Category: Novels

Heaven and earth

Reading Alexei Navalny’s book ‘Patriot’ has been a sobering experience. It is a conventional biography until his return to Russia after poisoning in 2021. From then on it’s the imposition of evermore stringent limitations on movement, not least the tiny cell, and on freedom of expression: his journal which takes up the second half of the book includes over 100 pages from 2022 and just 20 in 2023. He was murdered in February 2024. The sheer guts of Navalny and utter, indeed vile, vindictiveness of Putin mirror in extreme form the battle lines of our time.

At the other extreme has been the Artemis mission to and around the moon. Physical space constrained but limitless space beyond the capsule. Navalny didn’t have to go back to Russia, but he calculated that, if not in his lifetime, should they take his life from him, but in the lives of those that follow him, a world of limitless possibilities would be opened up in Russia. People might see this as a wild aspiration, when we’re always falling short, but to have aspirations is where freedom lies.

I’ve also been reading the remarkable, ‘Orbital’, the Booker-prize winning novel in 2024. We’re aboard the space station, four men, two women, two of the men being Russian. The Russians have separate quarters, Again, space constrained, but without gravity they have freedom of movement. Every ninety minutes they complete a circuit of the earth, and it is a thing of wonder, of colour and light, where human habitation only becomes visible when cities and roads light up as earth and spacecraft turn their backs on the sun.

‘This thing of such miraculous and bizarre loveliness. This thing that is, given the poor choice of alternatives, so unmistakably home. An unbounded place, a suspended jewel so shockingly bright. Can humans not find peace with one another?  With the earth? Can we stop…’

Constraints of space are also a focus of the 2025 Booker-prize winning novel, ‘Flesh’, when a Hungarian boy in a Budapest high-rise escapes via the army to England, to a security job and marriage to his boss’s widow, to the greatest riches, and then … I’ll let the ending take you by surprise. Where ‘Orbital’ is about wonder, and imagination, ‘Flesh’ is pared down, contained in a world where sex is the stepping-off point. The two novels, ‘Orbital’ and ‘Flesh’, exist at different poles. Wonder is open-ended, reaches the stars. Escaping privation on the other hand is a roller-coaster, you claw up, you’re cast down, upward mobility with the threat of downward always present.

Hungary is also in the news because of the recent election, and the ousting of the kleptocratic populist and aspiring autocrat, Viktor Orban. I don’t want to push parallels too far – or maybe I do. We’ve seen twelve years of a government encroaching on everyday freedoms. But not to the extent that an election could be fixed, though Orban tried his best. It was just this kind of attack on political and personal liberty that could possibly have been stopped in its tracks maybe twenty and more years ago in Russia.

Hungary can now be open again to Europe and the EU, and enjoy ordinary freedoms. We can parallel their absence for Navalny with the freedoms now opening for Hungary. And the freedom to wonder, whether you’re bound to the ground or circling in space, at all the earth has to offer.

Before I sign off I’ll also put in a word for Pope Leo, new to the job, but taking on Trump, Trump as aspirant Jesus (as he depicted himself in Truth Social)), and Trump as tyrant. For Pope Leo it is simply a case of speaking truth. He of course can speak from the elevation of a papal chair. But given his opponent, it takes courage.

Navalny was speaking from prison. That took courage to a whole other level. As he wrote from prison in 2022, ‘I knew from the outset I would be imprisoned for life – either for the rest of my life or until the end of the life of the regime.’

The old democratic certainties are gone, maybe forever, but we can still aspire to them, always, if we can, keeping one step ahead of the bad guys.

Summer reading

Are the better angels of our nature winning out? Are we, as we achieve higher levels of civilisation, becoming any less violent? I hadn’t intended it this way but violence has been an undercurrent throughout almost all my summer reading. My blog’s name may be Zenpolitics but there are no easy rides.

I’ve been back, with the wonderful John Stoner and his novel ‘Augustus’, to the life and times of Caesar Augustus and his immediate precursors. (Books by Mary Beard and Tom Holland, serious non-fiction, underline just how bloody life could be in ancient Rome). Moving on 1400 years, to the decades either side of 1400 (a neat symmetry!), Helen Castor’s ‘The Eagle and the Hart’ (not a novel but narrative non-fiction) focuses on Richard II, a lover of peace assailed by violence on his home soil and over the Channel. His successor, Henry IV, copes better. A little more than a century later we’ve Luther nailing his theses on a Wittenberg door and precipitating the Reformation, and its appalling immediate aftermath, the German Peasants’ War, as wonderfully described (in ‘Summer of Fire and Blood’) by Lyndal Roper.

We’re visiting France next month so I read Emile Zola’s novel ‘Debacle’, about the Franco-Prussian War by way (a curious way, I admit – the book happened to be on my shelves) of preparation: the victors of the battle of Sedan in 1870 would return to France less than fifty years later.

I stayed with roughly the same period, moving on to 1874, when I picked up another John Stoner novel, ‘Butcher’s Crossing’. (Now a film.) If I was hoping for respite the title should have warned me. It’s about a journey from Kansas to the Rockies where they hunt buffalo (for their hides) in a high mountain valley, shooting thousands, with a view to leaving none behind. A direct route to extinction.

I found respite in a wonderful book, ‘Left Bank’, by Agnes Poirier about Paris in the 1940s and how its intellectual and cultural and café life survived the Nazi occupation. It’s the world of Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus, and fighting is in-fighting, literary and artistic. But there is a looming threat. Their opponents once the Germans are driven out are the hard-core Soviet-aligned, toe-the-socialist-realist-line Communists.

The dangers, as they might have been, to Paris and to France of hardline Soviet Communism are spelt out in a graphic way in Anne Applebaum’s remarkable book, ‘Red Terror’. Its subject is Ukraine in the inter-war years. By 1921 the various attempts to establish independence in the aftermath of World War One had all failed. Soviet power was firmly established. (It’s curious to read how in the years 1921-22 American aid had been enlisted to combat famine.)

Ukrainian language and culture were for a while encouraged as a way the Soviets saw of binding Ukrainians to a new Marxist dispensation. But by 1929 Stalin was in charge and the mood was changing. A trial of that year referred to ‘Ukrainian nationalism, nationalistic parties, their treacherous policies, their unworthy ideas of bourgeois independence, of Ukraine’s independence’. The brutal introduction of land reform, the obliteration of the kulaks as a class, and at the same time the requisitioning of the grain, on which the peasants survived, for the cities and for export, led to the Holodomor, the famine of 1932-33, during which up to five million people died. Stalin’s paranoia was by this time deep-rooted. His purges of the late 1930s all but wiped out Ukraine’s intellectual and cultural life.

There’s so much more I could say. Read the book. For my next book, something that’s maybe an easier read? Maybe, maybe not. Take each book as it comes.