• Robert Tressell
• Penguin Modern Classics (2004)

Exploding unemployment. Reckless state mismanagement. The obscene profits banks derive from debt. The yawning gap between rich and poor.

These are some of the facts of our time. They were also prevalent in Robert Tressell’s time, at the turn of the twentieth century. Since then, with two world wars and the fall of empires, a whole, tumultuous century has passed by, the majority of which Tressell never witnessed, dying while still fairly young from tuberculosis.

Tressell was the nom de plume of an Irish painter and decorator named Robert Noonan (viz. the trestle table of his profession) who signed his work thus to protect himself from the inevitable controversy of his radical political novel about class struggle and the troubles of a few ordinary men.

Sadly, he needn’t have worried. The novel was rejected by a succession of publishers and did not appear until some years after his death.

Radical

Robert Noonan left home when he was sixteen years old. Growing up in Ireland in 1870s, he became politically radicalised and left for South Africa. While there he married and carved out a career in the construction industry.

However the Boer wars interrupted his steady course to maturity and eventually he found himself in England and in somewhat reduced circumstances.

His frustration at the deep-rooted inequalities in British society led to his writing of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists but the finished manuscript was unanimously rejected.

Though he will have noted the widespread protests and marches that signified a tide turning towards his viewpoint, Tressell never lived to see the advent of the Russian Revolution, which brought about the total restructuring the sort of which he dared to dream.

Legacy

The resultant Soviet society echoed in many ways the central thesis of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists in the form of Barrington’s lunchtime lecture, yet that same Soviet society was both corrupt and flawed in a way that Tressell’s Socialist workmen could not have expected.

Even if Communism is now a failed experiment, Tressell’s contemporaries have left behind an enduring legacy in less absolute societies. The end of the Second World War saw the implementation across Europe of systems intended to provide basic healthcare, education and social welfare. These were the foundations that rebuilt modern Europe and their decline and gradual dissolution in recent decades is a cause of great concern.

Perhaps this is a good moment to take another look at The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and think again about our priorities for the future.

• José Saramago
• Harvill Press (2001 edition)
• 

This was José Saramago’s breakthrough novel in the English language. His narrating personality is less obvious here but, even as he describes the events of three centuries ago, he still can’t resist the occasional modern reference.

There’s also an interesting, slightly bitter tone. This is a story that crosses the spectrum of 18th century Portugal, opening with the royal family and descending from palace to the street where we find our protagonists Baltasar and Blimunda. That initial sweep sets the pattern of the novel, with Father Bartolomeo Lourenço passing between both camps.

The priest has designed a flying machine that, in taking off, threatens to leave his faith behind as well as the ground. The two young lovers assisting him are also Saramago’s vehicle for showing us the hardships and poverty of ordinary lives. Thus the author wastes no opportunity to contrast the lot of such folk with that of the self-absorbed, near frivolous royals. Only in the queen and princess do we detect a note of sadness, for the freedom of their lives is severely limited by protocol, arranged marriage and the ugly male expectation of childbirth.

I felt that something lacked in Baltasar and Blimunda. We eagerly await the flight of Father Lourenço’s contraption for half the novel, the anticipation of which drives the story. However, while in the other half we’re supposed to all but forget about the magnificent machine while we witness instead a town’s struggle to build a ridiculous, excessive royal convent. Even so, Saramago’s capacity for critical observation is almost compensation enough.

• Graham Greene
• Vintage (first published 1951)
• 

Greene was in his writing prime when The End of the Affair was published. The book can nonetheless be considered a transitional piece: it’s an early prospect of the rich black humour the author would mine effectively in later works.

The novel is rather uneven. It describes in flashback and with extraordinary intensity the beginnings of a love affair between Bendrix the narrator and civil servant’s wife Sarah Miles. However, the denouement is somewhat more roughly carved, giving over much space to comic relief and muddled religious questions that do little to underscore Sarah’s predicament.

What Greene always excels at – and this is starkly obvious to readers living abroad – is the acute observation of the English middle class. The taut, serpentine machinations of this love affair are exacerbated by the ill-chosen silences of people who stay bound to the suffocating dogma of their society.

• Natsuo Kirino
• Harvill (2007)
• 

After I recently moaned about the commercial fetishization of Haruki Murakami‘s work, I can see this happening again with Natsuo Kirino. Kirino apparently has a back catalogue of well over twenty books at the time of writing and what Harvill pulled off with Murakami they must be feeling capable of repeating here.

Fortunately, Kirino’s brand of full-frontal brutality is neither palatable to lovelorn teenagers nor suitable prose for future A-Level lit papers. Whatever the risk, you have to hope that Rebecca Copeland is putting in the requisite overtime to deliver a succession of translations.

