Nick Estes - Our History is the Future

In 2016 a protest encampment at Standing Rock in the US state of North Dakota became a symbol of resistance to fossil capitalism. The camp, which arose out of indigenous peoples' movements, became a focus, in the dying days of the Obama administration, of bottom-up organisation against the expansion of oil pipelines. Quickly it gathered support and brought together disparate groups of people - from the indigenous communities to environmental activists, NGOs and even former members of the US military. The camp saw down brutal repression to become, at least in the short term, victorious. Perhaps just as importantly the "water protectors" helped inspire other campaigners across the globe. I remember speaking at a protest march against fracking at Barton Moss in Salford in the UK and a great cheer went up when I mentioned Standing Rock - a cheer that celebrated their struggle, not my speech!

Nick Estes' new book is subtitled "Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance" which neatly sums up his central argument: the protests that took place at Standing Rock are part of a long continuity of indigenous resistance towards a settler state that has sought to exploit the US's natural resources and people in the interest of profit and, to do this, has needed to destroy the indigenous peoples. This saw a genocidal war against the Native Americans, culminating in them being forced into smaller and smaller reservations, together with laws that codified their oppression. All this was justified through racism. Estes' book is a history of all this, which is at times difficult to read as well as inspirational.

I won't dwell here on Estes' account of the military repression of the indigenous people. Instead I want to highlight Estes' argument about the way that the US state made the repression and attempted destruction of the Native American way of life a central part of its approach towards those communities. He explains:

The design and development of the carceral reservation world was well under way by the time Cheyennes, Lakotas, and Arapahos made Custer and his Seventh Cavalry famous. In 1876 Indian Commissioner John Q. Smith envisioned US Indian policy as having three central goals: to concentrate remaining Indigenous peoples onto fewer reservations, to allot remaining lands, and to expand US laws and courts' jurisdiction over reservations... the latter two goals were achieved through the disintegration of political and social structure, and the carving up of the remaining communally held lands. The fur trade may have introduced the capitalist market, but it never made the Oceti Sakowin [this is the correct name for the people commonly called the Sioux] truly individualistic, and communal land practices and social customs still prevailed. This was the final frontier.

He continues that "reservations thus became sites where social engineering was used to break communal organisation".

While the use of military force against the indigenous people declined it never disappeared and there were other ways of destroying communities. The creation of dams is a case in point, which Estes shows were frequently built to generate energy, and often located in land or reservations that historically was of importance to indigenous people. Take the Garrison Dam which "inundated the For Berthold Reservation" drowning 152,360 acres of land belonging to the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara nations. But the dam was modified by the Army Corp of Engineers to ensure that the "majority-white border town of Williston, North Dakota" lost no land. The dams location was chosen to avoid damage to other towns whose residents were mainly non-indigenous. No such care was taken for Native American people, and these dams, which were part of the "Pick-Sloan" project of the late 1940s where described by one historian as destroying "more Indian land than any single public workers project in the United States".

The question of land could not be separated from wider social questions - poverty, racism, unemployment and lack of decent housing. Este thus describes as succession of social movements that arose where indigenous people fought back for justice - in the late 1960s these took a more radical turn as a new generation of young people challenged both their elders and put forward more powerful demands from the government. To me, at least, here is a forgotten history of those who, alongside the black, gay and women's movements of the 1960s, created a revolutionary "Red Power" movement, which is remarkably inspiring. But the struggle is by no means over. Estes points out:

Anti-Indianism has also been reinforced under neoliberalism - the restructuring of politics and economy towards privatisation...But the role of the US state in reproducing anti-Indianism has also increased since the mid-twentieth century, including through the expansion of the military and prisons... Native inmates [in South Dakota] make up 30 percent of the total [prison] population while only constituting about 9 percent of the state's population. The rise in incarceration rates directly correlates with increased Native political activity in the 1970s.

Estes is clear that justice for indigenous people will not be solved via the US government in its current form. Clearly there needs to be more funding for schools, hospitals, housing and so on. But at the heart of US society there is a great injustice - the creation of the US state required, and requires, the systematic oppression of the indigenous population. Capitalism will not be able to fix this, as it will require challenging the very nature of the US state. This is also true of many other countries who built their wealth through colonialism and imperialism, and the systematic oppression (and decimation) of people in Africa, Asia, South America and Australasia. Estes details the strong internationalism of the indigenous communities, who have created international movements (eg solidarity between Palestinians and Native Americans) to fight for justice.

Real justice will arise when society can accept that indigenous peoples must have the right to solve problems in their own way. Estes notes that one vision for this was Lenin's argument for the "right of colonised nations to secede and declare independence from their colonial masters" but he cautions, while it is a view that has been taken up  by many in the "Asian, African and South American contexts" it is "entirely absent in North America, except among radical Indigenous, Black, Asian, Caribbean and Chicanx national liberation movements".

The logic of capitalism means the destruction of natural resources and people in the interests of wealth accumulation. One barrier to the continued search for profit has always been, and remains, the resistance of indigenous people. As Standing Rock showed these struggles can ignite further alliances, and such unity raises the potential for a radical challenge to capitalism. I hope that occurs, for otherwise we will not see, what Estes calls "the emancipation of earth from capital".

Nick Estes' book is a powerful read. I learnt a great deal from it - not just about the history of indigenous people in what is called "Turtle Island", but also about what liberation means for them. These struggles, in the face of the most brutal, racialised repression from the US state, are inspirational, but also hold up hope that a better world is possible.

Related Reviews

Tully - Crooked Deals and Broken Treaties
Cronon - Changes in the Land
McMillan & Yellowhorn - First Peoples in Canada
Leacock - Myths of Male Dominance
Fagan - The First North Americans

CJ Sansom - Sovereign

The period of Henry VIII's rule in England has furnished plenty of material for authors of historical fiction. For CJ Sansom it is the perfect backdrop to his stories of mystery and detection - plenty of plots, murders and scheming. But the specific social changes taking place allow a remarkably varied set of stories. In the first book Sansom sets up a locked room mystery (well locked monastery mystery) in the context of the dissolution of the monasteries. In the second, Dark Fire, he skilfully weaves the story of Thomas Cromwell's fall around a hunt for a lost chemical weapon.

Sovereign is more ambitious. It is set during Henry VIII's Great Northern Progress in the aftermath of the two, linked, northern rebellions that took place from 1536 to 1537 (though Sansom only mentions the Pilgrimage of Grace neglecting the Lincolnshire Rising). The Progress was a mass display of power by Henry designed to cow the population and force supplication. In this it was an immense success, though as Sansom seems to understand, its importance today is mostly remembered for being the period when Catherine Howard's alleged infidelity was discovered.

Matthew Shardlake, the lawyer hero of Sansom's Tudor novels joins the Progress on the instructions of Thomas Cranmer who sets him the difficult task of bringing a rebel safely back to London. The rebel has evidence of a conspiracy against the King and Shardlake is thus risking his life to complete the mission. As always with these novels the level of detail is astounding and Sansom's knowledge of the political twists and turns of the Tudor court is excellent. I found the denouement of the novel somewhat of a let down, but Sansom certainly managed to tie all the threads together well.

One thing that I think Sansom does extremely well is to demonstrate how the King was the centre of the universe for Tudor society. Characters repeatedly ask each other if they have seen the King, or discuss being in his presence. Shardlake himself is terrified of meeting Henry when petitions are presented and, in a nicely comic passage, is terror is replicated among even more experienced court followers who have to rush to the toilet after the audience is over. Henry was the centre around which everything revolved, but he was also both human and horrible, and Shardlake experiences with a rather unpleasant awakening.

It's an excellent book, though my attention did wane after 500 pages and the last 100 or so felt like I was reading simply to get to the end. That said, it's entertaining and I'd second Sansom in his recommendations of books on the Northern Revolts - see below.

