Observer's 100 best political booksBooksFiction and drama hold a mirror to the virtues and vices of an age. Here’s our pick of the best
Native Son by Richard Wright (1940)
Richard Wright wrote to his friend William Faulkner that black and white Americans were engaged in a “war over the nature of reality”. The terms of Wright’s engagement in that ongoing war were set by his 1940 novel Native Son, which sold 250,000 copies in its first three weeks. The novel tells the story of Bigger Thomas, a native of the south side of Chicago in the 1930s, who murders two women, one white and one black. Its controversy was rooted in the case Bigger’s lawyer makes in mitigating his crimes in the context of racist oppression – that white society is also responsible. The book did much to politicise the civil rights generation and continues to be a key reference point for #BlackLivesMatter.
The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek (1923)
Hašek’s furious and hilarious satire of the first world war remained unfinished at his death in 1923, but inspired every subsequent act of rebellion in eastern Europe and beyond. Based on his own experiences in the conflict, the grim adventures of Hašek’s indelible infantryman established the idea of war as the ultimate human absurdity. Joseph Heller often said Catch 22 could never have existed without it.The book was banned by Nazis and Soviet communists, but Švejk’s mixture of cunning and resilience had the last laugh among Czechoslavakia’s samizdat intellectuals who reflected its spirit, and cited its influence, in the 1989 revolution.
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (1957)
Rand’s final novel has, since its publication in 1957, been the bible of libertarians and neo-liberals, and is arguably the novel that most closely reflects the political spirit of the current “make America great again” movement. It describes the efforts of a family to keep open their railroad company in the face of an overbearing state. Set in a dystopian America, it imagines a nation brought to its knees by excessive regulation and attempts to show how great visionary individuals, “ethical egoists”, the prime movers of history and wealth creation, can be beaten down and destroyed by unchecked “socialist” politics.
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985)
Canadian writer and activist Margaret Atwood’s novel – recently a celebrated Channel 4 series – presents a very different kind of American dystopia, in which a warped and fundamentalist Christian dictatorship has taken control of the country. The book is told in the voice of Offred, a woman whom we discover to be among many held captive as “handmaids” to ensure reproduction to counter growing sterility in the population. The novel satirises the strain of evangelical puritanism in American culture and the objectification and control of women’s bodies. It is more broadly a contemporary myth of despotic power, and how such power deforms those who are subjected to it.
The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell (1914)
Robert Tressell was the pen name of Robert Noonan, an Irish painter and decorator who settled in Hastings in 1901. The novel is rooted in his own struggle to find work and raise his daughter as a single parent. The novel’s hero, Frank Owen, is a socialist at the time when the labour movement was first gaining ground in British politics. As Owen works on a house renovation, he rails against capitalism and the cast of corrupt politicians and hypocritical liberals who support it – and the workers who accept it. The book was widely rejected and remained unpublished at Noonan’s death, but was saved by his daughter and eventually championed by George Orwell, who called it the book “everyone should read”.
What a Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe (1994)
The excesses of Thatcherism were the inspiration for many telling satires – from Martin Amis’s Money to Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty – but no book skewered the 1980s quite as effectively and entertainingly as Coe’s brief history of the fictitious Winshaw family. Between them, the heirs to Winshaw Towers cover most bases of that venal political decade: tabloid columnist, arms dealer, factory farmer, investment banker, gallerist and politician. Their apocalyptic rivalries and loyalties create an unforgettable vision of a society sold off to the highest bidder.
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (1958)
Chinua Achebe once observed that his mission as a writer was to show African readers that their home had not been a life of unstoried darkness before the arrival of western colonialism. His greatest book comprehensively dismantled the idea of Africa as presented in the western canon. The epic story of the wrestling champion and tribal leader Okonkwo is steeped in a sophisticated Nigerian, Igbo culture – a society undermined by colonial influence. Both a call to arms and a raising of consciousness, Achebe’s novel captured the growing spirit of self-determination on the continent and remains a defining political landmark.
Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871)
Set in the years of the Great Reform Act of 1832 and written just after its successor, the Reform Act of 1867, George Eliot’s masterpiece unpicks every nuance of the ethics and economics of Victorian progress. Its characters share a faith that they can make the world a better place; the novel quietly and inexorably proves a good deal of this faith a delusion or a vanity. Along the way, Eliot makes the world of Dorothea Brooke and Will Ladislaw, Tertius Lydgate and Rosamond Vincy, a tangible vision of provincial society – and a stage for the reality of liberal idealism.
