Jack Kerouac's London - 1957

Jack Kerouac, 1957 - by Jerry Yulsman

“Paris is a woman but London is an independent man puffing his pipe in a pub.” – Jack Kerouac.

Fifty years ago this month, early on the morning of October 21^st 1969, the writer Jack Kerouac passed away aged 47. A little over a decade before his death the publication of his second novel, On The Road (1957), based on the real-life events of a madcap road trip across America made with his close buddy, Neal Cassady, catapulted him to fame. The book, which was initially drafted on a single continuous teletype roll without margins or paragraph breaks in a three week Benzedrine fuelled marathon, notoriously defined a generation – the ‘Beat Generation.’

On the eve of his success in February 1957 he boarded a Yugoslavian ship, the Slovenia (probably the Jugolinija freighter, Slovenija, built in 1951), leaving Brooklyn on a twelve day crossing bound for Tangier in Morocco. He and a somewhat unfriendly Yugoslavian woman were the only passengers on board the freighter. While crossing the Atlantic the ship encountered a large storm which tossed the boat about quite a bit. Watching the towering wall-like waves descending on the ship from his porthole, Kerouac had to pad the length of his bunk with pillows in order to wedge himself in and prevent him from being thrown out of it. Once the storm abated he spent his time befriending the ship’s two cats. Eventually the ship sighted land. Kerouac at first thought the mountains he could see on the thin line of the horizon was Africa but later found out it was actually the coast of Spain. 

Slovenija, built 1951

In Tangier he stayed with his friend, the writer, William S. Burroughs. Burroughs was living in exile having accidentally shot his wife at a party in Mexico City in 1951, so the story goes, when playing a trick which went wrong. The couple’s party-piece was supposedly a William Tell-like game in which Burroughs wife, Joan, balanced a whisky glass upon her head and Burroughs, a gun enthusiast, would shoot it off. The couple were both drunk and high at the time of the incident, and their relationship was also somewhat strained. The exact details of how Joan’s death occurred are sketchy. Burroughs later skipped over the border to Mexico and so was convicted of manslaughter in absentia for killing Joan.

Tangier, Morocco, 1957 - by Allen Ginsberg (Getty Museum)

In Tangier Kerouac and Burroughs spent their time wandering around the town, the beach, and the surrounding hills, getting high or writing in their digs. There was also another ex-pat American writer, a long-established resident in Tangier, Paul Bowles – author of one of my most favourite novels, The Sheltering Sky (1947). Even though Kerouac stayed in Tangier for around a month his account of this trip doesn’t mention Bowles, who had little to do with Burroughs at that time – much to Burroughs chagrin. Bowles was very likely away travelling and so it seems unlikely that Kerouac met Bowles during his stay in Morocco. However, a few years later the luminaries of the so-called ‘Beat Generation’ en masse descended on Tangier – Bowles wasn’t overly impressed with the new American counter-culture trend, writing to his parents in 1961: “Everyday one sees more and more beards and filthy blue jeans, and the girls look like escapees from lunatic asylums, with white lipstick and black smeared around their eyes, and matted hair hanging around their shoulders. The leaders of the ‘movement’ have moved their headquarters here.” Here Bowles is referring to Burroughs, and the poets, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso – but Tangier wasn’t the Beats’ headquarters for long as all three moved on soon afterwards. Bowles did meet Kerouac some years later in New York, Jack giving him a signed copy of his novel, The Subterraneans.

