This novel, the blurb tells us, was 10 years in the making. What it doesn’t tell us is that it was even longer getting into print; it took a small independent press miles from London to show the necessary nous and guts to bring it out, mainstream literary publishing being dead now in Britain.
In fairness, though, who in the mainstream could have expected that a fictionalised history of the Independent Labour Party from 1893 to 1937 would make for an absorbing, funny and moving novel?
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Well, anyone familiar with Broady’s earlier, highly praised novels. And anyone who bothered to read beyond the synopsis and into the novel itself, even a few chapters.
Funny it certainly is; Broady is up there with Amis père. But Broady’s is the insider wit of sympathy, not the outsider wit of satire. Absorbing also, as it focuses on two men – Fred Jowett and Philip Snowden – with a third, the outrageously charismatic Victor Grayson, who, in person or in absence, haunts the novel.
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Around them jostle other politicians, “celebrities” (GB Shaw, Jacob Epstein, the king...) and above all, “The People”. Shown collectively, at election rallies for instance, they resemble animated canvases by LS Lowry.
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That comparison extends to Broady and Lowry’s similar sense of humour and their technique: caricature which is sharply observant but warmly compassionate.
That humour, in Broady’s case, can at times modulate into ironic ambivalence or turn indignantly black, when, for example, describing anti-pacifist mobs, conditions in the trenches, the postwar “White Terror” in Hungary witnessed by an Independent Labour Party delegation; even in reference to the eponymous workers nightly toiling to clear the communal cesspits, whose appearances – olfactory or corporeal – serve as leitmotif throughout the novel.
Overall, though, The Night-Soil Men is a moving portrayal, in a series of vignettes whose dates are helpfully supplied in the chapter headings, of friendship, comradeship – not without hostilities, rivalries and betrayals – founded on a shared vision of a political Utopia every bit as alluring and illusory today as it was then.
Published, finally and fortuitously, in what is both an election year and the centenary of the first Labour government in Britain, this novel’s time has now arrived.
