Then it struck me that she shares some of the qualities of an oddly un-imprinted character in Angela Carter’s first novel, Shadow Dance (1966). Having somehow escaped the clutches of history, Emily is invulnerable to myth, in control of her biology, adaptable and pragmatic. Riches may not be quite so original, but as a child of the technological revolution who “tweets in her dreams”, and who deploys her digital self (@littlemisswilde) in the services of the Occupy movement, she is, like Emily, a harbinger – one of the figures in Why it’s Kicking Off that Mason is trying to identify, not unambitiously, as “a new type of human being”.

In the January round-ups few critics will fail to register 2011’s historic nature, but Mason, I’d wager, will be the only mainstream figure who’ll go so far as to propose – as Virginia Woolf once did of human character in 1910 – that in this year human consciousness altered. He calls himself a “technological determinist” and argues that just as body shape changed during the industrial revolution, so the way we relate now, as “networked individuals” with socialised cognition, will change the map of our minds. The key point about the internet is that it is an ever-expanding learning loop, feeding back information about how things might be otherwise and already are elsewhere; its strongest meme is that being linked, we are powerful, because “a network can usually defeat a hierarchy”.

It was this knowledge, Mason argues – the fruit of “info-capitalism” – that created a tipping point in 2011 bringing people onto the streets in greater numbers than ever before. Those in the Middle East, unable any longer to put up with what Auden called “the elderly rubbish dictators talk”, came to topple tyrants; while westerners disappointed of their expectations (“the graduate with no future”, the worker losing her pension), challenged the ‘market is king’ orthodoxy that was destroying livelihoods and corroding democracies.

His account of this collapse in deference is engaging and informative – particularly fine is the opening chapter on how globalisation destroyed the micro-economy that, with great ingenuity, Zekry and other workers created out of Cairo’s rubbish, depriving them of a living and leaving them no option but to join the uprising. It is a story that distils a larger argument, though one not immediately apparent to the reader because the full audacity of Why it’s Kicking Off takes a while to reveal itself. Mason’s title promises answers to why 2011 was such a momentous year, but the narrative he comes up with does much more, suggesting that events now unfolding demand a revised reading of history, one from which we might – just possibly – find a new way into the future.

Yet what he’s writing, he insists, is journalism, albeit today’s opened-out journalism, still rooted in street-level reporting and the detail of individual lives, but invigorated and made increasingly speculative by the pressure of information (he draws on voices from social media, internet psychology, modernist art, radical manifestos, political and economic theory, labour history, sociology and urban planning, as well as re-working his own tweets, blogs, Newsnight reports and earlier books). Like the ‘netizens’ he describes, Mason is intellectually promiscuous, chopping between different ways of considering the world, but in a voice so conversational it goes some way to masking the designs he has on us.

As well as reportage from Egypt, Britain, Greece, America and the Philippines, there’s a briefing, updated from his 2009 book, Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed, on the decisions that brought capitalism to the brink, characterisation of the new activists (non-ideological, “without loyalty”, highly individualised), debate about why the year’s revolutionary uprisings were unforeseen (dogmatism on the right, defeatism on the left), analysis of how today’s ‘horizontalist’ movement is succeeding where earlier democratic movements faltered (a congruence of popular mood and technological means, making radicalism fashionable and potent again), and a range of historical and cultural parallels to mull over, many where economic decline and technological innovation also spurred revolt (Europe in 1848, the Paris Commune, modernism and the belle époque, syndicalism and the Great Unrest, the counter-culture of 1968).

In order to understand these connections between past and present, though, Mason thinks it necessary to reconsider the narrative of workers’ history and, with this, the left’s idea of what it should be doing now. The attempt of ordinary people to wrest control of their lives and communities, he believes, is not the dominant story of trade unionism and class struggle, but (as syndicalists once claimed) something more pioneering of modernity, more autonomous, imaginative, and less straitlaced.

