Angels of the Revolution

By J.W. Horton

ANGELS OF THE REVOLUTION is commiepunk literary fiction set in Gothland, a nation based on Germany's post First World War Weimar Republic. In the gritty, sexy capitol city of Weimarstadt, two former pilots who fought and flew for the now lynched Kaiser have become socialist revolutionaries. Katyusha and her lesbian lover, the Major, take advantage of a lull in the ongoing revolution to search the streets of Weimarstadt for Der Film, a mysterious and legendary piece of cinematography whose origins, significance, and whereabouts are not clear. But what of the reactionary, proto-fascist Freikorps? Do they have an interest in the film as well?

This short novel of 62,000 words portrays a world of guns and cars and motorcycles, sex workers, bohemians, and transvestites. But this work aims at no shallow voyeurism. Katyusha, the main character, is a radical Christian, socialist, and dangerous "gun girl" haunted by the war, and is now struggling with depression, absinthe, and a profound ambivalence to the violence which threatens her sanity.

Imagine Noam Chomsky crossed with Thomas Merton and Thomas Pynchon, and you might get an idea of what this book is like.

The people who have been telling us good literature can not be political are in for a surprise.

• Language: English
• Publisher: J.W. Horton
• Release date: Jan 6, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310877841

J.W. Horton

J.W. Horton was born in Vancouver in 1961. He earned his B.A. in 1983 at the University of Manitoba (Winnipeg) where he has taught English literature since 2004. He has an M.A. from Dalhousie and a Ph.D. from the University of Western Ontario. He has also taught at Cape Breton University. When he isn't teaching, J.W. Horton is reading, writing, going out for groceries, or arguing with people on Twitter. Aside from literature his interests are socialist history, military history, and Christian approaches to politics.

Book preview

We have no idea how we got here, but here we are, in the dark, as usual...

Marie, Marie, hold on tight...

shovelled under too soon

our paper not heard

our warning not heeded

our painting disfigured

or tossed to the fire

this world is not ours

Quiet, please; quiet, gentlemen.

The air is still and slightly cool; we are in total darkness. From a slight distance, a gentle, subdued clatter as of much silverware is heard--from the sound of it this is a large, marbled room with many guests who eat quietly.

We seem to be getting closer to the sounds. The light scraping of a chair is heard and everything falls silent. Another voice rings out. A woman’s voice: clear, proud, aristocratic, military. (The Major. You recognize this at once.)

"Gentlemen.

If,

I may be so bold, a toast

to Rosa Luxemburg

and all

who share her spirit.

"We are here to give the lie to the Devil’s doctrine:

you must never hope

that anything can change."

There is a loud click and a film projector clatters to life. Voices whisper.

...but now they are all gone and there is only cool night air gently ruffling the thin curtains. You are in another room now, above the city streets, lonely freight yard engines throbbing gently up and down afar off.

You are dead beat, exhausted, and dread the coming light, wanting to sleep longer and hoping that when you remember what day it is it will turn out not to be a work day.

You know how it is.

The tobacco smoke of Goth jazz fades out of the mind, the mystery banjo-bass quietly exiting the room, everything exiting the room, leaving it large and empty save for you. Goodnight, smiles the jazz, goodnight everybody, the insidious black, foreign face (black Amerikaner face, doubly foreign) and incongruous sunlight teeth bowing out of the room, lightly stepping backwards, taking along little Negro men and their whispering clarinets. Off to sleep now, off to sleep. So dreadfully late, so early...the little row of windows, some with the cheap shades up, admits moonlight with fantastic Caligari shadows slowly forming on the sawdust floor, evoking a film noir with the incipient white of the whale and the black of the vampire.

You are the only one left and on the only bed in the room--which is actually just about the only piece of furniture. Floorboard lines seem to retreat in perspective as if in some Hogarth engraving of an emptied madhouse, a madhouse you think you saw before, somewhere.

In the distance is some kind of road machinery, some engine grinding away, rhythmically hammering away and muffled by the distance, pausing, hammering away as before...

Get up now? No. Let it stay dark. Outside, several floors below, someone or a cat knocks over a can; a ponderous lorry trundles by, heavily shifting gears, the first machine on the road for hours it would seem. The road machinery seems a little closer now. A worker, trying to shout over it, is faintly heard.

