The Orwell Prize will be awarded this evening and one of the following books will win:
Death to the Dictator!, Afsaneh Moqadem
Afsaneh Moqadem’s Death to the Dictator! is the fashionable choice for the award. Written by an Iranian dissident using a pseudonym to protect his anonymity, Death to the Dictator! is a fictionalisation of the failed Iranian revolution of 2009.
The book opens with faceless security operatives dumping Mohsen Abbaspour’s tortured body at a roundabout on the outskirts of a town. Moqadem weaves an intricate yarn. He examines the character of tyranny, recalling Solzenitsyn and Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, particularly the scenes between Captain Merrick and Hari Kumar in The Jewel in the Crown.
Abbaspour is Moqadem’s finest achievement. He is a student of literature, not a gun-toting revolutionary, and his role in the pro-democracy demonstrations following Ahmadinejad’s perversion of the election unfolds. He is principled before he is angry, but above all he is alienated. His diffidence increases as the price of failing to uproot the tyranny under which he lives.
One can read Abbaspour’s struggle as an inspiring tale – a defiant finger flicked at dictators across the world. But there are darker interpretations too. As the Arab Spring wilts in the deserts of Syria and Libya, this book has the air of a requiem about it. The crowds supporting Mosqvadi chanted “Death to the Dictator!” But the dictator lived on.
Hitch 22, Christopher Hitchens
“Hitch 22 will probably win and it deserves to,” wrote a commenter on a previous blog about the Orwell Prize shortlist. It’s easy to see why: Hitchens’ turns of phrase and barrage of quips are worthy of a separate book of aphorisms. (By chance, the Quotable Hitchens is soon to be published, introduced here by Martin Amis.)
But there’s more to it than that. Hitch 22 is most striking for its candour. His self-awareness about his own contradictions and misgivings are enthralling and endearing at turns, certain that they define his political thought.
Hitchens begins at the beginning, saying: ‘it will always seem tempting to believe that everything must have a first cause or, if nothing quite as grand as that, at the very least a definite beginning. And on that point I have no vagueness or indecision. I do know of how I came to be in two minds. And this is how it begins with me.’ From then on, I was hooked by the Hitch. It’s agonisingly funny too. I agree: Hitch 22 will probably win.
The Rule of Law, Tom Bingham
Pre-eminent lawyer of his generation is an overused phrase, but not in the case of the late Lord Bingham, former law lord and scourge of the overbearing executive. Bingham will be remembered for his dispassionate vigil to uphold the rule of law against the Blair premiership’s terror legislation.
His book, The Rule of Law, relates to that period. Bingham re-imagines the concept. The rule of law, Bingham insists, is not a dead-handed academic doctrine but the lifeblood of human flourishing, the central tenet of modern civilisation. It stands for liberty and justice, a universal to be applied even where democracy is impossible.
Bingham examines the history of the phrase and its development since it first appeared in the middle of the nineteenth century, analysing its impact on social, political and economic change in icily incisive prose.
To challenge the rule of law, Bingham seems to suggest, is to defile society itself. This is a book to level against sometimes sensational politicians, a book to sound down the ages.
Supermac, D.R Thorpe
Three decades of work has gone into D.R. Thorpe’s exhaustive biography of Harold Macmillan. It is at turns enlightening and enthralling. Thorpe’s fellow historians expect the book to be definitive for some time to come.
His thesis is that Macmillan, far from being the Establishment chump of ’80s alternative comedy, was a radical who brought Conservatism into the material age. Macmillan may have appeared paternalistic, and in many ways he was, but he was compassionate and attuned to the needs of working families. His determined opposition to Stanley Baldwin in the 1930s was predicated on this compassion for the hard-pressed poor.
When in government, he realigned his to spread material wealth, primarily by lowering unemployment and tackling inflation. This strategy was reduced to the pithy catchphrase: ‘You’ve never had it so good’.
His success was phenomenal, leading to the 100 seat landslide he won in 1959. Labour grandee Patrick Gordon Walker reacted to the defeat by conceding: ‘the simple fact is that the Tories identified themselves with new working class rather better than we did.’ Cartoonist David Low put it rather more cuttingly with a cartoon of Macmillan at the Cabinet table surrounded by washing machines and televisions, congratulating them on delivering a winning campaign.
The Betrayal, Helen Dunmore
Off all the books on the shortlist, Helen Dunmore’s The Betrayal is the most artistically written. Even the
Hitch can’t quite match the beautiful simplicity of Dunmore’s prose.
The Betrayal is a love story set in Leningrad in the early ‘50s, with Stalin’s maniacal tyranny in full swing. Ann and Andrei are drawn into the fearful atmosphere. In a scene reminiscent of the dying Stalin being attended by petrified doctors, Andrei is called to examine the terminally ill son of a secret police officer. This breeds suspicion among their friends and acquaintances, and Andrei and Ann try to come to terms with living with fear and deceit.
The Betrayal is continental in its emotional sweep, reminiscent of Tolstoy or, more recently, Simon Mawer’s The Glass Room. It’s enrapturing and deeply rooted in its historical setting. And that its weakness in the context of the Orwell prize: I don’t see its relevance to contemporary political life.
Let our fame be great, Oliver Bullough
Had we but world and enough and time I’d sit down and devour this book again and as slowly as possible, such is the
volume of information imparted and the riveting evocation of place. Like the work of Fitzroy Maclean, journalist Oliver Bullough’s journey into the wild climes of the Caucasus becomes an
examination of our past and current way of life, as much as a story of strange people in a strange place.
This is a history of the defiant peoples who have resisted the hegemony of various Romonovs, Ottomans, Stalinists etc, etc, etc. This defiance, of course, lives on in the conflicts between Russia and Chechnya and Georgia. In many cases, however, the empires won and Bullough’s luxurious narrative doubles as a tour of forgotten genocides. In terms of becoming more knowledgeable, this book is unmatched on the shortlist: few English speakers have set foot in those regions since the nineteenth century.
Above all though, there is Bullough’s eye for place – louring marshland, the crest of an escarpment and the drama of a natural river crossing. The landscape and the history are entwined. The bloody-minded people seem to have been cut from the atavistic environment in which they wish to live unhindered.
This book won’t win, but it probably deserves to.
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