‘Arm the global poor!’

Philip Hensher’s novel about ageing student radicals is elegant and warm-hearted, discovers Nakul Krishna

PA SMALL REVOLUTION IN GERMANY by Philip Hensher 336pp, Fourth Estate, £14.99, ebook £8.99

hilip Hensher’s career has taken him a long way from the clever, catty and somewhat show-offy books of his literary youth. Gone (or muted) are the salacity of Kitchen Venom, the gift for highbrow pastiche he displayed, to virtuosic effect, in

The Mulberry Empire. What has taken their place is a low-key elegance of prose, an almost Dickensian generosity to all characters, even the most minor, but with just enough of the old acid left to avoid a lapse into slush.

I confess to having found A

Small Revolution in Germany the weakest of his recent novels. It holds the attention, though, and mounts an argument that makes one want – as novelistic arguments seldom do – to argue back.

Spike, our narrator, starts the novel a schoolboy in the Eighties. Bright and articulate, he is more than ready for the two lifechanging encounters he will have in the space of a few dozen pages. The first is with a gang of Lefty students, led by the drawling and confident Percy Ogden. Spike is welcomed to their ranks, eventually, though he has to tell a white lie or two along the way.

But soon he becomes what he once falsely claimed to be: “the person in the Ogden group who had read Capital”.

Even as he has a character dance around a menthol-smoke-filled room saying things like “I love, love, love Bakunin” while the group plans to disrupt a meeting of the CND with shouts of “Arm the global poor!”, Hensher tempers the satire with affection. The “Spartacists” are silly, of course, but Hensher doesn’t hold it against them that what they’re silly about is politics. all your life. Not if you want to grow up at all.” The pair are split up and interrogated by the authorities; they never meet again.

More time passes, off the page. It is now, more or less, the present. Ogden has transformed himself in the meantime into an unhappy cross of George Monbiot and Owen Jones. Another of the Spartacists has had a wardrobe and political makeover at (where else?) Oxford, and is now a Conservative Home Secretary. Spike is an unsung academic at an unnamed, presumably undistinguished, university. He and Joaquin are still together, both still in love and in possession of their youthful

‘You’re not going to hold the same beliefs that you had at 16. Not if you want to grow up’