The Socialist 4 August 2010 Con-Dem cuts mean: we need ‘biggest movement since poll tax’ 
We need 'biggest movement since poll tax' 'Radical' cuts require serious action Waltham Forest's Labour council faces opposition Coventry campaigners fight cuts of £140 million Swansea trades council leads battle for services Campaigners answer Bristol's 'Big Conversation' Cuts news: Mental health services facing the axe Afghanistan: US strategy in disarray Oppose divisive academies policy Talks resume at British Airways Angry workers strike over pay freeze and bosses' bonuses Witch-hunted Unison activist wins tribunal Unite general secretary election We won't be a lost generation, fight for jobs and education! No to privatisation of our universities For real jobs, not slave labour Profiting from wrecking the environment Daily Mail admits guilt over smearing Tamil hunger striker Socialism 2010 - a weekend of discussion and debate Love Parade catastrophe was entirely preventable Garment workers demand a living wage Tories put profits before patients Rich just carry on getting richer |
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Home | The Socialist 4 August 2010 | Join the Socialist Party Review: The LacunaThe howlers' world and oursTHE LACUNA is written as the diary of a solitary young man, Harrison Shepherd, who ends up working as a cook for the Mexican artist Diego Rivera and then the exiled Leon Trotsky, one of the leaders of the 1917 Russian revolution. Hannah SellThis novel won Barbara Kingsolver the 2010 Orange Fiction Prize. Kingsolver has previously written about workers' struggle, in particular in her non-fiction book Holding the Line, about women in the Arizona mine strike in the 1980s. The Lacuna covers an era with many parallels with today. Shepherd is an observer and reluctant participant in great events. He is a schoolboy in the US during the Great Depression, and witnesses the massacre of the starving Bonus Army (marching in 1932 to demand that the Hoover government pays them what they were promised for fighting in the first world war). Shepherd experienced first hand the activities of the Committee on Un-American Activities, a proto-McCarthyite body. The Lacuna features real people, but it is fiction not history. Nor does the book deal with Trotsky's ideas. Nonetheless, it would give the uninitiated a better glimpse of the kind of man Trotsky was than most of the non-fiction dealing with him currently on the best-seller lists, such as Robert Service's scurrilous attacks on every aspect of Trotsky's life and ideas. This attempt to bury Trotsky's ideas under an avalanche of slander is understood by Barbara Kingsolver. The book deals with the way in which 'the howlers' - the capitalist media - lied about this revolutionary leader in his lifetime, even claiming that Stalin's assassins' attempts to murder him are an elaborate hoax by Trotsky to gain publicity. Later on, when he is back in the US and a successful novelist, Harrison Shepherd is hounded by the press for supposedly being a communist. Looking back, he remembers what Trotsky told him about there being "two kinds of papers, the ones that lie every day and the ones that save it for special campaigns, for greater impact." This is not just a historical novel. It makes points on how Kingsolver sees art being used in the US. At one stage Shepherd's friend and assistant, Violet Brown, argues that his historical Mexican potboilers can deal with themes of injustice and remain acceptable because they are set in a dim and distant past and a foreign land. At the end of the book she has Shepherd's diaries locked away for 50 years, with the idea that they be published on their release and, presumably, in the hope that the story they tell will have become something that can find an audience by then. The Lacuna is written as those diaries. No doubt Barbara Kingsolver hopes readers will draw comparisons with today - with the propaganda surrounding the 'war on terror' and the gulf between rich and poor in the US, now once again approaching the level it was in the 1930s. The Lacunaby Barbara Kingsolver£18.99 (hb) £7.99 (pb), please add 10% for postageAvailable from Socialist Books, PO Box 24697, London E11 1YD or www.socialistbooks.co.uk or ring 020 8988 8789In this issue
Anti-cuts campaign
War and occupation
Accademies
Workplace news and analysis
Workplace Debate
Youth fight for jobs
Environment and socialism
Tamil Solidarity
Socialist Party LGBT Socialist Party events
International socialist news and analysis
Socialist Party news and analysis
Review & Comment
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