Let us go then you and I, out the window, down the wall like Mr. Edwards’ flying spider, burning hot and whistling on a brick: along the very early morning streets of Weimarstadt, the narrow twists and turns of the Altstadt sector now with sand bags and command boxes and machine-gun posts and a few narrow streets that go on intolerably straight, like a shaft in a pyramid for gazing at a star, or for gazing way off in the distance of lonely telephone poles and wires until some slight drop in the ground at a hill crest ends the street--for the eye at least, which stares out the squared and tiny hole of the gunsight street at a distant nothing. The eye gazes at the high ground, the sky...far from the granite and marble immensitudes of the old imperial bureaucracy, far from the eyeless generals on their obedient mounts on sarcophagus pedestals; here is exposed brick and crumbling plaster, tall firetraps wavering under their own weight that just escaped the dawn of firebombing visited a few streets away, creaking fire escapes and a few soldiers on patrol, a few of the earliest, early delivery men in the slowly reversing dusk...now a wider street with a few neon signs still stupidly shining, flashing in the less than half light, themselves half lit from broken tubes or connections...and that road machine seems to be a little closer here. The worker cries out again, trying to be heard over it, as if it’s just him and the machine and the machine is operating itself, ignoring him, on its own path now.

You know how it is.

You thought that Negro went home to sleep, but he never sleeps, following on a low cloud with a saxophone like a figure in an evil foreign cartoon, his hollow, simple lack of melody a never-ending comment on both worldly and transcendent desolation...

You think of the past, strangely, in this place made to forget all past and future. A good idea, nicht wahr? Are not the past and future mostly pain anyway? The hell with them, somebody seems to say, this is the place for the moment...the hell with the past a drunk seems to say, carefully picking his way down the street, stopping to maintain his balance every once in a while in gestures of exaggerated dignity, stalwart attempts to forestall vomiting...

At some point, without you noticing, someone puts two and two together for you and the sound of road machinery becomes the round mouth of an aeroplane radiator, psychopathic prop from the other side of nowhere quietly screaming across the sky, closer, closer, like some approaching hysteric, some hospital nutward case come to wake you up, something with terror on its mind, or what is left of its mind...the Machine comes to speak to you with its ultimate and brutal authority closer and closer...

Waking in Weimarstadt

Saigon. Shit. I’m still only in Saigon.

Apocalypse Now

...the blue monkey. It spoke to her! What was it saying?...

Katyusha awakes from troubled dreams to see before her in the large, greasy dressing table mirror of a dreary hotel room the image of a naked woman sitting in bed, and to the right, a blackened, creaking fan in its battered wire cage scraping away in its pointless task of cooling a room too cold to begin with.

The dreams, the nightmares or whatever they were have not quite left her mind (the olive green Sopwith Triplane again, fire, spinning, corkscrew of greasy black smoke...).

The naked woman in the mirror is herself. She is sitting bolt upright against the brass bedstead. Her makeup is smeared all over her face and she realizes she has been crying again.

The sheets smell of tobacco. She turns her head to the right. Parting the filthy Venetian blinds she looks out the window from five stories high.

Weimarstadt. There is no peace. She has come to see that the cynics among the ancients were right. There is no peace until you die, no matter who you are, no matter how fortunate. And who knows. Maybe not even then. If you can believe the Church.

Weimarstadt. Cobblestones, dirty, loud, rattling cars, people in black. Uniforms--domestic and foreign. Business suits. Bowler hats, cloth caps, the well-dressed, people in rags. Horses. Cripples. Lots of cripples. Too many cripples. Flashing neon and giant words and images looming at you from the sides of buildings, all trying to sell you something. Tons of it. They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Proud stone buildings flanked by stone lions, scrappy little brick buildings from before the empire, and a very few smooth, glass-sheeted towers signalling a new Bauhaus architecture, and perhaps a new world. Shit from the sewers, geraniums from the Tiergarten, sweet, dusty, and fresh; horse sweat and old leather, gas and octane fumes, expensive perfumes, pungent body odour. Ugly, dirty old cars with shimmying wheels; huge, sleek monster saloons with curtains inside the windows, ancient men on bicycles. Even some Asians if you can believe it. There’s a Chinatown just like the Amerikaners would have. The Chinese were brought over to clean up the mess when the war ended and they are not finished even now. Won’t be for years. Were it not for her European clothing, Katyusha, with her round, mostly Japanese face would probably be mistaken for one of them daily. They are still getting blown up almost every day from leftover ordnance.

