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In the sitting room there’s a photo of Miranda, which I took on a cold weekend walk at the Norfolk coast. She’s standing with her back to the camera, looking out to sea. The light is coming straight at the lens, and she’s little more than a silhouette: big boots, narrow shoulders wrapped in an ethnic something-or-other, hair streaming in the wind. Somehow that’s the image that comes to me, frail, romantic Miranda, rather than the arranger of breakfast meetings, the recipient of local chamber-of-commerce awards, the Miranda of the last few years. Soon a wave is going to break over her: police, maybe the media. How will she cope? I wish I could feel optimistic, but Miranda isn’t a person who deals well with the world’s unpredictability. She’s always fought hard against randomness, with all the weapons in the stationer’s: a little arsenal of agenda and diaries and wall-planners dotted with coloured stars. Poor Miranda, no amount of Post-its will ward off what’s about to happen to you. You’re utterly unprepared.

The stairs creak as I climb up to the bedroom. I have to duck my head to go through the door, I’ve never found the low ceilings and narrow corridors of country cottages quaint, at least not straightforwardly. They’re scaled to the small stature of poorly nourished people; an architecture of hardship and deprivation. Of course I’ve never said this to Miranda. Irregular walls and creaking floorboards please her. I think she’d like to forget she was born into an industrial society. I can’t, at least not in the same way. That kind of mystification has never seemed right to me. It’s so incoherent, for one thing. A country life, but with plumbing and telecoms and antibiotics. A rich person’s fantasy.

But this is our house, or rather Miranda’s house, the house she allowed me to share and always wanted me to love as she did. I realize I’m standing with my fists clenched, glaring at the William Morris wallpaper, the patchwork cushions of the armchair. Above our bed, hanging from the oak beam, is a dream-catcher. I tug at it, breaking the string. I’ve wanted to do that for so long. Such an absurd, out-of-place thing. Our house is filled with these objects – tribal, spiritual, hand-crafted little knick-knacks that are supposed to edge us nearer to Miranda’s wish-fulfilment future of agrarian harmony. There are corn dollies and old glass bottles and prints of medicinal herbs with quotations from Culpeper printed underneath in calligraphic lettering. ‘Only from lucre of money they cheat you, and tell you it is a kind of tear, or some such like thing, that drops from Poppies when they weep.’ That’s outside the bathroom. Culpeper is natural, and natural is the flag Miranda waves at the world, the banner standing for righteousness and truth.

Why am I doing this, breaking her things? None of it’s her fault. She’s worked hard to make the life she wanted. She’s tried to be a good person. And she has loved me. I know that will be the most terrible thing – the look on her face, the gradual opening of the abyss. Everything she has known or believed about me, her lover, her partner for sixteen years, the man who has been a stepfather to her daughter, is untrue. Or if not untrue – for I’ve tried no to tell unnecessary lies – then partial, incomplete.

Listen to me. Partial, incomplete. I’m even lying to myself. It could hardly be worse; she doesn’t even know my real name.

Hari Kunzru published this memory or time novel in 2007. A memory novel is when a narrative of now interchanges with a narrative of then, and the problem is usually that the ‘then’ narrative is more colourful and vibrant than the ‘now’ narrative. I should add that this wasn’t the case, at least for me, with My Revolutions.

Fifty-year-old Mike Frame has a past that his partner, Miranda and step-daughter Sam know nothing about, lived under another name amidst the turbulence of the revolutionary armed struggle of the 1970s.

He’s been on the run for a long time, from the authorities and from himself, but now, inexplicably he glimpses an old comrade and lover while on holiday in France; and back in England a friend from the past turns up on his doorstep, looking to reminisce, and to blackmail. It seems to Mike that he has to face up to the contradiction between who he is and who he once was.

Mike’s story brings to mind the work of groups like The Baader Meinhof Gang, the Weathermen, and the Angry Brigade. It is the journey from political radicalism to armed terrorism.

But in Kunzru’s hands the narrative isn’t allowed to descend into a right-wing nightmare. He is concerned to contrast and compare the political idealism and naïvety of the sixties and seventies with the bleak compromises of the nineties and the opening years of the present century. And at the same time, though as sub-text, he is concerned with personal psychology, particularly in the making and dismantling of identity. How identity is put together piecemeal, collected on the run, so to speak. And how easily it is torn down.

This is an enjoyable novel, probably suffering from a little too much research. But there is much to be admired in it, and I’ll certainly look for more from Hari Kunzru.

The art of the 60s counterculture was almost all bad. All the flower children and peaceniks were capable of was a stream of doodlings, recycled William Morris, a little dada, co-opted Kollwitz, and so forth. The dreariness of today’s graffiti continues the tradition of visual illiteracy.

The music was a different matter. Sixties musical culture was as deep as the visual culture was shallow. All the artists you heard of were only the visible parts of an iceberg of submerged musical activity that was going on in every small town across America. Integral to the tradition, whether blues, rhythm’n'blues, bluegrass, country or folk, was protest – and protest is an essential element of freedom. Every dictator will abuse the name of freedom, will erect hideous lumps of masonry and call them Freedom This and Freedom That, or simply rename old monuments, as the King Memorial Tower in Tehran was renamed Freedom Tower. States are authoritarian structures; to call them free is oxymoronic. Freedom cannot be built, but it can be sung.