To call Natsuo Kirino a crime writer is like calling the Pope a priest. She is at the very least a master manipulator, but her manipulations go far beyond mere plotting. Where the darkly brilliant Out tested an honest protagonist’s willingness to hide an increasingly bloody secret from colleagues against a backdrop of banal factory work, Grotesque turns an uncomfortable stare on its readers, asking us to tease out the truth from bitter accounts of broken lives.

Two former schoolmates are found dead in Tokyo, having both been active prostitutes. We step back in time to follow the history of the strained relationship between one of the victims Yuriko and her unnamed sister, who narrates with the occasionally gleeful partiality of a strongly disaffected sibling. As the story develops, a cast of other characters joins them during the years spent within a privileged private school system.

And Kirino has much to say in criticism of an education system – and the society it feeds – that pressurizes its youth and places gross emphasis on status and academic success at all costs. Thus, where Out was remarkably and necessarily claustrophobic, Grotesque achieves with similar candour an impressively broad sweep. Such eloquent honesty has no need of merchandising.

• Piers Paul Read
• Phoenix (2003 edition)
• 

Piers Paul Read has written fiction, biography and journalism. He brought us the now-famous story of the Andes flight disaster of 1972, told from the perspective of the survivors in his book Alive. This work of popular history concerns the Knights Templar, an military-monastic Order whose precise history remains rather obscure.

The Templars prefigured the modern corporation. As Read explains, whilst the focus of their activities was in the Frankish Holy Land, business was conducted in their name all over Europe. The Order was so rich and powerful that it provoked the envy of kings and clergy. The aforementioned obscurity, a factor surely at odds with an organisation so conspicuously large, seems to have been created by the favour of and later persecution by, the Catholic Church.

Read breathlessly covers a millenium’s worth of history in under fifty dense pages, thoroughly explaining the Templars’ raison d’être. Moving through the Torah, the Bible and the Koran and onto a wealth of historical sources, a clear picture gradually takes shape, depicting a formidable force working in the difficult conditions of a hostile region. The taller order is to find viable reasons for the Templars’ disagrace and relatively rapid decline. In this, Read is less convincing, presumably hampered by a paucity of material and the unhelpful contrast with his earlier deeply evidenced chapters. Thankfully he avoids filling the gaps with flimsy inventions, many of which are responsible for the cultish perception of the Templars today.

• Haruki Murakami
• Vintage (2008)
• 

I’ve been a devoted Murakami fan for years, mainly because he has always echoed and expanded my own thoughts and feelings. I came to him after a number of “classic” Japanese writers. When I was at university and Harvill released one translation after another, I hardly read anything else, including my study texts. Murakami even introduced me to his namesake Ryu – bought accidentally as a gift – who, like Haruki-san, has very little to do with literary tradition.

Times change, of course, as do people. Lately, I’ve started to feel like Julio and Tenoch in the wonderful final scene of Y Tu Mamá También. Like two old friends who, having been through a lot together, meet up after a time and suddenly find they have nothing more to say to one another.

After Dark is one of Murakami’s in-between books, like Blind Willow Sleeping Woman or After the Quake, though here we’re presented with a single story. By turns cool, kooky and ethereally atmospheric, with the sort of stuff that David Mitchell used to imitate in his early work, the book is full of the usual Murakami charm. Yet against expectations of something more than ‘the usual’, it offers little in the way of substance, being on the whole rather slight and inconsequential.

Aside from any mixed feelings about After Dark, Murakami is now a commercially important author on the Vintage roster. Unfortunately, that means his oeuvre is prone to being fetishized and turned into marketable products, utilising the naff artwork of monochrome Japanese waifs, mock brush paintings and crap typography. Bring back the Jamie Keenan covers! And just what is the point of a Murakami Diary? Whatever next: the Murakami Back To School Kit?

• René Weis
• Penguin (first published 2001)
• 

The Inquisition weighs heavily in our modern impressions of an era in which cruelty, intolerance and ignorance reigned supreme for several centuries. Yet a growing body of academic research into the Catholic suppression of the “heretical” Cathar faith now demonstrates with no small irony the sophistication of a highly developed subculture thriving around the uplands of Lombardy, Catalonia and Pyrennean France.

Thanks to the rich detail contained in depositions from two extant Inquisition registers, René Weis here offers readers an insight into life in the village of Montaillou and the Cathar heartland, according to the testimony of its residents. Montaillou may well be, as the author suggests, the best known village in Medieval Europe. Never shy of expounding on his personal sleuthing around the quiet backwaters of modern France, Weis is clearly fascinated by his subject. Equally, the wealth of the material and the complexity of the family histories would be an exciting, if daunting, challenge for any author of popular history. Nevertheless, Weis somehow manages to totally dessicate the stories of intrigue, vendetta, virtue and ambition like tomatoes in the sun.

