Alexei Sayle: Stalin Ate My Homework
Mar. 17th, 2012 11:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustI heard Alexei Sayle read from one of his books at a LitFest event, many years ago, and had him mentally filed away as someone to read more of, sometime. Despite which, this is the first of his books that I've read. I was curious to read his account of a Communist Party childhood in 1950s Liverpool, since my own early childhood had been within the Party in East London in the 1950s - and that title promised it would be entertaining.
Thia was naïvely literal-minded of me: I approached the book as a memoir, with the default assumption that it may events and situations might be heightened for effect, but that the narrative was basically true. As a result, it took me a while to find my bearings, to realise that the autobiographical narrative has been polished into the sort of standup routine Sayle describes himself developing towards the end of the book.
My confusion was increased by a sort of temporal displacement. It doesn't help that, because Sayle made his name in the 1980s wave of standup comedy, I had been thinking of him as substantially younger than me, when we are close to the same age. But much of what he describes feels even earlier. It doesn't help that the big opening number recounts how, when all his school friends were excited about going to see Bambi (really? about a reissue of a fikm that was some 15 years old?), his parents wouldn't allow him to be sullied by this product of the capitalist machine and took him instead to see the 1938 classic Alexander Nevsky. The identity of the films concerned generates some additional noise, but the underlying narrative conveys something equally archaic, the observance of policy in small things as in large. If the childhood described in this book feels to me like something from another era, a long time ago when people joined the Communist Party because they believed in the revolution and the benevolence of the Soviet Union - well, that's in part because the 1950s were a long time ago.
The Party was the background of much of my childhood, but it wasn't the constant presence that it seems to have been for the Sayles. Nonetheless, there is a lot here that I did recognise. Opening the book at random, I read a passage about Unity Theatre and the sense that when actors who had graduated from the theatre appeared on the TV "it was our socialist duty to watch them." I wouldn't have put it that explicitly, but I read his list of examples - Lionel Bart, David Kossoff, Warrwn Mitchell, Alfie Bass - and recognise figures who were regarded as in some way 'ours'.
Because Alexei's father worked for the railways, the family benefitted from cheap travel, and holidayed in eastern Europe, where they seem to have been treated less as tourists than as a fraternal delegation, and put up in great style. My parents were both trachers, so we were able to take long camping holidays in the summer, though mainly we went south rather than east (reading this book on holiday in Spain I was reminded that there was a reason why - although I had been to Italy and Greece by the timr I was 12, Spain was always off limits). In 1958, though, we went to Hungary, and I was charmed to compare my rather hazy recollections with Alexei Sayle's much clearer memories of a 1961 visit: he was unimpressed with the campsite adjacent to his luxury hotel by lake Balaton, but we were very happy there.
All this is wonderfully described.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
helenraven quotes an early passage about how brusque his mother and her sisters were with each other: "as if my mother was applying for some sort of mining permit". I was much taken by a description of a train which I can't now find (there are quite a lot of trains in the story). Mostly, though, I didn't want to read odd phrases out to prople, I wanted them to read the whole book. When I'd finished it, I passed it on to durham_rambler, who enjoyed it, and then to my brother who was less impressed.
It's true that it tails off, rather, as it moves from the author's childhood to his adolescence, from the tight little family unit to the emerging individual (I haven't talked about the depiction of his parents, but it is delightful, both very funny and very touching). The last chapter, in particular, read as if it had been included purely in order to bring the story to the point at which Sayle goes to college and is therefore no longer a child, in order to provide a stopping point in lieu of an ending. Well, sometimes you just can't find a good ending...
Guardian article.
Thia was naïvely literal-minded of me: I approached the book as a memoir, with the default assumption that it may events and situations might be heightened for effect, but that the narrative was basically true. As a result, it took me a while to find my bearings, to realise that the autobiographical narrative has been polished into the sort of standup routine Sayle describes himself developing towards the end of the book.
My confusion was increased by a sort of temporal displacement. It doesn't help that, because Sayle made his name in the 1980s wave of standup comedy, I had been thinking of him as substantially younger than me, when we are close to the same age. But much of what he describes feels even earlier. It doesn't help that the big opening number recounts how, when all his school friends were excited about going to see Bambi (really? about a reissue of a fikm that was some 15 years old?), his parents wouldn't allow him to be sullied by this product of the capitalist machine and took him instead to see the 1938 classic Alexander Nevsky. The identity of the films concerned generates some additional noise, but the underlying narrative conveys something equally archaic, the observance of policy in small things as in large. If the childhood described in this book feels to me like something from another era, a long time ago when people joined the Communist Party because they believed in the revolution and the benevolence of the Soviet Union - well, that's in part because the 1950s were a long time ago.
The Party was the background of much of my childhood, but it wasn't the constant presence that it seems to have been for the Sayles. Nonetheless, there is a lot here that I did recognise. Opening the book at random, I read a passage about Unity Theatre and the sense that when actors who had graduated from the theatre appeared on the TV "it was our socialist duty to watch them." I wouldn't have put it that explicitly, but I read his list of examples - Lionel Bart, David Kossoff, Warrwn Mitchell, Alfie Bass - and recognise figures who were regarded as in some way 'ours'.
Because Alexei's father worked for the railways, the family benefitted from cheap travel, and holidayed in eastern Europe, where they seem to have been treated less as tourists than as a fraternal delegation, and put up in great style. My parents were both trachers, so we were able to take long camping holidays in the summer, though mainly we went south rather than east (reading this book on holiday in Spain I was reminded that there was a reason why - although I had been to Italy and Greece by the timr I was 12, Spain was always off limits). In 1958, though, we went to Hungary, and I was charmed to compare my rather hazy recollections with Alexei Sayle's much clearer memories of a 1961 visit: he was unimpressed with the campsite adjacent to his luxury hotel by lake Balaton, but we were very happy there.
All this is wonderfully described.
helenraven quotes an early passage about how brusque his mother and her sisters were with each other: "as if my mother was applying for some sort of mining permit". I was much taken by a description of a train which I can't now find (there are quite a lot of trains in the story). Mostly, though, I didn't want to read odd phrases out to prople, I wanted them to read the whole book. When I'd finished it, I passed it on to durham_rambler, who enjoyed it, and then to my brother who was less impressed.It's true that it tails off, rather, as it moves from the author's childhood to his adolescence, from the tight little family unit to the emerging individual (I haven't talked about the depiction of his parents, but it is delightful, both very funny and very touching). The last chapter, in particular, read as if it had been included purely in order to bring the story to the point at which Sayle goes to college and is therefore no longer a child, in order to provide a stopping point in lieu of an ending. Well, sometimes you just can't find a good ending...
Guardian article.