Kerouac in Tangier, 1957 - by William S. Burroughs

Leaving Tangier by boat again, this time travelling fourth class – a decision Kerouac came to regret somewhat, as once on board he discovered the five dollars he’d saved on the fare meant he was not provided with either food or a bunk throughout the passage to the south coast of France. From Marseilles Kerouac planned to hitchhike his way north to Paris, but soon found this wasn’t going to be a viable way to travel as no one stopped to pick him up, so instead he took a series of buses and trains. Travelling through Provence to Arles and Avignon, the landscape evoking thoughts and reveries of famous artists, such as Van Gogh and Cezanne, as well as poets and writers, such as Rimbaud, Flaubert, Balzac, Genet and Celine. In Paris he wandered, similarly in awe of the city’s “Proustian showgoers” hailing cabs on the boulevards, passing through Saint-Germain-des-Prés – erstwhile haunt of Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir – spending his time getting footsore tramping around the endless galleries of the Louvre, again revelling in his descriptions of the paintings he saw there. “Fragonard, so delicate next to Van Dyck, and a big smoky Rubens (La Mort de Dido). – But the Rubens got better as I looked, the muscle tones in cream and pink, the rimshot luminous eyes, the dull purple velvet robe on the bed.” Haunting bookshops, and presumably the famous bouquinistes along the River Seine, near Notre Dame. Enchanted by the Sacré Coeur in Monmartre. He seems to have relished the charm of eating simple fare – coffee and pastries for breakfast; onion soup, fresh bread, pâté, and “thin stemmed glasses” of red wine for dinner. Everywhere he goes compulsively commenting on the beautiful women he sees. 

Sacré-Cœur, Montmartre, Paris, 1957 - By Inge Morath

From Paris he set off for London. He had just enough money in his pocket to see him across the English Channel, intending to pick up a royalty cheque from his London publisher when he arrived. “Swiftly we left the French shore and after a spate of blank water we began to see green carpets and meadows stopped abruptly as with a pencil line at chalk cliffs, and it was that sceptered isle, England, springtime in England.” – As with Paris, he was already in love with the idea of London before he reached it. Invoking pilgrim-like thoughts in anticipation of its mysterious, Dickensian atmosphere. Imagining himself exploring the city’s twisting streets and alleys in the thick ‘pea-souper’ London fog, like a character in a Sherlock Holmes story. 

Victoria Station, London - 1956

 

Arriving by rail at Victoria Station he had an impromptu brush with the law, finding himself suddenly accosted by a group of London “Bobbies.” As he describes it this was probably because he was unshaved and “looked like a bum,” but also because he arrived in close proximity to a “Negro” fellow (Kerouac’s word) who seemed to be somewhat mentally unstable. His travelling companion, who he’d seen on the same boat from France but whom he didn’t actually know, had no passport or other travel documents and so was duly hauled off by the Police. It’s interesting to note that this was also the time of the arrival of the so-called ‘Windrush Generation’ – people from the dominions of the British Empire in the Caribbean who were officially invited to settle in the UK; many of whom similarly had no documentation, a fact which has recently caused significant controversy and injustice with the heavy-handed and overtly racist bureaucracy of the ‘hostile environment’ initiated by Theresa May’s Tory government, shamefully seeking to expel them and their descendants from the UK irrespective of their long and decent law abiding contributions to cosmopolitan British society over the last six decades. Kerouac defined the Beats as “sympathetic” – relating himself to all struggling peoples – the working class, the underprivileged, the down and outs – the vast underclass of society who are all simply trying to make their way in the world, free of the shackles and the burdens of conformity and prejudice. 

Victoria Station, London - 1956

Arriving at Victoria with scant money on him, Kerouac soon found himself in deepening hot water, with a British immigration officer questioning him closely. He only managed to convince the man that he really was a writer when scrabbling in his rucksack he managed to produce a magazine article about himself and the writer, Henry Miller. This sufficiently impressed the officer, who claimed the British authorities had also recently detained Miller too! – And so, with genuine relief, Kerouac suddenly found himself free to go. He set out on foot, tramping his way, via Buckingham Palace, to the Strand.

