Our History in a Revolutionary Novel
There can be few novels which link together James P Cannon, Jock Haston and the British Stalinist leader, Harry Pollitt. Fewer still which feature the origins of the Trotskyist movement in Britain and focus on the lives of a young émigré woman involved in Irish republicanism and her four newly met working-class companions who meet in pre-2nd World War London. For these reasons alone Graham Durham, a well-known British socialist and Unite the Union activist, has done the international socialist movement a service, producing a gripping novel which also can act as what the British call a “pub quiz” for socialists. There will be no reader who does not learn something new about our movement’s rich history.
In the tradition of Vasily Grossman’s Soviet masterpiece, Life and Fate, the novel tells of the tumultuous events of the period 1936-1945 through the eyes of five diverse young people who arrive or are forced to the capital of the British Empire. As war looms, they are caught up in the debates and actions of British imperialism, its backers in the official labor movement and the emerging revolutionary 4th International and the military struggle for Irish freedom.
Beautifully drawn characters experience love, life, loss and betrayal as they struggle to define their own politics in the context of Churchill and Roosevelt’s attempt to project imperialist war as “the people” against evil. Simply unputdownable.