My Revolution, by Hari Kunzru
We all want to save the world
John Lennon
The revolution will not be televised.
Gil Scott Heron
It might have been Peter Fonda who said, “If you can remember the 60’s, you weren’t really there.” We all know what he means, but to dismiss the entire decade as a plastic fantastic mind trip, a purple haze, or up in smoke, is to give the truly revolutionary things that happened during the 60’s: the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-war movement that propelled the candidacy of Eugene McCarthy, and finally the Women’s Movement, short shrift.
<p style="text-indent: 0.5in">While some people spent the 60’s stoned out of their minds and avoiding the draft (me, for instance), others were on the front lines, marching in the South, protesting and working to destabilize the war, going to jail, and even dying for their beliefs.
Hari Kunzru wasn’t born until 1969 by which time Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were dead and the Tet Offensive in Vietnam had already taken place. But he sure has a handle on the politics, especially the extreme politics of the era. Because it wasn’t all peace, love and granola; extremist groups like The Weathermen used violent, and sometimes deadly, means to try to achieve their ends.* Kunzru’s description of the inner workings of a revolutionary brotherhood working in London in the late 60’s and early 70’s is stark and chilling. They were cold blooded and uncompromising, even when it came to their fellow revolutionaries. They depended on absolute loyalty from their members and the means to those ends were such as would make a religious cult look like a kindergarten class. One means of achieving this is described as “Criticism-Self-Criticism.” Members of the group would literally lock themselves into a room, usually after taking acid, and pick away at each other’s defense mechanisms until the individual was removed and all that was left was the will of the Collective. According to their rules, “no one could leave… until the group agreed it was finished. Every interaction, every interrogation, had to run until the bitter end.”
Chris Carver, the character whose revolution gives the book its eponymous title, lived as a revolutionary and then, of necessity, was reborn as Michael Frame, when the non-violent methods of the brotherhood began taking on a more radical cast. Carver, Sean Ward, and Anna Addison were the senior members of the group and they goaded each other to increasingly dramatic demonstrations of revolutionary fervor. But when Anna forged an association with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the group was ordered to assassinate a local businessman, Frame knew it was time to leave Carver behind. Taking the $5,000 the PFLP had given the group to close the deal and a passport he had for emergencies, Michael took off for Europe and the Far East. He wound up in Thailand, strung out and broke, where an old acquaintance found him and put him into a tough-love rehab program run by Buddhist monks. He stayed with the monks for four years before returning to England where he slowly began assembling the pieces that would constitute his new life. A wife, a home in the South of England, a step-daughter and a prospering business start-up help him put distance between himself and his past until one day he is accosted by a person who had been on the fringe of his group. This person seems to know entirely too much about his past and is intent on using Chris/Michael as a pawn in a political ploy directed against one of his former associates who has worked her way into a high-level Cabinet position.
Chris, who has never revealed to his wife what his life was like before he became “Michael”, is faced with domestic problems and the prospect of jail time. He takes flight once again but realizes before he gets too far that there are only so many opportunities to remake one’s self in a lifetime. Sometimes the real revolution is deciding just who you are learning to live with yourself.
Hari Kunzru is also author of The Impressionist, which won the Whitbread Best First Novel Award. He probably can be followed on Twitter but I have no idea how.
*“We were very careful… to be sure we weren't going to hurt anybody, and we never did hurt anybody. Whenever we put a bomb in a public space, we had figured out all kinds of ways to put checks and balances on the thing and also to get people away from it, and we were remarkably successful—Bill Ayers
Harvey Klehr, the Andrew W. Mellon professor of politics and history at Emory University in Atlanta, said in 2003, "The only reason they were not guilty of mass murder is mere incompetence. I don't know what sort of defense that is."