Related Reviews

Sansom - Dissolution
Sansom - Dark Fire
Hoyle - The Pilgrimage of Grace and the politics of the 1530s
Moorhouse - The Pilgrimage of Grace
Fletcher & MacCulloch - Tudor Rebellions
Fraser - The Six Wives of Henry VIII

Kim A. Wagner - Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear & the Making of a Massacre

I am posting this review on the centenary of the Amritsar Massacre which took place on April 13 1919. On that day Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer ordered his troops to fire over 1,600 (they counted) bullets at a densely packed, unarmed, crowd killing hundreds and injuring hundreds more.

In Britain the run up to the anniversary has seen debates about what took place and whether or not there should be an apology from the British government. Reading Kim A. Wagner's excellent study of the events before and after the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh I'm struck by how ill-informed much of the discussions have been. For those wanting a clearer understanding of what took place in Amritsar in the Punjab one hundred years ago, there is no better starting place than Wagner's book.

Wagner begins by taking the reader through what is perhaps the most influential account (at least for British audiences) of the massacre - the depiction in Richard Attenborough's film Gandhi. It is a powerful sequence and tells at least a partially accurate account of the day. But Wagner argues that:

Presented without any real context in the movie, the Amritsar Massacre functions simply as a grim vignette to illustrate the power of Gandhi's message of non-violence. The speaker at Jallianwala Bagh is giving voice to the doctrine of Satyafgraha, or soul-force, when he is silenced, quite literally, by British bullets. The massacre is thus depicted as the inevitable result of the clash between Gandhi's righteous struggle and the oppression of colonial rule... Yet the violence unleashed... is entirely embodied by Edward Fox's Dyer: a man seemingly incapable of emotions, who appears as nothing so much as an automaton.

Wagner, in contrast, locates the massacre not as an "inevitable result" of the growth of the independence movement, nor, the consequence of Dyer's mistakes or personality but in the paranoia, fear and racism of the colonial rulers. The story really begins in 1857 when the Great Rebellion, which began as a mass mutiny of colonial troops, nearly destroyed British rule in India. It was a sobering, never to be forgotten, event for the British - India was the key lynch-pin of the British Empire, a vast source of natural resources and the destination was many of the outputs of British Industry. It was also key to a wider network of Imperial relations and losing India could have easily lead to the further unravelling of the Imperial project.

The 1857 rebellion was a bloody event and the British escalated the violence with their collective mass punishment. But the pure fact that it happened left the British terrified. Following World War One the British once again feared rebellion. India had provided vast quantities of troops and resources for the war and many Indian veterans believed that the aftermath would bring reforms and improvements at home. Nothing of the sort took place and growing discontent began to fuel the independence movement of figures like Gandhi. Elsewhere in the world revolution and rebellion where threatening Imperial domination. Most significant was the Russian Revolution which had a major anti-colonial component, but perhaps more important for the people of India were rebellions in Ireland and Egypt which threatened the British.

Its notable that the British in India feared Russian "Bolshevism". Wagner quotes many British people in India who reference the Bolsheviks in 1919 and in the events of April the British certainly imagined shadowy revolutionaries organising violent insurrection. This factor alone put the administration on edge as key figures in Amritsar began to organise the Independence struggle.

But Wagner also emphasises that racism was a central factor in the events that took place. To understand this one has to understand the deeply ingrained racism towards the Indian people by the British. Wagner has many examples, but this particular contemporary account stuck out for me:

Mrs Montgomery told me once she nearly trod upon a krait - one of the most venomous snakes in India. She had been ill at the time, suffering from acute facial neuralgia, 'so that I didn't care if I trod on fifty kraits. I was quite stupid with pain and was going back in the evening to my bungalow, preceded by a servant who was carrying a lamp. Suddenly he stopped and said "Krait, Mem-sahib!" - but I was far to ill to notice what he was saying and went straight on, and the krait was lying right in the middle of the path! Then the servant did a thing absolutely without precedent in India - he touched me! - he put his hand on my shoulder and pulled me back. My shoe came off and I stopped. Of course if he hadn't done that I should undoubtedly have been killed; but I didn't like it all the same, and got rid of him soon after.

What I think existed among the British in India in the post-war period was a racialised paranoia, that meant that people like Dyer (and almost everyone else) saw rebellion everywhere and could only interpret crowds of Indian people as a dangerous, irrational uncontrollable mass. When local leaders were arrested and deported and the local population organised to try and present a traditional petition to the local government on April 10 1919, the British resorted to gunfire to keep the crowds back. This in turn provoked violent rioting which left several British people dead or badly injured and from then on, Dyer's actions were inevitable. He arrives in the city spoiling to teach the masses a lesson and does precisely that. Dyer, it should be noted, was an odious Imperialist, who never wavered in his self-belief after the massacre and was celebrated by the British-Indian establishment, even as he was punished by the British government. In fact, in the immediate aftermath of the massacre, Dyer acted to collectively punish the city in the most brutal fashion, to try and stop further anti-British anger. This led to the infamous crawling order, and:

The very same day Dyer gave his racialised and righteous colonial sermon in church, a striking example of what 'justice in the hand of authority' actually entailed was made... By erecting the whipping post in the street where [Mrs] Sherwood [a victim of the anti-British riots on April 10] had been attacked, Dyer was explicitly drawing on a long tradition of executing criminals, and afterwards gibbeting their bodies on the site of their crime. Not only was the public punishment intended to serve as a deterrent, it also transformed the physical space into a permanent reminder of the power and vengeance of the state.

The crawling punishment inflicted
by the British after the massacre.

In the aftermath the British struggled "to find the evidence of the rebellious conspiracy that they were convinced had been the cause of the unrest". Wagner show that they were more successful in keeping quiet the extent of the massacre and word barely trickled out. One senior government official claimed he'd only heard about the scale of the events when it was raised in the British House of Commons in December 1919 by the radical Labour MP J.C. Wedgwood who claimed that "This damns us for all time. Whenever we put forward the humanitarian view, we shall have this tale thrown into our teeth". The shadow of Amritsar would certainly hang over the rest of British colonial history. As Wagner points out, when the British fired on a football match at Croke Park, killing thirteen, it was called the 'Irish Amritsar'. Even that arch-Imperialist Winston Churchill described the events as "monstrous", but in doing so, he began a process of depicting Amritsar as an isolated event, that bucked the trend of benevolent British rule. It is this argument that has dominated the airwaves and newspaper papers around the anniversary, but it is one that is singularly defeated by Kim Wagner's meticulous book.

Wagner's conclusion is very different to the mainstream:

Taking succour in Britain's past glory requires that colonial violence and events such as the Amritsar Massacre be glossed over... A British apology for the Amritsar Massacre in 2019 would, as a result, only ever be for one man's actions, as isolated and unprecedented, and not for the colonial rule, or system, that in Gandhi's words, produced Dyer.

The reality of course is that the British Empire saw many massacres. From Ireland to India, from Africa to the Far-East, British rule was based on divide and rule, systemic racism and the regular use of extreme violence. The very unity between Muslim, Hindu and Sikh that was displayed in Armritsar in the period undermined the whole Imperial project. However weak the British state might be today, it stands on that colonial history, and the only real apology will come as a result of a fundamental challenge to a system that continues to oppress and exploit millions.

