Charles Finch

I've mentioned in this space how much I admire George Orwell, not as much for his fiction (though Coming up for Air is a good book and 1984 did what falls to very few books and invented a language) as for his essays and memoirs. The best of these, his masterpiece Homage to Catalonia, is a moving long meditation on his role in the Spanish Civil War.

And yet anyone who has read Orwell's letters knows that in 1939 Victor Gollancz's well-meaning Left Book Club rejected it, because Orwell was (presciently and bravely) an anti-Stalinist when much of England's left fully embraced Russia's leader. Another of Orwell's greatest books, The Road to Wigan Pier, the Club only accepted after revision that downplayed the book's criticism of certain socialists.

The Left Book Club's checkered history ran through my mind when I read the other day about the new Progressive Book Club, which will apparently serve a similar purpose. In an age of fractured political movements, the people running the club would do well to remember that ideologies can infect and splinter the Left just as easily, perhaps even more easily, than the Right.

***

The good early reviews for The September Society continue to pour in. Kirkus Reviews, notoriously the most astringent of the pre-publication reviewers, devoted most of their review to a summary of the plot, but also called it "exciting and cerebral." I'm really proud of this book and hope it will prove to be a great August read.