The Strand - Street of Ink, 1969 - by Ron Embleton

In my late teens and early twenties I read a lot of books by, and about, Jack Kerouac. I used to write a lot of poems when I was at Sixth Form College too. It was a creative time for my friends and me, a sort of Dead Poets Society. We mainly circulated our poems in a kind of handwritten samizdat, with a few getting published in the college’s weekly newsletter. A friend in my Classics class asked me one day if I liked Jack Kerouac. “Never heard of him, who he?” – I replied. The friend thrust a copy of Maggie Cassidy (1959) into my hands and said: “You need to read him.” The friend was right. I was instantly hooked. There was something about the lyrical oddity in the way Kerouac wrote which seemed to zap straight to the centre of my mind. I didn’t always understand all of the things that he was saying, but I liked the way he was saying it. His writing thrummed with an energy and intensity. The words seemed to rocket along at a pace which was both thrilling and intoxicating. I loved the way that whatever Kerouac was scribbling about (or pounding out on his typewriter) he always seemed to be on the move, and he had a band of close friends with whom he clearly forged deep and lasting almost spiritual connections – this seemed to click with me and how I perceived my own friends. 

Silent film footage of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg et al in New York, 1959

Kerouac’s books spoke about freedom, escape, creativity, exploration, openness, spirituality, hedonism, love, anguish, despair, poverty, the feeling of being trapped – but knowing that one day you’d exceed the horizon and excel into the limitless future. All things could happen and probably would, given time, inclination, personal drive, ambition, faith and belief. All the things that seem so vital and so appealing to a youthful adolescent with similar fledgling literary ambitions. All the things which characterise that first awakening, and the possibilities which seem so limitless and abundant at that time of life. Exploring who you are, who you might be, what you might do, and where you might go, both alone and in the company of your closest friends. Kerouac’s world, and more importantly his prose and his poetry, seemed to sing itself electric about all of these things, the most vitally important themes of life. Even though he was essentially of my grandparents’ generation, he was exploring and encapsulating a zeitgeist which remains eternal. He has distilled what it means to be young and alive to the world lived at large. The timelessness of the jazz age and the distinctly American lyrical-tone he used to describe it all only adds to the sense of 'cool' – at the time, making it all the more appealing to the staid boringness of my English suburban upbringing.

One of the things about his books, especially novels like On The Road, Desolation Angels, The Dharma Bums, or The Vanity of Duluoz, which was most appealing was the idea that you could just get into a beat-up old car and drive and drive and drive across the vast expanse of America, disappearing into a land of endless adventure. By comparison the UK seemed very small and hemmed in, hence why his books lent themselves so greatly to the imagination. But happily I remember reading his collection of travel sketches, Lonesome Traveler (1960), in the summer when I was transitioning between Sixth Form and University, when I first read his account of his “Big Trip to Europe” in 1957. This was the first thing he’d written which I felt I could actually relate to, because here he was in my city, walking the streets that I knew, exploring my world and describing it in words which I could really properly get to grips with. This was clearly the piece which would connect me most closely to him as a person and as a writer. And the line that was key for me was when he describes reaching Saint Paul’s Cathedral on that first walk from Victoria Station – “… where it got too Johnsonianly sad. – So I turned back, tired, and went into the King Lud pub for a sixpenny Welsh rarebit and a stout.”

Ludgate Hill, c.1890 (Science Museum, London)

 

The thought that I could go and find the very pub in which Kerouac had drunk a pint of stout was too exciting to believe. Guinness was one of my top tipples at the time and the idea that I could find this very same pub and sit there sipping a pint of the ‘Liffey Water,’ just as he had done, was thrilling. But this was in the days before the internet. In order to find the pub I’d have to go there and wander about in search of it. Which is exactly what I did. Wandering down Ludgate Hill seemed a good place to start, but every pub thereabouts seemed to have a name far removed from that of the eponymous King Lud. It was becoming rather baffling and so I eventually asked a passer-by, someone who looked like he might appreciate a good pub and so be somewhat knowledgeable upon the subject and perhaps the locale too. “Yes,” he said, “that name rings a bell. I think it’s down there, on the corner.” And then, just as he was about to turn and go on his way, he added: “I think it might have changed its name though.” 