Related Reviews

Ward - Our Bones Are Scattered: The Cawnpore Massacres & the Indian Mutiny of 1857
Davies - Late Victorian Holocausts
Newsinger - The Blood Never Dried
Macrory - Signal Catastrophe
Holmes - Redcoat
Dalrymple - Return of a King

Farah Mendlesohn - The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein

I have an ambiguous relationship with Robert Heinlein. On the one hand, I read and re-read many of his novels from childhood through my teenage and later years. For some reason, on a lone cycling trip through France at the age of 18 the only book I took with me was Stranger in a Strange Land which I read several times; re-reading it in later years. Several other novels have stuck with me for various reasons. Time Enough For Love I enjoyed mostly for its interludes which described slices of life of Lazarus Long whose long existence enabled him to experience many different times, places and loves; Glory Road I enjoyed as a teenager for its swords and sorcery, only later coming to view it as faintly ridiculous and I read Farnham's Freehold a couple of times and on each occasion spotting something that angered me more. Friday was, for many years, a favoured tale of pure adventure with a strong female lead that was unlike much else in the science fiction genre.

That Heinlein's books could be read and sometimes enjoyed over such a period is a sign of his innovation and strength as a story-teller. What became much clearer was that there was an ambiguity to his writing which was at times, frankly revolting. As a teenager I remember finishing To Sail Beyond the Sunset and for the first and only time in my life, defacing the book in anger at what I saw then as the complete degeneration of Heinlein's politics.

Looking back now I find myself much more at odds with Heinlein. Farnham's Freehold is frankly a racist book and parts of Time Enough for Love or Stranger in a Strange Land make me very angry indeed; my last reading of Stranger in 2005 left me aghast in some places, notably the infamous line put in the mouth of a female character that "Nine times out of ten, if a girl gets raped, it's at least partly her own fault". Then I saw Stranger as reflecting Heinlein's trajectory towards reactionary politics. But now I am not so sure.

Because I retain some of the enthusiasm for Heinlein from my younger years I was drawn to Farah Mendlesohn's new book on Heinlein's writing. It is not a biography, rather a thematic study of almost all his writings. Having read it I found myself warming much more to Heinlein as a thinker, even though I felt, as I think Mendlesohn does too, that at times he was extremely and dangerously naive. Mendlesohn illustrates this well when studying the racial politics of Farnham's Freehold. She argues that Heinlein thought it would be an anti-racist work because it inverts slavery, making white people the slaves and black people, in a post nuclear war USA, the masters. Instead it is a novel that racists would enjoy - in particular (spoiler) because the black slave owners turn out to be cannibals. Heinlein's failure to grasp what racism is, lies at the root of this contradiction.

But the point that Mendlesohn makes is that this reaction would have upset Heinlein. He was, particularly for his time, very progressive. He had, for instance, a "deep-down belief in justice and in sexual and racial equality"; and wrote about topics that today are quite common within science fiction but were rarely talked about (or were even taboo) at the time - including gender, race and trans-questions. His language might today seem clumsy, but it was innovative - particularly when one looks at his attitude to "family" which rejects the western norm. This is, of course, why some of his books, like Stranger became icons of counter-culture - his characters have sex, take drugs and resist authority. But he did, as Mendlesohn says, "drift to the right" and in part I think this is because he was cynical about social movements. His engagement with politics was, in the context of the US at least, one that was relatively mainstream - attempts to launch radical movements were still born and floundered on what I think was a limited understanding of how society worked.

Mendlesohn writes that while "Heinlein's political opinions changed over his forty-year writing career, it is important to understand that his underlying beliefs did not". I think this is an illuminating point. Whatever Heinlein is doing there is a very emphatic "right and wrong" to his core beliefs. One of the problems that people often identify with Heinlein's books is that they feel like lectures at times - with characters extolling a particular world view. Time Enough For Love does this is several ways - with the interludes with Long's sayings interspersed with other tales where he gives waxes lyrical on a theme (slavery, racism, gun ownership) etc. Here Heinlein's characters (and we must assume Heinlein himself) have a particular vision of a better society, though it is rarely different at an econoimc or political sense, rather as the result of different personal relationships.

In discussing For Us, the Living (which I have not read) Mendlesohn says that

there is a clear sense in this book of the communitarianism still current in American life in the 1930s. In For Us, the Living civic duty is focused on contribution, and respect for the individuals social liberty; privacy is absolute, childrearing is no longer solely an occupation for women... and sexual jealousy is a mystifying illness.

It all sound very attractive, but there is no sense of how to get there. Heinlein writes about revolution in several of his books. But they are not Revolutions that socialists like myself would recognise. They are top down movements, led by small groups of people, or other intelligences, which Mendlesohn (in my opinion, mis-characterises, as being like Bolshevik organisation). But without mass involvement in such movements how will people transform themselves and "rid itself of the muck of ages" as Karl Marx argued. Heinlein provides no answers.

As the quote above indicates, Heinlein's attitude to sex and sexual relations is inseparable from his wider attitudes to interpersonal relationships and the family. In these he is firmly in the progressive camp; though Mendlesohn points out he "dives gender equality from gender roles". As a young reader of Heinlein in the 1980s and 1990s I found his discussions on such things exciting and innovative; but I found his attitude to incest troubling. Time Enough for Love and its follow-ups are, essentially a long tale about the hero eventually getting to have sex with his mother. However Heinlein dresses this up, it is odd and I was surprised that Mendlesohn didn't discuss it further.

In many ways its easiest to characterise Heinlein as a classic Libertarian, though that word is inadequate. It is possible at every stage to cherry pick Heinlein's "good" policies - he opposed the draft his whole life, he celebrated differences etc, but mostly he appears to be politically adrift. Indeed this is a point that Mendlesohn makes very well when discussing his attitude to racism:

There is never any question which side Heinlein stands on the debate... but we also need to be aware of the lack of nuance and sensitivity to the oxygen he breathes. Heinlein understands and opposes enslavement and colour prejudice, but he does not really see that racism has a wider infrastructure. He does not understand what we now frame as systemic racism.

I think this sums up Heinlein extremely well. He has instincts (some good and some bad) but he has no real framework to understand or explain them. Hindsight is, of course, a wonderful thing and the world is a different place to the one Heinlein was writing in. His novels are full of mansplaining white characters, which can be hard to stomach today. But on the other-hand he had many innovative ideas which certainly shaped science-fiction but had wider influences too. For me Mendlesohn's book was in someways a way to understand my own thoughts about Heinlein, an author who had a influence on me. I think her insights into his motivations and the ideas that informed his writing clarify those writings and put them in a wider context. Farah Mendlesohn's book is thus a stimulating read for fans of Robert Heinlein (and those who used to be) and an excellent piece of literary criticism.

Related Reviews

Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land
Heinlein - Starship Troopers
Rhinehart - The Dice Man

Melissa Harrison - All Among the Barley

*** Warning Spoilers ***

You don't have to read much fiction about the history of the English countryside before you encounter writing that is essentially about a fantasy rural idyll. In it, rural inhabitants live poor, but fulfilling lives, essentially in a balance with both the natural world and their compatriots, rich and poor, in the village. Disagreement - such as the failures of an absentee landlord or, the drunkenness of a labourer - usually resolve themselves through the internal democracy of the community; either that or happy accident. Weirdly these fantasies are nostalgic for something that never existed but are often tremendously popular.

