Jessica
It would be such a stretch to say I liked this book, but it's thought-provoking and reasonably left-wing. Set in Thatcher-era London, it follows 36-year-old Alice, a member of a kind of cultish, dubiously left-wing sect who lives a really miserable life, even though she won't recognise it herself.
So this is a very depressing book to read – it's mind-bogglingly slow, and I spent most of the book frustrated with Alice for refusing to make use of any opportunities that arose to make her life better. For one thing, she's stuck in a horrible relationship, a sexless one designed just to give cover to her secretly-gay partner, who twists her wrists any time he doesn't get his way and takes all her money, by stealth or by force, and blows it all on pointless shit until they have no money for like, any bills. (Ah, but as we will get to, paying bills is bourgeois!) She's stolen so much money from her parents to fund his lifestyle that by the beginning of the novel, her parents are sick of her and want nothing to do with her any more. It is just unbelievably frustrating to read about someone who screws her life up like that.
Secondly, the politics of this sect (and, by extension, Alice) are really terrible, which kind of contributes to the terribleness of her life. She condemns basically anyone with a white-collar job as “bourgeois” and “middle-class” (which, to her, are the same thing) and it gets to the point that she condemns people as bourgeois for like, owning furniture, or wanting to not live in a squat. She herself gets condemned as bourgeois by other members of the sect for wanting to live in a squat with hot water and electricity. At one point, she turns down a white-collar job offered to her because she doesn't want to live in a flat she actually pays rent on, which according to her only bourgeois people do. In her mind, the true representatives of the working class are people like the members of her sect, none of which have seemingly ever tried to get a job, and instead live on welfare as a point of principle. Their complete and utter lack of a genuine class analysis leads to the kind of political activity you might be able to guess: unable to work within the working class, organising and strengthening it, they resort to “propaganda of the deed”-style terrorism which kills and injures working-class people and cements them as eternally irrelevant.
I feel like this is a book that would be very easy for right-wing people (or even, say, feminists who are hostile to genuine left-wing politics) to take and say, “hey, look! this PROVES that communism is a terrible idea and communists are terrible people!”, similar to 1984. In this sect, the women make the tea and the men do all the “real work”; many of them (including Alice) are anti-intellectual and think it's bourgeois to read, especially to read anything you might disagree with; they dismiss any idea that “the personal is political”; then there's all the “propaganda of the deed” stuff. Like 1984 though, I don't think this book is really hostile to genuine revolutionary politics, but rather to various badnesses that “Marxism” has been used to justify. The Good Terrorist is hostile to terrorism, isolating oneself from ordinary people, being wilfully blind to sexism in the name of “class struggle”, and so it goes. But it never tries to defend Thatcherism, the cops are mostly thuggish, bureaucracy unfeeling, and the IRA are depicted positively. If anything, I would call it a book of despair. Which I guess is what Orwell wrote too.
Rating this book is hard, since as I'm sure I've made clear I didn't particularly enjoy reading it, even if I think it has merit. Since I can't give it two and a half, I'll give it two. It wasn't a bad book, just slow and frustrating to read.
It would be such a stretch to say I liked this book, but it's thought-provoking and reasonably left-wing. Set in Thatcher-era London, it follows 36-year-old Alice, a member of a kind of cultish, dubiously left-wing sect who lives a really miserable life, even though she won't recognise it herself.
So this is a very depressing book to read – it's mind-bogglingly slow, and I spent most of the book frustrated with Alice for refusing to make use of any opportunities that arose to make her life better. For one thing, she's stuck in a horrible relationship, a sexless one designed just to give cover to her secretly-gay partner, who twists her wrists any time he doesn't get his way and takes all her money, by stealth or by force, and blows it all on pointless shit until they have no money for like, any bills. (Ah, but as we will get to, paying bills is bourgeois!) She's stolen so much money from her parents to fund his lifestyle that by the beginning of the novel, her parents are sick of her and want nothing to do with her any more. It is just unbelievably frustrating to read about someone who screws her life up like that.
Secondly, the politics of this sect (and, by extension, Alice) are really terrible, which kind of contributes to the terribleness of her life. She condemns basically anyone with a white-collar job as “bourgeois” and “middle-class” (which, to her, are the same thing) and it gets to the point that she condemns people as bourgeois for like, owning furniture, or wanting to not live in a squat. She herself gets condemned as bourgeois by other members of the sect for wanting to live in a squat with hot water and electricity. At one point, she turns down a white-collar job offered to her because she doesn't want to live in a flat she actually pays rent on, which according to her only bourgeois people do. In her mind, the true representatives of the working class are people like the members of her sect, none of which have seemingly ever tried to get a job, and instead live on welfare as a point of principle. Their complete and utter lack of a genuine class analysis leads to the kind of political activity you might be able to guess: unable to work within the working class, organising and strengthening it, they resort to “propaganda of the deed”-style terrorism which kills and injures working-class people and cements them as eternally irrelevant.
I feel like this is a book that would be very easy for right-wing people (or even, say, feminists who are hostile to genuine left-wing politics) to take and say, “hey, look! this PROVES that communism is a terrible idea and communists are terrible people!”, similar to 1984. In this sect, the women make the tea and the men do all the “real work”; many of them (including Alice) are anti-intellectual and think it's bourgeois to read, especially to read anything you might disagree with; they dismiss any idea that “the personal is political”; then there's all the “propaganda of the deed” stuff. Like 1984 though, I don't think this book is really hostile to genuine revolutionary politics, but rather to various badnesses that “Marxism” has been used to justify. The Good Terrorist is hostile to terrorism, isolating oneself from ordinary people, being wilfully blind to sexism in the name of “class struggle”, and so it goes. But it never tries to defend Thatcherism, the cops are mostly thuggish, bureaucracy unfeeling, and the IRA are depicted positively. If anything, I would call it a book of despair. Which I guess is what Orwell wrote too.
Rating this book is hard, since as I'm sure I've made clear I didn't particularly enjoy reading it, even if I think it has merit. Since I can't give it two and a half, I'll give it two. It wasn't a bad book, just slow and frustrating to read.