My Revolutions

A great book, highly recommended. Loosely based on the activities of the Angry Brigade in the late 60s and early 70s it is a superb and highly convincing account of how a small group of activists become more and more cut off from reality, more and more mutually dependent and mutually destructive and how sexual tension and sexual politics drive even more extreme action. It would be easy to deal in charicatures but Kunzru draws his characters with so much sympathy that you end up caring deeply about what are essentially very unloveable, selfish, malicious individuals and being touched by the futility of their behaviour - the vast majority of their actions pass unremarked by press or public. And as the main protagonist Michael / Chris, tries to forget his past and hide in bland suburban family life, Kunzru brings out how unsatisfying the replacement of idealism with the quest for money and material goods really is. Better passionate belief in a losing cause, than the current belief in nothing Kunzru seems to be saying. Hard to disagree with that point of view. A complex, passionate, engaging and brilliant book

I just finished Kunzru's brilliant novel last night, and recommend it highly. I think that I'm about the same age as the author, and so I missed out on the Angry Brigade years, but I was a part of the eighties incarnation of the same ridiculous revolutionary impulse -- lived in squats in Brixton and the Lower East Side, and did plenty of foolish things, although nothing as violent as his protagonists, for which I am now devoutly grateful. I thought that Kunzru did an incredible job of evoking both the ghastliness and the seductiveness of the British far Left. He perfectly captured the hideous way that it consumes and shreds its own energy in lacerating (drug-fueled) self-criticism sessions, while also describing the charisma of women like his anti-heroine Anna, whose beauty and courage and complete self-abdication draws the susceptible narrator deeper and deeper into the coils of the movement. The narrative is taut and compelling at the same time as the texture of day-to-day existence is wonderfully described. I felt as though I had been privileged to witness the gritty dreariness of sixties London, when the network of slums and squats and co-ops in Notting Hill formed, for a fleeting few years, the web of a real alternative community. One customer reviewer suggested that no-one in the book was likable, but I found Chris Carver to be eminently sympathetic (perhaps because I could identify with his earnest silliness and its dangerous consequences). I thought this book was a real page-turner, as well as an imaginative tour-de-force.

Mike Frame's story begins innocently enough: his wife, Miranda, has organized a 50th birthday party, their troubled relationship shaky due to lapsed communication and Mike's dreadful secret. A secret he realizes is about to be exposed when a familiar face from the past arrives on his doorstep. Mike Frame has erected a documented identity, but Mike is really Chris Carver, a 1960s London revolutionary with a violent past. Now his carefully structured new life is threatened, Chris about to be exposed as Miles Bridgeman inserts himself into the present, making demands that Chris cannot ignore. Integrating his early years with Chris's frantic present, the author describes the long, painful journey of a young man seduced by ideals and socialist rhetoric, London youth outraged by the Vietnam War and the ongoing violence in Ireland, a culture in search of a cause, heady with their own importance and righteous anger against the establishment. Leaving family behind, Chris finds community with his friends, a loose group of anarchists who spend long hours discussing a world they have not made, formulating a response to an intransigent and powerful government. Fueled by social issues, the group is determined to make a difference, to take action, sacrificing personal goals for the good of all. There is a natural progression from idealism to action, "the experience of transgression" pushing the revolutionaries to more dangerous, more thrilling adventures, fetishizing nonviolence, the liberal use of drugs, the growing paranoia of a group that eventually resorts to repeated violence to capture the public's attention. Chris is inseparable from the movement, even though he is unnerved by the brutal tactics and disregard for consequences, half in love with the fiery Anna, who casts aside every social convention in her fervor, a close-knit group of friends who march into demonstrations, arms linked. This is a harrowing exploration of youthful idealism run aground by a self-defining counter-culture, the clear-eyed goals of the early days replaced by more nefarious plans, connections to radical groups in other countries. By the time he walks away, Chris has suffered a number of disturbing epiphanies, not the least of which is viewing himself as "a compulsive believer, always mistaking my ideas for the world". Bombs explode, people die, the radicalism of the 60s consumed by time and attrition. Chris has not accomplished the hoped-for escape from the furtive indiscretions and years of participation in anti-government activities. Ultimately, he has changed nothing, only piled up horror in his wake. Hoping to rescue some remnants of his life with Miranda from the threat Miles delivers with a smile, Chris comes face to face with the consequences of his actions. Kunzru is unsparing, the glory days long gone, the romance of revolution a smoldering heap of ashes as Chris scrambles for purchase and the devil demands his due. Luan Gaines/ 2009.

If you are interested in the sociological development of militant protest in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Hari Kunzru's research into the Revolution in order to create this novel will supply much detail and speculation worthy of your consideration. Much of my generation's opinion of this period was shaped by television news and popular music, and much that I have read on the period has depended on the media's importance in shaping the thoughts of the times. Kunzru, who did not live through the reign of the Beatles and Walter Cronkite, avoids the media in his novel, allowing the development of the story to explore, on a grass roots level, political beliefs as they radicalized from protest marches against nuclear testing to terrorism against the hated Establishment through several stages of disappointment. If you are an American reader, as I am, My Revolutions will also enable you to contemplate the era through unfamiliar parallel developments in Britain and Europe. Kunzru pivots his story within 24 hours in the late 1990s while looking back on the narrator's development as a militant. A middle section (that is, what happened between the 1990s and 1970s), though hinted at, is largely left to the last few pages of the book, in which a rather straightforward "confession" fills in the gaps.

I was quite enthralled with this book, mostly since it really appears that Hari Kunzru has done his homework. He really paints a vibrant picture of the era of a sixties revolutionary hell bent on change. You can picture every row house brick in the burroughs, and the cramped in meetings of the characters he picks up along the way. The best success is the feelings he gives to the reader in wanting to know what really makes these activists in his story tick, they really are off the deep end in politicizing even the most single trivial decisions. Kunzru also manages to stay away from stupid plot devices and from the nicely wrapped up ending. You really get a sense of wanting to know what happens next, and never feel cheated in the end.