Of magic and Marxism

I’m a socialist, you may have gathered from some of the stuff down there: it’s out of some mixture of ardent desire for world justice and Morningside belief that everything is just so untidy the way it is. I’m not any good at parties, economies, issues etcetera and hope never to be elected to anything, but I have my convictions and I stick by them, and I occasionally feel the urge to write something on behalf of The Movement.

So for some time past I’ve been turning an idea over in my mind. It’s something that troubles me a lot about fantastical settings and which – fantastical settings not being a byword, in the English-speaking world, for literary seriousness – nobody seems to bring up. All modern people of goodwill, whatever their opinions about parties, economies, issues and all that sort of thing, would surely accept the principle that every person ought to come into the world the same kind of human being with the same rights and duties and chances. There is no room for slaves and masters in a civilised country.

In our world we know that all the mechanisms set up to divide people into real people and, you know, them – race, class, gender, the whole sordid heap – are made up in an attempt to fend off 'that dreaded, hated thing, a world of free and equal human beings' and it is part of the job of literature to show this. But hang on, in worlds where some people have magical powers, the assumption on which our notion of a just society is based is out of the window. People aren’t equal. What kind of a society do you get, then, according to Ye Aulde Marxisme, when the means of magical production are in the hands of this small class, who are obviously going to hold gigantic power in society? And is it a society in which your or I would want to live?

I thought further about this. A lot of the time, magic just sort of happens to you around puberty without any obvious reason. Surely that means that somewhere, sometime, the people on the bottom of the sordid heap of history are going to find themselves in possession of some undiluted magical whizz-bang? And that’s not going to end well: you don’t ask slaves to be reasonable to the slavers, we can’t all be Nelson Mandela. Magic, it seems, is just like capitalism: doesn’t solve any problems, just moves them about.

So for a long time I’ve been meaning to do something with this idea. I’ve got a sketch. Magic is coming back into the world (again like capitalism, magic operates on long waves which nobody really understands) just as a country whose name isn’t important is undergoing a hodge-podge of my favourite revolutions. And it nearly all seems to be coming back into one particular chap, our protagonist, an illiterate boy from some obscure hinterland scoured by slave-takers. Everybody wants to get their mitts on him, of course – surely there needs to be a mechanism for finding and indoctrinating magical people if a society is to stay up – but the Revolution gets there before the Dastardly Enemies of the People.

And then? I don’t know. There’ll an ensemble cast of bespectacled revolutionary heroes, defiant prostitutes, good-hearted White Guards; and gallons of blood, of course. I feel it might veer towards a sympathetic treatment of our protagonist as he himself veers into being a sort of magical Stalin (you never ‘veer’ into anything pleasant); because in the end, I am firmly convinced, no good ever comes of damn magic. But it must have an ending sufficiently ambiguous to pass as happy. The Revolution can’t fail; it’s an aesthetic necessity, dammit! The main thing is to approach this kind of setting with a concern for power and society that's generally absent.

And it’s all Dreadfully Serious, though the narrator doesn’t always succeed in keeping a perfectly straight face because my narrators don’t. So here, dwarfed by the explanation of them, are some odds and ends I did. Nobody has any names yet, so forgive the confusing proliferation of pronouns.



Space-time is a frightfully complicated thing which I won’t pretend to understand. But probably it wouldn’t be lying to tell you that, in the world concerned by this narrative, about three-hundred years have passed since its end. A great many books have been written about these events. You could learn all about how they affected the production of fine pottery in the countries where they took place, if you like that sort of thing. My book, the latest on the pile, is neither cutting-edge research nor authoritative summary, and if you are a serious student and somebody has put this on your reading-list you should protest.

No, my ambitions are small: I don’t propose to tell you why any of this happened, only that it happened, and that it happened to living people and not to a series of names, dates, blobs of ink on maps. My sources were cherry-picked, my biases show, and I took artistic liberties with the translation. But oh well: my humble hope is that, if it is not certifiably true, and in fact not very probable, and in fact not even terribly plausible, my history is at least believable. And one cannot believe in fine pottery alone.

Anyway, I really cannot stand introductions of more than a page.


