Our life in Algeria came to an end in 1960, when my father, who’d been moved up to lieutenant, was deprived of an eye by a vindictive Arab. Despite the way he treated me, I remember feeling sorry for him and thinking all Arabs were loathsome. It was at that age, and for several years to come, to have a father who was a hero; only later did I learn how zealous he’d been in what I came to realise was a more than questionable war.
We came to France, to Gif-sur-Yvette, a pleasant, leafy suburb where children do not go astray. Which I didn’t. I was, if I say so myself, a talented, studious pupil, gifted in art and languages, popular with my peers and held in esteem by my teachers. My parents noted with pride and satisfaction that my school reports were tip top.
But underneath the goody-goody, a rebel strained to get out. I prowled and fretted like an animal in a cage -- and yet I must have been so accustomed to my niggardly little space that when the cage blew apart, I didn’t even escape. I’m talking now about a certain month of May.
Do I need to justify myself for not being there erecting barricades and setting the Latin Quarter alight? Probably. There were, after all, plenty of adolescents of my age slinging the old Molotovs with the best of them. They may not have understood what was happening, but they had a hell of a good time. And speaking of early accomplishments, by that age Rimbaud had written Le Bateau Ivre.
Well, Gif-sur-Yvette was not quite the same as Paris. Although in our lycée there were sit-ins, debates and gatherings which occasionally got quite stormy, I never imagined myself announcing to my parents after supper that they weren’t to worry, I’d be back in the morning, I was just nipping into Paris to overthrow de Gaulle. That’s not to say we didn’t argue. For two whole months the drama of the nation was enacted in miniature in our flat. Then they packed me off to England for the holidays and when I came back it was over, the seething energy fragmented into whimsical agitation.
Is it only with hindsight that I see in ’68 not the birth of a new era, but the abortion which ratified an old one, and would drip its clotted remains over the whole of the next decade? The maoists and trotskyists and their dissident splinter groups, the advocates of zero growth and bicycles, the health food gurus, the women’s libbers, the buddhists, the drug fiends, the goatherds, the sexpol seminarists -- I sympathised with all, but I couldn’t believe in any. OfficialIy enrolled as a law student, I in fact spent my time reading poetry in cafés and indulging in idle dreams. I could trek through Ethiopia, or join the Palestinians or go and live in the Amazon. Or why not drown in Lake Como? Luckily I had a motor-bike (a gift from my father, who thought I was studying hard), which I drove at breakneck speed around the boulevard périphérique and predictably ended up crashing, whereupon I discovered amongst other things, during ten months in hospital with fourteen operations and not enough morphine, that I was happy to be alive.
The above is an extract from The Sally Effect, a long, sprawling novel published by the now defunct Unbound Press. I may revise it one day - there's plenty in it that's good, but as it stands I'd be more inclined to disown it. I simply wanted to post that extract because although the narrator isn't me, our outlooks are similar. And the older I get, the stronger that outlook becomes.
It's a reaction, no doubt, to the way the world is heading. Fifty years ago I was optimistic, but how can I be optimistic today? The answer to that is Glow. While I might, if the right circumstances arose, joyfully join in a repetition of May 68, I put no trust in revolutions. But I cherish the hope that one day things could be different. They could, in fact, be something similar to Glow.
The Sally Effect ran to 600 pages. Glow is a mere 80. A novella set in an alternative society, one which might have existed if different choices had been made after the First World War.
Available free here.
