'A Woman's War Against Progress' by Allan Cameron (to be published by Vagabond Voices on 2 October 2023)
Since at least 2008, when he established the publishing house Vagabond Voices, Allan Cameron has been an energetic and prolific player in the field of not just Scottish but also international literature. If you do not recognise his name, this is probably because his ventures happen at some distance below the radar of most of our media. When it comes to reporting on cultural matters, Scotland's commentators generally seem content to recycle familiar names and time-worn clichés rather than go in search of really interesting, intellectually stimulating activity. As one reviewer wrote back in 2014 in the now defunct
Scottish Review of Books: 'If Scottish literature has a true outsider, it is not Irvine Welsh: it's Allan Cameron'.
Cameron is a novelist, short story writer, essayist, poet, editor and translator. He grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in Nigeria and Bangladesh before settling in Italy at the age of 20. He moved to Britain in 1981 and worked offshore for two years before going to Sussex University as a mature student. He moved to Scotland in 1992, living in the Western Isles before coming to Glasgow, where Vagabond Voices is now based. As a publisher he produces as diverse and unashamedly highbrow a range of books as any other Scottish house.
On its website, Vagabond Voices is described as 'both Scottish and fervently European', committed to 'promote literary ambition and innovative writers, and to challenge readers'. With refreshing honesty, the blurb admits that 'the resources of a small publisher… can do very little to change popular tastes and attitudes; instead, we seek to serve the small but significant camp of readers that are being let down in these times dominated by the economies of scale'.
'Abandon all hope of riches, ye who enter here' is one way that writers might interpret this message. Despite this, Cameron has an impressive range of authors on his list. Among those from Scotland are Allan Massie, Jim Sillars, Jenni Daiches, Chris Dolan, Peter Arnott, Gerry Loose and the late Helen Lamb. The European dimension, too, is striking: Cameron himself has translated numerous books from Italian, and the list includes novels by the Swedish writer Magnus Florin and works of German, Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian literature.
Perhaps Vagabond Voices' most ambitious project is to publish, in English, the classic five-volume
Truth and Justice series of novels by A H Tammsaare (1878-1940).
Vargamäe and
Indrek, the first two parts of this foundational Estonian text, which might be compared with Lewis Grassic Gibbon's contemporaneous
Scots Quair trilogy, are already available, and the intention is to complete the pentalogy by 2025.
Allan Cameron's latest publication,
A Woman's War Against Progress, is his fourth novel. It's a big, difficult, frustrating, intriguing and moving book which is unlikely to sell in vast quantities or make the cut for any literary prizes, but deserves to be noticed because it so uncompromisingly refuses to conform to expectations of what a novel should be. Ostensibly it is the autobiography of Rahväema Ranavutavskaya, a woman born in 1900 who lives to be 117, and whose life is therefore mapped upon the turbulent history of the fall of the Russian Empire and the rise and fall of the Soviet Union.
Rahväema belongs to the Surelikud, a minority people who inhabit the Siberian Forest, and her story is of the struggle of her people to retain their customs, culture and language against the backdrop of the ideological and military violence of the 20th century. She becomes the driving force in the Surelikud's battle for survival. Her personal life is inextricably linked to, and damaged by, her political activism, and while she espouses causes for which most liberal-minded people would feel sympathy, she is in many ways a conservative thinker and actor, who is deeply suspicious of the notion of an ever-improving progress. Hence the title of the novel.
In this respect, reading her story is a little like reading a fictionalised version of the Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson's
Essay on the History of Civil Society. Whilst recognising the benefits of some aspects of historical progress, Rahväema is deeply conscious that that same progress destroys the relationship between humans and their natural environment. In our desire for material comfort and freedom from the hardships of a hunter-gatherer existence, we kill our most fundamental needs and joys, but do not recognise this until it is too late to recover them. There could hardly be a message more relevant to the ecological catastrophe facing us today.
So far, so relatively simple. But Rahväema − a strange mixture of imperiousness and self-effacement, of resilience and fragility − is a highly unreliable narrator, who wants to paint a generous portrait of herself for posterity but whose honesty does not allow her to conceal her own doubts and failings. Her story is being taken down by a younger woman, 'the Scribe', who is the object of her derision and with whom she repeatedly argues between long passages of dictation:
'You're such an elitist,' the Scribe cries defiantly, and she's not entirely wrong.
'It's a wonderful world [Rahväema replies], if a Surelik woman from the forest who never went to school and was brought up in rags can be called that, but if you even stop to think about it, you'll find that the word
elitist has many meanings – as many as the people who utter it, and we always interpret it in our own way. Words are expansive, but the human ear is reductive.'
The Scribe dislikes the 'parables' Rahväema tells, and Rahväema considers the Scribe to be obtuse and shallow, although it turns out that their relationship is a symbiotic one and that neither can really do without the other.
It is through this mechanism that the reader is given the long history of the Surelikud over more than a century, with powerful, sometimes very amusing but often tragic episodes covering the Russian Revolution, the Stalinist decades, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the post-Soviet gangster-capitalist Russia of the 21st century. Again, given Putin's ruthless methods of exerting power and the war in Ukraine, the novel is highly topical. It is about more than the travails of the Surelikud, more than the oppression of so many linguistic and ethnic minorities worldwide. In fact, it is about all human beings and the manner of their existence, and survival, on a planet which 'progress' has brought to the point of utter devastation.
As already hinted, this is not a conventional novel. There is no complex plot and little character development. Perhaps it would be better described as a work of philosophical fiction. Yet there are many passages that are truly arresting, for example when Rahväema expatiates on mankind's capacity for self-destruction:
'God is a necessary concept for civilisation, because civilisation is humanity's attempt to tame nature, and to homogenise and rationalise it. The cruelty of nature works because it punishes overarching success, but man's progress puts this defence mechanism at risk. Nature thrives on diversity, randomness and opportunities provided by its wastefulness. Something is always there to mop up what has been discarded. Homogenisation and rationalisation are toxic to nature, but nature will eventually win, because the higher humanity builds its fortifications against nature, the harder it will fall. Humanity will destroy itself unless it changes its ways and it is probably incapable of doing so, but the price of humanity's overarching success will be much more disruptive and toxic than anything that has happened in the past.'
Neal Ascherson, a man of great wisdom with a profound understanding of the traumas that have afflicted Russia and Eastern Europe over the last century or two, has called
A Woman's War Against Progress 'a majestic, always original work… a Russian river of a novel'. Praise from such a quarter should be taken seriously. But perhaps the last word on what this novel is, or is not, should come from its chief protagonist. This is Rahväema's opinion of fiction:
'I don't think that a novel has to be either political or unpolitical, or that there's some golden mean of political content suited to it. A novel can be anything: it is the most chameleon-like of genres, because what differentiates it from the other forms of writing is that it doesn't tell people how it is – it allows the readers to interpret it in their own particular ways. There isn't one
Crime and Punishment performed in one particular way, but as many
Crime and Punishments as there have been readers of it. Of readers who have performed it in their brains.'
She could easily have been discussing Allan Cameron's remarkable book.
James Robertson is a writer and poet