The King Lud, Ludgate Circus, c.1900

My sketch of the King Lud (Hogshead), 3 March 1995

He was right. There was a pub there, but it was called The Hogshead at Ludgate. Pubs in the early 1990s were beginning to struggle financially. The Wetherspoons phenomenon meant that many breweries were merging and turning their pubs into branded chains. Each one identikit and in essence absolutely boring and characterless. Hogshead was no exception. I walked through the door to find a vast open interior with a long continuous bar running down the left-hand side of the room. It was a beer hall of the most modern sort, essentially designed to pack in as many people as possible for televised football matches. A vast, echoey space with sanded-down floorboards and distressed wood panelling, attempting to fool everyone that it was old when in all likelihood it had been genuinely old before its modern make-over. So many lovely old Victorian pubs have succumbed to this architectural-business-rationale-driven plague. It’s criminal. The King Lud it seemed was just such a victim. The old pub gone and rebuilt with just its façade preserved for posterity. Nevertheless, I bought myself a pint of Guinness and found a table at the very back of the pub, which was a bit cosier than the front. Taking a sip I wondered what it would have been like when Kerouac stopped here. Welsh rarebit sadly was very definitely no longer on the menu.

Looking up the King Lud on the 'interweb' today there still seem to be a lot of fond memories of this pub circulating. It apparently, very proudly trumpeted its claim to be the actual place of origin for Welsh rarebit – although many people very much doubt this fact. Lots of British pubs like to make grand claims such as this, and some more than others manage to stick fast in the local folklore forevermore. It seems probable that the King Lud was gutted and refurbished when the railway viaduct which ran very close behind the building was completely dismantled and removed – but essentially the façade is just as it was when the pub was built in the late 19^th century. The carved wooden faces of King Lud himself still looked down from the lintels above the doors. They must have seen Kerouac entering the pub, just as they'd watched over me.

Interestingly, Kerouac mentions that the ruins of “Hitler’s blitz” were still visible in the area surrounding Saint Paul’s. Contemporary photographs taken by Hans Richard Griebe capture perfectly the atmosphere Kerouac describes (see here). From the early 1990s up to the present day, the area has been significantly redeveloped – Kerouac and Griebe would hardly recognise it today. And the Hogshead, the former King Lud, itself – where, thereafter, I often used to drink during my undergraduate days – is very sadly no longer a pub at all today. The stout and the Welsh rarebit are now both long gone.

Another location Kerouac describes is the hotel where he stayed, near Leicester Square – “… I got a fifteen-bob room in the Mapleton Hotel (in the attic) and had a long divine sleep with the window open, in the morning the carillons blowing all of an hour round eleven and the maid bringing in a tray of toast, butter, marmalade, hot milk and a pot of coffee as I lay there amazed.” – This building still survives, and although no longer called the Mapleton a part of it at least is still a functioning hotel. Sadly the ground floor street-front, chock-full with little shops selling tourist souvenirs and bureau de changes, manages to obscure the old building entirely. A Pathé newsreel from 1951, showing the fire brigade rescuing a woman from the hotel's parapet, gives an idea as to what the hotel used to look like (see here) – but, as the newsreel footage has no commentary, it’s not clear how or why the woman came to be stuck out on the hotel’s roof and required rescuing. The incident clearly seems to have drawn a crowd of concerned onlookers. It’s certainly the busiest part of London town. A short walk away is Piccadilly Circus where walking back to the Mapleton one night, perhaps after savouring the illicit delights of nearby Soho (which he certainly knew thereof), Kerouac got talking to some Teddy Boys who jokingly asked him if, as a fellow American, he personally knew the famous jazz musician, Gerry Mulligan. Curiously Kerouac doesn't mention the fact that there was a very popular "all-nighter"  jazz club in the basement of the Mapleton Hotel, called 'Club Americana' (see here). Although, thinking about it, perhaps that's why he was still in bed at 11am when the maid brought in his breakfast of toast and marmalade!