Oddly enough a fair bit of non-fiction writing about the countryside falls into this trap too. Though there are also many exceptions. Ralph Whitlock's 1945 classic Peasant's Heritage mostly avoids the nostalgia trap, but has a telling comment about it's main subject, the agricultural labourer, the "English peasant ... the same man as his forefathers, the men who fought and won Agincourt, the men who made the face of rural England with crude tools and by hard work, and defended as passionately as they worked for it." A bigger problem is that books that are actually quite faithful accounts of working class life in the countryside are often stripped bare of their reality and turned, usually for the TV screen, into pastiches of their content. To choose two cases in point, Laurie Lee's Cider with Rosie is often remembered as a sun-infused coming of age account in a Gloucestershire village, but few people remember the murder that takes place when a rich returnee splashes his cash around and is collectively set upon by the locals. Flora Thompson's wonderful memoir Lark Rise to Candleford is often read for their accounts of life and nature in her home village but she notes the exploitation and oppression at the heart of country life. As I noted in my review of it she writes:

The joy and pleasure of the labourers in their task well done was pathetic, considering their very small share in the gain". Later when discussing the elaborate (and extensive) feast given by the farmer to those who'd laboured on the harvest, a celebration that was even extended to any passing "tramp", Thompson has her father comment that "the farmer paid his men starvation wages all the year and through he made it up to them by giving that one good meal. The farmer did not think so, because he did not think at all, and the men did not think either on that day; they were too busy enjoying the food and the fun."

Life in the English countryside was, as I tried to show in my own book Kill All the Gentlemen, one of constant class struggle against poverty, exploitation and oppression.

I dwell on this because I want to contrast it with Melissa Harrison's wonderful novel All Among The Barley about life in East Anglia in the early 1930s. I did put a spoiler warning at the top of this review, but I want to repeat it. Do not read further if you don't want to have this novel ruined!

Having read a few pages I was ready to lump it in with all the other terrible books about life in the countryside where the sun always shines, and the much needed rain comes during the night. But quite quickly I began to notice that something wasn't quite right. The main character Edie Mather is writing, as an adult, about her childhood, and occasional references to an event that took her from her home village left me with a real sense of foreboding. The story unfolds slowly, framed around the arrival of Constance FitzAllen in the village. Constance is very much the glamorous modern urbanite. She wears trousers, drinks in the pub and is not afraid to impose herself on the rural community. She is writing a series of articles about the countryside and wants to know all about the traditions that make up family and farming life. Here, for me, is the genius of the novel. Harrison has taken that awful trope of countryside nostalgia and inserted one of its proponents into her novel in the act of creating the fantasy itself. Of course Constance finds what she wants to find, though often to the bemusement of the rural community and in the process she begins to transform Edie.

Edie has little to look forward to. She's good at school but there's little chance for her to do anything than become someones wife "pushing out babies" every year or go into service somewhere. So Constance's London glamour entrances her. The reality of hard work, poverty and a prospect of a forced marriage to a man who rapes her, with a background of economic crisis and crop failure, help to push Edie closer to Constance, until in the novel's climax we see what has been increasingly hinted at - Constance is a rather slick fascist, who is writing for a far-right publication and believes that England's farming communities need to be protected and returned to their traditional ways. Fantasies of idyllic rural communities based on traditional values and the family are a favourite of fascists - both in the past and today and Harrison cleverly manipulates this into the story - though it should also be remembered that the left has not been immune from this either - with William Morris a case in point.

But what is really clever is how Harrison shows Constance slowly winning people to her point of view. Slanders against the few local Jews, hostility towards agricultural unions and criticism of big government lead to splits in the community and eventually, an enormous chasm opening up in Edie's family. Frighteningly in 2019 the method will not be unfamiliar as we survey far-right politicians around the world. The novel's ending is brutal (with an implicit critique of Thatcherism) and I had to read it two or three times to fully get its enormity.

Melissa Harrison has written a marvellous book. It turns the genre on its head; skewers the invented history of the countryside and does it at the same time as being a faithful account of life in a poor rural community. But this is certainly my highlight of 2019 and I am not sure I'll read a better novel in the remainder of the year.

Related Reviews

Berger - Pig Earth

Whitlock - Peasant's Heritage
Archer - A Distant Scene

Kerr Cameron - The Ballad and the Plough
Thompson - Lark Rise to Candleford

Okbazghi Yohannes - The Biofuels Deception

On March 15 2019 up to 1.5 million students walked out of class to demand action in the face of looming environmental catastrophe. In the UK one of the most popular slogans was "System Change not Climate Change" reflecting the protesters' feelings that capitalism and its politicians had failed them. As Marxist writers like John Bellamy Foster and Ian Angus have shown, capitalism is at heart, a system that puts the accumulation of wealth above the general interests of people and planet. In the face of this, the capitalists have to find alternative ways of continuing to make their profits and, one of these is the use of biofuels.

Biofuels have been marketed by multinationals, governments and corporate think-tanks as a green way of producing energy. Because they are plants, the argument goes, they are effectively carbon neutral, sucking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and then releasing the same amount back when they are burnt. Biofuels could produce electricity, propel cars and aeroplanes and essentially continue to allow the system to do what it has always done, without the climate catastrophe.

However, in this closely argued book, Okbazghi Yohannes argues that it is a desire to continue the system of accumulation that lies behind the drive for biofuels, not an interest in saving the planet from catastrophe. Yohannes explains:

The underlying motivation of those who call for biofuels is not to solve energy and food shortages or reduce climate change. Rather, the goal is to resolve the anarchy of agricultural production in the Global North, brought about by the green revolution and the consequence transformation of agriculture into a food-manufacturing system during the second half of the twentieth century - a transformation made possible by integration with the petroleum industry.

The Green Revolution produced a surplus of grain for the agricultural and grain trading corporations and it was these, rather than the oil companies that initially pushed the idea of biofuels. Yohannes continues by arguing that the contemporary capitalist state has become a proponent for biofuels through the influence of the food and fossil fuel multinationals. Both the US and the EU, together with other international organisations are pushing biofuels as a solution to climate and food scarcity, and encouraging policies that will facilitate further production of these crops.

The problem is, as the majority of Yohannes books is devoted to explaining, that biofuels are not a solution to hunger, environmental disaster or anything else. In fact they are likely to make these things worse. In part, the issue is the limitation of bourgeois economics:

The call by ecological economists to redesign capitalism in such ways as to establish a thermodynamic balance between what is bio-physically possible and what is ethically, socially and psychically desirable smacks of romantic petty-bourgeois utopianism.

The other issue is simple physics. Growing the quantities of biofuels that are needed to generate the energy and food suggested by their proponents would require enormous deforestation, vast quantities of water and, because the production, processing and transport of biofuels uses lots of energy, contributes significant amounts of carbon to the atmosphere. To take just one of numerous statistical examples, Yohannes points out that:

even after biofuel producers devoted 20 percent of the 2006 [US] corn harvest to ethanol production, it displaced only 3 percent of gasoline consumption. If the entire annual corn grown on 90 million acres is converted to ethanol fuels, the country may be able to displace only 12 percent of its annual gasoline consumption.

Yohannes reports one study as showing that one gallon of [biofuel[ ethanol needs 129,600 BTU of energy to produce, but only has an energy value of 76,000 BTU, so we are effectively wasting energy to produce energy. There are similar shocking statistics about water use, deforestation and environmental destruction associated with biofuel production.

No one could read this book and believe that biofuels are the solution to any of the social problems we face. But Yohannes doesn't simply argue against the biofuel strategy, he also argues for an alternative. It involves a recognition that the biofuel strategy arises out of a need for capitalism to greenwash its continued accumulation of wealth. This has partly been done by the covering up of the impact of biofuel production, for instance, in the aftermath of the food crisis of 2008, George Bush's administration suppressed a World Bank report that "showed the link between the food crisis and ethanol production".

But the state itself is not neutral, it exists, as Yohannes reminds us, to facilitate the accumulation of wealth, and he argues we are seeing a "transformation of the state as a geo-economic agent in the service of the bioproduct industrial complex and the transition to a post-petroleum bioeconomy". I'm not one hundred percent convinced that this is a global phenomena as I think the state is primarily concerned with making sure that the fossil fuel corporations can continue and that biofuels are a part of doing this, but I do agree that increasingly biofuels are seen as a key component for certain nation states and multinationals in terms of future accumulation.

