Monday, April 13, 2009

The Underground Rebel Book Club


‘Underground. Rebel. Book. Club. Say it nice and slow. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Now just bite down on this copy of Catcher in the Rye. That’s right. No crying now - this won’t hurt one, little, bit…’

Obviously the name of this blog needs some explaining - not everybody will be familiar with the URBC. Some, like poor old Adrian above, are all too familiar with the Rebels. When bridge clubs, Live Action Role Play societies or neighbourhood watch meetings make the mistake of holding their get-togethers in the same pub and on the same night as the URBC, they don’t repeat the mistake in a hurry. Adrian took his lesson well though, as any veteran of the Great War would. Petitioning for more disabled access in the village are you? Not on my clock. Bless his withered, gently fading heart.

The point of the book club is to get hardened anti-socialites reading. Bring a club, to the club. Watching the 250-page long train roll by isn’t much fun unless you can gabber about it afterwards and then fight each other. The book club is an attempt to steer the conversation away from the usual topics (of crime, nudity and violence) towards discussion and understanding, the sharing of ideas and thoughts.

Unfortunately, proximity to alcohol was a precondition of the club’s establishment, and has proved an obstacle to achieving these aims ever since. Despite having been in session for just one month (two meetings), already six people have died. A further eight others have been arrested for ‘copious public indecency and inside-out exposure’. The club goes on, though, despite no indication that anything relating to these hideous fortnightly occurrences is likely to change any time soon.

The two books read for the meetings so far have been A Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Homage To Catalonia by George Orwell. The third book, to be read for a meeting in two weeks time, is A Company of Liars by who cares. We never should have let Will choose.

Both books have been well received by the Rebels, though a couple of us struggled with dodgy translations of A Day In The Life. Mine was the oldest translation of the bunch, deep-fried into English by Ralph Parker in the 1960’s. The insult ‘bitch twat’ is everywhere, though I can’t imagine that slander provoking anything other than a smirk or a look of stark confusion. Discussion raced along faster than Stalin could lock away whoever he wanted, a lot of it focussing in on the juxtaposition of scale that the novel deals with – a single day in 3,653; the humble struggle for survival against the bellowing ideological crank of the Soviet machine.

It seems the word ‘hunk’ can be used to describe two things in life – a bronzed, square-jawed pin-up boy or a meagre little piece of bread. From the two books read so far, it seems to me that if someone’s got a hunk of bread it’s usually pretty much all they’ve got. There’s a lot of hunk-hustling and hunk-hiding in A Day In The Life, and a fair bit in Orwell’s book on the Spanish Civil War. Class-conflict and the emancipation of the proletariat all seems a bit petty when all you’ve got is a stale ball of French loaf and an unknown amount more years to serve on a sham sentence.

Meanwhile, Homage To Catalonia starts off being unashamedly (I think…) funny. A great number of the injuries inflicted on the POUM (the United Marxist Workers Party, a socialist militia which Orwell travelled to Spain to fight alongside) are self-inflicted. Dodgy rifles send bullets flying everywhere (though poor alignment means that having the rifle pointing straight at you when it goes off is not a guarantee in itself that you will be shot. It pointing elsewhere, though, is no guarantee that you won’t be). Bombs regularly fail to explode or explode when they’re told not to. One bomb passes back and forth between the socialists and the fascists almost every day and never goes off. A lot of the soldiers are teenagers and a lack of strategic awareness means, for instance, that trenches are regularly dug so far away from the enemies’ that neither warring faction can actually war with one another. It was hard not to laugh – Orwell’s descriptions of this initial stage of his involvement are deliberately wry. The humour leads you up a very specific perspectival bridge which comes crashing down when, as rivalries and treachery within the fragments of the Left cause the whole thing to implode catastrophically, shit gets serious and people begin being locked up, tortured and shot by their own ‘comrades’.

Another thing I noticed when I was doin' readin' was that ‘Manana! echoes thorugh the book like some dismal prophecy of the inevitable failure of all that Orwell felt possible in terms of democratic socialism, the end of inequality and the tyranny of class hierarchy. It’s almost a subliminal voice – manana, as Orwell frequently says, often never comes.

No comments:

Post a Comment