This is the centre of a stilled, a deadlocked revolution: sparked by the end of the war, temporarily halted in part by the threat of occupation by the war’s victors, but too strong to be swept away by it. Were the governments and businessmen ruling the Entente to have their way, every Red in Gothland would be put up against a wall and shot. But there would be opposition not only in Gothland, but in the victors’ nations as well.

In Gothland people are negotiating, it seems. Or pretending to.

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven. Katyusha dreamed those words once. They were shouted at her anonymously in rage and fear as if through a membrane that could not be broken, as if from another time or another world, but much like this one. When she awoke she wrote them down and put them on the wall in her and the Major’s little Tauentzienstrasse apartment--which is empty right now, unless the police are searching it. In this business you must never leave anything at home worth confiscating and always be ready to check into a hotel: a reliable one such as the Hotel Gräfin Peenemünde here, where no shifty-eyed clerk will phone the authorities such as they are now and get you arrested, interrogated, or worse. (The authorities: supposedly socialist, but a highly compromised socialism, deferential to the perpetually indignant masters of the old regime and with a civil service shot through with reactionary elements.) Katyusha is not, when you think about it, an inconspicuous person, but can walk tall and proud on the streets most of the time--the revolution is still in process after all, even if in something of a lull. But she and the Major sometimes have to live on the lam for short periods.

They’ve made a few sons of bitches run themselves. And more than one has paid the price in terror or broken bones or worse for playing games with Katyusha’s or her comrades’ freedom. Consider the radical pacifists, Katyusha, consider them well, says the Major in her jaunty way, the end of her cigarette circling thoughtfully in her fingers, and so the Major herself does consider the pacifists. Considers them well indeed. But she does not seem quite to agree with them, given her record: an ace from the war--Pour le Mérite and all--one of its finest flying leaders, and the brains behind the revolutionaries’ defense of the Zeughaus in the Adlon Crisis. She had been everywhere after her peculiar Junkers-to-socialism political conversion--leading from the front you might say, in that peculiar, fluid form of leadership practiced by anarcho-socialist units--and had been the bane of Freikorps reactionaries shocked to find that not they alone had any fighting pluck. At the Zeughaus, what should have been a Freikorps walkover followed by the usual massacre of remaining revolutionary workers’ soldiers’ and sailors’ leaders, became a humiliating rout: the nine-lived Ehrhardt shooting himself in the head to avoid the disgrace of capture after being on the losing, Goliath end of a David and Goliath battle.

The revolution must be a hydra, the Major had said. Many heads. In a revolution there is no rear area where our leaders can hide like generals. Many heads, Katyusha, otherwise all the enemy need do is put a few leaders against a wall and all is done with a handful of bullets. It was a new kind of war, the Major had said, as new as their aeroplanes had been in the previous war--but perhaps far more significant. War beyond war.

Katyusha lets the slats fall back into place. Her exhausted arm falls back to her side. Jeroboam. That Turkish shit. The sable tobacco really takes it out of you.

She was never a regular smoker. Not even in the war. An occasional type. Some are like that.

She is not going to be herself today. Shit. She has not been herself since the war. Look: her hand is shaking a little. Nerves. The war. Those dreams or something. There should be a café on the Schwarzallee where she can get a coffee. Maybe she’ll feel like eating in an hour or so, but not now.

She wishes the Major were with her.

Back to the mirror. And to think there was a funeral just a few days ago. Another old comrade; ...death had undone so many... complications, political action, suicide. Curious how many veterans she knew who survived the war only to die afterwards in some stupid accident or other.

There is no one with her. That is not the way she does it after all. When she goes on a binge there is no sex to it. She rules that out. She tries to keep that, at least, joyful. Besides, she can’t do a thing with her dick when she’s drunk.

Turns out she’s wrong. About being alone, that is. She stumbles to the bathroom for a piss and she’s there: half naked and sleeping on the floor by the toilet. Yes, Katyusha remembers her now. Of course: Jeri. Impoverished art student. She wants to be a revolutionary. Afraid she got here too late and that all the best fun is over. I’ve got news for you kid, Katyusha thinks. Jeri found Katyusha through reliable channels. And they didn’t do it, the two of them, neither wanted to. Not that Jeri isn’t attractive; Katyusha sensed the kid was kind of gone on her too, like a fool. Like you do when you’re a kid. She wanted to hang out with Katyusha, it seemed, because Jeri was sad.

Aren’t we all, thinks Katyusha, aren’t we all.