It’s an argument he was already making in 2007 in Live Working or Die Fighting: How the Working Class Went Global, before Lehman Brothers collapsed and before the current wave of uprisings, and which now, in their wake, seems vindicated. What we see in today’s protests and occupations – resourcefulness, improvisation, knowledge- and pleasure-seeking, the euphoria of annexing spaces or simply of taking part – can be seen throughout history in waves of creative revolt and experiments in living. This is what Mason is thinking of when he tweets: “I will never tire of the minutae of minute by minute conquest and reconquest of #Tahrir by the people, a year after it started…”

Unlike “the actual history of organised labour”, these intermittent raids on freedom were invested with what Karl Marx, in his early, humanist phase argued for: not proletarian power, but the desire for “the liberation of individual human beings” in which people would “express their freedom through communal interaction”, so becoming a “species-being”. Because capitalism atomised and alienated workers Marx thought this could only be achieved after its rout. But Mason suggests that new technology poses the possibility we can achieve species-being – connected and expressive as we now are – inside capitalism.

Such an idea raises questions about the ground the left is fighting on: if we no longer need to wait for the revolution to end time and start it up again, we can begin to change things here and now – precisely what Mason thinks his “new type of human being” is already doing. What they have grasped is that capitalism’s most advanced form may not be run-for-profit corporations like Microsoft or Toyota, but a “semi-communal form of capitalism exemplified by open-source software and based on collaboration, management-free enterprise, profit-free projects, open-access information.”

It’s a wildly iconoclastic thought that turns capitalism into a machine of emancipation rather than enslavement, driven by curiosity and cooperation rather than greed. The prospect it holds out of accelerated learning and problem-solving makes our current ‘free-market’ system look archaic and superstitiously restrictive. More than this, for the left it allows reconciliation with a re-modelled capitalism without the spectre of apostasy, without losing faith with the history and tradition of workers’ liberation.

For these reasons the book ends not in one of 2011’s hotspots, with the dancers and drum-beaters facing down power, but in a Manila slum where the future is beginning to take shape. With great inventiveness, in cramped and shit-smelling conditions, inhabitants here have created something “orderly, solidaristic” and entrepreneurial. Making his way in a warren of tunnels Mason finds a store, an internet cafe (“the unmistakable whizz and pop of something digital”), and a DIY police force, all run by graduates in business admin, engineering and political science. He sees satellite dishes and solar panels, and thousands of people living hugger-mugger without too much in the way of crime or prostitution or drugs.

He talks to urban planners who explain how much we have to learn from slum-dwellers – how those who are managing such low-impact, highly-educated, technologically connected lives, look like a good model for our future on an overcrowded planet with limited resources. It is by no means a starry-eyed response, however: as in the opening chapter, Mason’s narrative emphasises the complexity of slum politics while keeping his eye trained on individuals like Len-len, who – barely able to feed her children, unable to pay for the course that might change her life – has no control over the global system she is part of.

A book as propositional as Why it’s Kicking Off (“The lesson is this”, “Exhibit one”, “I propose a different reading”) means to provoke argument. My reservations concerned the paradoxical way in which his new human beings, for all their “elevated individualism”, are presented as so improbably alike, largely undifferentiated by religion or sex, all jeans-wearing, looking “just like you” – as if homogeneity were a necessary pre-condition for their modernity. There is too, and perhaps for the same reasons, a disregard of the extent to which multinational corporations and power elites have already infiltrated the net (a Saudi prince owns 5% of Twitter) and to which governments are increasingly using it as a tool of repression. One of Angela Carter’s last prophecies, made not long before she died in 1992, was that surveillance would become a major political issue in the 21^st century.

In early reviews some critics have raised questions about Mason’s infatuation with the power of new technology and his belief in its potential for liberation. These doubts perhaps stem from the perspective of the west. For those already living in relative prosperity and freedom the changes may not be so great. But this book begins and ends in the slums of the third world – where one billion of the world’s population live, and where soon many more will follow. For these people the revolution in technology and the possibility of sharing out globalisation’s dividends more equitably, of putting info-capitalism’s knowledge-power into their hands, will be utterly transformative. It’s not hard to hear those locked out from modernity, still only permitted “accidental glimpses of human freedom”, clamouring at the door: this week newspapers carry the story of rioting outside an Apple shop in China, where frustrated customers were unable to get their hands on the latest iphone; while on the radio, a Nigerian man declares, “We have the will and resources to look after ourselves, just bring us the technology”

This article first appeared on the Red Pepper website on 22.1.2012 as ‘History in the Making’.

