Swastika Night

"The book was written in the mid 1930s, before the Second World War. The author is warning that the Nazi state will win a major war and then rule for seven centuries. It’s very possible that the Nazis and the fascists could have won, so it’s a kind of alternative history. The book was read by many socialist book clubs in the UK at the time, but after the war it was forgotten, because fascism was defeated in many people’s minds and it wasn’t relevant anymore. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter A recent revival of interest in the novel is mostly from a feminist angle, because in this ruthless state people are discriminated against and women are considered inferior – fascism emphasises masculinity and makes a myth of fraternal feeling. But I was interested in its description of a sustainable fascist state. In the book, there could be no end to a fascist state. I see it as a cautionary tale of how a new type of Chinese state could stay in power. I was looking for dystopian novels about fascism. I always suspected there were novels in the thirties warning against fascism, even before the Second World War. Somebody must have known what would happen if they won, writers must have come out with some ideas about it. I thought it might be useful for me to imagine what China could be. That’s how I came across Iron Heel as well. He wrote this in 1902, predicting that by 1962 China would be the leading country in the world, that everyone would come to and praise China. It’s almost like today – almost, but not quite yet. He was very optimistic. I think if China didn’t go through the detour of Maoist rule, something like that would probably have happened in the sixties or seventies, as in Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Korea and Hong Kong. It would be a capitalist world, with an export-orientated economy and cheap labour. The coastal cities would be very prosperous. There would be inequality, probably something like the present day with great disparity of wealth between the urban rich and the rural poor. Without the communist detour, something similar to today would have already happened. It’s very rare, this kind of utopian novel in China. For the longest time, people did not follow dystopian or utopian novels. During the Cultural Revolution and the eighties there were only a few kinds of novels you could write. It was always a romantic vision of the Communist Party. In a way that’s a kind of utopia – it has only positive things to say about the coming society. After that, understandably, writers turned to realism, trying to expose what went wrong in the Cultural Revolution. They were trying to write about change – the Chinese saw themselves in yet another abrupt change after the Cultural Revolution, swaying from one thing to another. A lot of people wrote about these changes, and that is what drew everyone’s attention. On top of that there was censorship, so you had to come up with a very literary way of treating your material. Magical realism was popular for quite some time, because you couldn’t write about the present directly, you had to do it in a roundabout way. Magical realism allowed you to do this, to write about the reality of something imaginary. So in the eighties and nineties most of the better novelists were writing about the past. They were not really thinking ahead. There have been more futuristic novels in the last ten years or so – I am told there is more and more serious science fiction coming up now. That could be indicative of something."