Tomorrow
By Ric Throssell
Melbourne: em Press, 1997. 289 pp., $19.95 (pb)
Review by Phil Shannon
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/14620
Ric Throssell's latest novel is a fictional re-creation of the life of the Communist Party of Australia from the late '30s to the party's dissolution in 1991.
The CPA members and sympathisers of the novel are buffeted and bounced about by the series of crises that tested their hopes and beliefs, including the zigzag of policy regarding World War II, Khrushchev's secret speech denouncing Stalin in 1956, the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the Sino-Soviet split, the internal regime of the CPA which mimicked some of the despotism of Stalin's CPSU and the crumbling monolith of Stalinism in the '90s.
The novel covers other major events, such as the various periods of illegality and Menzies' referendum (narrowly defeated) to ban the party, and infiltration of the CPA by anticommunist agents.
Throssell competently deals with the stresses these events placed on CPA members, and their reactions, from stubborn defence of Stalin and Moscow (or Mao and Beijing), to resignation and expulsion.
Whilst the novel captures the way in which Stalinism doused the light of belief in a socialist future for many party members, it is only a partial picture of the total CPA experience and the progressive, and often significant, influence the party had on Australian history.
By concentrating on the international Moscow-driven context of the CPA, which shook the Stalinist structure and beliefs of the party, the predominant mood of the novel is one of disillusionment, of "shaken faith sustained too long in gods proved false", the death of the vision party members had held for a socialist tomorrow.
With rather thumping symbolism, most of the party members in the novel go to hell in a hand basket, mirroring the decline of the CPA.
Billy King, party stalwart and bookshop worker, with the "deformity" of a dwarf-like body and a sour personality, dies melodramatically from a heart attack whilst re-shelving the Stalin stock as his world collapses after Czechoslovakia.
Ruth Rowley, the "great bohemian in the Free Thought Society" at university, as she leaves the party degenerates from the sensuous physicality of youth to the slovenly appearance of a 40-year-old bad mother.
Her son, Vladimir, is meant to depict the decline of a politics named after another famous Vladimir as he degenerates from a keen student of socialism into an alcoholic political cynic and bad father.
Only Galina Karowitz, Polish refugee from Nazi-threatened Europe, hangs on to her beliefs, or rather the memories of her beliefs, in the end, committed to what the CPA stood for "or was supposed to stand for".
Yet, even Galina is "deformed" by a tram accident, her legs turned into twisted, useless limbs, and her final years are dominated by "the incomprehensible present, where all the old truths had turned to lies". Her sense of bewilderment at the dying dreams and crumbling convictions around her mark her faith as quaint nostalgia, as romantic eccentricity. Past zeal is now replaced by just "sadness and hurt".
Probably against Throssell's wishes (he has been a strong anti-nuclear and peace campaigner), the net effect of his novel, like many on the failings of the communist experience, is to depress all hopes for social betterment and political change.
There is little on the successful outcomes of CPA campaigning, waged by people with a genuine commitment to radical change on issues including trade unionism, workers' living standards, Aboriginal rights, feminism, anti-imperialism, unemployment and civil liberties.
Whilst the CPA could be faulted for its pre-1969 Stalinism and its latter years of moderation and reformist accommodation to capitalism, the home-grown socialist effort of the party is a proud, if mixed, legacy.
Being a party member was not just about being sucked in by Stalin and mistaking Moscow for Marxism. This other side to the CPA experience is rather lost in the gloom and doom of dying illusions.
Tomorrow is not the great Australian novel on the CPA experience, politically or artistically. What it does, it does competently <195> tracing the impact of Stalinism on the CPA's decline <195> but there is too little on the greatness of the CPA and its ordinary heroes. Tomorrow is too much about lost yesterdays than the continuing struggle for a better future.