Review of Alan Gibbons' novel "Winds of October"

Winds of October

Alan Gibbons, Winds of October, Hastings, Circaidy Gregory Press, 2017, 230 pages

Alan Gibbons has published over sixty books, usually novels for young people, and often engaging with contemporary political questions. Hatedealt with hate crime; The Trap dealt with terrorism; An Act of Love tells the story of two childhood friends who both end up fighting in Afghanistan, but not on the same side. Caught in the Crossfire tells a story of intercommunal violence. Gibbons does scores of school visits every year, runs campaigns to save libraries, and carries out other vital activities in our neoliberal world. He is an anti-capitalist activist and can be found knocking on doors for Corbyn or at innumerable demos, summer schools or meetings for the cause.

This of course goes some way towards explaining his latest project, a trilogy of short novels set during the Russian Revolution, of which the first is just out, under the title Winds of October.

It is a fast-paced read, following the fortunes of five young participants in the Revolution. The novel takes us first through the insurrection of February 1917, when the tsar is overthrown but the new government refuses to stop the war, which has already killed over a million young Russian men. We then jump to the events of April, when Lenin returns to Petrograd and insists that only a government based on workers’ and soldiers’ councils will stop the war and concentrate on feeding the hungry masses. The last section is set in October, as the provisional government collapses practically without defenders, and the workers’ councils take power under bolshevik leadersip..

A tapestry of telling detail brings the revolutionary year to life: the workers who destroy the leather armchairs when they take the Winter Palace, because they need the leather to make shoes, or the brave revolutionaries who persuade soldiers at the barricades not to shoot but to join the revolt. We see the different stages of the revolution and how everyone’s certainties fall apart. In particular the women characters are no longer prepared to put up with being treated as sex kittens, and frequently tell male comrades where to get off. Quite complex questions of revolutionary strategy and tactics are well-portrayed and explained in dialogues between the insurgents.

This is Gibbons’ first novel not specifically aimed at young people. It maintains however several of the codes of young people’s literature: it is short, and there is rather a lot of falling-in-love at first sight. It is not classified as “for young people” because of the (unlikely) amount of always-energetic sex in the story.

It is notoriously difficult (and perhaps impossible) for historical novels or films to reproduce the psychology of a hundred years ago. But this is not  really the objective of the book. It is more to give a believable account of how people’s lives change, and of the sort of decisions they suddenly had to take as they became subjects of history. It has a couple of anachronisms, and some characters seem to be wholly unaffected by their upbringing, but it is a success in its own terms, and is a place you can learn about the greatest revolution ever while enjoying an exciting tale.

John Mullen