The Road to Corbyn
by Rob Donovan
(Matador, £8.99)

THIS re-imagining of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress for our own more secular times certainly opens impressively: “One night, on my journey through the wilderness of this world, I laid me down to sleep and the likeness of a dream came to me and, behold, I saw men and women and children and they were all suffering.”

That language, redolent of an earlier powerful dissenting tradition, imitates John Bunyan’s prototype as a work of literature and political polemic.

Its protagonist, Pilgrim, carries his burden and dreams of a world traduced by Mammon and is guided through it by the Interpreter, a modern Evangelist and the Lady Hope — the Lady Charity having disappeared from society.

In his wanderings, Pilgrim travels through the years from 2010 to the election of the eponymous Labour leader and, artistically, the book largely succeeds in the process.

The reader is engaged in identifying which of Donovan’s characters relate to the equivalents in John Bunyan’s original and especially to the cast of crooks in contemporary British society.

Head Boy, Pocket Money and No Benefit are clearly Cameron, Osborne and Duncan Smith respectively, although they also represent the deluded and uncaring class in whose interests they legislated.

Pilgrim’s encounters in the Election Fair and the Free Market Inn, where the dismal offerings and illusions of liberal democracy are reflected back to us, grimly amuse and the slow politicisation of Pilgrim is well handled in the discourses between him and the Interpreter.

Indeed, by the end of the novel it is Pilgrim who is doing most of the talking and most of the analysis. This student has learnt well and understands the world, the better to change it.

There are literary weaknesses though, not least in the heavy slabs of reportage, data and summaries of contemporary economists as to the negative consequences of neoliberalism that are dumped like roadblocks into the text.

These sit outside the free-flowing dialogue between Pilgrim and the Interpreter and Donovan seems incapable of synthesising them successfully.

More disappointing is the book’s narrow and shallow polemical ambitions. Not only does the author confine Pilgrim’s journey to just the five years after the coalition government was formed, he totally ignores any class-based analysis whatsoever.

For Donovan, the task is to manage capitalism, not to replace it. Pilgrim is even encouraged by the Interpreter to exercise empathy for the people’s oppressors — they are burdened themselves, apparently, by their self-delusion.

The SNP, with its social-democratic rhetoric and pro-capitalist policy platform, is held up as an apparent role model for the Labour Party in presenting a clearly told alternative to the Tories.

Those slabs of undigested references are largely given over to the opinions of leftish economists and thinkers including Piketty, Unger and Zizek, who are quoted with holy reverence.

But there are no mentions of the verities in the writings of Marx, Engels and Lenin.

And there is not so much as a paragraph about the class struggle and the need for the working class not to cohabit with its oppressors but to control all the means of production, distribution and exchange for the betterment of all.

Although The Road to Corbyn ends with the Interpreter, Lady Hope and the returned Lady Charity glancing approvingly back at the tumult created by Pilgrim and thousands like him as they begin their march for change, socialist readers will remain unconvinced that this sense of goodwill on its own will relieve the burdens from their backs.

Review by Paul Simon