The Iraqi people were well on their way to freedom. The scenes of free Iraqis celebrating in the streets, riding American tanks, tearing down the statues of Saddam Hussein in the center of Baghdad were breathtaking. Watching them, one could not help but think of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Iron Curtain. . .
It was entirely possible that in Iraq you had the most pro-American population that could be found anywhere in the Arab world. If you were looking for a historical analogy, it was probably closer to post-liberation France. We had the overwhelming support of the Iraqi people. Once we won, we got great support from everywhere. . .
The U.S. devoted unprecedented attention to humanitarian relief and the prevention of excessive damage to infrastructure and to unnecessary casualties.
The United States approached its postwar work with a two-part resolve: a commitment to stay and a commitment to leave. The United States had no intention of determining the precise form of Iraq’s new government. That choice belonged to the Iraqi people. We have never been a colonial power. We do not leave behind occupying armies. We leave behind constitutions and parliaments. We don’t take our force and go around the world and try to take other people’s real estate or other people’s resources, their oil. We never have and we never will.

From Sam Smith at Undernews.

Europe’s most blatant example is Vladimir Putin’s Russia. When its agents poisoned Alexander Litvinenko with polonium-210, the Russians were as astonished as the Saudis that Britain insisted on bringing alleged criminals to justice. ‘I don’t understand the position of the British government,’ a foreign ministry spokesman spluttered. ‘It is prepared to sacrifice our relations in trade and education for the sake of one man.’
From Leon Trotsky on, the Soviet regime has killed exiles. The difference between the old and the new Russia is that now Russia can buy the support of corporations and capitalists who will excuse their crimes.
In The New Cold War, his study of Putin’s impact on Europe, Edward Lucas of the Economist argues that the Russian elite has understood that money can be used to undermine freedom because there are many in the West who believe that ‘capitalism is a system in which money matters more than freedom’.

Discuss.

The festival runs from the 1st to the 15th March. Although not on the scale of Cheltenham or Edinburgh, there is a varied programme on offer, mainly involving local writers and readers, of whom there are many. Among writers brought in to the festival from the wider world, there will be Tracy Chevalier (Girl with a Pearl Earring), the poet Carol Ann Duffy (The World’s Wife), Joolz Denby, GP Taylor, and Joanne Harris (Chocolat).

Jonathan Heawood, the director of English PEN, will speak about the history and future of PEN International. He will concentrate on the dangerous side of writing, including the 2006 murder of Ann Politkovskaya, the author of books on Putin’s Russia and the war in Chechnya, and the threats to Salman Rushdie’s life in 1988. PEN’s members are writers and literary professionals who aim to promote literature and defend the freedom to write. This event will be in the Marriott Room at York Central Library on the 10th March at 7.30pm.

Without dismissing the alleged dangers entirely, a sensible person quickly appreciates that the threat (of attack by foreigners—nowadays, by Islamic terrorists, in particular) is slight—just do the math, using reasonable probability coefficients—whereas the cost of (purportedly) dealing with it is colossal. In short, as General Smedley Butler informed us more than seventy years ago, the modern military establishment, along with most of its blessed wars, is for the most part nothing but a racket. Worse, because of the way it engages and co-opts powerful elements of the private sector, it gives rise to a costly and dangerous form of military-economic fascism. Lately, the classic military-industrial-congressional complex has been supplemented by an even more menacing (to our liberties) security-industrial-congressional complex, whose aim is to enrich its participants by equipping the government for more effectively spying on us and invading our privacy in ways great and small.

There are too many guns in the USA.
They are too easy to get.
I’m sick of the NRA.
I’m sick of listening to blathering shills telling me over the airwaves that this is the price of freedom, that gun control won’t work, that the Second Amendment means any idiot can get a gun, and decide when he’s had enough he can take innocents with him.

It doesn’t make any sense. Those of us who understand this need to speak out.

Certainly nothing is commoner nowadays than to see people working from morn till night and then proceeding to fritter away at card tables, in cafes, and in small talk what time is left for living. Nevertheless, there still exist towns and countries where people have now and again an inkling of something different. In general it doesn’t change their lives. Still, they have had an intimation, and that’s so much to the good. Oran, however, seems to be a town without intimations; in other words, completely modern. Hence I see no need to dwell on the manner of loving in our town. The men and women consume each other rapidly in what is called ‘the act of love’, or else settle down to a mild habit of conjugality. We seldom find a mean between these extremes. That, too, is not exceptional. At Oran, as elsewhere, for lack of time and thinking, people have to love each other without knowing much about it.

Camus describes a collective affliction. The plague occupies the town as surely and rigidly and impersonally as a Panzer Division.

And the description is about what happens to the town, the community, as well as the single individuals. The narrator is an individual, and we meet some others, Rieux the doctor, Tarrou and their friends and colleagues, although none of these seem to be fully explored or realised. Camus’ theme is society, it’s illusions and attempts at identity. We read about the indifference of the many; the general consensus that the responsibility for the plague lies elsewhere.

We read about the events of the plague. What happens is reported. There is nothing more than that. Although the progress of the spread and decline of the plague are natural we are always conscious that the plague is a metaphor or an allegory, perhaps a series of metaphors for the Nazi invasion and occupation, or for any thing or concept that imprisons us and takes away our freedom or our expectations.

Camus has a story to tell but he also has a message. Now that God is no longer part of our equation we have to take our destiny into our own hands. Prayer will not defend our freedom. And involvement in the death of others, directly or indirectly, will only add to our problems and not even begin to penetrate the absurdity of our situation.

This post also concerns the writer, Albert Camus