The wind made waves on the heather: a brown sea, under a grey sky. The effect was completed, improbably, by a ship on the brow of the moor, a very fine ship, sleek, painted, and carved with a dragon’s head. On its deck, a sacrificial goat bleated its last strangled bleat, as if aware of the necessity of the proceedings but wishing they could have been a bit more professional. The blood on the deck looked brown as well.

It was spring, but you wouldn’t have known. Winter had been long, and only persons of naïve and sentimental disposition will tell you that a long cold winter means a long warm summer. After all, there is only so much year. No, a cold winter, in melting, soaks all the other seasons and you end up with a sodden summer and a sodden spring like this one. The young grass was sad stubble on the muddy chin of the world. The new flowers smelled like death.

[The start, at a funeral. The protagonist comes from a sort of Norse-Gaelic-looking setting, but they're the victims of something much like the African slave-trade. People making up fictional worlds that are supposed to be recognisably like our own often transplant historical societies in poor imitation of Tolkien, I gather. But the Searing Light of Marxist Science tells us that cultures and so on are all just built on geography and economy, so change the geography and you change all the cultures and their relations to each-other. In other worlds, why should the 'white northern Europeans' be the most successful at world-banditry just because they were in our world? I’d like to challenge some assumptions.]


His voice was not loud; it demanded quiet from others. It was not his mouth that did the work at all, but his eyes. You looked into them and knew they weren’t looking back; they were fixed on something invisible to you. He couldn’t hear your noise, either, and his obliviousness made everybody feel that talking would be futile. He was in fact slightly deaf: a childhood in the printing-shop had done that to him. It had done more than that. Metal-forged words had crashed daily down around his young mind, and in that mind their sound became the sounds of cannon, and toppled empires crashing to the ground.

Probably – even the omnipotence of the historian has got its limits, I’m afraid, when it comes to some things – it was at this moment that she fell in love with him. If people fall in love in measurable moments, which they clearly don’t; but then gross oversimplification is the whole business of the historian. So she fell in love with him, in her dogged pugnacious way. When you have lived a life full of people worn out, broken, vanished, hardly seen, well, it must be easy to fall in love with a mind like a red-hot printing-press. Perhaps she felt that a mind like that could love as well as it hated, if it was given the chance.

[I promised you bespectacled revolutionary heroes and defiant prostitutes. You were sold a bill of goods.]


He heard the sound of stars, saw hopes and fears, tasted love and hate, and felt himself shaken by the heavy-footfalls of time. I’m making this sound far too fun, amn’t I? No: it was without a doubt the most horrible thing that had ever happened to him.

[Our protagonist warns kids that this is your brain on serious magic.]


He stood perfectly still and looked intently over the fields, as though they were a piece of writing he was determined to memorise before it was snatched away. But in fact it was the same view he had seen often enough before: of the fields clambering up to the iron-grey horizon and sliding away into the mists and ghost-shapes. There were the same fences, the same rich blacks and subdued greens, the same skeletal smudges made by the bare trees.

There were far more beautiful countries in the world, of course, and he knew it: as a young boy he’d gazed long and hard at the illustrations of any book of travels passing through the printing-shop. But quite suddenly, he felt that these weary hills were worth any hantle of majestic mountains: partly it was the gladness of regaining something you thought lost, and partly the keen attachment people feel to an heirloom from the dead, and partly the pride in something made by the work of their hands. The land he had always known had become his, somehow.

[B.R.H, a patriot after all. The haircuts will be French, the inability of anyone to stop being tooth-grindingly dramatic for the shortest time will be Russian, I hope; but the scenes I take from our iron-grey island. Bagpipes on cue at this point. Lovely!]


Spring came again, and came as a surprise. It had been another long winter, and a winter of hardship and death, and a winter when rumours and lies circulated at parity with the truth owing to shortages; and truth to tell people had begun to doubt whether the long-promised spring would ever turn up. Had there been spring before the war? Wasn't it all another malicious propaganda trick?

But the world must spin on around its axis, else we should all inevitably fall off. Spring came. Frozen rivers buckled, cracked, burst the ice and resumed their courses. So did History, and we come to the final phase of our narrative.