When in 1992, it was revealed she had been used by the Stasi from 1959-1962 as an inoffizielle Mitarbeiterin (informal collaborator) the ensuing attacks on her integrity nearly brought her writing to a halt: “I have the feeling”, she said at this time, “that a bush is growing in my throat”. That she provided no information of value to the Stasi, was soon dropped for “reticence”, and was herself the subject of surveillance for thirty years, did not mitigate the ferocity of the attacks from “the stone-throwing West Germans”, as her translator, Michael Hoffman, called them.

It was argued that the writer who had done most to articulate “the difficulty of saying I” was herself little more than a state poet, a mouthpiece for the regime. Her refusal to simply exonerate herself was read as a sign of guilt, rather than for what it was: a continuation of her life’s work of intense self-interrogation and reflection, in which one must “execute the verdict oneself” – as she wrote in her most important work, Nachdenken über Christa T. (The Quest for Christa T., 1968) – rather than succumb to the demagogue’s version of events.

Born in 1929 in Landsberg an der Warthe in Brandenburg to a grocer and his wife, who were protestant, middle class, pro-Nazi, Christa was a member of the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the female counterpart of the Hitler Youth. She was ten years old when she watched the SS march through her town as they advanced on Poland, and sixteen, in 1945, when her family ran from the invading Russian army.

This moment of ‘liberation’ recurs in her fiction, in Kindheitsmuster (Patterns of Childhood, 1976), in which she tries to reconnect East Germans to a past from which they believe themselves acquitted; and in ‘Blickwechsel‘, a story from 1970, (translated as ‘Exchanging Glances’ in 1992), where a family snatch their belongings and flee westward toward the Oder-Neisse border. As flames rage in the night sky, the youngest daughter laughs uncontrollably at the spectacle of her resolutely bourgeois family, sellers of sour pickle and malt coffee, literally going to hell in a handcart.

Wolf’s family didn’t make it to the border, and when the dust settled and the maps were redrawn, Landsberg, the town of her birth, became Gorzów Wielkopolski in Poland; Mecklenburg, where her family landed, was now part of a newly minted nation, the German Democratic Republic. She was finishing high school before she began to understand the full extent of “what happened back then”. Against this, the new republic offered another faith. Marxism, she believed, was the polar opposite of what happened in fascist Germany: “At all costs I didn’t want anything that could be like the past…That was the source of [my generation’s] commitment and…why we clung to it so long” – something critics in the West have often failed to grasp.

In 1949, as the GDR came into being, Wolf joined the state communist party (SED). She studied literature at Jena and Leipzig universities, was involved in the Bitterfeld movement of worker-writers, and spent three years as a research assistant in the East German Writers’ Union. Here she met “comrades who had come out of the concentration camps, out of prison, back from exile, impressive people”. Her generation’s guilty conscience about what happened to these men and women was another reason for commitment to their cause.

Her first book, Moskauer Novelle (Moscow Novella, 1961), was well received in the east but never translated in the west. A novel  influenced by her Bitterfeld work, Der geteilte Himmel (The Divided Heaven), followed two years later. It won the Heinrich Mann Prize, bringing her international recognition. But in 1965 she spoke at the Eleventh Plenum of the SED Central Committee and began a long process of disenchantment with actually existing socialism, which, she felt, “wasn’t moving in the right direction.” A pattern emerged: disillusion, followed by withdrawal and contemplation, from which she would surface with a vindicating work: “Each time…I’d moved a bit further along the road to myself.”

Out of the “deep depression” she suffered after the Eleventh Plenum she wrote Nachdenken über Christa T. To read it now is to encounter an indisputable feminist classic: in its assault on patriarchal authority and in its fragmented sensibility, the novel pursues the difficult “attempt to be oneself”, for which she was accused in the GDR of  being “individualistic”. The book was banned, then published only in a limited edition. Rather than the image of perfectibility that socialist writers were encouraged to present, Wolf set out in Christa T. to imagine the life of an outsider, but she does this from inside socialism, reinventing the heroic mould, or questioning at least whether a life like this – marginal, hesitant, obscure – might not also be of value, full of “latent possibility”; might be, in fact, what socialists looked for in art: the exemplary.

She continued to produce innovative work, countering crude Zhdanovite prescriptions with her notion of subjective authenticity – an author should not hide behind her characters but include intertextual commentary. While her position as a “loyal dissident” was not easy, it was undeniably a source of strength. It is as a writer from inside the socialist project – however distorted the GDR version of this was – that she seems so interesting, casting new light on questions of philosophy, genre, form, delivering insights on the writer’s ‘inner censor’, and in the process making much western writing seem too easily conformist.

