Revolution in the head

Published on Friday 29 February 2008 20:26

TRY AS I MIGHT, I CAN'T IMAGINE Meaghan Delahunt before she became a novelist. Instead of the quietly attentive, empathetic, stylish woman in front of me now, my mental image of her would have to shift radically.

Her soft curls would be replaced by an angry crop, and there would be no hint of lipstick or mascara, those classic signs of bourgeois self-indulgence. More than that, I'd have to picture a woman whose dedication to politics was so extreme that when the comrades instructed her to drop out of university and work in on a car production line, that's just what she did, becoming a firebrand who would stand on top of tables to harangue union moderates, then a strident spokesperson for 5,000 laid-off workers. No, I just can't imagine Meaghan Delahunt as a Trotskyite.

Maybe she can't either, which is why she's hardly ever written anything about it in the 15 years that she's lived in Edinburgh. But if the eight years she spent as a Trotskyite agitator in her native Australia hasn't yet directly infiltrated her own fiction, the directions her reaction against the party took her in certainly have done.

First, art. Her debut novel In the Blue House (2001) may have had the ageing Trotsky in the foreground, but it was Frida Kahlo, the artist with whom he is rumoured to have had an affair, that inspired Delahunt's multi-voiced, prize-winning book, which sweeps across both decades and continents.

Now, spirituality. It's not as though her interest in art has withered – Delahunt remains one of the most visual of writers, and one of the three characters in her long-awaited second novel, The Red Book, is Franoise, an Australian photographer. Nor has her interest in politics faded: the concern for social justice that first drew her into the stern embrace of the Socialist Workers Party lingers on in The Red Book's setting, the Indian city of Bhopal, 20 years after the gas leak at the Union Carbide factory killed thousands in 1984. But it's the search for spirituality that gives the book its heart.

Franoise, visiting India for the first time, isn't initially so much concerned with that. What counts more is a search to see the world afresh, taking pictures that show absence as much as presence, finding a way of photographing this vibrant, vivid, chaotic country without reproducing all the old visual clichs. Delahunt's writing is a neat parallel: no clichs, but a compellingly credible portrait of life in a Delhi guesthouse, complete with textbook examples of show-don't-tell dialogue and a wonderful style that is somehow at once descriptive and pared down.

Like Delahunt herself, Franoise goes to work on an arts project in Bhopal. There, we meet Naga, a former servant at the Delhi guesthouse, now a Buddhist monk. His search is spiritual, as is that of his friend Arkay, a Scot battling addiction, grief and memories of abuse. Arkay's demons at first hold him back, so his preliminary search is the more basic one of, quite simply, how to be good. As the three meet, their lives change: these searches coalesce and move towards, in one case death and, in another, life. The Red Book which Franoise assembles of their time together is an album of photos that slowly develop their stories.

As written up by Delahunt, who tells the story from the point of view of each of the three characters in turn, it's an exceptional novel that haunts the mind. If it is tough to picture Delahunt as a former Trot after meeting her, after reading this book it is becomes impossible to imagine. Books as nuanced, lush and above all as spiritual as this just can't come from a mind geared to the heavy churn of revolutionary politics.

Delahunt smiles and tells me the story of how she became involved with the comrades. It was love. She met "a beautiful Indian man" when she was 19 and in the second year of an arts degree at Melbourne University; he was the charismatic leader of Resistance, the SWP's youth wing, and worked in an aircraft factory. They'd go to great pains to hide their love – the comrades frowned on "horizontal recruits" – but it flourished all the same.

Young, idealistic, unstoppable, she quit her "bourgeois" university in her last year to obey the party's instructions to its cadres to infiltrate industry and went to work at General Motors. Life meant subservience to the party, endless action committees, doing her bit for Castro's Cuba and writing for the party's newspaper.

Behind the politics, though, was an even older impulse. Ever since the age of ten (her mother says five), she had wanted to be a writer. The first thing she wrote about for the party newspaper, she says, was a description of a union meeting: "I was describing the way in which people put up their hands for a vote, the angles of their faces, things like that. I was so overwhelmed by the atmosphere and my writing reflected it. Later, the party secretary said sternly: 'Comrade, we don't do things like that here.' So I had to take out all the atmosphere and characterisation and rewrite it."

For eight whole years in her twenties, though, she stuck with them all the same. There were, in hindsight, worrying signs of wobbling faith. Would a truly secular apparatchik really go into churches, light candles and pray for forgiveness? Love poetry? Retain that long-buried wish to be a writer and start writing short stories? Have doubts about the sexually predatory nature of the party secretary?

Still, in 1984 when the Bhopal tragedy happened, it fitted in completely with her politics. That's what you'd expect from capitalism: that a multi-national company wouldn't care about safety standards in a country where life was cheap. And when she sold socialist newspapers in between shifts as a revolutionary car worker, they carried some of the iconic photos from Bhopal by Raghu Rai. The Red Book begins with Franoise remembering one of them – of a child's corpse, all but its face covered in earth, its dead eyes looking up past the viewer, a relative's hand stroking its forehead.

After she'd left the party, a former Buddhist nun moved into the house Delahunt was renting in Perth and taught her how to meditate. She'd met Buddhists before – indeed, she'd helped to recruit one into the party, much to the suspicion of the comrades, for whom Buddhism's tenets on curbing anger and violence were at odds with their own strident, unreflective militancy. But that's the path Delahunt has taken away from revolution, a difficult journey made slightly easier by reading Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, which deals with a similar theme. "It is," she says, "the book that changed my life."

Her own creative path since then hasn't been smooth. For all the highlights – winning Australia's biggest short-story prize, all the major awards won by The Blue House (including two in Scotland) – her career has in the past been affected by changes in literary agents and publishers. "I feel," she laughs ruefully, "as if I have had the worst luck of any writer I know. But strangely, it's always led to something good."

To compound the problem, she'd spent five years working on a novel about India that hadn't worked. "It had some of the same characters as The Red Book but was completely different. I had to let it go: it was an after-death story set in a dying monk's head. Part of the problem was that I just didn't know what it was about. There was a lot of death in my life at that point – my partner's parents and my own father, and I think in some ways I was writing this book about death in order to be able to deal with it."

With The Red Book, Delahunt's writing process may seem more like collage-making than taking the idea for a plot and writing it up, yet it seems to have a firm sense of its direction and focus. It might address the same issue – Bhopal – that the younger Delahunt dealt with in her crop-headed, righteous Trotskyite incarnation, but looks at it from the deeper perspectives of Buddhism.

In two three-month residencies in India, Delahunt had come to understand more about the religion. "I stayed at monasteries, visited the place where the Buddha was born, met the Dalai Lama and the head of the Tibetan government in exile, and my understanding of it deepened, not just on an intellectual level but on a more fundamental one. And ultimately that was what my issue with the Left was all about. We were so focussed on changing the outside world that we never looked inside ourselves at the often tyrannical way in which we behaved while we were trying to do just that."

Look inside. As a young Trotskyite, Delahunt mightn't have understood that. But whatever your politics or religion, if you want a beautifully written story that gets inside characters on a spiritual journey through modern India, that would be also be my advice about The Red Book. Look inside.

&#149 The Red Book is published by Granta, priced 10.99. Meaghan Delahunt will discuss it at Aye Write! in Glasgow on 15 March, 11:30am (www.ayewrite.com) and on 26 March at the National Library of Scotland at 7pm, 0131-623 4675, [e-mail] ).