Mike Marqusee's Top Ten Books

tim — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 11:58:55 +0000

A Scots Quair by Lewis Grassic Gibbon

Once you get accustomed to the invented prose idiom, the groundedness of this epic takes a grip. The architecture of the trilogy embodies a big (Marxist) picture of historical development, but it’s built out of emotional intimacy and physical immediacy. The conclusion of Sunset Song, the second volume in the trilogy, with its invocation of the sufferings of the first World War, moved me as much as anything I’ve encountered in British fiction.

Poor Things by Alasdair Gray

A wildly inventive yet in its own way utterly logical fictional confection. What’s great is that the bravura assemblage of voices, styles and narrative gimmicks all tend to a purpose; they’re not only immense fun, they’re fused and directed by Gray’s compassion for aspirant humanity and his contempt for power and hierarchy. This is a wonderfully partisan novel.

Beyond a Boundary by CLR James

This is not only by some way the best book ever written about the sport of cricket, it’s also a wonderful piece of inventive prose artistry, genre-busting in its mix of memoir, history, theory and political polemic. It ranges from colonial Trinidad to industrial Lancashire by way of ancient Greece and Victorian England — all swept along by the radical verve of James’ intelligence. He saw cricket in context, shaped by and giving shape to the conflicts of the world in which it was played. James took cricket seriously — perhaps too seriously — as an art form, and he was demanding in his judgements, which have a terrific elan, even when they’re wrong. Be warned: cricket’s most eminent Marxist has a surprising soft spot for the English public school ethos!

A Wet Afternoon by Sadat Hassan Manto

Toba Tek Singh — set in an asylum for the insane on the newly drawn India-Pakistan border in 1947 — is the great fictional comment on the tragedy of partition. Manto (who was also a screenwriter and journalist) wrote stories in a plain-spoken Urdu about prostitutes, dissolute intellectuals, compromised small businessmen and imprisoned housewives. He’s a sour but compassionate observer, and he leaves the big judgements up to the reader. Even in translation, this jaded epicurean with a stubborn moral core speaks with a distinctive voice. He died in 1955, at the age of 42.

Leon Trotsky trilogy by Isaac Deutscher: The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed, The Prophet Outcast

You don’t have to be a Trotskyist to derive pleasure and enrichment from Deutscher’s beautifully written biographical trilogy. This is more than Trotsky’s story — which itself is one of the most dramatic, and tragic, of the 20th century — it’s a supple study in the rhythms of political and historical change. It’s clear and fluent and deeply considered and introduces you painlessly to a wide range of people, places, ideas and debates. The Polish-born Deutscher was himself an anti-Stalinist Marxist, a brave and independent intellect, whose essay The Non-Jewish Jew I’d also recommend.

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

As Indira Gandhi’s ‘emergency’ grips the country, four characters — a Parsee widow, a middle class student, and two lower caste tailors — find their lives squashed together in a Bombay flat. Among other things, this book is a chronicle of the cruelties of that era, and provides a much sharper commentary on Indian politics than is found in more celebrated novels. The method here is unapologetically, and masterfully, naturalistic. The suffering in this book comes in many forms, is at times unbearable, but is always concrete and credible; so are the moments of hope or relief, buoyed up by the humour and idiosyncracy of the characters.

Out Stealing Horses by Per Pettersen

It’s hard to describe how and why Pettersen’s novel becomes so deeply engrossing. Like his previous works, this one shifts between past trauma and present uncertainties, and accumulates its insights, builds its very tangible world, sentence by sentence. In Out Stealing Horses an old man retires to a cottage in northern Norway and reflects on the events of a summer holiday some fifty years earlier. As the story unwinds, the long-term effects of these events become apparent. Pettersen refuses easy closures. His narrative is mostly close-up, but there are also sidelong glances at Norwegian history, at the Nazi occupation, at class and poverty. Despite the subject matter, and the real sadness, it’s anything but glum. When I read this book, I really felt I was seeing — feeling — the world afresh.

Walden, or Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau

In 1845, Thoreau beat a retreat from the polite society of Concord, Massachusetts, to live in the woods by Walden Pond. The book is the record of his experiment: to see how many of the ‘necessities’ of civilisation we can really do without. But it’s more: it embodies an attempt to live fully and deliberately, to find a deep meaning in daily life. He didn’t go the woods just to prove it could be done, but to re-appropriate himself, to live a more authentic life than the one offered us, ready-packaged, off the shelf. Thoreau was one of the first critics of what we now call consumerism, which he sees as destructive of the environment and the human spirit. The book is full of wry humour, as Thoreau mocks himself and his society, and the prose has an un-showy solidity, like skilled carpentry.

King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild

There’s not much in modern history that exceeds the depravity of the ‘Congo Free State’, the vast territory appropriated by the Belgian King in 1885 as a kind of private enterprise free-fire zone. In the end, millions were killed, millions more mutilated, tortured, enslaved, by a small, sophisticated European business coterie. This is the story of that atrocity, but also of the global campaign protesting against it, a forerunner of the modern human rights movement. So among the genocidal villains and amoral rogues are genuine heroes: Hochschild makes sure neither are forgotten.

Complete Writings by William Blake

I take Blake at his own estimation: as a prophet. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is a startling act of literary and intellectual insurgency. The conclusion of the epic illustrated book Jerusalem something for which here is no parallel in English poetry. Blake struck deep into me when I was a teenager and I’ve gone back to him repeatedly over the years, each time finding more than I expected. The ‘gentle mystic’ is largely a creation of literary legend; Blake was ferocious: “half friendship is the bitterest enmity.” The revolutionary republican prosecuted a kind of one-man ‘culture war’ for much of his life. Result: poverty and obscurity. Don’t worry about the details of Blake’s weird invented mythology; there’s more than enough that’s arrestingly transparent to compensate for the obscure bits.

Literature | ukwatch.net

Mike Marqusee's Top Ten Books