Her success meant that she was allowed to travel and teach abroad, and in the Seventies she made friendships with other women writers, consolidating her interest in feminism. A study trip to Greece brought an oddly late epiphany about the extent of her sex’s marginalisation: “I…had a real shock when I realised that in the past two thousand years women really have not been able to exert any public influence.” The work that resulted from her forays into Greek myth in novels such as Kassandra (1983) and Medea (1996), was instantly recognisable to friends in the west like Margaret Atwood, who wrote Medea’s Introduction, observing that “the heroes are really like devils, and the victims are the most important”.

Following a further experience of defeat over the enforced exile of the singer-poet Wolf Biermann from the GDR in 1976, she continued her work of re-evaluating literary tradition from a specifically German context. In this she found inspiration in debates between Georg Lukács and Anna Seghers about the meaning of Romanticism. In Kein Ort. Nirgends (No Place on Earth, 1979), she imagines a meeting between two writers, Heinrich von Kleist and the poet Karoline von Günderrode, both of whom killed themselves in the early 1800s, as a way of examining the German tendency to alienation, malady and self-destruction. Again, the exploration takes on greater force for being cast from inside a society whose ideology dismissed despair as a luxury.

A later work Leibhaftig (In the Flesh, 2002), draws on her experience of illness as the dream of socialism unravelled. In 1988 as Wolf finished writing Sommerstück (Summer Play), her appendix had burst, leaving her with peritonitis. The following year she resigned from the Party. Five months later she gave a speech at the Berlin Wall, then collapsed with a heart attack shortly before it came down. A few weeks later she wrote the final wording for the Für unser Land (For Our Country) petition, which argued against reunification and was signed by 1.1 million people, (“we were thinking about preserving an entirely different country”), but history’s doors were banging shut and the moment of possibility quickly passed.

In recent years, as Germany has come to feel more at ease with reunification, less bedevilled by the ghosts of history, Wolf has been recognised, alongside Günter Grass, as the nation’s most important postwar writer. She received the 2002 German Book award at the Leipzig Book Fair, and won the 2010 Thomas Mann Prize for her last novel, Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud (City of Angels or The Overcoat of Dr. Freud) based on a period of research she undertook in Los Angeles at the time of the 1992 Stasi revelations. This was a work ten years in the making and critics hailed it as her final reckoning, a courageous act of remembrance and leave-taking, a proof, Die Welt argued, “of the ordering mind’s triumph over the chaos of emotion”.

Wolf ended her life in her beloved Berlin, doubly exiled in her own country and shorn of her faith, left only with Was bleibt (What Remains) –  the title of her account of being under surveillance by the Stasi; written in 1979, it aroused considerable controversy when published in 1990. Like her friend, the American writer Grace Paley, she came to believe that change would never again be born from an ideology, but progress might occur through shifts and pushes made at ground level from grassroots associations. And for such projects she remained engaged, believing in the importance of activism and hope.

Her 1987 book Störfall: Nachrichten eines Tages (Accident: A Day’s News) about the Chernobyl disaster reflects some of this, with its concerns about technological advance and ecological decline, in the face of which she poses “the significance of daily structure”, the reiteration of human scale. Still, the loss of the comradeship and self-realization socialism had promised was hard to recover from; as was the possibility she refused with customary honesty to dispel entirely: that one may have done wrong in its name. And with all this was her abiding sense of “the abyss that yawns before us”, the fear of a future with no countering vision, a world with nothing but the military-industrial complex to guide our dreams.

“A post is vacant”, Wolf wrote, when her friend and sparring partner the Swiss playwright and novelist Max Frisch died in 1991. It’s taken from the Heine poem, ‘Enfant Perdu’, whose first line runs, “Verlorner Posten in dem Freiheitskriege ” (Vacated positions in the war of freedom). Asked later about her choice of encomium she replied, “No one talks like that any more. I think these ‘posts’ no longer exist. The times and people’s objectives have changed.” The times have indeed changed, and the terms of our struggle for freedom with them, but the need for voices like Wolf’s that remain fully human and compassionate even under the strongest pressure and provocation, is greater than ever.

