My monthly book blog: Freedom, fascism and false hopes

Freedom may be the Word of the Year in 2024 — a year with a record number of elections, and it would seem a record number of promises for freedom.?

Parties on the left and right, in all sorts of languages, are seizing on a worldwide perception that we’re losing our freedoms. Perhaps it’s the pandemic and its restrictive lockdowns. Perhaps it’s the raging uncertainty that seems to stalk the planet. Or the screams of repression on social media. Or the sense that technology is at once liberating and restricting us, in ways we don’t really understand.

As Kris Kristofferson wrote, and Janis Joplin famously sang, “freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.”

Yet freedom is much more, as it represents everything left to be gained and lost.?

Whether it’s in Indiana or India, there’s a lot at stake this year when it comes to freedom, which is why I picked two very different and widely celebrated novels on the theme for my September reading list.

It Can’t Happen Here, by the Nobel prize-winning novelist Sinclair Lewis, was released in 1935, as fascism marched across Europe and threatened to spread to Depression-era America. If you’re shocked by the rise of political violence in America this year, you might want to reflect on what Lewis said about his country nearly a century ago. The book was a warning shot to America, during the rise of Hitler, that Americans could just as easily succumb to nationalistic fervour and bigotry — as well as the false promise of economic salvation. At the time, a populist politician, Huey Long, was emerging as a serious challenger for the Presidency, until he was assassinated.?

Lewis gives us one of the more memorable characters from that period of American literature. Buzz Windrip, a charismatic populist, wins the Presidency by claiming to champion “the forgotten man” and promising every American $5,000 as their rightful share of the nation’s wealth. Once elected, Windrip quickly overturns the constitution and suspends a range of liberties, including freedom of the press, and unleashes a militia called the Minute Men to engender fear (and compliance) across the country. One of their targets is a newspaper publisher, Doremus Jessup, who continues to criticize the regime — until his paper is shut down and he is arrested, sentenced by a kangaroo court to an American-style concentration camp.?

Prophet Song, by Irish writer Paul Lynch, is just as provocative and disturbing. It won the 2023 Booker Prize for a different but equally excruciating portrayal of totalitarianism, in modern-day Dublin. Lynch reveals the dysfunctions of our society through the saga of a mother and her wrenching choices, as fascist forces seize power and civil war erupts. In the novel, Eilish Stack’s trade unionist husband is detained by a new secret police force, never to be seen again, leaving her to weigh the risks facing her and her four children. One son joins a rebel force, not to return. Another is injured by an aerial bombing, and then taken from hospital by government forces, turning up in a morgue where Eilish must identify his body, disfigured by torture. She finally escapes with her two youngest, to an ambiguous fate. “The only freedom left is to fight.”

(The novel was celebrated as much for its style as its substance, with its creative use of run-on sentences, no paragraph breaks and dialogue without quotation marks, neatly capturing a society without order.)

Interestingly, the protagonists of both novels — Doremus Jessup and Eilish Stack — seek to escape to Canada, and the promise of freedom. They also both meet ambiguous endings, leaving the reader to wonder what good is freedom when the cost is so high — and yet what hope is there in life without freedom. As Lynch writes, prophetically, “fear attracts the very thing it is afraid of.”

Both novels show how arbitrary powers are the biggest enemies of freedom. Whether in the 1930s or 2020s, we can’t take freedom for granted. The freedom to vote, to protest, to speak and to live without fear or favour — those are among our greatest rights and privileges. And their protection should cross political lines, just as their value has crossed through the generations. It’s a very good ballot question, indeed.