City of Darkness, City of Light

Marge Piercy
Penguin
ISBN 0-14-026606-2
£6.99

A Tale of Two Classes

It was the best of books. It was the worse of reviews.

No review can really do Marge Piercy's wonderful City of Darkness, City of Light justice. Set during the French Revolution, she paints a vivid of the reasons for that Revolution and the Revolution itself. Drawing on the lives of six historical characters (the famous -- Robespierre, Danton, Madame Roland and Condorcet -- as well as the not so famous -- the san culottes Pauline Leon and Claire Lacombe) she combines the personal and the political to show the nature of the peoples revolution and its ultimate defeat by the rich and the very instrument created to protect it, the new, Republican state.

Piercy, as readers of her excellent Science Fiction novels Woman on the Edge of Time and Body of Glass, is a feminist writer with a strong libertarian theme to her politics and writing. This libertarian theme is also at the fore in City of Darkness, City of Light. The liberating nature and effectiveness of direct action as a means of social change is brought home by the development of the two female san culottes. Thus the revolutionising of individuals and social relationships is stressed along with the revolutionising of the wider society. Similarly, the progression of the revolution from its moderate original aims towards a social revolution is also vibrantly portrayed, with the very process of direct action producing wider, more radical demands and changes in society and individuals.

This book makes one want to buy and read Kropotkin's The Great French Revolution to find out more about those turbulent times. It truly is a book which you will not want to put down. This review, as I said, cannot do it justice!