Versions of this article appeared on the Guardian website as Christa Wolf Obituary on 1.12.2011 and in the newspaper on 6.12.2011.

In the middle of this period, on November 23, the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI) – set up by King Hamad bin Isa Al-Khalifa and chaired by the international jurist, M. Cherif Bassiouni – will produce its report into whether or not there were human rights violations during the spring uprisings.

A lot rides on this report. The fate of hundreds of protestors already imprisoned or still going through the courts may depend upon it. And for the Bahraini state – where financial services have overtaken oil as the nation’s prime business – at stake is its credibility on the world stage and ability to do business in the international market. In America, after objections from a handful of senators, Hilary Clinton has decided to delay a $53 million arms sale to Bahrain until the BICI’s findings are announced; while complaints raised by international trade unions and the European Parliament about the mistreatment of workers have put the US-Bahrain Free Trade Agreement in jeopardy.

Since the uprising began on February 14, the Al-Khalifa Sunni ruling elite – governing a nation that is 70% Shia, and where the King’s uncle, with a forty year incumbency, is the world’s longest-serving Prime Minister – have proved themselves expert at combining antique methods of control with modern ones: not only the use of foreign troops, martial law, military courts and torture, but ‘soft’ power attacks on civil society. To date, nearly 3000 workers have been dismissed, television and social media are being used to name and shame ‘traitors’, and American and British PR and intelligence gathering firms such as Potomac Square Group and Olton Ltd have been employed to ensure that the government’s story is the one the world is listening to.

The stories they are trying to suppress are those being told by Faisal Hayyat, one of the sports journalists being tried, or Habib Alnabbool, the Chairman of the Gulf Air union, also on trial. “I was tortured by the Bahraini army and by security men connected to the Ministry of the Interior”, said Hayyat. “They tied my hands from behind, blindfolded and beat me with pipe, cable and their military boots.” Alnabbool also claims that after his arrest he was handed over to the Ministry of Interior, where, he says, “I was interrogated, humiliated, blindfolded and forced to sign documents I wasn’t allowed to read”.

Hayyat is one of more than sixty journalists who have been arrested. “There is no real journalism, no room for expressing opinions”, he says. When Al-Wasat, Bahrain’s main opposition paper, was closed down for a day its editor-in-chief, Mansoor Al-Jamri, was forced to resign; he was reinstated four months later but in October he and three colleagues were fined 1000 Bahraini Dinars ($US2650) for “publishing news that defamed the image of Bahrain abroad”. Alnabbool also feels that rights guaranteed him under the constitution to speak publicly about his area of work have come under attack. He was warned by Gulf Air’s CEO, Samer Majali, not to talk to Al Jazeera or to other press. Alnabbool is part of the largest group of victimised workers in Bahrain where twelve companies (Gulf Air, Alba, Batelco, and nine others) have been responsible for 919 dismissals.

All these companies are related to Bahrain’s sovereign wealth fund, the Mumtalakat Holding Company, which has substantial shares in each of them. This is important because it appears to link the victims of torture to the royal family. “Mumtalakat companies sacked workers”, Alnabbool said, “and then passed their names to the military prosecution”. Mumtalakat is presided over by the Crown Prince, Salman bin Hamad Al-Khalifa. He appoints the board whose members include one of four Deputy Prime Ministers, Khalid bin Abdulla Al-Khalifa, the Minister of Finance, the Minister of Cabinet Affairs, the Minister of Works, and Gulf Air’s Chairman, Talal Al Zain.

“During the implementation of the ‘national safety’ [martial law] by the army”, said Alnabbool, “it was not safe to go into work. Samer Majali sent an email to all his employees, stating that workers who stayed away because they feared for their own or their family’s safety, would not be penalised.” Despite this, the blanket grounds given for dismissal in the Mumtalakat companies was “non-attendance”. At Gulf Air there were 230 dismissals and Majali sent an email to his remaining staff inviting them to inform on fellow workers. “This email was used by some to settle personal issues”, Alnabbool said.

Since then, union executives have been prevented from entering their office in the Gulf Air premises, and holding meetings with their members. The International Trades Union Confederation say that 59 union leaders have been fired, and two unions have been dismantled altogether: in March Bahrain Petroleum (Bapco), where 293 workers were dismissed, dissolved its company union, and in April the Bahrain Teachers Association was closed down, and its president and vice-president arrested.