Piccadilly Circus, c.1950s

Teddy Boys - London, 1955 (Associated Press)

Kerouac mentions looking up the French heraldic shield of his ancestral family name at the British Museum and finding the family motto which accompanied it suitably ‘Beat’ – “Love, work and suffer.” He doesn’t mention it, but I imagine his route from the Mapleton to the BM could very well have been a stroll up the Charing Cross Road, famous for London’s bookshops (sadly now much depleted) – where at the time another American writer was engaged in a wonderfully eccentric correspondence with a British bookseller. Helene Hanff’s letters to Frank Doel were published in 1970 as a book, 84 Charing Cross Road. Writing from New York to place orders for obscure books on English literature with the booksellers, Mark’s & Co., where Frank Doel worked, she and Doel struck up an unlikely long distance friendship which slowly grew over time with Hanff eventually sending him, his family, and his co-workers food parcels to supplement the wartime rationing which continued in Britain long after the end of the Second World War. Sadly she never got to meet Doel in person. He died in 1968. She did, however, make the trip to London just after 84 Charing Cross Road was published – just in time to see the empty shop, which had recently closed down. This trip is entertainingly described in Hanff’s book, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street (1973). Reading Hanff and Kerouac as a native Brit, it is interesting to see London and the British from a distinctly American point of view – both writers seem to fixate with good-natured glee upon the British vernacular, parodying the British accent a la Dick Van Dyke in the Disney film, Mary Poppins.

The British Museum, c.1950s

The Old Vic, Waterloo

Before Kerouac left London he returned to Saint Paul’s and experienced a small epiphany whilst listening to the choir there singing Johann Sebastian Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion on Good Friday – “Holy Bach spoke to me and in front of me was a magnificent marble bas-relief showing Christ and three Roman soldiers listening: ‘And he spake unto them do violence to no man, nor accuse any falsely, and be content with thy wages.’” He also took in a play. “At the last moment I discovered the Old Vic while waiting for my boat train to Southampton. – The performance was Antony and Cleopatra. – It was a marvellously smooth and beautiful performance, Cleopatra’s words and sobbings more beautiful than music …” – From this we can likely infer that he left London from Waterloo Station rather than Victoria. The cast of Antony and Cleopatra at the Old Vic in 1957 starred Keith Michell, Margaret Whiting, and Derek Godfrey – the last of whom later starred in the same theatre as Oberon alongside Judi Dench and Frankie Howerd in a Midsummer Night’s Dream in the following season. Seeing Shakespeare performed on the stage in the Bard’s native land was for Kerouac the perfect end to his literary pilgrimage through France and England. Little did he know that it was also the prelude to his own elevation to the pantheon of literary greats. 

Saint Paul's Cathedral, 1954 - by Hans Richard Griebe

Shortly after he returned to the United States his second and most famous novel, On The Road, was published and a review written by Gilbert Millstein for the New York Times catapulted Kerouac into the public consciousness. His life was never the same again. As is true of other extremely sensitive artists – essentially introspective people inadvertently wrong-footed by the success of their own talents – fame was something which didn’t sit so well with Kerouac. After years spent drifting in various jobs, trying to make ends meet, scrapping together enough money to pay for the next trip and the next adventure, he was still deep-down inside a struggling writer. A man more accustomed to obscurity, longing for greatness and recognition. He was much more used to observing the world, but now that he’d finally made it and found that the world was watching him so acutely in its turn, things were suddenly sent wildly off kilter. Despite the successful subsequent publication of his prolific backlog of other writings thereafter, many of which had previously been rejected by various publishers, this intense literary spotlight precipitated a sad decade of decline. He passed away, a victim of his own despondency made manifest in frequent bouts of unrestrained alcoholism, a little over a decade after that “Big Trip to Europe” in which he had wandered so freely and so unknown through the streets of Tangier, Paris, and London. At heart, a true lonesome traveller, summing up the essence of his life: – “Railroad work, sea work, mysticism, mountain work, lasciviousness, solipsism, self-indulgence, bullfights, drugs, churches, art museums, streets of cities, a mishmash of life as lived by an independent educated penniless rake going anywhere.” – Amen.

