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From the pages of the "Industrial Worker"
RED LONDON, by Stewart Home
ISBN 1 873176 12 0
Published in 1994 by AK Press
22 Lutton Place, Edinburgh EH8 9PE, Scotland, UK
5.95 Pounds + 10% handling
U.S. order to AK Press, POB 40682, San Francisco, CA 94140-0682
$12.95 + $2.00 shipping
RED LONDON is a novel about a revolt of the oppressed
against their oppressors. Its protagonists spend their
working lives as members of what is termed these days by
official authorities from Clinton to Habermas as the
"underclass". The sell their time as prostitutes, obscure
rock musicians, porn magazine photographers and so forth;
while devoting their free time to sexual pleasure and the
murder of the ruling class. They are libertines with
visceral passions. Their practice of meeting out class
vengeance is both crude and ruthless. They are serious
proles with serious lusts.
RED LONDON is not for the squeamish or prudish of heart.
Stewart Home's prose is on a par with the Marquis de Sade
when it comes to sex and violence. Here's a taste. The
setting is a rock concert for conservative teens, given by
an older Tory rock star, Sebastian Fame, whose neurosis of
choice happens to be pedophilia. Security for the concert
is by a gang of fascist boot boys, known as the Aryan Youth
League. Nobody suspects that the Soho Prostitutes
Collective has planned a guerilla action.
"The minders jumped to attention when a van skidded to a
halt outside the hall. Twelve masked wimmin leapt from the
transit, while the driver remained at the wheel. The
heavies relaxed. Obviously these birds were a part of some
practical joke, one of their mates had no doubt set them up
by writing to Jeremy Beadle. The two AYL yobs were mentally
incapable of accepting the fact that many of the greatest
fighters down the ages had been wimmin.
"'We don't need to see your faces', the fatter of the pair
laughed,'just get your tits out.'
"'Get your tits out, get your tits out, get your tits out
for the lads!' his mate chanted, but not for long!
"Cleo floored the sexist retard with a kidney punch that
brought blood bubbling up through his mouth. Then the kung
fu chick broke the bastard's spine by bringing her boot down
on th back of his neck. There was the satisfying crunch of
splintering bone and the fascist bore became just another
name on the Met's long list of murder victims.
"Simultaneously, Melody Thrush slammed a clenched fist into
the other minder's mouth. Having rearranged the brickhead's
teeth, she landed a devastating blow to his stomach and
within seconds, the prick was puking his lunch. If nature
had been left to take its course, it looked like the bastard
would have retched up his guts, piece by little piece.
Instead the steel toe-capped boots of several SPC members
rained in against his body. After the first few ribs had
snapped with a sickening crack, a badly aimed kick hit the
cunt's head and the beer boy's body went limp. It was
bloody unfortunate that his brain no longer registered the
searing pain which accompanied the early stages of the
beating. But, to the fascist, the icy numbness of physical
blackout was more welcome than a million pound win on the
pools.
"Sebastian faltered and broke off midway through a song as
the SPC cut through the hall in a flying wedge. After a few
screams, the crowd fell silent and the only sound to be
heard was the tramping of boots on the wooden floor. Cleo
and Melody grabbed Fame. The other SPC members herded the
audience into a side room. Adults were simply shot through
the head and left where they fell.
"Sebastian was shoved across the stage and held against the
wooden cross. Melody removed two hammers and a fistfull of
six-inch nails..."
RED LONDON is Home's latest novel. Like his previous works
of fiction: NO PITY, PURE MANIA and DEFIANT POSE, Home has
set RED LONDON in a Britain which has already raced through
the cautionary traffic light, flashing " a clockwork
orange", into a nearly visible future populated by an
increasingly class conscious, if semi-educated, proletariat,
who live within the socio-economic boundaries of a
capitalist system in terminal decay. In RED LONDON, the
self-appointed vanguard of the lumpen and proles is composed
of young men and wimmin, who have cut their ideological
teeth on a tract penned by the then notorious K.L. Callan.
Callan's infamous, banned book, MARX, CHRIST, and SATAN
UNITED IN STRUGGLE is passed in xerox copies between
self-styled anarchist fighting units and individual
anarcho-nihilists, like Adolf Kramer. Kramer is the main
protagonist. His mental interior reads like a
politico-genetic cross between Charles Manson and Ulrike
Meinhof. He is the archetypical child of the urban
terrorist movement, grown more sly; but just as
psychopathically dogmatic as his forbearers. Adolf and his
comrades are prone to using the blood of their class
antagonists to dab quotes on walls at the scenes of their
actions. It is invariably K.L. Callan's MARX, CHRIST and
SATAN UNITED IN STRUGGLE which is quoted.
"Adolf slit Gallon's throat with a flick-knife, then set to
work ritually mutilating the bodies of the two class
traitors. After dipping his fingers in the gouts of blood
that were still spurting from Gallon's bulk, Kramer scrawled
the following observation across the living room wall:
Contrary to orthodox opinion, be it situationist or conservative,
it is quantitative--not qualitative--problems that lie at the
root of the current crisis.
"It was a quotation from MARX, CHRIST and SATAN UNITED IN
STRUGGLE, magnum opus of that most mysterious of nihilists
K.L. Callan."
These exiles from main street move within a milieu of
militant vegans, situationists, buddhist priests, nazis,
skinheads and other assorted denizens of lumpen and prole
origins. You follow them through the pages of RED LONDON as
they drink, fight, and sexually amuse themselves in the
public housing projects, whorehouses, streets and bogs of
the city. RED LONDON is a simple book, written in a
minimalist style, with more than a few repetitious icons
e.g. the ubiquitous bottles of 100 Pipers Scotch, preferred
brand of the underclass; the ever present sexual motif of
couples, "beating out the primitive rhythm of the swamps."
It's also an exciting bit of anarchist pulp fiction. The
sex and ultra-violence can stir up your deepest Id-ish
fantasies. But, I don't think that it should be read as an
organizing prescription, the way its heroines/heroes seem to
have read K.L. Callan's MARX... . Nor do it think that
Stewart Home sees himself as the K.L. Callan of today.
There is more tongue in cheek within RED LONDON than is to
be found in the numerous scenes of oral sex.
No. RL might better be read as a warning; much as the
proles of yesteryear read Jack London's IRON HEEL, that
foreboding tale predicting the advent of the fascist States
of the mid 20th Century. The warining this time is for the
bourgeois of the world, whose commodified morality leads
them to treat their wage-slaves as nothing more than
carbon-based biological work units to be thrown on society's
scrap heap when they're all used up. Home has given us a
novel about a pissed off underclass of midnight ramblers who
are going to be the first to stick their knives right down
the throats of the ruling class--and baby it hurts! The
warning is as simple as that old working class
aphorism--what goes around, comes around.
Mike Ballard
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