Alongside these attacks on trade unionists, public vilification has continued. There are many websites such as Bahrain Online and Bahrain Arabia on which photographs of workers on demonstrations have been posted, their faces circled and names identified. One site, Awakened Giant, has 131 photographs identifying Gulf Air pilots, engineers, ground staff and cabin crew. “The government have closed down opposition sites”, Alnabbool says, “but continues to allow these people to target workers, to list their names and addresses, to call them traitors and conspirators. It’s fear and fear only that they’re spreading, and it sets people against one other.”

After international pressure the King, the Prime Minister and the Crown Prince have all made announcements that sacked workers should be returned to work, but these announcements are perhaps for western ears: the Mumtalakat companies have been slow to respond. At Gulf Air, where all of the dismissed workers are Shias, only 136 staff have been reinstated. Of these, however, 79 have not been returned to their former posts but are now required to spend their working hours cramped into a room 7 by 21 metres with only 30 chairs between them, an environment Alnabbool describes as “totally disgusting”, pointing out also that they are finger-printed on their way in and out and checked regularly throughout the day. “It’s possible these companies are using the political situation in Bahrain to restructure”, says Jane Kinninmont, Senior Research Fellow at Chatham House. “Some have been riddled with corruption and Gulf Air is losing money.”

Foreign businesses operating in Bahrain like DHL have also been caught up in the political situation. Shukri Hassan, president of the Bahrain DHL union and eight of his colleagues have been charged with “violating national security”, though their case has been temporarily suspended without reason being given. And senior staff at RSCI Bahrain, the prestigious training college run by the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, where twenty medical staff have been arrested and imprisoned, asked three students to swear a loyalty oath to the Bahraini royal family. The RCSI in Dublin have since apologised for this, calling it “unacceptable”.

There are some in Bahrain who believe the King set up the BICI in order to give himself a weapon with which to fight more conservative elements in the Al-Khalifa family. If so, he may find that he gets more than he bargained for. Should Bassiouni’s report reveal even a fraction of the human rights violation protestors claim have taken place, the country’s reputation as one of the most forward-looking of the Gulf states will be tarnished, and conducting twenty-first century business while presiding over an archaic political system that breaches human rights, as well as ILO and OECD guidelines, will become more difficult.

The Al-Khalifas are already spinning the BICI report. On Sunday the Crown Prince said that after last year’s cancellation, Bahrain was now “safe” to stage next year’s Grand Prix, and that the BICI report would allow the country to “move on”. He made no mention of the 27 workers who were sacked at the International Circuit, where the Grand Prix has its home, nor of the allegations that some of these were tortured after arrest. Mumtalakat have a financial interest in the Grand Prix because it owns 42% shares in the McLaren company, and because, as the Crown Prince said on Sunday, the “race is what ties Bahrain to the world”.

The protestors share one thing in common with the Crown Prince: they also want to “move on”, but their idea of progress and modernity is not the same as the Al Khalifas’. “We want a civil state”, Faisal Hayyat says, “not a backward country where we are subjected to the armed forces and security police.”

This article appeared on 14.11.2011 as Latest Bahrain Trials Begin Tomorrow on the ITF website, on Counterfire as Bahrain: western-backed police state puts trade unionists on trial, and on the Gulf Air Trade Union website as Latest Bahrain Trials Begin Tomorrow. On 15.11.2011 it was picked up on the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights website as Latest Trials Begin Tuesday and on The Bahrain Justice and Development Movement site, where it appeared as Bahrain Trials and the BICI.

The novel begins with a swirl of yellow dust, a pale sunset, a gas-lit town. From this impressionist haze emerge the Karols – a family at war. Eight year old Hélène nurses thoughts of revenge against a mother whose fairy-tale looks (“snow-white skin…claw-like nails”) arouse feelings of revulsion in her. Bella, the scornful mother, dreaming of Paris and the arms of some anonymous lover, longs to escape from her provincial, Ukrainian family: from her husband, a banker who dreams only of money, and from her parents, the fading, aristocratic Safranovs, dependent now on their “peasant” of a son-in-law, “the little Jew who came out of nowhere”.