 Jack Kerouac on the Steve Allen Show, 1959

Postscript: In 2012, the original teletype manuscript – “The Scroll” – the first draft of On The Road was put on display for a short time at the British Library in London (see here). I went to see it. It was a fascinating thing to behold, especially given the almost mythical status this document has accrued over time, making it a kind of mystical modern-day holy relic in its own right – if only Jack could have known on that day when he looked up his ancestral coat of arms in the British Museum Library that one day his inspired 'spontaneous prose' magnum opus would be displayed by the same institution in its new home just a few blocks up the street from the BM in Bloomsbury. I wonder what he would have thought of that? – Rather fittingly, for a writer who had been proud to work for a short time as a railroad brakeman in California (as he describes in another essay in Lonesome Traveler – “The Railroad Earth”), the present site of the British Library was a railway stockyard at the time he visited London.

A London 'Bobby' on Ludgate Hill, c.1950s

~

A newly revised version of the essay above was published in September 2023 as a limited edition 'chapbook' by Beat Scene Magazine, titled JACK KEROUAC: LONESOME TRAVELLER IN LONDON – 1957. For more information, please click here.

If you are interested in seeing what Kerouac’s 1957 walk through London looks like today (in January 2025), eminent psychogeographer, John Rogers, has posted his own video diary retracing the walk and telling of his similar fascination with this Kerouac-London connection: – which you can watch here. I highly recommend John’s YouTube channel, it’s one of my favourites with lots more to explore, particularly of London and its surrounding areas.

Andrei Makine - An Homage to Lost Time

I first discovered the writer Andreï Makine in the pages of the TLS in 2000. It was a review of his novel, Once Upon the River Love. I remember the review intrigued me so much that I went straight to one of the big bookshops on London’s Charing Cross Road (Books, etc. – sadly now long gone) where I found and bought a copy. Just reading the first page I sensed there was something special about the way these words were crafted (and so ably translated, as are all Makine’s books, by Geoffrey Strachan). I was hooked. I went on to read his subsequent books, almost keeping pace at first, as each was translated into English. I began to see how certain themes recur in his novels. These seemed to give hints and clues, suggestive of the author’s own background. Indeed, Makine’s own story is as intriguing as his plotlines. Over the years, the interviews with him which I’ve read in newspapers and magazines tend to give very scant detail about this author and his life – reading them, it’s almost as if he is one of his own characters, so deftly yet sparingly sketched out. A loose yet fluid set of lines, roughing out the suggestion of a figure, lightly delineated on a blank white page. A form upon which we can overlay the contours of a character. Indeed, it seems all too easy for us to project something of our own imaginations as readers, conjuring up the picture of a man as exile, as a writer, as an artist.

The fact’s state: he was born in the USSR, in Krasnoyarsk in 1957. He was allowed by the Soviet authorities to come to Paris in 1987 as part of a teacher’s exchange programme, where – despite the thawing of the Cold War – he defected to the West. He was granted asylum. Lived rough for a while, including two weeks living in a cemetery. He settled in Paris, and has lived there ever since. Absolutely committed to a writer’s life. His major breakthrough came with the publication of his novel, Le Testament Français, in 1995. A novel which achieved the unprecedented feat of winning both the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Medicis, as well as the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens. Writing in French prose so finely crafted he had to claim his books were translations from Russian originals in order to persuade his publishers that he’d actually written them himself. Before coming to France, in the Soviet Union he’d been a teacher. He’d also served in the Red Army, tank corps; posted to conflict zones in Angola and Afghanistan. He was an orphan, raised by his grandmother. Makine may well even be an adopted name; the grandmother perhaps not his grandmother after all. Such are the sketchy details, the bare bones of possible facts which seem to beg for elaboration. Facts that suggest so many questions, but how to sift through such layers so lightly laid down – they seem so thin, almost opaque, like the thin leaves of the thinnest onion-skin Bible paper. Not so much the whole truth, but rather nothing of the truth at all? – Less of a life’s testament than a palimpsest of speculation. Questions and echoes.

