Author: Kevin Hargaden

Francis Spufford, who authored the single finest chapter I read in any book last year, has written something very special in Red Plenty.

In Red Pletny, Spufford tells the story of a strange and wonderful moment at the end of the 1950’s when the Soviets had reasons to believe that within a generation they would have overtaken the capitalist west and won the Marxist utopia long awaited. This seems fanciful to us today for two reasons: firstly we know very little about the Soviet Union and so imagine that the bits and pieces of caricature we have picked up are accurate and secondly, we are constantly told that capitalism is the end of history and it is fanciful and unreasonable to imagine that any other way will ever be conceived.

In other words, this seems fanciful to us today because of our casual ignorance.

In the decade after World War II, the Soviet Union grew, in even the American estimations, at a rate of about 10% a year.

After defeating the Nazis, after the purges of Stalin, after the murderous New Economic Plan, after the invasion of Russia by the White Forces, after the 1917 revolution instigated by only a few thousand people and just a century after most of the population were effectively slaves, this transformation is the stuff of fairytale.

And Spufford is wise enough to root us down in the miraculous narrative by approaching the economic history of a country as if he is writing a novel. What we have in Red Plenty straddles history and fictional narrative and gladly falls head first into politics and philosophy and economics whenever there is need.

This approach isn’t some faddish innovation to avoid turgid economic history. It is fitting in the most appropriate way because the story of Soviet economics in that era was the elaboration of the modified Marxist vision that energised the whole nation. The USSR, no less than the USA, was a nation founded on a story it told itself about itself. With the emergence of computing, mathematicians in Russia slowly became convinced that the progress they had made thus far would now actually accelerate because they could enhance the natural superiority of a centrally planned economy through cybernetic efficiencies.

By fictionalising the historical, Spufford manages us to get down into the contradictions and compromises that people had to make on a day by day basis as they sought to achieve utopia. The tension between belief and unbelief in the Soviet project and the complexity of being in a topia that is destined to become utopia are drawn out beautifully without Spufford having to point at it. It is seriously classy, beautifully written and utterly fascinating.

Behind it all of course is the belief in progress, the cold rationalism that sought to be so unsentimental but ended up being a figment of the 20th Century’s collective imagination. Paragraphs like this stand out with potent clarity:

Electrons have no point of view. They form no opinions, make no judgements, commit no errors. Down at their scale, there are no opinions, judgements, or errors; only matter and energy, in a few configurations from which the whole lavish cosmos jigsaws itself together. Electrons move when forces act on their speck of negative electrical charge or on their infinitesimal pinpricks of mass. They do not choose to move; they do not behave, except in metaphor. Yet the metaphors creep in.

– Francis Spufford, Red Plenty, p. 108.

The metaphors creep in. The utopia is never realised.

Red Plenty features the finest description of cancer I have ever read and the most immersive description of childbirth I can remember. It moves with the momentum of a novel. It lingers with the thoughtfulness of a political theology.

Your Correspondent, He won’t let love disrupt, corrupt or interrupt him

Mr. Hoppy lived in a small flat high up in a tall concrete building. He lived alone. He had always been a lonely man and now that he was retired from work he was more lonely than ever.

There were two loves in Mr. Hoppy’s life. One was the flowers he grew on his balcony. They grew in pots and tubs and baskets, and in summer the little balcony became a riot of colour.

Mr Hoppy’s second love was a secret he kept entirely to himself.

GAH! I must learn more of Mr. Hoppy! This is why we learned to love novels- Roald Dahl’s storytelling genius. I thought I had read everything he had written for kids, then a lovely South African woman from my church gave me this late work and I read it twice in the same day. Once to myself and once out loud to a fascinated audience. Dahl books were always a chief delight of my childhood, especially when read out loud by an adult.

This is typical Dahl – amusing, fast-paced and terribly immoral in what it teaches children about the world. Therefore, it is tremendous.

Your Correspondent, Now he’s ready for some power-nesting.

Beautiful Ruins is the kind of book that justifies beach holidays, so you can read it lounging in the sun. I don’t mean that as anything but a compliment.

Here is a bit I liked, because it is a bit that I resonate with. After all, for all the fancy literary criticism you can read about books much more highly regarded than this intricately plotted musing on memory and love, it always comes down to what we can resonate with:

Weren’t movies his generation’s faith anyway – its true religion? Wasn’t the theatre our temple, the one place we enter separately but emerge from two hours later together, with the same experience, same guided emotions, same moral? A million schools taught ten million curricula, a million churches featured ten thousand sects with a billion sermons – but the same movie showed in every mall in the country. And we all saw it!

Your Correspondent, Thinks it might be the most intimate thing possible, to fall asleep next to someone in the afternoon.

Here is Aidan Mathews, writing a letter about the future to his daughters:

From the moment of your real baptism, which will be closer to thirst than to fonts and freshets, you will be propelled ‘immediately’, as Saint Mark likes to insist with his frequent use of the word ‘euthus’, into a desert experience, into the wilderness of the deep evolutionary interior. God will enter your life there as disaster. Your loneliness will grow around you like a monastery. This is not all, but it is everything. For, as my teacher, the poet Denise Levertov used to say to me, if you bring the Lamb of God into your living room, he will almost certainly ruin your carpet. There will be incommunicable spaces of pain and insight within you which have been set aside by God as the pavilion of his presence, like an oxygen tent or like the tent of meeting itself, for the most intimate of encounters.

And that paragraph brought me to tears when I read it because its talk of ruined carpets and incommunicable spaces and intimate encounter with God put words on that which I don’t have it in me to say, even though all that is in me longs to say it.

And then later he writes:

It’s in the cross, however, in the crucial and excruciating obscenity of casual human violence, that God’s self-description as a saviour is exposed, like a photographic negative, outside the encampment in the rubbish dump of Calvary, where the memory of the killing of one condemned criminal signifies God’s total recall of all humanity, especially of those whom humanity has deemed not to be human at all. So, in the Greek of St. John, our weak and wounded nature is lifted up to hang and is lifted up to heaven in the same moment, by the same verb, for the passion narratives vivisect the beating heart of the violence that we call keeping the peace, law and order, the status quo, social cohesion, self-preservation, public demand, the democratic mandate, the moral imperative.

And in writing the first, so deeply personal, paragraph and then the second so brutally wide-ranging paragraph, he once again reminds me that Christian faith is not a proposition about whether God exists and nor is it a psychological coping mechanism that assuages troubled Western consciences. It is the truth. My interiority and humanity’s exteriority: nothing escapes God’s subversive grace, that perhaps looks like a photographic negative because it is our responsibility to develop it.

This book is a collection of reflections on the Gospel of Mark that Mathews shared on Irish national radio in 2006. I didn’t know they were on. I missed them all. I am now deeply grateful to have copies. It is a beautiful and stunning work by a uniquely articulate fellow pilgrim.

Your Correspondent, Knows drinkers often have writing problems