A moving family saga

The alt-right isn’t trying to smash prevailing class structures. It is trying to strengthen them. Applebaum’s analysis may be more relevant in Eastern Europe, where the post-Soviet consensus is visibly under strain, than it is in Western Europe and America. But as a blanket account of how rightwing politics moved from the “Reaganite optimism” of the 1980s to the “apocalyptic” alarmism of today, it fails to convince. Twilight of Democracy is a compelling book, just not a very persuasive one. Applebaum wants things to go to back to normal, before “hyper-partisanship” and “polarisation” became the key registers of debate in London, Washington, and Warsaw. She overlooks the fact that normal wasn’t all that democratic in the first place.

BLACK SUNDAY Tola Rotimi Abraham

Canongate, £8.99

Twin sisters Bibike and Ariyike have their comfortable middle-class life in Lagos snatched away when politics force their mother out of her government job and their father is scammed in a dodgy money-making scheme. Looked after by their Yoruba grandmother, they do menial jobs to keep their younger brothers, Andrew and Peter, fed and to pay the fees for the boys’ harsh boarding school. But the sisters’ paths begin to diverge, Ariyike going full Pentecostal and pursuing a career in Christian radio, while Bibike clings to more secular values.

Beginning in 1996,

Black Sunday follows the siblings over the next two decades. In a confident, moving debut novel, Abraham unflinchingly presents women trying to make their way through a soul-destroying culture of corruption and sexual exploitation, finding strength in the scattered moments when her characters rise above their predicaments with grace and determination.

DO DICE PLAY GOD? Ian Stewart

Profile, £9.99

Author of a staggering 120 books and garlanded with a host of honorary doctorates, Ian Stewart reverses the famous Einstein quote to examine how human beings have sought to find patterns in the randomness around them. When it comes to calculating probabilities, he writes, our intuition is “hopeless”, and he leads us through the various means we have employed to try to predict future events, from divining entrails through devising laws of motion to eventually embracing unpredictability as an inherent feature of a quantum universe.

Going against the grain of popular science books, Stewart doesn’t go out of his way to make it easy for the layman. There are equations aplenty, and mathematical concepts that require close attention. But it’s worth persevering, as they’re spliced into an informative narrative which encompasses gambling, thermodynamics, entropy and the particular difficulties of predicting phenomena like weather and the economy.

THE LAST HIGH Daniel Kalla

Simon & Schuster, £8.99

Both a crime thriller and a medical mystery, Kalla’s latest novel is sited squarely in the midst of the opioid epidemic sweeping North America. Seven overdosed teenagers are brought into a Vancouver hospital from a party, their hearts unable to beat by themselves. Only two survive the night.

Clearly, there’s a potent drug on the streets, and bodies quickly pile up. ER doctor and toxicologist Julie Rees joins forces with her police detective love interest Anson Chen to try to track down the source in a city where great wealth exists alongside hopeless poverty, and organised crime has its hooks in both. A doctor in real life, Kalla whips up an all too plausible scenario with well-realised characters, such as the dealer who lectures his customers always to take drugs responsibly and Julie herself, a former opioid addict driven by her need to redeem herself for the death of her fiancé.

ALASTAIR MABBOTT

TEDDY JAMIESON

JAMES Dean Bradfield first heard the name Victor Jara in a song by The Clash. The future Manic Street Preacher was still a teenager at the time when he listened to Washington Bullets. Back then music was often, he says, a form of education. He’d hear a name in a song and want to find out more.

Jara’s name was one he would hear again and again in the years that followed. He’d come across it in a U2 song, or in an album dedication by Simple Minds.

“Subsequently, lots of people start writing about him,” Bradfield recalls. “I bought a Calexico album and they had written a song about Victor Jara. I had some records by Dafydd Iwan, who was a Plaid Cymru MP and a folk singer in Wales, and he wrote a song about Victor Jara. It was an echo that kept coming back and back.”

Now Bradfield has added his own to the tributes to the Chilean. Even in Exile, Bradfield’s second solo record, is a concept album, by turns impassioned (The Boy from the Plantation) and delicate (Under the Mimosa Tree), based on the life and music of the Chilean protest singer who was tortured and killed in 1973 in the wake of the coup led by General Pinochet against the Salvador Allende government.

Jara was a poet, a teacher, a communist and a protest singer. After the coup he was arrested and detained in the Estadio Chile.

When soldiers realised who he was, they smashed his hands and told him he would never play guitar again. They then shot him more than 40 times. His body was then put on display outside the stadium.

Jara was one of the earliest victims of a coup that would see the murder and torture of thousands. But his name lives on.

Bradfield’s homage is the latest proof of that. Currently at home in Cardiff with his family, Bradfield has, like all of us these days, been in lockdown in recent months. “I’ve got two young kids, four and eight, so it’s mostly been centred around that,” he says.

This afternoon, though, he is here to talk about Jara, Fidel Castro, the future of the Manics and the death of the music press.

HOW DID THE NEW ALBUM COME ABOUT?

Around two-and-a-half years ago myself Nick and Sean decided that there was going to be quite a big gap between the last Manics album and the next one. When I realised the gap was going to be about three years – now it’s going to be longer, obviously – subconsciously, I panicked. ‘I’ve got to do something. What will I do?’

I’m a musician and I’m an institutionalised Manic Street Preacher, and when that’s taken away from me I just melt down, slowly but surely. So, I’m walking around in a bit of a daze thinking, ‘I need something to do.’

THAT’S WHERE PATRICK JONES COMES IN, PRESUMABLY?

I’ve got a routine. I live quite close to where I was born. There’s this one day a week I go and see my father. And on the way back I see Patrick Jones, Nicky Wire’s older brother. He was always the older, cooler kid.

He’s a published poet and playwright, so I’m always interested in what he’s doing. And he said, ‘Oh I’m just writing about Victor Jara, do you remember him?’

He just showed me a file. A little lightbulb went on in my head and I said to him, ‘Do you think we could turn some of this into music?’

He was very sceptical. This was stuff that was never intended to see the light of day. And, also, it was an emotional exercise for him because he had just lost his mother and his father was now very ill.

BUT HE CAME AROUND?

As soon as I put them to music, we enjoyed them.

WHAT WAS IT ABOUT JARA’S STORY THAT YOU CONNECTED WITH?

When you first listen to his records, the music floats over you and it’s so beautiful. It’s so ethereal. Some of it is as beautiful as Tim Buckley wanted to be. It’s absolutely amazing. But then you start hearing references to Ho Chi Minh.

It is ideological, but the form doesn’t ram it down your throat. It’s very gentle. The music to him is just as important a vehicle as the words. The music must soothe. It must heal. So, he is a protest singer like no other I’ve ever heard. And I think that’s attractive.

He looks like a dude. And then, of course, he was murdered. He hasn’t become a myth because he is the real thing, someone who embodies conviction and unfortunate tragedy. It shows what can happen if you let that political conviction guide your life and guide your art, I suppose.

WHAT GROUND RULES DID YOU SET YOURSELF?

Number one with Victor Jara, you don’t try to follow someone like that. We wanted to talk about his entire life.