But perhaps the facts are all there? – Hiding in plain sight. After all, the themes which recur most frequently across his novels seem to echo those bare facts known of the author’s life. The grandmother who speaks French. Looking down the barrel of a tank gun in a conflict zone. An exiled writer seeking to reconnect with the past. Familiar tropes indeed. Albeit refracted in myriad ways which make the truth even harder to pin down. But then that’s the essence of all his stories right there. It’s not so much about the truth as more about the feeling. The reckoning with an unfathomable past. How the individual is lost in the immensity of history. Engulfed and overwhelmed, yet somehow surviving. Bobbing back up to the surface. Constantly. Carried along by the tidal flow of time and events. And eventually set down on the wayside of history to think, ponder and reflect on all of it. What it means, what matters, and, moreover, what doesn’t matter at all. Life isn’t lived in the details of history, but rather that’s where a life is lost. It’s only in the present resurfacing that through recollection some sort of sense can be made of it all. But even then, all those certainties unfathomed and arrived at can all be swept away again in the merest blink of an instant. After which, once emerged again; shot out from the other side of the welter, can we begin to recalibrate, realign, reset and remember from a different vantage point. Life is fluid. Unchanging in its ceaseless changeability. Like Heraclitus’ river.

Makine is often compared to other writers: To Proust. Tolstoy. Bonin. Chekov. Balzac. Stendal. Solzhenitsyn. But I tend to think this is simply a lazy journalistic take. He’s Russian; he writes in French. Perhaps at best though such comparisons are a means to attempt to signpost him, pointing as definitively as possible in the direction of truly great literature. The grand tradition of the Great Russian novel. A la recherché … and all that. Which is fine by me. I think Makine is probably one of our greatest living writers. But I think in time he will come to be seen as standing amidst this august company on his own terms. For the distinctiveness of his own voice and for the themes he chooses to explore and unpick that most clearly characterise our own era. In that sense I genuinely think he is one of the foremost writers of our times. And I say this because he captures our present preoccupation with the past so well. Such that he is capturing not just the zeitgeist of the present, but that he is doing so in a way which is refracting even within the rapidly changing nature of our times. When I began reading his works there was a sense of nostalgia mixed with a fascination for the incomprehensible. As a child growing up in the 1980s, at the tail end of the Cold War (not that we really knew it was the tail end at the time), the Second World War still didn’t seem all that long ago. It was still a living memory, as was the First World War even. But the world I knew, the world I was growing up in, seemed utterly removed from those two calamitous eras. Life was now infinitely better and improved. There was still a looming existential threat, nuclear holocaust and mutually assured destruction; but it all seemed so very far away. And as the thaw set in with the era of Glasnost and Perestroika everything seemed to be heading in the right direction. The end of the decade only confirmed it. The Fall of the Berlin Wall, the Velvet Revolution (overlooking the inconvenient anomalies of Tiananmen Square and the former Yugoslavia) – the 1990s now seem like halcyon days, all taken so much for granted. Requiem for the East bridges this divide perfectly, yet it also manages to highlight the undercurrents which persist (largely unseen but there in plain sight) into the present day.

