Arts & Entertainment

‘One of Us’:the New Labour story through the frame of Antigone, the classic Greek tragedy

By team ⋅ March 29, 2008 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

The Guardian, 8 March

While the 9/11 attacks have spawned a number of recent novels, the decision ot go to war against Iraq has received relatively little attention in fiction. Melissa Benn’s second novel puts that disastrously decisive event at its moral centre as well as locating it within the wider context of the Labour party’s recent history. Few could be better placed than Benn to chart Labour’s painstaking reinvention of itself through the repeated election defeats of the 1970s and 80s, via the landslide victory of 1997, to the debacle of the Iraq war and its sorry aftermath. As the daughter of Tony Benn, the sister of Hilary Benn and campaigning journalist in her own right, she has witnessed public and private contours of Labour’s journey over the last 30 years.

Tempting, then, to approach ‘One of Us’ as a roman à clef, an insider’s guide to New Labour. But while it is certainly true that Benn is concerned with and perceptive about Labour’s transformation, particularly as experience by those involved, her real focus is a much bigger theme: the risks and rewards of kinship, political, professional and, most importantly of all, personal.

It was an inspired decision, then, to tell this tale through a reworking of the story of Antigone, of all the Greek tragedies the one that addresses most directly the dilemma of wise governance, the conflicting pulls of familial bonds, civic interest and political authority.

Benn is wonderful on the telling of family life, the delicate balance between individual and collective identities within a family. ‘One of Us’ is unashamedly a novel about politics, a damning indictment of New Labour and the fatal erosion of moral discernment in political life. It is a novel about marriage and the unseen, unacclaimed domestic lives that we lead. Above all, it is about the fragile, precious web of personal connections. Benn has succeeded in being the ancient themes which preoccupied Sophocles up to date with a keen eye and subtle intelligence.