Fiction that informs, enrages — but never preaches
One of the first books I read at school, A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines, was published in 1968, with the film version directed by Ken Loach, Kes, appearing in 1969. A reviewer, marking half a century since the book’s publication, wrote: “This was an era when there was an appetite for working-class, regional writing. It was an era when writers from humble backgrounds had access to networks, so scarce today, that could open the doors of opportunity.”
Even if the setting is grim and the story tragic, the novel succeeds in lifting the spirit.
Later, the book I read with greatest pleasure was The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell, a comic novel based on the fictionalized lives of real painters and decorators in Hastings, on England’s south coast.
You may know the film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart and Walter Huston. But do you know the book on which the film is based? First published in 1927 as Der Schatz der Sierra Madre, it was written by the prolific but mysterious author B. Traven, a German revolutionary living in exile.
Both The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre contain very simple explanations of Marx’s economic theories. They appear as natural parts of the story. That is the essence of socially engaged literature. It informs, and maybe even enrages, but it doesn’t preach.
Oskar Maria Graf belongs to the same tradition. His exact ideology is difficult to pin down (Marxist? Anarchist? Antifascist?) But the two books I have translated, We Are Prisoners and Anton Sittinger, provide fantastic insights into what was going on in Weimar Germany from a radical perspective.
Such literature can take any form. Novels, autobiography, poetry… It need not be — and should not be — written as propaganda.
Really, there are only two criteria that matter: first, that the work makes us think, and second, that it is a bloody good read.
RedLines 