Now though such things are getting harder not to see. It feels like we’re stuck in a deracinating chaos of rising nationalism, xenophobia, gameshow politicians summoning up goose-stepping delusions towards a nostalgia for broken empires and far flung wars, domestic terrorism, austerity, minimum living wages, zero-hours contracts, food banks, gold-plated elevators, expense claim scandals relating to superfluous second homes with pay-as-you-go pornography, duck houses and moats. Brexit as tragedy, farce and folly. Remembrance Day charity campaigns in which children wearing T-shirts with the slogan “Future Soldier” emblazoned across the front parade holding giant plastic red poppies – Lest we Forget, and, Never Again … Lions led by Donkeys; twas ever thus, and, so it seems, still it is. Hollow words parroted for unthinking times. Hidden agendas parodied into reality. “Fake News” fabricating a new set of Emperor’s clothes to distract from a corrupt and greedy global system which somehow manages to sustain itself as one economy after another tanks itself. Third World Debt. First World Guilt. Climate Change Denial. We’re not waving, we’re drowning in the largest gyre of plastic waste ever recorded choking the oceans and being ingested in the very food we all eat and the water we drink. What the hell has happened to all our bright tomorrows? That happy future heralded by the chants of ‘Freiheit’ – ‘Freedom’ and the ‘wind of change’ which we heard sung of so loudly and optimistically in the 1990s? – Makine himself has spoken out against these First World delusions and the duplicity underlying them in perhaps the most public forum he could, when being inducted into the Académie Française in 2016.

When I first began reading Andreï Makine’s novels they appealed to me because I simply couldn’t imagine what it must have been like to live through the horrors and deprivations of the two World Wars. What it must have been like to lead a life defined by duty and self-sacrifice. Even though I’d heard my grandparents telling their life stories, describing what it was really like. I could never properly picture what it would have been like had I had to live through it. The UK is unhealthily obsessed with this period – we were taught about it over and over at school, it’s on our television screens every night, either in documentaries (Dan Snow, Dan Snow, and more Dan Snow…), or sit-coms (think Dad’s Army, Allo Allo, Goodnight Sweetheart, etc.) – and this has been a constant since I was a child. Our Finest Hour. Never to be forgotten. And don’t you forget it! … But likewise, as a child of the Cold War, I was fascinated by what life might be like had I lived on the other side of the Iron Curtain. I vividly remember watching the parades of Soviet missile transporters passing through Moscow shown on the TV News. It was both chilling and beguiling. I later got a taste of what it might have been like when I stayed with a family in East Berlin in 1993. Makine’s novels give a window into that lost world of fear, labour camps, the KGB and Joseph Stalin forever looking over your shoulder and listening in on you. Of loyalties betrayed. The many veils of idealism and ideology. Naivety met by the bluntness suddenly emerging from the shadowy fog of reality. The deep lacerations of individual lives coerced, distorted, twisted and broken as so deftly described in A Hero’s Daughter.

His novels are often stories within stories. Not so much Russian dolls, but rather that strangely displaced schism of the mind – the here and now attempting to comprehend and contend with the past and its echoes. His novels always manage to expertly explore the place of the solitary human within that wider history, of the individual within that vast inhuman machinery of the State, and of States at war. Yet within this giant whirligig of time he manages to find small but universal anchors in the form of love, music, personal connection, links which lead ultimately to some form of redemption or reparation. The Life of an Unknown Man captures this perfectly. His novels can seem outwardly bleak but losing yourself within the sonorous nature of Makine’s prose they become transformative, and they somehow always manage to end on a profound note of hope and optimism. Nihilism has its silver linings. No matter how bad things become in the end the individual holds true. Hope shines through. Time is lost, but time is also regained even if it is reshaped – time and its recall remould us, reader and character, anew. This is the process and the point of indulging in or undertaking such strenuous meditations on the past. Experiencing the emotions of people other than ourselves. We know nothing if we don’t know what empathy truly is.

In that sense all Makine’s books are an homage to the indomitable spirit of ordinary souls who manage to remain unbroken by the malicious intent of the collective machine. The essential soul of all his characters ultimately survive and emerge unscathed. They represent a poetic homage to hope as the essential element of the human condition. And I hope, reading Makine, particularly in these troubled times; I hope that his books prove to be prescient and right. I still believe in that indomitable spirit of revolution which marked my teenage years so indelibly in the early 1990s – hence I hope our here and now is simply the story within a story that I will one day tell to my niece and nephews, and them to their children someday too. When the bright new tomorrows have eventually returned.