This would be interesting enough, if Yohannes left it there. But the final chapter is devoted to showing how a rational, sustainable agriculture could develop. This, he argues, requires the direct producers taking control of the food system. Problems of hunger, environmental disaster and water shortages are the direct result of the insanity of production under capitalism. The alternative is the "masses of peasants and workers, who together must then begin to create a sustainable world". It's a vision of change that fits well with the demands of the school students.

Okbazghi Yohannes book contains a wealth of statistical data and information. At times this is a little overwhelming, but so is the environmental disaster we face. The information it contains makes a powerful argument, not just against biofuels, but for a new post-capitalist world. The task is for us to get there.

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Temi Oh - Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

It is 2012 and it's an alternative Earth also on the brink of ecological collapse. Yet there is hope. Back in the 19th century astronomers learnt of the existence of Terra-Two, an earth-like world a few light years from our solar system. Robot exploration tells scientists that it is inhabitable, and ripe for colonisation. The global super-powers, principally Great Britain, dispatch missions to prepare Terra-Two for mass colonisation - its a new chance to start again.

The UK's mission is crewed by a tightly selected group of young adults and an elder group of experienced astronauts. The latter won't live to see the destination but the youngsters will be adults, in the prime of their life upon arrival. Do You Dream of Terra-Two begins with their selection and education, a bizarre mix of Harry Potter and high-science were these gifted students are crammed with information, subjected to a battery of exams and medical tests and go through puberty. With the eyes of the world on them they prepare for space, say good-bye to their families and head off.

Temi Oh does an excellent job on this part of the novel. The characters' back stories reflect the UK in this alternate and our own timeline - the children are from poor and wealthy multi-cultural backgrounds. The different trajectory of history in this novel has not changed Britain's role in the world - only its global position in the 21st century. Some readers may well enjoy the copious references to contemporary culture - one of the six teenagers, the polyglot Poppy, reads Harry Potter in Latin and Korean on the space-ship; and brands like Cafe Nero get plenty of mentions. Personally I found this self-reference a little annoying, like the author was trying too hard to prove that they knew Britain in 2012 to future audiences.

But the meat of the story is the relationships between the astronauts as they get underway. Quickly the pent up tensions and emotions begin to create division on the ship, and teenage hormones don't help. Some of young astronauts have been come through their training hyper competitive, and a strict regime means that despite being in space, their mission becomes more a reality TV show. Oh writes brilliantly about the sense of loss and alienation the young astronauts go through and there is a good portrayal of the depression that one character experiences.

It would be deeply unfair of me to describe how the story continues. Major events early in the book have a lasting affect on the crew's experiences. Oh's portrayal of the mission and its planning highlight the illogicality of seeing young adults as simply being less developed versions of their older selves. A point not lost on those who watch from home. Towards the end, one character's subtle musings on why governments engage in such high-profile, costly spectacles are neatly contrasted with the 2012 Olympic Games.

Despite being in a very science fiction context this is not a highly scientific novel. Oh is well versed in space science; but on occasion I raised my eyebrows at some of the portrayals of the mission. It is, for instance, madness to think that the spaceship would make a stop at a base near Jupiter on its way out of the solar system (why would you give up that delta-v?) I won't mention a couple of others as they give away key aspects of the story; and that's the point really. Temi Oh is writing a novel about relationships, friendship and alienation - not hard science; and any inaccuracies in the latter are about ensuring that the former works better.

This is a unique novel, highly enjoyable, tense and well-written. A brilliant debut and I look forward to the authors' future books, though I hope the ending to this isn't ruined with a sequel.

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Joshua B. Freeman - Behemoth: A History of the Factory & the Making of the Modern World

The "factory" would seem to be ubiquitous with capitalism. But, as Joshua B. Freeman explains in this remarkable book, the "dark satanic mills" which concentrated huge numbers of workers together with machinery under one roof to mass produce goods have gone through a process of evolution themselves. While the enormous plants that build everything from iphones to toys in Asia have many similarities with car plants of the mid 20th century, or cotton mills of the 18th and 19th century, they have many differences too.

Freeman begins with the first plants, showing how these evolved out of the change needs of production in early capitalism. Initially these attempted to bring earlier forms of family production under one roof before moving to the more recognisable building with large numbers of workers doing similar tasks. As Freeman notes, we sometimes look back on these changes as the dawning of a new, positive era but at the time commentators noted something very different:

the Industrial Revolution is often associated with individual liberty and what is called the free market. But in the early years of the factory system, it was as likely to be dubbed a new form of slavery as a new form of freedom. Joseph Livesey, a well known journal publisher and temperance campaigner, himself the son of a mill owner, wrote of the apprenticed children he saw in mills during his childhood, "They were apprenticed to a system to which nothing but West Indian slavery can bear any analogy".

Focusing on the birth of the factory system in England, Freeman highlights how the industrial revolution sucked people from the countryside into the cities, "Manchester and adjacent Salford more than tripled in population from 95,000 in 1800 to more than 3100,000 in 1841." Factory owners saw the development of the system as creating wealth that would trickle down and improve life for everyone - though the enormous profits they made rarely permitted paying decent wages. Factory life was brutal, hard and poorly recompensed - the workers suffered badly, something highlighted brilliantly by Frederick Engels. Freeman also argues that the factory system developed as a method of disciplining labour a change that required the British state's support - both in terms of permitting the factory organisation and in punishing workers who challenged the owners' power.

One of the great things about this book is that it celebrates the workers' struggles - both against the factory system and within it. In the chapter focusing on Lowell in the United States, one of the first places to successfully introduce cotton manufacturing to that country, he notes how the owners created a town were the cotton mills were "hailed as beacons of a bright future". The workers were paid well, and, despite severe restrictions on behaviour, had clean places to live. No less a critic than Charles Dickens in 1842 wrote that the city, when compared to places in England, "the contrast... [was] between the Good and Evil, the living light and deepest shadow". Yet this could not continue. Eventually management, under pressure from over-production, cut corners and attacked workers conditions. By the 1830s and 1840s strikes were common, and by the 1850s "when New England mills appeared in the news, it usually was because of untoward developments".

From here Freeman studies how the capitalists tried to create the perfect factory - integrating workers and machines. This is done through a brilliant study of Ford's car plants and he shows how Fordism was copied throughout the factory system. I won't dwell here on other aspects of Ford's company - some of that is in a review of Greg Grandin's book Fordlandia, which I highly recommend. But the startlingly thing that I found was how Fordism and its close cousin Taylorism, was integrated into Russian manufacturing. Both Lenin and Trotsky wanted the development of the factory system - seeing it as key to the development of the socialist economy. They were keen to adopt scientific methods like Fords - though for very different reasons. Under Stalin this was distorted into a parody of socialism - with men and women being worked to the bone for little in return. The chapter on factories in the Soviet Union was particularly interesting, even if I didn't entirely agree with Freeman's characterisation of that society (though he, notes that few care today about the exact nature of Soviet Russia!) I was particularly surprised to learn how closely US capital was involved in developing Russia's factory skills and infrastructure in the 1920s and 1930s.

From the Soviet Union, Freeman looks at the decline of the factory in Western Europe and the United States and turns to China and Vietnam were enormous plants are being built to satisfy the hunger for profits of corporations like Apple. These have many similarities - entire cities are being born and the countryside sucked dry of labour - with England in America in the early years of industrial capitalism. But the factories are also different - geared towards just in time production and rarely relying on a production line in the same way as, say, a Ford car plant.

