This book was one I had never heard of before. It was originally published in 1914, and I presume it made the list as it is a treatise on socialism thinly disguised as a novel.
It was pretty hard work to read, and not massively engaging as a novel, but quite rewarding as an academic exercise.
The novel centres around the struggles of a group of painters & decorators who live in deep poverty even when they're working and tip over into starvation as soon as they are without work. One or two of the men are socialists, and spend the book trying to convert the others, offering plenty of opportunity for long speeches outlining the principles!
It is a deeply depressing book - there is some positivity in the way the men look out for each other and their families, and share the little they have, but other than this it is unremitting doom and gloom. I found it difficult to become attached to the characters because you expect them all to meet an early end; I guess this highlights how cheaply life was viewed by the capitalist rulers of society.
It is unforgiving in the portrayal of the evil capitalists - all are corrupt, and hypocritical, and even those who are charitable are filling their own pockets first before meeting the needs of those they are there to help. I'm not sure how realistic this is; I'd like to believe that there were some good members of the "ruling" class but perhaps that is just my optimism!
I was alarmed by how little has actually changed! The book opens with a discussion about why unemployment is so high: general opinion is that some men are just too lazy to get jobs, and foreigners have taken the jobs that are available...the men are then chastised for believing everything they believe in the newspaper. There is a council meeting where the councillors agree in one breath that the town architect is underpaid at 15 pounds per week, increasing his salary and his paid holiday days, and in the next agree to reduce the salary of the labourers employed by the council to sixpence per hour; poverty is caused by laziness and spending too much money on alcohol, and the men cannot possibly need to earn as much as they do. There is the cycle of poverty - getting credit to get through to payday, paying back the credit, running short, needing more credit...and the ways that poverty breeds poverty: buying the cheapest second hand clothes is more expensive as they wear out almost immediately, and so forth.
There is an election campaign where the Liberals and Tories vigorously campaign, breeding passionate supporters on each side, while one of the Socialists point out that they are simply criticising each other without offering any real policy or change.
I could go on but I don't want to labour the point. It terrifies me that we are still seeing this kind of rhetoric and (albeit slightly less blatant) hypocrisy today...George Osbourne, I'm looking at you.
I am about to reveal the end of the book, so stop reading now if you don't want a spoiler. I wouldn't usually do this, but it isn't a work that relies on the power of dramatic tension to be readable so I thought it would be ok, and it's kind of necessary to comment on the most thought-provoking aspect of the novel.
As the end of the book approaches, Owen (who has been the most active Socialist throughout) has just adopted a baby from one of the other men's families. He is ill; there is very little work in prospect; he has no idea how they will all survive the winter. Then he is given an unimaginable sum of money and the book ends with them saying something along the lines of "we'll be all right now". I don't know if this is intended by the author, but it left me with questions. Does this then suggest that Owen has been corrupted by capitalism? i.e. it is only the personal acquisition of wealth which offers any longer term release from the daily grind of poverty; as it is not enough to help everyone else there is no point distributing it, so is he therefore complicit within the workings of a capitalist society? Could it be any other way? Is the author actually admitting that Socialism is unworkable because it can't be introduced one man at a time, as one man operating as a socialist could not survive?
Not sure. It's worth a read if you want to be shaken up a bit and reminded of how many people now are still living in the modern version of these conditions - I'm not a convert to socialism by any means but it has somewhat woken me up from a complacent doze. Be prepared for a hard read though!
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