Much has been written of the Cathars in this genre, in part because modern readers are understandably attracted to perceptions of “enlightened” liberality in a time of oppressive dogma. Weis responds to such sweeping generalisations with a pedestrian, repetitive and chronologically uneven exposition, as if the switchback style of his manuscript source rubbed off on him. The Yellow Cross qualifies easily as history, but it’s hardly popular.

• José Saramago
• Harvill (first published 1999)
• 

You can imagine the sort of outraged comments this book will have provoked from many zealous Christians. If online bookseller Amazon certainly intended customer reviews to help sell books, there’s a danger here of their pages turning into a forum for religious debate. “The Bible storyline is flagrantly ignored, replaced, changed, and enlarged,” spits one reviewer at the American website, “with Jesus, instead of being the ‘perfect sacrifice’, being a pretty good guy who falls into sin just as easily as your or I”. The same reviewer later adds, “If the gospel is true, and I believe it is 100% true, we had all better be deadly serious about what it says.”

Those who have read more of Saramago will know that ‘deadly serious’ is a state into which the author never allows himself to transgress. It must be said, however, that he is frequently less playful in The Gospel According To Jesus Christ than in others of his works, signalling that he may well be mindful of the paths he treads here.

Indeed Saramago shows himself to have a detailed knowledge of the synoptic gospels, the geopolitics of the period and even an appreciation of the social mores. Whilst his rendering of the biblical world offers up cruelty, hardships and instability, this never obscures its immediacy for the reader.

Before I set out into the author’s desert, in the midst of which he reminds us we may all speak freely, I expected to encounter blasphemies through the course of some sort of alternative narrative of Jesus Christ’s life. In this way, the novel’s path would bear comparison with those already fashioned by Norman Mailer or Nikos Kazantzakis.

What surprised me instead was how Saramago actually more or less stuck to the original plot of the gospels. There are a few fascinating deviations, most of which serve to emphasise Jesus’ humanity, but in general the preference is for biblical course of events.

Saramago presents his most studied profanations in Jesus’ dealings with God and the Devil. In the novel’s climax, all three can be found together in a sort of holy council. For the author, God is an implacable, almost arrogant God who acknowledges and downplays the existence of other deities, treats humanity with harsh indifference and seeks only His Own Greatness. The devil, conversely, comes across as a reasonable sort of figure who recognises the implicit necessity of his own existence in order to maintain the status of the Other.

Ultimately, however, the success of the novel is to be found in the marvellous illustration of human relationships, moulded by the conditions and circumstances of the times. Even if Saramago tends to zigzag rather wildly between “authorised” history and dramatic invention when the story accelerates in the third act, you have to admire his steady handling of family and guilt issues earlier on.

• José Saramago
• Harvill Secker (2008)
• 
• Author won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998

As translated by Margaret Jull Costa, Saramago is the sort of wise old gent we’d want present if we could still demand bedtime stories in adulthood. Death at Intervals has all of the charm, quietly controlled meanderings and simple sagacity of a writer who’s plainly enjoying his literary prime.

Based on a “what-if”, the sort of open question of which screenwriters are fond, this is another of Saramago’s metaphysical fables in which Death decides to take a break, such that the order of human society starts to collapse. And Death is female, a fact of which Saramago convinces us in his typically laborious, yet always affable, style.

Just as in The Double, the writer delights once more in telling the tale of an illogical cause and its logical effects. For, in Saramago’s world, a doppelgänger will fancy your wife, the Devil is quite pleasant and a whole population will spontaneously choose not to vote.

• Chuck Palahniuk
• Vintage (first published 2007)
• 

With Rant, the endlessly inventive Palahniuk may have finally run out of ideas. The author’s formidable back-catalogue, which includes Fight Club, Survivor and Lullaby, illustrates his original, if extreme, prognosis for American society. What makes reading Palahniuk such a thrilling experience, that his characters’ realities are so close to ours, is missing in Rant, in which the author resorts to a rather half-baked examination of time travel.

The device used to tell this piece of hokey urban folklore is an oral history. In short soundbites, characters reminisce about the protagonist as if being interviewed. Without his usual mouthpiece in the form of a first person narrator, Palahniuk’s idiosyncrantic, often polemical style is muted.

Yet whenever called upon to offer criticism of the powers that be, the author’s sardonic wit and novel language burst through. Palahniuk shows himself always equal to the task of challenging the torpor of American society, mining a rich source of angst in the process. So if Rant was intended as a stylistic departure, many of his loyal readers will probably expect a glorious return.