This whistle-stop review of Freeman's book barely touches the surface of the material he has covered. It is a subtle study of the role of the factory in the development of capitalism, and what that means in the 21st century. He never loses sight of the fact that the factory always requires men and women whose labour is squeezed from them and turned into profits - so at every stage he notes the resistance, the rebellion, the attempts to organise and the strikes - that have terrified the bosses from England in the 18th century to China in the 21st. Freeman is not afraid of using the unfashionable work of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky to understand the factory system's history - and this means that he understands the interplay between capitalism and worker well.

If I had major criticisms, they would be that I wished Freeman had developed more on the role of the factory in the Russian Revolution itself. While he mentions the huge workplaces of Petrograd, he gives little space to the struggles of the workers there. I'd have liked more on how the Putilov workers helped make the Revolution. I also thought that the work of Andreas Malm would have been interesting to note - the way that the development of factories ended up locking capitalism into a fossil fuel system with all that means for the environmental crisis today.

But these minor comments aside this is a brilliantly written, fascinating and very human study of those most inhumane of workplaces. I highly recommend it.

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Mike Gonzalez - The Ebb of the Pink Tide

In the early years of the 21st century one of the inspirations for radicals in the anti-capitalist movement were events in Latin America. There a succession of left governments seemed to emerge out of economic and political chaos, on the back of, or buoyed by mass radical movements. The Zapitistas, the MST, Hugo Chavez, President Lula and in particular, revolutionary events in Bolivia seemed to offer real hope to millions of people. Mike Gonzalez emphasises however that these movements were the latest stage in a "relentless" struggle by the people of Latin America, one of which the outside world is "largely ignorant".

Today the picture is very different. We've seen the election of the far-right Bolsanaro in Brazil, the latest in repeated attempts by the United States and the Venezuelan capitalist class to undermine the legacy of Chavez's rule in that country. The "Pink Tide" is very much on the retreat as suggested by the title of Gonzalez's new book on the region. Gonzalez begins by tracing the origins of the movements that inspired us back in the 2000s. He is careful however, to make two crucial separations. First he doesn't suggest that all the governments and leaders that claimed the mantle of the pink tide were actually part of it. He notes, for instance, that

The example of Ecuador...illustrates... that the discourse of twenty-first century socialism and the pink tide slips easily off the tongue of eloquent and charismatic leaders like [Rafael] Correa. But the content of their actions belies the rhetoric.

Secondly he separates those left leaders like Lula and Chavez from the mass movements that both lifted them, and helped shape them. This I think is particularly important when we look at Venezuela. To many people around the world Chavez was an inspirational socialist leader and, in some ways he was. However Chavez was not originally a socialist, and while his reforms were significant steps forward for many of the poorest in that country, they did not originate from any attempt at fundamental transformation of society. Indeed, Chavez was not initially part of a mass movement - the revolutionary movement came when Chavez was threatened in a coupe by the Venezuelan capitalist order:

What was understood by revolution in the Venezuelan context?... if revolution is defined politically as the moment when the protagonist of revolution, its subject, becomes the mass of working people, then it can be descried as the sign of a profound political change. What happened on 12-13 April [2002] as the mass movement descended on the presidential palace demanding the return of Chavez, was such a sign. But that is all it was. The bosses' strike, and the attempt to sabotage the oil industry and bring down the Chavez government with it, deepened the class confrontation, and marked a second phase in the class struggle... it was the intervention of organised workers that ensured the continuity of production that was key to victory.

What workers did was to keep the system running in the face of a bosses strike that brought the economy to a temporary halt. But that was all. There was no real attempt to turn this into fundamental reorganisation of the workplaces under workers' control. The bodies that were set up were not bottom up democratic organisations. The problem, as has been argued elsewhere, was not too much socialism, but not enough. Gonzalez emphasises this:

in practice there is nowhere in the pink tide countries any evidence of the laying of the foundations of a new economic order. One possible framework would be buen vivir - but the realities appear to have flown in the face of any attempt to put it into practice.

In fact:

Insofar as buen vivir reflected the accumulated experience of collective labour among indigenous peoples, or the protection of territories where that experience was embedded, the opposite developments seem to have occurred.

Gonzalez notes that at the highest points in struggle, in particular the revolutionary movements in Bolivia in 2003 to 2005, when millions of "peasants, workers, indigenous communities, men and women in urban and rural struggles, students, youth" came together in a movement that challenged directly capitalist power, there was the "absence of a common project for an alternative order, and alternative vision".

Unfortunately Gonzalez's book fails to spell out what this means. What I think he means is the lack of a mass revolutionary socialist party that could both shape and lead struggles, build the links between different movements and argue for that alternative vision. It is clear that in all the cases he examines such a party might have made a fundamental difference in pushing forward the interests of the workers and peasants. That need hasn't vanished, as Gonzalez notes, "Resistance continues, but this time, and increasingly, against the very states that the movements raised to power."

Gonzalez is very clear in his conclusion that the movements that emerged in Latin America failed, in part, because the "pink tide was a movement whose economic thinking was shaped by developmentalism" and points out "the future will pose the same problems again". The alternative is a socialist society created through the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. Getting to that goal will require the building of new revolutionary organisations - a challenge for activists following the "ebb of the pink tide", but as Mike Gonzalez's book makes it clear, Latin America has no shortage of workers who have fought in the past and will fight again in the future.

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Wilhelm Liebknecht - Karl Marx: Biographical Memoirs

Wilhelm Liebknecht was a founding figure of German Marxism and a leading figure in the German Social Democratic Party. He was a principled activist who spent years in exile during which he met, and became very close to Karl Marx and his family. These memoirs are not particularly political - they contain little about Marx's ideas - except for a brief discussion of Marx's historical materialism and focus instead on Marx and his family. I picked it up because I wanted to read the first hand account of Emmanuel Barthélemy whom I'd encountered in Marc Mulholland's book.

Readers familiar with the biography of Karl Marx will recognise some of Liebknecht's book as the major sources. Liebknecht's account of a pub crawl along Tottenham Court road in which Liebknecht, Marx and their (then) friend Edgar Bauer has become a oft-told story among left-wingers who gleefully recount how the group got into a near fight after challenging some "old-fellows" English patriotism and then fled the police after breaking numerous street lamps at 2am. The book is also the likely source for the accounts of Marx's love of chess and cheap cigars.

Wilhelm Liebknecht

At times the book approaches a hagiography. For Liebknecht Marx was an infallible, enthusiastic and important teacher. He does acknowledge Marx's tendency to feuds and polemic, but locates this all in Marx's desire for political clarity and the strengthening of the revolutionary movement. Perhaps most importantly the book challenges any idea that Marx was an uncaring, miserable revolutionary hidden in the British Library. Liebknecht attests to Marx's inability to ignore the plight of an impoverished child, describes a nearly dangerous encounter when Marx tried to save a woman being assaulted by her husband and attests to Marx's love for poetry, literature and his friends. The Marx home itself is a place of welcome and friendship - Marx's wife Jenny was a welcome support to many of the lost and isolated exiles around the group. Liebknecht saw her as a mother figure having lost his own mother very early, and the terrible poverty which they all lived in - as well as the early deaths of their children, clearly moves the author long after events.

It's a melancholy book. Wilhelm Liebknecht is writing his memories, together with the recollections of Eleanor Marx, towards the end of his life and the final section - when he returns to the London of his youth to find the places that he, Marx and the wider circle of exiles argued, debated and laughed - is tinged with real sadness. Marx was clearly a towering political figure for Liebknecht, but also a close friend - the description of his first meeting with Marx and Engels as they cross-examine him over beer and food gives an idea of how Marx would allow people into his inner circle, but only if they could demonstrate their political principles. Once in that circle however, Marx and his family would gladly give everything they could.

The book is not easily available. But it is online at the MIA while it is not a starting point to understand Marx's ideas - it is the basis to understand him as a person.

