Books
Rebels with a cause
by Philip Matthews
In My Revolutions, Hari Kunzru reconstructs the radical politics of the late 60s and early 70s.
Hari Kunzru was born in England in 1969, the year of the moon landing and – more important – the year that Chris Carver, Sean Ward and some others occupied abandoned terrace houses in London, barricading themselves in when the property owner and the police conspired to burn the houses down to flush them out. Carver and the others are fictional but the events that Kunzru describes are so exactly within the urgent, uncompromising spirit of the times that they could have slipped out of any history of late 60s radicalism.
I’m guessing that Kunzru is a student of those times and those politics. I’m just as sure that he compares the present age and finds it wanting (in the Times last month, he talked about there being a “listlessness and hopelessness in the culture at the moment”). The late 60s and early 70s that he describes in My Revolutions aren’t an Austin Powers sketch or a summer of love roll-call of band names and fashions. There’s no Woodstock, no John and Yoko. This is the times as defined by the Red Army Faction, the Red Brigades, the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Army, King Mob, the Angry Brigade: in most cases, middle-class kids on a diet of Marx and Mao, dropping out of the prosperous west and picking up causes.
The present for the novel is 1998 and Carver is living as Michael Frame, turning 50 in comfortable, provincial Sussex. His partner, Miranda, used to stress the “alternative” in the phrase “alternative lifestyle” – now she stresses the “lifestyle”. That’s a nice line, suggestive of Kunzru/Carver’s disappointment. “It’s supposed to be the triumph of capitalism – the end of history and the glorious beginning of the age of shopping.”
But something makes Carver quit this safe, drab new world – and it’s not the prospect of turning 50. He packs his false passport, takes Miranda’s BMW and heads for France, to a site where, incidentally, the heretical Cathars were besieged and burnt by the armies of the medieval church. Does this sound familiar? Whether it’s Languedoc in 1209 or London in 1969, no one’s going to let utopias stand for long.
As Carver drives south, his history unspools in his head. Kunzru’s tight narrative is written with momentum and immediacy; there are fast, film-like cuts between past and present. How he joined the CND, how he graduated to Vietnam marches, how he joined a revolutionary squad that Kunzru has clearly modelled on the US’s Weather Underground and the UK’s Angry Brigade, in that their targets are corporate and military property, not people.
As such, Kunzru makes his fictional group responsible for the real bombing of London’s Post Office Tower in 1971. To this day, no one has claimed responsibility for the bombing, but it’s believed that the bombers posed as diners in the tower’s restaurant – as Carver and Anna Addison do here. Of the group, Addison goes the furthest and believes the hardest, leaving the kind of freeze-frame news-grab image that we now call up when we think of 70s terrorism: she dies during a siege at the German Embassy in Copenhagen in 1975. Or did she also go underground like Carver?
In any event, the closer we get to 1975, the more serious things become. Addison forms an alliance with some Palestinians, who operate at another level entirely, just as things got “a lot heavier”, as former Angry Brigade member John Barker has said, once the IRA bombing campaign hit England. The hopeful late 60s are already starting to feel like a lost paradise – you try to find your way back with mysticism or drug addiction. Kunzru evokes that world with great care and feeling: these days, Notting Hill is as gentrified as Grey Lynn, but here it’s still full of squats and activists, black workers and a paranoid shaman. Abandoned factories in Hackney were still empty, waiting to be occupied by collectives and factions churning out communiqués on ancient printing presses. Where’s that London now? It’s a ghost within the present one, the Blair and Brown-era London that’s “open for business and closed to anything else” as a blogger called K-punk recently put it – and that’s a line that Kunzru and Carver would also surely endorse.
MY REVOLUTIONS, by Hari Kunzru (Hamish Hamilton, $37).