Hélène loves only her reserved French governess who dispenses nothing but the most practical advice: “Hélène, don’t read while putting on your socks. One thing at a time.” Yet even she is marked by “the stain of desire”, a story in her past (to do with “’love’, ‘kisses’, ‘fiancé’”  and throwing herself in the Seine) that Hélène instinctively recoils from, stamping her feet and singing at the top of her voice in an attempt to banish the fate she senses lies in wait for her as a woman. What she likes best, what feeds her turbulent imagination, is to write in the pool of light at her bedside table, or to hear Mademoiselle sing the Marseillaise while she plays Napoleonic games with toy soldiers, “in a dream of bloodshed, of glory”.

The figure of the rebellious daughter is common enough in literature, but it is rare to find one as affronted and intelligent as Hélène. She stands shoulder to shoulder with Louisa in Christina Stead’s novel of 1940, The Man Who Loved Children, not just in her desire for revenge on an adult world that denies and humiliates her, but in her Nietzschean resourcefulness, transforming what material she has available – her repudiation and alienation – and making from it the steel in her back, the will to create herself: “if no one really cares about me I’m going to have to love myself”, she vows. It’s an idea Némirovsky returned to the year before her death in a poem she dedicated to herself, also titled ‘The Wine of Solitude’: “To lift such a heavy weight/ Sisyphus, you will need all your courage.”

Némirovsky wrote several versions of the daughter story including The Ball (1930), which Ian McEwan found “perfectly controlled”, and Jezebel (1936), a more melodramatic affair about matricide, but The Wine of Solitude is her most autobiographical fiction. Her identification with Hélène produces some complex narrative strategies that throw doubt on the teller’s memory and reliability, as Sartre was to in Nausea three years later. At one point Hélène is projected into adulthood: “The truth is that I came to understand gradually and now I’ve convinced myself I saw everything in a flash.” But the child rises up against this rewriting, thinking it further evidence of the bad faith between generations in which children (denied seriousness and the use of grown up language) feign ineptitude, and both adults and children see one another obscurely, as “insubstantial ghosts”.

When the Karols move to St Petersburg, Hélène’s illicitly scribbled words, “The husband, the wife and…the lover”, force the drama, leading to the death of Mademoiselle Rose. As revolution comes to the city the father stuffs dollars into sofas and under carpets, and Bella’s jewellery is sewn inside her clothing. The family leave for Finland, and it is here, in “air like ice-cold wine”, that Hélène has her first love affair and realises she can exact retribution by seducing Bella’s lover. The flirtation brings her “wild, proud pleasure”, demonstrating her power as a woman but also yielding a childhood freedom she has never before experienced – kisses happen on exhilarating sleigh rides, amidst shouting children and in the “rough and tumble” of snow play.

The affair ends when White Russians seize the town and the Karols are exiled to Bella’s beloved Paris. Here Hélène finally lets go of her obsession, as neither of her parents have been able to, realising “my desire for revenge isn’t strong enough to risk my own happiness.” But the damage is done, Bella is now the abandoned one, reduced to paying for lovers, and when her husband dies she is left searching for a fortune that no longer exists. Without saying goodbye, Hélène slips out onto the Champs-Élysées, shedding her past like an unwanted skin.

After much argument about the treatment of Jews in Irène Némirovsky’s writing, and claims from Gabriel Josipovici that Suite française was too highly praised, the republication of so many of her novels now allows us to consider her career in full. The Wine of Solitude is part of an analysis of Jewish life that begins in the caricatures of David Golder (1929) and culminates in the passionate illumination of The Dogs and the Wolves (1940). It places her among modernist contemporaries such as Stead and Jean Rhys who also wrote about estrangement and the modern diaspora, about women who “lived on the sidelines”, and the savagery of family life. Most importantly it lays claim to Némirovsky as one of literature’s great defenders and vindicators of children.

This review appeared in the TLS as ‘Bon Courage, Sisyphus’ on 10.11.2011.

The figure of the tiger savaging a sepoy is perfect for Nagra’s pouncing poetry – in turn seductive and assaulting – and in this sly self-portrait he prises from its jaws ideas about the legacy of empire, but also about will, bravado, opportunism and parodic style. The seriously funny image of the poet clawing at his mirror, “overcome by the camps of history!”, sets the tone for the collection, a hot-blooded, coolly wrought affair in which indignation is balanced with a knowing playfulness: “You’re awfully scary once in your stripes!”

