Demo
Alison Miller Hamish Hamilton, 323pp, £12.99
ISBN 024114342X
We live in turbulent times. Tens of millions are rising up against neoliberalism. Here in the UK, more than a million took to the streets to oppose the Iraq war, and schoolchildren played truant to defy Tony Blair. Voters may be deserting the polling stations, but politics is alive and kicking.
So where is its literature? Why is so much contemporary fiction still depressingly postmodern and narcissistic? Is Ian McEwan's Saturday - radical politics as seen through the eyes of a smug north London bore - really the best we're going to get?
I have an interest to declare. Seven years ago, I wrote what I was convinced was a brilliant and mould-breaking political novel about the road protest movement. Publishers thought otherwise, and it's still in my bottom drawer, which in retrospect saved everyone involved a lot of embarrassment. But the question I wanted to answer now seems even more urgent: where are all the political novels?
Alison Miller's Demo attempts to answer this question, and in doing so it unintentionally demonstrates why there are so few. Clare is a 16-year-old from Glasgow. As the novel opens, she is about to leave her sturdy working-class parents to take the bus to an anti-globalisation demo in Florence with her brother Danny. On the way, they hook up with Danny's friend Julian, a public-school trustafarian, and his equally posh former girlfriend Laetitia.
The plot signposts are well painted from the start and, sure enough, Clare is soon in bed with posh Julian, having her virginity forcibly stolen and her political awareness raised. Meanwhile Danny is off with Laetitia. Sweaty afternoons are spent in hotel bedrooms when they should be out on the streets bringing down capitalism. Naturally, everything goes horribly wrong: Julian and Laetitia get back together; Clare leaves in a huff; Danny gets chippy about southern ponces.
The rest of the novel follows the characters' progress as they bump into each other in various flats, cafes and anti-Bush'n'Blair demonstrations. I won't reveal what happens at the end, partly because it would be unfair to readers and partly because - to be honest - I can't quite remember.
And this is the problem: it's hard to care. Clare is a feisty heroine, but she's not interesting enough to carry the story, and her Glasgae dialect - all "shouldny" and "isny" and "hame" - becomes wearing after a while. Julian is a cardboard cut-out toff, as unconvincing as he is annoying, who is there mainly, it seems, to provide a foil for proley Clare and Danny. Laetitia is not much better, and her and Julian's various posh friends are even worse. (Have you ever met anyone who introduced themselves as "Douglas . . . acquired the moniker amid the college cloisters"? On an anti-capitalist demonstration?)
Demo is not a terrible book - it's just not a good one. Some of Miller's writing is effective, particularly when she allows Clare her own voice. The problem is that it's hard not to suspect that the plot is nothing more than a clumsy framework on which to hang the politics. All the right boxes are ticked: globalisation, the killing of Carlo Giuliani at Genoa, Palestine, the dilemmas of a teenage Muslim girl in modern Britain, the decline of union power, the Butler report. But why does Clare care about any of it? Why does Julian? Why, come to that, does Clare care about Julian, who first rapes her and then acts like a punchable cretin for the next three years?
Herein lies the dilemma of the "political" novelist. If it weren't for the Politics, with a capital P, this novel might have worked; Miller could have focused on making her characters believable, and on telling a story led by them, rather than imposed upon them. Yet if it weren't for the Politics, this novel would have no reason to exist. One of these days we'll get a political novelist who will be able to square this circle. For now, however, we're still waiting.
Paul Kingsnorth is the author of One No, Many Yeses: a journey to the heart of the global resistance movement (Free Press)
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