Maggie & Me

By Damian Barr, 2013

This is a weird book. It’s a very entertaining comic story about a working-class boy growing up and coming to terms with his queerness in a homophobic society. It’s also a detailed picture of physical and sexual abuse within a highly dysfunctional family. And it seems to justify the social and political scene that Damian, the author, recognizes and struggles painfully to overcome.

Damian, now a journalist, knows how to tell a story and fill it with enough detail so that a reader can visualize the scene and see a real person in it. This part is great. I’m always curious to learn about what actual life is like for other people, especially for working-class people, and setting the story in a steelmaking town outside of Glasgow gives it a unique specificity. (Who knew that you’d enjoy two sunsets as the molten steel was poured at the end of the day?)

The fact that Damian knows he is growing up gay makes it especially interesting for me. His exploration of queer sexuality with his school mates, his fear of AIDS at age 12, his overachieving in academics while underachieving in physical activity, these tell a story about growing up gay that many of us can identify with. His many lusts and his friendship with Mark, followed by his betrayal, is poignant.

This is offset by the grim life he leads after his parents divorce and he has to live with his feckless mom and her cruelly abusive boyfriends. Everyone in his extended family except his dad is on the dole and spends their money on drink, leaving Damian often cold and hungry. Author Damian shows these for the horrors that they are, and makes them readable by lightening up the stories with humour. In one extended scene, he decides to strangle his mom’s boyfriend and wraps a cord around his neck when the man is asleep drunk. But the elastic cord stretches when Damian tightens it. The boyfriend pulls it off and sleepily tells Damian to go back to bed.

In the background, while Damian is growing up, Maggie Thatcher is shutting down unprofitable industries, like Scottish steel, cutting social services, and making it illegal for school teachers or councillors to “promote” homosexuality. Growing Damian absorbs a hatred for Maggie from everyone around him, and he can also see how Thatcherite policies harm his family and his own personal life. Author Damian inserts a quote from Thatcher at the start of each chapter, although the connection to the events of the story were obscure at best. Young Damian’s life was hell, and it would have been with or without Thatcher. In the final chapter, 33-year-old Damian revisits his home town and reflects on his life. He bluntly lists half a page of Thatcherite policies that blighted his youth, his family and his community.

But then he makes an extraordinary backflip, calling Maggie his “other mother.” “You saved my life. You were different, like me and you had to fight to be yourself… you made a hero of the individual, a cult of the achiever and I did my homework to impress you.… You hated where I was from and I did too, so you made it OK for me to run away and never look back. You offered me certainty, however grim, when I had none at home. You threw me an escape ladder. You made it possible – but not probable – for me to be the man I am now.”

This is weird. Author Damian is perhaps trying to be realistic in acknowledging that Thatcher forced him to overcome very bad circumstances by working hard and striving for something better. But Thatcher created many of the conditions that he had to overcome, even accepting that the dismal social and economic issues existed before her government. Giving her credit and calling her “mother” would seem simply provocative, except that Damian writes this chapter as if he believes it. But having come this far with him, we know he is intelligent, analytical and a keen observer. It undermines the rest of the book to end on this note of uncritical sentimentality. It leaves the book in the camp of social conservatives who say, Yes, Maggie was tough, but she brought Britain into a new era of wealth and influence. I don’t think that’s what Damian believes, so why does he end a moving story on that sour note?

Swimming in the Dark

By Tomasz Jedrowski, 2021

Although the story line feels a bit contrived, this novel is interesting for its realistic details about a young man growing up gay in 1980s Poland.

The protagonist Ludwik grows up with his mother and his granny in a small post-war apartment, barely getting by on his mom’s government salary. They listen to Radio Free Europe and she tells him how the Russians, now allies, murdered Poles in the Second World War. The Soviet Palace of Culture dominates the grey skyline. He knows the regime is corrupt and repressive, but does not question it as a youth.

Ludwik has boyhood crushes on other boys, and meets the handsome and accomplished Janusz at a farm work camp when he finishes high school. They fall in love, but Ludwik wants to escape the repressive state, while Janusz believes that accepting the compromises is worthwhile because the state has lifted the lives of poor working people. And he believes he can rise within the system. Janusz gets a job censoring newspapers and is satisfied. Ludwik can’t get behind anything, and studies for his doctorate. They see each other only in secret.

Janusz introduces Ludwik to some powerful, wealthy Poles, and Ludwik sees first-hand the corruption in the Polish government. Ludwik is drawn to the underground anti-government movement, but as he goes through college, he makes more compromises. When his landlady becomes sick and cannot get the care she needs in the public health system, he turns to his powerful new friends. Desperate to get a visa to America, he confesses his sexuality and finds that his friends’ worldly experience has made them more accepting than the broader Polish society.

The inevitable conflict with Janusz plays out. They hide their sexuality because Janusz knows it would block his bureaucratic future. Ludwik pleads with Janusz to leave with him, but Janusz has too much to lose. In parts of the novel, Ludwik addresses Janusz from America, relishing the freedom while expressing his loneliness. In spite of the dark tone of the novel, it ends on a somewhat more hopeful note in America.