Such self-mockery, of course, could be self-defeating. But Nagra’s hybridity (he’s English born of Punjabi parents) means, I’d guess, that he’s always bound to see the other side, even of himself. One of the triumphs of this book is that it sustains such doubleness and complexity while raising a smile or packing a wallop. As the punchbag imagery suggests, the debate Nagra is rehearsing about his part in “Empire’s quid pro quo” isn’t academic. Like Yossarian in Catch 22 he refuses to regard himself as a cog in the machine and takes history personally, so the struggle is keenly felt: “To some degree it always feels out of control in my head” he admits. Once on the page, however, this volatile material is quite deliberately plotted: Nagra’s lines, as he says in his dedication, are “tamed”, his lovers and fighters all stage-managed.

There are some quiet moments (a pair of tender sonnets updating Shakespeare; a dissolving stanza musing on origins), but in the main the poems are rowdy or highly expressive – an aesthetic response to the equanimity of the English canon. Sitting in Faber’s offices, surrounded by glass cases full of handwritten manuscripts, Nagra observes, “Canon is quite a physical, scary word, isn’t it? And I don’t believe that can really apply anymore, there are so many different constituencies.” Which doesn’t mean the greats can be ignored; you have to work your way through them, trusting – as he says at the Bloomsbury Festival a few days later – “one’s personality is strong enough to make something of me, from them”. He particularly admires Eliot’s “spiritually-directed voice, that high rhetoric” which seems close to his own play with rhetorical surfaces; while Larkin’s interest in domestic arrangements strikes a chord (“growing up as an Indian in Britain you’re dealing with marriage as a major issue”) and his “plain-speaking, ordinary subject matter” is inspiring.

Plain and direct English – beloved of teachers and journalists – is for some, though, not readily available: “It’s fine if you’re a clear, cogent speaker, if you’ve learned the rules and studied well. But straightforward English in the Larkin or Orwellian sense is not easy for everyone. Especially for some of my speakers, it’s very hard, so I want to explain all that.” It’s another trick he pulls off: masking, ‘lying’ and browning up to prevent himself from being pinned down or written off, yet producing poetry that is spiritedly partisan. We’re left in no doubt that he sides not with the kings whose heads are “cluttered with golden age bumph”, but the “turncoat” class betrayers and the “groundlings”.

His father was a factory worker and shopkeeper, and Nagra has a nice line in workers’ romance (‘Confessions of a Coolie Woman, Part 1’; ‘Raju T’Wonder Dog’). At home there were no books, and his schoolmates, a bunch of “exceptionally bright kids who were always playing around with words” but who, like Nagra, left after CSEs, were aware that their way of talking was never heard on the telly, never mind getting a look in from the poets. It was the desire to capture these voices that spurred him to writing.

Their expressions still enliven his performance (“She’s that fit!”), but it’s the way he infiltrates English with Indian accents and cadence that makes Nagra’s language so pleasurable and subversive: “When I think of English, OED words, the sort that Eliot and Larkin used, I’m always looking for a point of spring off from them, for an Indianness or Indian music in them.” This is also what arms his writing. For instance, ‘This Be the Pukka Verse’ is chock-a-block with Indianised words, its stanzas bulging with empire’s “shafted…goodies”. Such fullness rebukes Larkin’s English tightness, as if to say, Well, where did all that shafting get you, you miserable old bugger!

Above all, though, it’s Shakespeare who runs through Tippoo, and in a final pièce de résistance, ‘A Black History of the English-Speaking Peoples’ (indebted to Auden’s ‘Spain’), Nagra considers the Bard’s part in empire-making, the canon’s “bleached yarns”, and the extent to which faith in this literary inheritance implicates or travesties him. His voice, he knows, is inevitably “phoney” in this pale company, but authenticity isn’t what he’s working towards. Rather he hopes that “through puppetry and hypocrisy” what rings true is his “gung-ho fury”.  I, for one, say, long may he “reign Bolshie!”.

Daljit Nagra has been shortlisted for the 2011 T. S. Eliot prize. The winner will be announced on 16 January 2012. This article appeared in the West End Extra, in Camden New Journal as ‘Awful Sacry in Your Stripes’, and in the Islington Tribune on 27.10.2011.