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)
Rushdie’s novel took a post-colonial “empire fights back” spirit, and a deep personal understanding of the politics of Indian partition, and exploded them into something teeming with imaginative life. Drawing inspiration from the magic realism of Gabriel García Márquez, his book found a voice, rooted in lived experience, to capture the sometimes brutal and often fantastical fallout of independence and its implications. Anglo-Indian narrator Saleem Sinai is “handcuffed to history” by the hour of his birth – at midnight on the day of India’s independence. He inhabits a hybrid consciousness, with a telepathic connection to the other children of midnight, and tells its stories for all he is worth.
The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope (1875)
The Way We Live Now was Trollope’s angriest novel, an 844-page destruction of the London society he returned to in the 1870s after a couple of years in the colonies. It begins as a satire on the literary establishment – the boudoir novelist Lady Carbury buying favours from malleable critics – but the book is soon hijacked by the grander corruption of city and state. The author of that corruption, Augustus Melmotte, sounds a clarion call for his own age (and plenty to follow): “I am proud to be an Englishman in these times! What is the engine of this world? Profit. Gentlemen, it is your duty to make yourself rich!”
ROBERT MCCRUM’S PICK OF THE PLAYS
King Richard III by William Shakespeare (1591)
This tour-de-force by the young Shakespeare portrays Richard of Gloucester, “the bottled spider”, as ambitious, bloody and treacherous, a murderer and a ruthless usurper. Shakespeare’s account of Henry Richmond (later Henry VII) defeating Richard at Bosworth gave the Tudor dynasty a legitimacy it craved. The playwright’s demonisation of the Plantagenet king owes a lot to Sir Thomas More’s History of King Richard III, which is not as saintly as its author.
Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht (1939)
Sometimes said to be the greatest play of the 20th century, and perhaps also the greatest anti-war play of all time, Mother Courage was written in weeks in 1939 “in a white heat” by the German dramatist and poet, in response to the horrors of Nazism and the outbreak of the second world war. Brecht’s principles of political drama insisted that the play should not be set in modern times but during the Thirty Years’ War of 1618–1648, a bloody conflict involving all of central Europe. Brecht follows the fortunes of Anna Fierling, nicknamed “Mother Courage”, a cunning canteen worker with the Swedish army who is determined to make her living from the war. Over the course of the play, she loses all three of her children to the very war which she has tried to exploit for her own advantage. It became widely adopted for the international stage during the 1960s as a play of protest against America’s involvement in the Vietnam war.
Soldiers by Rolf Hochhuth (1967)
Subtitled “an obituary for Geneva”, this play became intensely controversial for its allegation that Winston Churchill had connived in the death of the Polish prime minister, General Wladyslaw Sikorski, in a 1943 air crash in order to appease Stalin. Writing around a century after the first Geneva Convention, Hochhuth, an excitable polemicist, also focused on Churchill’s support for the indiscriminate fire-bombing of German cities, such as Dresden. The play was scheduled to be premiered at the National Theatre in London, but this was cancelled after the row. It was subsequently produced in the West End, though its success was inhibited by a lawsuit that Hochhuth subsequently lost.
Top Girls by Caryl Churchill (1982)
An explosive examination of feminist ideals set in Thatcher’s Britain during the 1980s. Churchill considers what it means to be successful as a woman, dramatising her argument with historical characters. Churchill also contrasted American feminism and its celebration of money and power among successful women with the socialist ideals of British feminism, which was instead focused on collective action for the common good. Top Girls became famous for its assault on the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, emphatically not “a sister”, but a woman who celebrated personal achievement and believed in free-market capitalism. Marlene, the play’s tough career woman, is portrayed as soulless. Churchill questions whether it is possible for women to combine a successful career with a thriving family life.
Mountain Language by Harold Pinter (1988)
This late Pinter play was inspired, in part, by a visit the playwright made to Turkey with his friend Arthur Miller. Pinter became obsessed by the torture of ethnic minorities and, as a writer acutely attuned to the power of speech in relation to individual humanity, by the way in which oppressive governments in history have deprived minorities of self-expression. When the play’s origins became disputed, Pinter wrote that “throughout history, many languages have been banned – the Irish have suffered, the Welsh have suffered and the Urdu and the Estonians’ language banned”. It remains, fundamentally, a landmark protest on behalf of free speech.
This is part of the Observer’s 100 political classics that shaped the modern era. Please leave suggestions below of books that inspired and shaped your political consciousness and we’ll round up the best in next week’s Observer
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