'The History Man'

The Present Man: 
a review of 'The History Man' by Malcolm Bradbury

The prevaricating qualities of introspection and uncertainty - even insecurity - can be useful if engaged in the fulfilment of knowledge and self-awareness. As we grow, intellectually and emotionally, we realise how we can be beholden to a mere idea; how notions of justice, change and improvement in society can arrest us and become almost an extension of the ego and part of our identity; and how this can lead us into the pit of ruthless, soulless inhumanity, often unintended - and almost always unexceptional - even if that inhumanity exists only in our unspoken thoughts, merely a voice in our heads. The young are perhaps specially susceptible to this, but not exclusively so. There are people involved in politics today, mainly at the demagogic margins, who have a social and political understanding equivalent to that of a 15-year old. They rationalise their certainty of mind, purpose and message, and its inflexibility, as one of the inevitable hindrances of a principled life. Human dignity is subverted to a superior moral equation that sees the fortunes of individuals as merely dust for blowing. It is but a short leap from there to the routinisation of debasement on the grounds of wish-thought and vacant idealism.

Right at the centre of Malcolm Bradbury's finest novel is a cruel man. 'The History Man', 'Howard Kirk', is an idealist - he would say 'materialist' - who sees others as dust for blowing and who routinely destroys those who will not serve as 'grist to the mill', a cog in the wheel of his teleological 'History' of 'inevitable progress' in which human beings must march for an idea. Kirk repeatedly runs into people who would much rather march for themselves. What he does about that is, essentially, the subject of this novel. Kirk serves as a kind of clever metaphorical device for the author as we are shown, horrifyingly, how a social and cultural revolution unfolds, in miniature, at a plate glass university campus. Kirk, and his wife, have fallen into the radical politics of this novel's period and Bradbury narrates its debasing and disintegrating effects on them and everyone else. More than a mere genre work - that is to say, not just a period novel or a 'campus novel' - 'The History Man' is an unappreciated classic of general importance that still has, or ought to have, a chilling resonance today, and deserves greater attention, especially among the 'Howard Kirks' of this world. We all know a 'Howard Kirk', for despite Bradbury's brilliant prescience here, his important message was unheeded. 'Howard Kirk' is, sadly, the Present Man, and growing in number.

T. T. Rogers