The novel, set in the 1970s and ’80s – that is, before the revolutionary Solidarnosz movement – sets the freedom of America as a contrast to the repressive Polish soviet regime. However, there is no detail about Ludwik’s new life in New York. It exists only as a vague beacon of freedom, with no reality to it. This and the loneliness Ludwik feels in the USA tempers its attractiveness. Knowing the opening of Polish politics and society that are to follow shortly after the novel ends makes me think that there might be a more hopeful outcome in Poland. Certainly, the deep conservatism of Polish society – and its recent homophobic government – would not make an easy queer life in Poland. But at moments in the novel, Ludwik is deeply connected to Poland, as when he stops into a village church and feels spiritually united with the singing crowd.

The storyline with its lovers at cross purposes and its noble compromises feels in places like a set up. Ludwik seems rather naïve for someone who grew up in a corrupt system. Janusz is a bit of a straw puppet, and other characters, like the professor who explains how Ludwik needs to get an influential sponsor, don’t seem quite believable.

In spite of its weaknesses, I did find the novel compelling and revealing. It’s the first story of growing up gay in the soviet system that I’ve come across, and it’s interesting to see the same themes show up as in western coming out stories – the youthful crushes, the attachment to revealing books, the struggles to overcome social pressures while attempting to build a relationship. The specific differences in the repressive and corrupt challenges are there, but the story is familiar. (And perhaps this story is more a western one than a Polish one as its author was born in Germany to Polish parents, and educated in England and France.) It’s an interesting and relatable story for queer readers.

The Buried Giant

By Kazuo Ishiguro, 2015

Like many of Ishiguro’s novels, this one involves a form of quest epic, though it is more explicit and classic than in his other novels. But instead of a realistic setting in the recent past, this one has a magical setting in Britain’s Arthurian past. The plot, the setting and the language are all mythic in form, but the object of their quest is uncertain. It’s never clear what anyone is seeking, and everyone is deceiving the others with their own secrets. The one constant is memory. The characters all seem uncertain about their past, and talk about a magical mist from the dragon Querig’s breath that seems to weaken their memory.

The central storyline involves Beatrice and Axl, an aged and loving couple who want to reunite with their son. Axl remembers a vague story involving a woman, but Beatrice does not or perhaps she prefers not to. She thinks she will remember the way to find their son, but Axl isn’t sure she will. They are both afraid that when they are tested they won’t remember enough of their story together to prove their love. When they recover their son’s story, it becomes tragic.

In their travels, they meet cryptic boatmen, corrupt monks, seductive maidens, a Saxon warrior, an Arthurian knight, a haunted but ambitious youth and several fearsome beasts. They remember things about themselves that may or may not be true. Interestingly, while everyone fears the dragon Querig, who seems to be responsible for the mist of memory, it takes very little to destroy it and begin to restore memory. But recovering the memories still takes work and it does not resolve the characters’ questions.

This subverts the conventional love story – instead of a young hero and heroine overcoming obstacles, the mature love of Beatrice and Axl is the central story and the main obstacle is their fear of losing their love by forgetting their times together.

The story also undermines some key English myths. The Saxon warrior Wistan challenges the common picture of Arthur as a wise and honourable king. In violation of Arthur’s agreement with the Saxons, the Britons slaughter the Saxon women and children. Sir Gawain, who joins the quest for a while, thinks the memory mist is Arthur’s strategy to prevent Saxons from taking revenge. Wistan wants to restore people’s memories so that they will take vengeance on the Britons. He is a heroic and sympathetic character even though his quest is for a violent uprising by a defeated people.

This has resonance with contemporary national struggles: the victors tell their own stories and deliberately wipe out memories of their enemies’ history. But even if useful, this strategy comes at the cost of integrity and truth. And of course it’s not effective because defeated peoples don’t forget their history even when it is buried (presumably the buried giant of the title). Instead, the victors lose the truth of their own stories and distort their own values when they suppress those of other people.

Putting all of this in mythic terms has the effect of abstracting it. The formal story-telling language makes a reader slow down and wonder about the magical mist and the mysterious creatures. The wealth of stories included in the main narrative takes a reader in different directions trying to fit it all together. What are we to make of the truth-seeking boatmen? Or the nasty beasts that the travellers encounter? Or of the dangers of the abbey? Or the entrancing women? Like the myths of Gawain and the Arthurian tales, they are open to various interpretations while they keep the story moving from one tale to another. None are explained, but all are somewhere between the world of lost memories and the dangers of the traveller’s journeys.

Ishiguro puts all of this together brilliantly. The prose is simple, descriptive and poetic. It has an oral tone that sounds like a bard telling an epic story. The characters are sympathetic, and heroic when called on. The novel is a fascinating and enjoyable creation of an epic myth around contemporary themes of identity, memory, aging and politics.