In his latest book, Dr. J. Russell Perkin explores one of the more tumultuous decades in modern British politics – as chronicled in popular novels of the time. Like much of the British music of the 1970s, these seminal bestsellers have endured over the past 50 years, reflecting the fascinating political history of the era but also playing a meaningful role in it.
While writing Politics and the British Novel in the 1970s, Dr. Perkin was struck by how “urgently contemporary” these stories remain: the environmental fable Watership Down by Richard Adams, The Ice Age by Margaret Drabble, Daniel Martin by John Fowles, John le Carré’s Cold War spy thrillers, V.S. Naipaul’s studies on post-colonial displacement, and works by Malcolm Bradbury, David Lodge, Doris Lessing and others.
As Perkin conducted his research for the book, the Brexit controversy echoed the U.K.’s 1975 referendum on joining the European Economic Community. The Saint Mary’s English professor observed many other recurring and continuing issues of nationality and citizenship, race and immigration, right-wing extremism, social disparity, gender, and the environment.
Finishing his manuscript during the first COVID-19 lockdown in the spring of 2020, “I often felt as though one of Doris Lessing’s dystopian visions was playing itself out in reality,” he remarked in the preface of the book, which was released in June by McGill-Queen’s University Press. Lessing’s “apocalyptic visions and bleak view of existing society” also resonated with students in his 2019 honours seminar on the same topic as the new book, Perkin added in a campus news interview.
“Her great novel, The Memoirs of a Survivor, was about a society that was collapsing for reasons that aren’t really clear,” he says. “It might be an environmental disaster or a failure of organization, but all the normal infrastructure of life is just failing. She captures that world, and I imagine it was partly from having lived through wartime that she was able to do it so powerfully.”
Though he specializes in 19th and 20th-century British literature, writing the book was also quite a personal trip down memory lane for Perkin. Born in England, he moved to Canada at age eight and returned overseas to study at Oxford University in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Margaret Thatcher had just been elected, the national health service and public housing were in jeopardy, students were marching for nuclear disarmament, and many felt Britain was losing its global influence.
Back then, the big social novels by Fowles and Drabble particularly stood out for Perkin, as both authors were diagnosing the state of the nation in their fiction. Years later, he found himself still thinking about these stories.
“One of the things a lot of novelists explore is this nostalgic idea of the good old days of Britain when things were simpler, which is a myth that has been there as long as British literature,” says Perkin. “It has always been reproduced in popular culture but also questioned. Certainly, Fowles’ novel Daniel Martin does both of those things. It has incredible nostalgia for an idealized past, but at the same time recognizes that it’s a construct and that for many people it wasn’t in fact such a great time.”