Shaw's socialist fiction

Press, 18 February 1989, Page 27

Shaw's socialist fiction

An Unsocial Socialist. By Bernard Shaw. Virago Press, 1988. 259 pp. $14.95 (paperback). (Reviewed by Glyn Strange) “I unhesitatingly challenge any living writer of fiction to produce anything comparable in vivacity or originality,” wrote Shaw (with his usual modesty) of this his fifth novel. Like the previous four, it failed. Almost every publisher in Britain, and many in America, rejected it. A century later it is not hard to see why. As Michael Holroyd asks in his brief Introduction, "What other novelist would allow his hero, pursued by an angry headmistress, two parsons, and a posse of policemen, to stop and lecture his wife for some 15 pages on Marx’s theory of surplus value?” The wife dies soon after, and

the matter of choosing a headstone for her grave quickly turns into a discussion of the redistribution of wealth. The ideological content eventually attracted a socialist magazine which serialised the novel in 1884. Once it appeared publishers woke up to Shaw’s merits as a novelist and suggested that he write more. By then, however, Shaw had decided that novel-writing was not for him and turned first to journalism, then to the stage where he put to good use the talent for sparkling dialogue that is evident in fits and starts in this novel. This reprint will be welcomed by socialists who like novels and by novel-readers who like socialism. Others may have mixed feelings.