Richard T. Kelly's Crusaders

I have been reading Richard T. Kelly's Crusaders, a very rewarding novel about England's northern cities, anglicanism and New Labour. It's set in Newcastle's lost, violent, housing projects in 1996, the year that Tony Blair's New Labour comes to power. Stylistically, it binds a thinned-out version of the classic realism of the Arnold Bennett kind to the modern thriller: its turn, increasingly as it goes on, to genre-fiction conventions and excitements provide it with formal constraint (and perhaps a readership) in lieu of more experimental or literary devices. Like many social-realist novels it needs to deal with the problem of how to represent characters and a social sector with little or no connection to the literary and intellectual world that the novel and its readers belong to. The thriller plot helps solve that problem. But the novel also belongs to the more recent genre of political novel (e.g. Alan Hollinghurst's The line of beauty) which relate the lived-in world to recent shifts in government and policy.

So Kelly is basically interested in juxtaposing Labour party policy and discourse with the lives of both the poor and the well-intentioned. It mounts a hard critique of the false promises of New Labour's simultaneous embrace of a certain christianity (even of 'christian socialism') and neo-liberalism/MBA-style managerialism. It does so by telling the (based on fact) story of an Anglican minister who sets out to establish a new Anglican church on a very run-down and demoralized state housing estate and his relation to various locals: the Labour MP, an thuggish enforcer for a local gangster; a young woman working in a massage parlour; Church volunteers. The novel is especially insightful about black-market/crim capitalism and its deep connections into the economic life of poor communities. At the end, it becomes clear that neither New Labour nor the Church have the capacity to reach into communities such as this. For these highly centralised and bureaucratised institutions poverty offers, at best, an opportunity for their own aggrandizement.

Perhaps this is not one of the great literary novels, although its dialogue is stunning and its characterization wonderfully unsentimental and finely tuned to its major argument (it's a novel which does have an argument). But then to write a great literary novel about the lives of the poor has not so far been possible in the capitalist epoch.

This novel is not available in Australian bookshops I think. A great pity.