The Great Believers

"Finalist"

"This book is set in the United States. It’s a beautiful, tragic, perfectly written novel about the HIV crisis. It’s written from the point of view of a protagonist who witnesses a friend’s death, or various friends’ deaths. It’s delicately done. There’s nothing voyeuristic or trauma porn about it. If you were too young to remember the HIV crisis, there was a lot of scaremongering that went on at the time, and there was a lot of prejudice. It was called the gay plague on the news, without any sense that this was incorrect or not how we should be talking about one another. There was a sense that if you caught it, it was somehow your fault, and governments didn’t try and push against that. If you caught it, well, too bad. And that was how it was treated for a very, very long time. We know now, of course, that HIV is not interested in your gender or your sexual preferences—it’s just a vicious virus. For those of us who were young at the time, we saw these horrific adverts on television, with a tombstone rocketing down. It scared us all to death and put us off having sex with anyone. And being friends with anybody who was gay suddenly became a life-threatening situation. The person who broke all of that was Princess Diana, who was seen in HIV wards, holding hands and hugging the men and women who were dying of it. So Rebecca Makkai writes this very tender novel, and for anyone too young to remember it, it’s a brilliant way of learning about the national trauma of HIV in the 1980s. Yes, absolutely. There were some terrible newspaper headlines and absolutely unadulterated attempts to slander and shame any woman who decided she wanted to go and reclaim the land and stop the bombs. I was writing an article for the Big Issue this morning and I was reminded of the methodology that the state and the police used to try and stop the Greenham women doing what they were doing. They shamed them for leaving their families, they shamed their sexuality, whatever it might be. Greenham really blew the doors off so many state-sponsored structures about who we are and how we should all be. A lot of women I’ve spoken to said they could never go back. They tried to go back to their lives after Greenham, but they just couldn’t do it. Some of them do. Some of them feel frustrated that they’re still out there protesting. I interviewed a woman the other day who had written to me because she didn’t have fond memories of Greenham. She said she felt a great pressure while she was there to be wilder than she wanted to be. Also, she couldn’t go back to her life afterwards. She tried to, but she couldn’t. One of the things about Greenham that really strikes me is that because it was not an ideology, it was full of dispute and people arguing. There wasn’t a great agreement on anything, apart from ‘reclaim the land and get rid of the bombs.’ That was it. There was an enormous amount of class dispute, race dispute, gender dispute, sex dispute, but that was okay. Nobody got thrown out of Greenham for not conforming to some way of thinking or language. That, I think, is perhaps even more significant than the fact that they achieved what they did. It shows that we are capable of all living together in one place and disagreeing. That we are able to hold complex ideas and conflicting opinions in one place and not cancel each other is one of the greatest lessons of Greenham, and something that I bring up again and again. It’s also what’s missing now. If you spend enough hours with another person, you’ll find something you disagree on. It’s absolutely inevitable and that’s okay. That’s another thing about the 1980s—we weren’t all defined by our politics. Now, if you’re whatever you are politically, it becomes your entire world. Whereas when I was a child, my dad was a Tory and my mum was a socialist. It was perfectly normal to have the entire range of the political spectrum at the kitchen table every night, and that was good. We were all trying to be kind individuals. We didn’t agree on how to run the world, but nobody wanted to cancel someone else just because they believed in the NHS or didn’t believe in the NHS."

"I’ve long been a fan of Rebecca Makkai’s work (don’t miss The Hundred-Year House), but nothing prepared me for her moving new novel. Set in two distinct time periods and locales (Chicago in the 1980s and Paris in 2015), the Chicago chapters revolve around a group of gay men in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, while the Paris sections involve a mother searching for her missing daughter. These two seemingly dissimilar plots gradually reflect and refract upon one another, giving additional depth and meaning to each. I’ve read a lot of novels and nonfiction dealing with AIDS, but no book since Randy Shilts’ And The Band Played On has affected me so powerfully as this one."

"Here are two I've read in the last four years that I recommend often"

"I love it when a novel includes, along with its larger themes, actual information about the actual world."