This is just a mood I’m in, Katyusha thinks. The kind of mood you get after a binge, the binge you have when the disappointment gets to you and you can think of nothing else to do. You are angry at God and want to see you can still be loved even when you blow it.

The Revolution is stuck. And it might start going backwards now. We don’t know.

God is always God after all. And you can trust him. Not in this life, of course, only for the next life.

Always for the next life.

There there, the Major had lightly reprimanded her once, agnostic as the Major was and is. Is the Almighty your supreme commander or is he not? If not, you must mutiny. If he is, you must obey orders. Nothing has hurt this revolution more than the attempt to serve two masters. So. You have confessed, however quietly, the name of Jesus. Then follow him.

Jeri’s mouth is a little dirty. And it looks like her vomit missed the toilet once, a little. Katyusha wipes her lip with a bit of toilet paper. With ease, tall Katyusha picks Jeri up off the floor and carries her to the bed. Jeri opens her eye, smiles, one eye half glued shut by sleep.

Don’t look at me, Katyusha says softly, I look like shit. I’ll get cleaned up first, then you. Then I’ll take you out for coffee and breakfast if you can choke it down. She puts Jeri down gently and covers her with a blanket.

As she walks away: Katy? Jeri croaks out of her terminating sleep.

Yes, my dear.

You have a terrific ass.

Yes, thank you.

It’s so firm. And plentiful.

The hallmark of my kind, honey.

Is it a trait of phallogynes to have such asses? I think you’re the only one I’ve actually ever met. Up close, that is.

A phallogyne’s ass is usually big enough to be seen from quite a distance, dear. But we have been known to have little ones. I’ll try not to take too long.

Katyusha shuts the bathroom door. Hotel showers in Weimarstadt are notoriously cold: some leftover Bismarck/Protestant shit; sensual pleasure is bad. Boy, but we’ve assaulted that one with a vengeance, haven’t we? And so they call us decadent in Weimarstadt. The war of pleasure it is...but a cold shower’s just what she needs. She usually sings Wagner, but her head hurts too much just now.

You hit a cop, Jeri says, as Katyusha comes out in a towel.

I hit a cop? That’s bad.

Or, no. So many uniforms around here. I think he was what they call the Freikorps.

That’s worse, she smiles. But better, too.

Since I’m new to Weimarstadt I don’t always know the difference. So many uniforms.

Neither do we. But on rare occasions a cop has a conscience.

He said something about Jasta 40 you didn’t like, and something about there’d be revenge for the death of the Kaiser.

Now I remember. Katyusha moves about, looking for her clothes. They’re always blaming us socialists for losing the war. Did I hurt him much?

SOCIALISM:

--Workers control the means of production.

--Elimination of class exploitation, and therefore of economic and political classes.

--Cooperation, not competition, is the working principle of economy.

--Each produces according to her ability and receives according to her need.

--The abolition of human self-alienation.

--Only labour--of mind or body, of human or nature--is productive. Money is useful but does not work, therefore is not allowed to claim the products of labour as autogenesis, therefore there are NO capitalists.

--Those whose very dreams are circumscribed by the possible do not define socialism.

I heard something crack, says Jeri, it must have been his nose or his teeth. He was bleeding like a fountain and didn’t look like he was going to get up soon. People started making noises about calling the police and you were raving about how glad you were the Kaiser had been lynched, so I bundled you into a cab and got us out of there.

Smart kid.

I’m not street smart like you are.

"I’m not street smart. Well, here’s one boot...I never fought much in the streets, just the mud. And then the air. In the Luftstreitkräfte you got three squares a day at least."

I thought you and the Major fought in the streets, in the revolution when the war ended.

Yeah. We did that. Where are my fucking pants?

"Anyway, I got the cabbie to stop a few

Reviews for Angels of the Revolution

[Jenifer Mohammed · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Absolutely brilliant storytelling. Horton takes the reader on a journey through the dangerous, sexy, troubling world of Gothland, painting sensory rich images with his lyrical command of language. In Gothland, the reader encounters intriguing and secretive characters scarred and transformed by their war time experiences and the following revolution. Through juxtapositions of past and present, truths are revealed, truths are obscured, and the reader must piece together each tantalizing clue to discover the truth of the Major and Katyusha’s quest for Der Film. This is a book that demands to be read again and again and each time the reader will discover new and imaginative ideas and images to be swept up in. A must-read book for anyone looking for a great book to start 2014 off with a bang not a whimper.