A friend recommended that I read this, saying that it was ‘a deeply-flawed masterpiece.’ It is certainly deeply flawed, but I found it an engrossing read. The story begins twice and ends twice. It begins with the seven year old English narrator – who goes on to tell half the story – seeing his Uncle Jack sobbing while chopping up a huge piece of meat at his butcher’s shop on the Old Kent Road. The narrator takes the rest of the novel to find out why, and it is an absorbing story. His uncle’s story starts in the Spanish Civil War and includes a stint on the Arctic convoys. But he has met Russian volunteers in Spain and their story (and that of their descendants) is told too –hence descriptions of the Battle for Stalingrad and the Holocaust, and later the suppression of Prague, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Chernobyl disaster – all of which are juxtaposed with the narrator coming of age in Britain during the 60s, 70s and 80s, and coping with fatherhood, infidelity and an insecure job – which creates a mystery since what he does for a living is finally revealed at the end of the novel with its two intriguing endings. I doubt than this will be popular with a general readership: the narrator’s political views are very left wing; the text is packed with literary allusions – I’m sure I didn’t get them all; there are frequent snippets of foreign languages; the narrator’s language is peppered with taboo words – but intellectually it is a stimulating book, ambitious in intent and full of compassion and even at times humour. My friend’s description was accurate in one sense: as I read the novel I came across passages of writing which were perfect and often made me cry or laugh (the chapters dealing with the Holocaust are especially well-written and made me cry, but these competed with the more bland and hackneyed writing about Afghanistan and Chernobyl. But I can see that the narrator is not everyone’s cup of tea: his speech is a strange mixture of erudite and the demotic. Imagine a bookish, foul-mouthed, and well-read Holden Caulfield from South London. The main narrator’s character will divide readers, although I found him engaging and constantly surprising. He is filled with self-loathing and tortured by his personal mistakes. The structure is of the novel is arresting too. There are chapters of third person omniscient narration, but there are many chapters written in the first person by characters in the story. In addition, the story is not told in chronological order and certain key events appear out of chronological order (which creates terrible ironies) or are held back until the end of the text. This in itself, for me, made it a compelling and interesting book because I could never tell what was going to happen next. Despite the chapters dealing with war, the other half of the book is about the main narrator growing up in England and being a father and responding to Thatcherism and divorce and the struggle to maintain good relationships with his children. ‘Keep it Dark’ is a recurring phrase which refers to the lies told by governments, but also the lies and reticence which can blight personal relationships. At one stage of the book I felt I was reading an agit-prop paean to the USSR, but the idealistic narrator learns some important lessons and sheds his idealism in what could be described a political coming-of-age book, which still manages to rescue the past and see it from a different perspective. And as for his Uncle Jack crying – the reasons are slowly revealed and kept me guessing throughout the novel. In conclusion – deeply flawed but ambitious and serious (although there are plenty of jokes too). Too esoteric perhaps for the general reader, but full of surprises and a valiant attempt to re-define the past from a left-wing perspective. A novel that we need now perhaps. If you like novels which can’t be pigeon-holed, if you like intelligent novels which move you and make you think, give this a try. IT is full of suffering, but also full of compassion for that suffering and a hatred of injustice. And it’s a good story. The ending(s) were a complete surprise to me.