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In The Second Year
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320 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1936
About the author
Storm Jameson
80 books24 followersMargaret Storm Jameson was an English writer, known for her 45 novels, and criticism.
Jameson studied at the University of Leeds, later moving to London, where in 1914 she earned an MA from King's College London. She was a teacher before becoming a full-time writer. She married writer Guy Chapman, but continued to publish as Storm Jameson.
From 1939, Jameson was a prominent president of the British branch of the International PEN association, and active in helping refugee writers. She wrote three volumes of autobiography.
A well-received biography, by Jennifer Birkett, Professor of French Studies at Birmingham University, was published by the Oxford University Press in March 2009.
Jameson studied at the University of Leeds, later moving to London, where in 1914 she earned an MA from King's College London. She was a teacher before becoming a full-time writer. She married writer Guy Chapman, but continued to publish as Storm Jameson.
From 1939, Jameson was a prominent president of the British branch of the International PEN association, and active in helping refugee writers. She wrote three volumes of autobiography.
A well-received biography, by Jennifer Birkett, Professor of French Studies at Birmingham University, was published by the Oxford University Press in March 2009.
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August 12, 2016From Novel: Biography: like 1984 but less good. but still good. Author has cool name.
fic-guided
July 24, 2020Oblivion lies heavier on some novelists than on others – unfairly so in the case of Storm Jameson. Not even her teasing pen-name (she was born humble ‘Margaret Jameson’), the Virago Press exhumation editions or an informative biography have managed to bring her back. Jameson was born – unstormily, solidly middle-class – in Whitby, Yorkshire, and went on to take a first-class degree in English at Leeds University. She was politicised into left-wing pacifism by losing a brother in the First World War. Her personal life was tangled and she supported herself writing well-received fiction for the huge inter-war library market. The germ of this novel – one of her best – was her attending, on 7 June 1934, the Nuremberg-style rally of the British Union of Fascists at Olympia, in the company of Aldous Huxley, Vera Brittain and some five hundred other protesters. When they heckled Oswald Mosley, posturing Hitler-style on the platform, the protestors were set upon by a thousand Blackshirt thugs. Several were badly beaten, others had castor oil forcibly thrust down their throats (inducing instant uncontrollable diarrhoea). As Jameson reported in the Daily Telegraph:
A young woman [was] carried past me by five Blackshirts, her clothes half torn off and her mouth and nose closed by the large hand of one; her head was forced back by the pressure and she must have been in considerable pain. I mention her especially since I have seen a reference to the delicacy with which women interrupters were left to women Blackshirts. This is merely untrue . . . Why train decent young men to indulge in such peculiarly nasty brutality?
Pondering the question, she came to the conclusion that British Fascism was peculiarly ‘British’. It originated not in the streets, but in the public schools (of the kind Mosley attended – Winchester in his case).
Jameson’s novel describes a British Fascist Putsch led by – who else? – Etonians. One of its leaders describes to the narrator-hero
the England he would create when he and his friends were in charge. It made me wince. It was like nothing more than a frightful public school, with willing fags, a glorious hierarchy of heroes in the persons of himself and his Volunteers, and floggings for the unwilling or rebellious.
In the Second Year is set over three months (April to June) at an unspecified point in the near future. Andrew Hillier is a cousin of the prime minister, leader of ‘the National State Party’. Frank Hillier (a kind of echo of Hitler and Führer) is a man of fanatic temperament, elected on a wave of popular discontent with rampant strikes and mass unemployment. He is assisted in bringing ‘discipline’ to the country by his second-in-command, General Richard Sacker (Andrew’s brother-in-law), who has recruited a ‘Volunteer’ force of five million men. The ruling pair are regarded (particularly in the newspapers they now control) as ‘the saviours of the country’. Sacker’s ‘discipline’ involves such measures as chopping up the poet Stephen Spender and throwing the bits into the Thames, forcing E. M. Forster into exile, and setting Virginia Woolf to work in a labour camp. And lots of flogging.
Andrew was a fag at Eton to both his relatives. But disabled, and incorrigibly liberal, he has taken refuge in Norway, where he is a university teacher. It is now the second year of the great reform and Andrew revisits a changed England. A Hitler/Röhm-style power struggle develops, based on Germany’s Night of the Long Knives. Sacker is liquidated and his ‘Volunteers’ disbanded, as was Röhm’s SA, to be replaced by the more military, SS-style ‘Special Guards’. Andrew returns to Norway. As they viewed newscasts of the August 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, readers of Jameson’s novel must have shivered. Was the lady right?
A young woman [was] carried past me by five Blackshirts, her clothes half torn off and her mouth and nose closed by the large hand of one; her head was forced back by the pressure and she must have been in considerable pain. I mention her especially since I have seen a reference to the delicacy with which women interrupters were left to women Blackshirts. This is merely untrue . . . Why train decent young men to indulge in such peculiarly nasty brutality?
Pondering the question, she came to the conclusion that British Fascism was peculiarly ‘British’. It originated not in the streets, but in the public schools (of the kind Mosley attended – Winchester in his case).
Jameson’s novel describes a British Fascist Putsch led by – who else? – Etonians. One of its leaders describes to the narrator-hero
the England he would create when he and his friends were in charge. It made me wince. It was like nothing more than a frightful public school, with willing fags, a glorious hierarchy of heroes in the persons of himself and his Volunteers, and floggings for the unwilling or rebellious.
In the Second Year is set over three months (April to June) at an unspecified point in the near future. Andrew Hillier is a cousin of the prime minister, leader of ‘the National State Party’. Frank Hillier (a kind of echo of Hitler and Führer) is a man of fanatic temperament, elected on a wave of popular discontent with rampant strikes and mass unemployment. He is assisted in bringing ‘discipline’ to the country by his second-in-command, General Richard Sacker (Andrew’s brother-in-law), who has recruited a ‘Volunteer’ force of five million men. The ruling pair are regarded (particularly in the newspapers they now control) as ‘the saviours of the country’. Sacker’s ‘discipline’ involves such measures as chopping up the poet Stephen Spender and throwing the bits into the Thames, forcing E. M. Forster into exile, and setting Virginia Woolf to work in a labour camp. And lots of flogging.
Andrew was a fag at Eton to both his relatives. But disabled, and incorrigibly liberal, he has taken refuge in Norway, where he is a university teacher. It is now the second year of the great reform and Andrew revisits a changed England. A Hitler/Röhm-style power struggle develops, based on Germany’s Night of the Long Knives. Sacker is liquidated and his ‘Volunteers’ disbanded, as was Röhm’s SA, to be replaced by the more military, SS-style ‘Special Guards’. Andrew returns to Norway. As they viewed newscasts of the August 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, readers of Jameson’s novel must have shivered. Was the lady right?
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 22, 2009
This just confused me because it doesn't fit the mold of a dysopia. There is not the sense of foreboding. I mean, there is a sense of danger, but not to the keyed-up level I'm used to. And the whole point of the novel, of what the characters were up to, just really escaped me. I don't know if this was poorly written or if it is so modeled on the England of just before WW2 that I just can't understand where it's coming from because I don't know enough of the political situation.
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