Romance and Revolution: Red-Button Years, Volume 2

Reviews

All credit to Ken Fuller. After Love and Labour, the mighty opening tome in his Red-Button Years series, he's avoided the "sequel sag." Romance and Revolution delivers the same compelling combination that marked out the original as one of my fiction books of 2020.

Successfully moulding together stories of the personal, the industrial and the revolutionary responses to a crisis of capitalism, his novel captures the febrile atmosphere in Britain during the later stages of the First World War, as witnessed by Mickey Rice, militant trade unionist and bus driver.

Still reeling from the death of his lover Dorothy Bridgeman, the novel interposes Rice into a sequence of fascinating and pivotal encounters.

Arguably the most intense is Mickey's relationship has Dorothy's upper middle-class mother Ines, as they come together in a shared grief and temporary loneliness. Fuller is good at sex. His writings about the couplings between Mickey and Dorothy are affectionate, anatomical and passionate. The relationship with Ines is equally well-written but it is clear that theirs is not a sustainable affair, with the class differences between them becoming more apparent.

In parallel, Mickey's trade union role intensifies as negotiations between the busworkers and their employers for improvements step up with the end of hostilities. Meetings of union executives could make for the dullest fiction, but Fuller injects a real sense of the vitality of the debates and the urgency of the issues under discussion.

It's not just busworkers pushing back against wartime privations. The novel encompasses the growth in militancy by a range of workers, including the police, train drivers and soldiers. The soldiers' animus is exacerbated by a number of issues, not least the British government's desire to send thousands of them to help snuff out the new Bolshevik regime in Russia.

And it is the fact of the Revolution and the inspiration it provides to the more advanced sections of the British working class that truly drives the narrative in this book. Events centre on the impressive figure of Theo Rothstein, the unrecognised Soviet ambassador who meets with leading trade unionists such as George Sanders to encourage support for the new regime in the face of growing imperialist aggression.

...A fine novel that informs and inspires in equal measure.

--Paul Simon, Morning Star.

In 1917, the effects of rationing take their toll, whilst growing industrial militancy and opposition to the war result in the draconian Defence of the Realm Act (DORA). Many working-class men, including transport workers, find themselves called up to fight in the imperialist war. Meanwhile, rays of hope appear across Europe with the Russian revolution.

Possibly the success of Fuller as an author is his ability to include just about the right amount of detail regarding the machinations of union politics; enough to inform but not enough to bore the reader. Meanwhile he is able to interweave key historical events into his story whilst spicing it up with romance.

Fuller keeps the reader abreast of the historical reality by including imagined meetings between government officials while using interventions from Theodore Rothstein to outline events in Russia and Germany. Events covered in the novel include the 1918 London Women Transport Workers' Strike, the Metropolitan Police strikes of 1918 and 1919, and the army mutinies of 1919.

The closing chapters of the book set the scene for the final novel in the trilogy. There is the prospect of amalgamation between the Red Button and more moderate Blue Button unions, although within two years the amalgamated unions would become part of the Transport & General Workers' Union under the leadership of Ernest Bevin, who also appears in the novel.

--Ben Soton, New Worker.