The Good Terrorist Book Review
There are words we can’t say on Youtube. Words, that if I was to use them in this video, would likely lead to it being suppressed in the algorithm. You can imagine what some of these words are – your mother probably told you not to say them when you were a kid. And when I suggest that many of them are also of a political nature, you can also probably imagine what topics might be covered. I can understand why they need to be blacked out, to be honest. The internet can be incredibly obnoxious in areas where people are able to say whatever they want, and Youtube is a commercial platform that relies on sponsors to keep its content creators afloat. It does make it a little difficult to talk about art sometimes though. In my case, I’ve had to rule out speaking about certain books entirely and have even danced around bland political terminology when I’ve covered some that might otherwise have gotten my channel flagged. What’s funny though is that Youtube doesn’t publish an extensive list of what words you can and cannot use, which is frustrating because while you’d think that it would boil down to common sense, there are actually a couple of seemingly innocuous bits of names and language that are outright prohibited – this big green guy for one. Luckily, a Youtuber named Andrew Platt keeps track of it all by manually creating video title after video title to make a note in a public spreadsheet of which words get demonetised. It’s thanks to his efforts I realised that I was probably better off not naming the Doris Lessing novel I recently finished when talking about it here on Content Lit.
Doris Lessing, for those of you who aren’t familiar with her, was a Nobel Prize-winning author who died in 2013. Here she is shooing away some journalists when they tried to make a big deal of her getting the prize. I haven’t read all of her stories. There’s over one hundred of them to get to. But from the few I have read, I can confidently call her one of my favourite authors, because while I haven’t come across any one book I feel like bagged her the Nobel Prize, as a body of work I’ve always been blown away by the level of nuance she can bring to characters that mostly just exist on the periphery in other forms of media, a trait of her writing that’s particularly noteworthy in this book that shall not be named.
The book in question was written in the 1980s and is about a group of people living in a London squat and who are motivated to make a substantial change in the world. To give you an idea of what kind of change they’d like to make, they aren’t the biggest fans of the conservative government, they don’t think that the primary objective of their country should be to protect big money institutions, and they’re sympathetic to a certain organisation in Northern Ireland, even as they display their ignorance as to what that organisation actually cares about. In fact, for much of the novel, you can’t help but feel like this group of squatters is hopelessly naive.
The main character in particular, a woman named Alice whose difficulty with assimilating into society seems more due to her troubled childhood than because of any real politically motivated ideas, has decided to support a man who you could really only describe as a bully and a parasite. Nonetheless, though Alice constantly finds herself drawn back to him even after he betrays her again and again, in general, she isn’t anybody’s fool. She can spot an undercover police officer from a mile away. Knows when a Russian is putting on an American accent. And if anybody in the room has a secret she’ll be the first to suss it out. So, whether you agree with her politics or not, you can’t help but come to admire her resourcefulness. What’s more, because her comrades’ beliefs are so extreme, you begin to see her battle with every decision, from personal hygiene to financial matters, based on whether it lives up to the group’s ideology. On the one hand, this makes the novel a typically insightful achievement for Lessing in that it demonstrates how every single choice you make in your life can be tied to politics. But it also paints an extremely layered portrait of some people who at the end of it all, commit some truly horrific crimes. I’m a few minutes into this video now so I think I get away with saying the title: This is a book about terrorists. And it’s a credit to Lessing that when they succeed in their plans, my knee jerk reaction was to think, but they can’t be terrorists – they’re too human. I suppose you can take this as an indictment against media organisations that have generally reduced perpetrators of these horrible attacks to cartoon villains. Though to say that it’s easy to find redeeming qualities in the people who commit these crimes would be a lie. It’s really thanks to Lessing’s keen eye for the complicated nature of our personalities that allows the message to come across.
Thinking about it now, it seems to me that literature really is the ideal way to explore issues of this type. Even if Youtube didn’t regulate what topics we talk about here, they’d probably become overrun with commenters speaking over one another and that probably isn’t the best way to explore subjects with any kind of gradation. When you read a novel though, you get to engage with a point of view that isn’t necessarily your own and to do so in a non-confrontational manner. I essentially spent two weeks with this group of squatters who if I were to live next door to, would probably have called the police on them a long time ago. I can’t blame you if this doesn’t sound like your type of thing. But if you’re a little bit curious, I do encourage you to pick up a copy. You’ll probably find a lot more interesting ideas in it than what we can talk about here. And if you’d like me to hear me to discuss a similarly complex novel in a bit more detail, then check out my analysis of The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood.
