The History Man

"I think The History Man is actually quite detailed social history. It’s meant to be about the early 70s. But it was published in the mid-70s and perhaps its picture of the early part of the decade is too dominated by concerns with the political left. I think the left’s real hold on the universities wasn’t really established until later in the 70s. It probably reached a peak in the early to mid-80s. But the novel paints a detailed portrait of the period. One element that I think is especially interesting, but not much talked about, is that the book’s central character, Howard Kirk, is a consumer par excellence . He and his wife belong to the Habitat-owning classes. They like wine, European things and have a Georgian house in a dilapidated terrace that they gentrify. I think his significance is as much a part of the new middle-class consumption as with him being on the left. He’s certainly an opportunist but I’m not sure it’s quite hypocrisy. It’s an interest in what he sees as modernity. Modernity involves ideas from the revolutionary left, but it’s also about having nice wine. They go together. There were tremendous tensions, but quite a few interesting people on the left tried to marry the two, like those who conceived and designed Milton Keynes. Paternalistic radical socialists who thought that, in the future, everyone should have a double garage and nice living-room furniture. They were trying to marry individualist consumerism with what they still saw as a socialist project. Now maybe those two things can never be married. But some of the more thoughtful people on the left at the time were savvy enough to see that consumerism could be a strengthening force in a more equal Britain. Look at Habitat catalogues from the 70s: they are full of mixed-race couples in bed together. There was an overt radical message in some of the consumerism at the time. Although Howard Kirk is a comic figure, and in some ways a hypocrite, I think he represents that. Yes. I think it depends when you read it. I read it when the left was marginalised and in retreat so I didn’t see Kirk as an ogre. I thought, God, this is a time when people on the left could have a nice job, a nice house, nice wine, and still believe in revolution. Whereas from the 80s perspective I imagine you could see him as an ogre. Many people at the time perceived the socialism that Kirk ostensibly espoused as being in the ascendant. It was a much greater threat and worthy of satire. He’s a bully. But if you read the book any time after 1990, he doesn’t seem quite as big a bully. You know that people like him were marginalised and on the run."