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Marc Mulholland - The Murderer of Warren Street

On December 8th 1854 Emmanuel Barthélemy visited the home of his employer George Moore together with a woman. After a discussion that became an argument Moore was killed and, during his escape, Barthélemy shot a second person who was pursuing him. As a result, Barthélemy was eventually executed.

It is an intriguing setup worthy of a detective novel. Who was Barthélemy? Why kill George Moore? Who was the woman with him? What was in the document that she read aloud that enraged Moore and led to a deadly struggle? The setup becomes even more interesting when we unpick more about Emmanuel Barthélemy himself. He was no ordinary worker - rather he was a leading French revolutionary, a man who had fought on numerous barricades, commanding one in Paris during the 1848 Revolution. But how did he end up in England? Why commit murder? And why George Moore?

Marc Mulholland's thrilling historical book reads very much like the novel I assumed it was when I first picked it up. But rather than a novel it is a book that puts a seemingly minor murder in a grand sweeping historical context. Mulholland expertly depicts a France where hundreds of thousands of ordinary workers and peasants had repeatedly engaged in a life and death struggle for social justice. For those of us who have identified with "revolutionary" politics during decades devoid of European revolution, the years of Revolution in France seem like a fairy tale - yet for individuals like Barthélemy there were decades when a new world seemed only a mass uprising away.

Barthélemy was not alone - he was part of a wider network of radicals and particularly identified with the revolutionary Auguste Blanqui whom he once planned to spring from jail. He was acquainted with Marx and Engels, though his impatience, as well as his uncouth manner (Jenny von Westphalen, Marx's wife, disliked him) and political disagreements led to a characteristic split from Marx's circle. In his memoirs of Karl Marx the German Marxist Wilhelm Liebknecht remembers Barthélemy and notes how even his death mask the revolutionary bore an expression of "iron determination".

The story of Barthélemy's life which forms the core to this history reads at times like a Boys' Own adventure. There is a detailed account of a duel in which Barthélemy kills an opponent who had slurred him; there's also a thrilling escape from a French prison over the roof tops and an escape from the barricades following a defeated insurrection. But what's remarkable about the book is that it is so much more than just this. Barthélemy's life can only be understood in the context of the enormous ferment that Europe was going through and the scale of the French revolutionary movements. Few authors could handle both aspects to the story and Mulholland does it extremely well.

For me, the Emmanuel Barthélemy that emerges is a brave but tragic figure. There is no doubting his commitment to the transformation of the world, but his radical beliefs were prefigured on a few brave individuals leading a spontaneous uprising. Barthélemy very much lived these ideals - on several occasions he was prepared to lay his life on the line for his political beliefs. But bravery and spontaneity are no substitute for strategy, tactics and the slow building up of a radical movement. Barthélemy last revolutionary plan - the assassination of Napoleon that curiously ended up in George Moore's second best visiting room - are the actions of a man who has had every other plan fail.

Today few on the socialist left see political assassination as a way forward and thus, to us, Emmanuel Barthélemy is an enigmatic, perhaps even insane, figure. Marc Mulholland's brilliant account helps us to understand how and why such individuals laid their lives on the line; even if we might ultimately look to other revolutionary strategies.

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Glenn Frankel - High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic

High Noon is, in my opinion at least, one of the greatest Westerns ever. I watched it again while reading Glenn Frankel's fascinating book and I was repeatedly struck by how modern it seemed. The fact there are not just one, but two, strong women leads is unusual for the period and the genre in itself - that one of them was a Mexican actor is even more surprising. The film is incredibly paced - almost every scene has a clock, and as the noon train gets closer the film seems to zoom in, closer and closer, on Gary Cooper, playing Marshal Will Kane. On that train is the killer Frank Miller whose gang will try and take revenge on Kane for his imprisonment. Kane is gradually abandoned by everyone in the town - some who are cowards, some who are scared and some who would simply prefer Miller back.

The backdrop to the making of the film is the second wave of American anti-Communist witch-hunts centred on alleged Communist influence in Hollywood. Carl Foreman, who wrote the screenplay, and was one of the few to stand up to the House of Un-American Activities Committee hearings, was half-way through when HUAC called him in. Frankel's book looks at how Hollywood became associated with the left and what, limited, influence the Communist Party had. Essentially with the end of World War Two, and a strategic alliance with Russia no longer necessary, it became politically useful for the right to run a big red scare. The witch-hunts were appalling, and broke every law of natural justice there is. People lost their jobs, families and livelihoods simply because they had been associated with the left, or were once, however briefly, Communists. A few made retractions, many more named names or swore loyalty oaths and not a few disavowed everything they'd believed in.

But interestingly the Witch-hunts also destroyed the idea that the US was a pluralist society that could accept dissent and criticism. The idea that democracy allowed different views of society was simply cast away. While many individuals suffered, so too did film-making with figures like Carl Foreman leaving the US to making films elsewhere. Films themselves would suffer without that talent or the ideas that inspired them. One "blacklist exile" Michael Wilson, a "thoughtful and unrepentant Marxist" screenwriter who had won an Academy Award for his work on the film A Place in the Sun in 1951 had refused to submit to the HUAC hearing and made the very valid point in a statement that the "consequence of these hearings will be appalling pictures, more pictures glorifying racism, war and brutality, perversion and violence". He was, of course, absolutely right.

There are three strands to Frankel's book - there is the story of High Noon itself, how it came to be, how it was made, and how it was affected by the swirling chaos of the witch-hunts going on around it. The second story is of the blacklists themselves, and the third is the story of Gary Cooper whose late career received and enormous boost from the film (and who got an vast quantity of cash from it too). Cooper was a right-winger, though somewhat naive and surrounded by Hollywood liberals he never quite agreed with it all. Carl Foreman was kicked off the production (though he got a handsome golden handshake) and went on to make some major pictures in Europe. Frankel details the ins and outs of what happened - how Foreman remained unacknowledged following the films blockbuster success and how those involved argued for decades about who was responsible for the final product.

Frankel writes all this well, though I think he is a little too convinced that High Noon is the progressive response to the witch-hunts that he argues it is. In this viewing High Noon is about the hero abandoned by his friends and nearly broken by his experience. There is another, more mainstream view - which explains the film's popularity for some. This is the idea that the individual is more powerful than the collective. That the lone hero can, and will win out, if only he (and its always a he) is brave enough; and finally that such an individual will save society. In this vein it's notable that the film is the one most requested by US Presidents (Bill Clinton screened it twenty times in office!)

When thinking of this interpretation I am reminded of another great liberal film that is often celebrated by the left, but can also be interpreted as a story of the limits of the collective - 12 Angry Men. It is a point also made by Peter Biskind in his book Seeing is Believing. Perhaps the real issue is that liberal politics isn't enough to distinguish yourself from the right in the contested cultural sphere. Whether you like High Noon or not, there's a lot in this book. But fans of the film specifically and the Western genre in general should not miss this.

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Chester Himes - A Rage in Harlem

Chester Himes was a repeated victim of the institutional racism of the United States. As a young boy his brother was injured in an accident, and failed to receive treatment because he was black. When Himes went to college he was expelled for a minor prank - a white student would likely have had a telling off - and eventually ended up eventually in prison for armed robbery. While in prison he began to write stories and then, on parole, he gets a job as a screenwriter, only to lose it because he is black at the behest of the the studio head (Jack Warner). Himes ended up in France where, like a number of other black expats, his career took off and he began to get real recognition.

Today Himes is best remembered for a series of detective novels set in Harlem in the 1950s featuring the black detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones. A Rage in Harlem is the first of these and it is run through with a rage at the condition of poor black working people in Harlem. This is a community of solidarity - were people don't rat on those running from the cops - but it is also a community where people swindle and steal to stay ahead - or to try and get free. Jackson the lead in this novel is swindled out of a everything he owns and the novel follows his naive attempt to fix things and get his lover, Imabelle, back. Jackson's brother dresses as Sister Gabriel and cons people into buying tickets for heaven, while looking for their own, big break.

