IF HE becomes known as the “communist novelist,” that’s fine, says Gavin McCrea.

But the author of the recently-published Mrs Engels, who’s now working on the second of a planned trilogy, is no mere uncritical friend.

He echoes Marx on the role of philosophy in transforming society when he explains that what truly interests him is our propensity to think we know what’s right for the world.

“What I find most interesting about communism is that it began with people with a vision which other people then tried to implement,” he says.

“Ideas are one thing but with communism people actually tried to do something with them.”

So any reader expecting an airbrushed version of the lives of the movement’s significant figures probably need to look away now.

In Mrs Engels, McCrea’s account of the world from the viewpoint of Lizzie Burns, they will even have to get used to occasional descriptions of Engels’s penis and Marx’s carbuncles.

So why Lizzie?

“I came across her by chance in Tristram Hunt’s biography,” he tells me. “I’d never heard of an Irishwoman in a relationship with Engels. Yet she, like her sister Mary — an earlier lover — was mentioned very briefly and there is only so much a biographer can do with her.

“I was more intrigued by Lizzie because she was second in line. And that opened up an emotional landscape which might not have been possible if the book was founded on Mary.

“I thought the idea of having a main character who was in a relationship with a man who’d already had a relationship with her sister really interesting!”

But that paucity of information offered McCrea the opportunity to plunge the reader into the vivid world of Victorian poverty and revolutionary politics through Lizzie’s equally discerning and perplexed eyes.

After a process of extensive research about Marx and Engels he had to resist the temptation to write it all down. “Any time when they or Jenny Marx or any other of the better-known figures started taking over, I had to push them away,” he explains.

“I certainly began very carefully with these huge historical figures and, at a certain stage, I relaxed and realised that this was a fictionalised pair of eyes I was forming.

“So writing the book was about taking different risks with Lizzie and how she was involved in some things and not others.”

He wanted her views about Marx and Engels to be “really smart” but he also wants the reader to understand that she wasn’t “on the inside.”

Spaces for an individual like her would have been quite limited even in radical circles, he points out, yet at the same time McCrea wanted her to have some perspective as to what was going on but not be involved in the intricacies of politics.

The process of accumulation and elimination had its fascination but he knew he had to make a story that is true to Lizzie, not some large statement about history or literature.

“I worked on the idea of a revolution in a single life, a kind of emotional, psychological revolution,” he says. “I felt that although she herself didn’t spark a physical revolution, she was still thinking: ‘What can I do?’”

Writing a principal character — male of female — is an onerous and equally difficult task for any writer. But Mc-Crea says that writing as a female character gave him a certain freedom.

“With Lizzie in particular, there was a contradiction between this fiercely intelligent woman who was illiterate and I wanted to show how her illiteracy could give that voice more power rather than impoverishing her,” he stresses.

In Mrs Engels, some of Lizzie’s greatest challenges are in her relationships with other women, particularly her sister Mary, Jenny Marx and her female servants.

Lizzie’s feelings about Mary centre on her getting involved with a man considerably richer than herself and they’re compounded by Mary’s early death.

In Jenny Marx, McCrea creates a persona who’s almost the antithesis of Lizzie. “Since I wanted the book to be from a female world view, I used Jenny as a malevolent force, a baddie,” McCrea explains. “But I did use the historical record to create that image.

“I needed someone that Lizzie could use to define herself against after leaving Manchester and coming into a very bourgeois setting, having servants and taking all that on board.”

Lizzie’s interactions with Engels’s servants are both poignant and amusing, with neither side quite achieving an equilibrium.

According to the author “the relationship with her servants is what really took me into writing the book in the first place.

She knew she had to be this authority figure and kind of enjoyed it at one level but at others not at all.

“Should she be strict with them or be their friend? It would just come naturally to ‘Baroness’ Jenny Marx. These episodes were a lot of fun to write.”

Yet in spite of his focus on the massive changes undergone by Lizzie as an individual, McCrea also asserts that she and Mary may have had a more profound effect on Marx and Engels’s interest in and knowledge of Ireland.

“I didn’t want to push this too much but it did intrigue me,” he explains. He consulted Rachel Holmes, author of Eleanor Marx: A Life and she thought they were extremely influential, “which gave me comfort in the decisions I made.”

Marx and Engels were internationalist and had no time for petty nationalism and borders. Ireland was the exception. 

“They expressed sympathy for the independence movements with Engels speculating that a rebellion in Ireland could bring about a crisis in the British empire that would in turn bring about a wider revolution,” McCrea says.

If Mrs Engels is McCrea’s very personalised novelistic view of scientific socialism in its initial theoretical stage, his second book is set at the height of 20th-century socialism in practice.

It’s about a theatre family from London whose fate becomes intertwined with that of Jian Qing — “Madame Mao.”

The third, only at the sketchiest stage, will be located in the economic rubble of eastern Europe after the counterrevolutions of the early 1990s.

By the end of this trilogy, McCrea will almost surely have earned himself the sobriquet “communist novelist.”

• Mrs Engels, price £14.99, is published by Scribe.