his beliefs, on the other hand, “has been untainted by any deals with what may be achieved now, today, this minute”, although he adds ambiguously: “I had kept my principles. I had remained what I was, a boy.” Have the others sold out for the sake of power, or simply grown up? Tracy is dead, and the blurred circumstances of her death are bound up with this question.
The mystery of Tracy’s death is intercut with Spike’s memories of a trip to East Germany in 1987, two years before the fall of the Wall. During this visit he experiences the reality of the socialist state at first hand, in the most traumatic way. But as far as abuse goes, there seems to be little to choose between the “punitive system” of hardline socialism and the ruthlessness of capitalism. When Spike returns to “this quiet corner” of post-reunification Germany on a walking holiday with Joaquin in 2020, it’s clear that his core belief in revolution hasn’t changed. Hensher treats us to a brilliant set piece: the two middle-aged anarchists, hiking along the old DDR border and eating chicken curry in their depressing mock-medieval B&B, whose owner turns out to have a revelatory – connection with the past.
This book is bound to be seen as a satire on the left. But in fact its keynote is a deep anger and disillusionment with politics, a lack of faith in all systems. Whether tragedy or farce, history, as Spike realises, “is what most people succeed in ignoring”, to their cost. Positioning his story within the frame of current events is a clever move on Hensher’s part. We’re reminded that “this year, the island on which we were born or made our home tried to extricate itself from the continent. Went sailing westwards, to borrow a metaphor, like a raft of stone.” Our national political structures, it seems, have become profoundly unfit for purpose too. Rejecting everyday politics and the shortsighted narratives it imposes on us, Spike waits instead for the mass “upheaval” that will “transform everything beyond the ordinary imagination”. Don’t hold your breath.
• Elizabeth Lowry’s Dark Water is published by Riverrun. A Small Revolution in Germany is published by 4th Estate (RRP £14.99). To order a copy for £10.55 go to guardianbookshop.com.