Jackson finds himself deep in a violent mess, not quite knowing who to trust and egged on by Sister Gabriel who is hoping to con the conners in turn. 1950s Harlem, with its drugs, drink and poverty stricken housing is a brilliantly drawn, backdrop to a fast paced story of bent cops, violence and, in Jackson's case, sheer bloody naivety in the face of overwhelming evidence that Imabelle is not who he thinks she is. This is a highly recommended novel that drips authenticity, born out of the reality of Jim Crow America.

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Peter Marshall - Heretics & Believers: A History of the English Reformation

The English Reformation is a daunting subject for the reader. There are countless contemporary books about the period, not least those the huge number that deal with the life and loves of King Henry VIII. The debates that took place during these years of social and religious change were complex and all encompassing. They were also perhaps the first major social changes to be thrashed out on paper in front of a mass audience that was, as Peter Marshall notes, experiencing a "slow but steady rise in literacy". Printing, Marshall points out "reflected and invigorated lay piety" and despite high-levels of illiteracy, he argues that in the early "sixteenth century, perhaps a third to a half of male Londoners were able to read". Thus the Reformation saw a correspondingly growth in material (religious and non-religious) that today informs historians and histories.

This vast quantity of sources means that any decent history of the Reformation is going to be long, even if the author has done their best to pare down the material. Peter Marshall's new history Heretics & Believers is a massive work. It is based on a scrupulous study of contemporary material, which informs the work, but doesn't over-whelm it. Marshall's book is not over-written, and on occasion, despite its length I sometimes felt I needed more than the few sentences devoted to a particular person or incident.

For Marshall, the Reformation is essential a period when religious change took place on the basis of a rejection of existing ideas and practices. Writing about Thomas More he says that he, "exemplifies the contradictory impulses felt by many thoughtful and spiritual persons in early Tudor England. They longed for reformation of Church and people. But there was a little clarity about who could lead that reform to fruition." Thus there was a "longing" for change that Marshall sees as coming inside the Church itself. As he explains in a key paragraph:

Resentment at the Church's jurisdictional powers, a dislike of overweening or immoral priests, exposure to the levelling wisdom of Lollardy - all these played their part in preparing people to welcome the winds of doctrinal change. But they were not the real wellsprings of the Reformation movement. It arose from deep within the devotional core of late medieval Christianity, a paradoxical tribute to the Church's success in cultivating among priests and people alike a serious concern with salvation, and in fostering a personal relationship with Christ.

This is not to say that Marshall neglects the way that ordinary people understood, debated, interpreted and argued over religion. In fact one of the lovely things about this book is that he celebrates this participation, and some of the most fascinating bits are those that explore the way that people experienced and, on occasion, drove the reformation forward (or indeed tried to hold it back).

But what Marshall lacks is an clarity in trying to explain what triggered the "wellsprings" of the Reformation. Why drove some among the "devotional core" to begin to question and demand change?

Interestingly on the page after the one where I've taken the above quote from, there is a hint at what I think is the real cause. Marshall writes:

One important resource, a true birthplace of the English Reformation, was... Antwerp...a hundred miles from the furthest tip of Kent. Antwerp was the 'staple' or designated port of business, of the Company of Merchant Adventurers, who enjoyed a monopoly of the export of cloth, mainstay of the late medieval English economy. Perhaps a hundred English merchants resided permanently in the city, but the transient population was much higher. Overwhelmingly the Merchant Adventurers were Londoners... Antwerp was also a centre of book production, the international lustre and technical capacity of its printing houses outclassing anything to be found in London.

So for Marshall, the close links with Antwerp and the importance and power of its printing and publishing trade were key. But he quickly moves on from Antwerp's role as a centre of merchant power, a crucible of capitalism. For me the roots of the Reformation lie in most part with a changing world. The decline of the old feudal order and the beginnings of a new society. Marshall himself understands this to some degree - in the early pages of the book he argues that "Catholicism was a better 'fit' for the traditional agricultural communities of late medieval England than for its developing urban centres". But for most of the book he sees the Reformation as essential a battle of ideas.

In some ways this doesn't matter. After all the Reformation was experienced by the majority of the population as a series of confusing changes to religious and secular practice. Old, traditional customs and traditions were gradually (or not so gradually) changed and replaced with new ways of doing things, new books and new languages. These changes were expressed as ideas about how to worship. No one turned up and said "hey capitalism is coming, you've got to change your religion". But in other ways it does matter. Religious practice was intimately tied up with everyday economic life. Thus when Marshall discusses the great rebellions of 1536 and 1537 the Lincolnshire Rising and the Pilgrimage of Grace, they are, for him, simply rebellions about religion. Yet they were also about mass rejection of the way that the Reformation was forcing change upon economic life. Religion was not a separate realm to everything else. They were inseparable.

While I disagree with Marshall's framework, I cannot help but celebrate his book. In its wealth of detail and breadth of coverage it is a definitive account of what took place during the Reformation. From the early religious arguments before Henry VIII's reign to the years of confusion that marked his rule, to the near Civil War that takes place afterwards, Peter Marshall manages to keep the narrative rooted in historical records. He never looses sight of the human aspect to the period - and whether its the execution of Thomas Cromwell, or the burning of some unfortunate heretic - Marshall puts each story into its wider context. It should also be noted that Heretics and Believers is an excellent read with smatterings of humour - quarrels between King and Pope, Marshall jokes, were to be expected "like rain on a Scottish holiday". So despite my reservations about the authors' framework for understanding the period, I have no hestitation in recommending that those interested in the period read it. Few books have the material and fewer still keep the reader engaged for 600+ pages.

Related Reviews

Duffy - The Stripping of the Altars
Duffy - Voices of Morebath
MacCulloch - Reformation: Europe's House Divided 1490-1700
Paul - Thomas More
Wilson - The People and the Book
Engels - The Peasant War in Germany

CJ Sansom - Dark Fire

The second volume of CJ Sansom's Matthew Shardlake series begins with an unusual request to look into a case involving the alleged murder of a boy by his cousin. Shardlake resents the intrusion - in the aftermath of the events of the previous book he thinks he is out of favour with his former employer, Thomas Cromwell, and is trying to keep a low profile by earning his keep working as a jobbing lawyer. But 1540 sees Cromwell's seemingly unassailable position becoming threatened and so, Shardlake is drawn into a parallel quest - a mission to find a source of Dark Fire that has been discovered during the dissolution of a monastry. This Dark Fire is an ancient weapon that will simultaneously strengthen Henry VIII's forces in the face of threat from Catholic powers and save Cromwell's position (and probably life).

It's a much tighter mystery novel that the previous book and it uses the tension of the years of Reformation well. We get a real sense of anguish and fear among the mass of the population - as old certainties change and the future is unclear. Gossip in the streets and pubs centres on rumours that the King will marry again and what this will mean for religion. But saying the wrong thing can still lead directly to prison, torture and execution and this, together with court intrigue, means the investigations continue in an atmosphere of extreme tension. CJ Sansom uses this well - the novel is long, but constantly intense - the reader is pulled along by events as, it must be said, is Shardlake who is frequently at a loss with what to do. Cromwell's servant and Shardlake's new sidekick - Barak - is a welcome foil to his new employers plodding honesty. The two go together well, and as they blunder towards a solution to a murder, they find themselves at the heart of a remarkable dangerous moment in the Reformation - publicly associated with the least popular person in the Kingdom. It's a great whodunit, even if you do know what happens to Cromwell.

Related Reviews

Sansom - Dissolution