With One Hand Waving Free: Ken Fuller’s Latest Political Thriller
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With One Hand Waving Free, Ken Fuller, 2024, 327 pages, £12.99.
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Anybody familiar with Ken Fuller’s Red-Button Men trilogy will know his novels illuminate true events and social consciousness in British political history, with important players being brought sharply back to life by his fictional characters. While the Red-Button Men books were set in early-twentieth-century London, based on the real-life trade union developments and struggles of the period between the wars, this time it’s a flash forward to Britain in 1978 against a backdrop of international political relations, the plot driven by themes of social mobility and colonialism.
Protagonist Roger Drummond has been drifting in a series of manual labour jobs with intermittent dole periods since leaving school. We learn early on he has, to a degree, been largely content with this, yet he is also acutely aware of the stratification of social class – and of his position within this system. Drummond is cognizant of these manual roles simply being a means to an end and that the workplace is somewhere where he is reduced to adopting a persona, a false consciousness, one that begets a need to escape but with the knowledge that you cannot truly escape. Hence ‘with one hand waving free’, he declares to his wife Hilary, is:
…my romantic way of saying that I wanted to escape all that but I didn’t know how. If the chance does come, that hand will be both waving goodbye and saying ‘Look, here I am! Over here! I’ve escaped! I’m free!’
Middle-class, socially ambitious Hilary then cajoles Drummond into starting employment with her uncle Joseph Thornton, the director of Merritt & Thwaite, a company which sells medical supplies to developing countries. This becomes particularly relevant in due course and starts a chain of events that predicate the real-life international political narrative of that decade. At first, Drummond finds the employment tedious, albeit finding he has a flair for the role, but over time, he becomes conflicted as his compliance with Hilary’s life-plan for their future sits uneasily with his working-class loyalties. There is a pivotal moment early on, which forces Drummond to confront this dichotomy:
When his eyes shifted to Drummond, the young man’s expression visibly soured into something approaching contempt. It was at this moment that Drummond knew that he had really arrived… It was as if he were looking at his own reflection in that young man’s eyes; and he did not like what he saw.
From then onwards, Drummond begins to commit small acts of defiance. We see it in his changing sexual relationship with Hilary, in his instigation of an intimate encounter with a female colleague and in his forays into the Third World literature specialist Grassroots Bookshop. The latter is particularly significant as Drummond’s progression at M&T comes with the realisation that the business is complicit in the exploitation of the poorer nations it purports to provide for.
It is this epiphany that reignites his social conscience and helps to cement the forging of an altogether new path. A chance meeting in the bookshop with a former colleague culminates in Drummond being introduced to and developing a friendship with politically-active Garry Lemay, a native of Arawak, a fictional Caribbean island. It is no coincidence here that
Arawak, with a newly-elected left-wing government, symbolises the island nations in the Caribbean and South Americas, which were subject to imperialist oppression – and Arawak was also the name given to the indigenous people of many of these countries.
As Drummond becomes more involved with the Arawak Support Group, he instigates a proposal at M&T to export medical equipment to Arawak. When the company hit a cashflow crisis, Drummond is promoted to a position where he can preside over the consignment.
Coinciding with the Labour government’s gesture to make a substantial donation to a developing country to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the NHS, Arawak and its formidable health minister Davinia Lee become the focus point of British and international political news headlines.
This intensifies the surveillance of US intelligence of leftist nations and the plot takes a veer towards spy territory, as Drummond is approached by an American who claims to be a representative of International Enterprises, a company offering to invest in M&T by way of a generous loan. However, it soon becomes clear that this company is little more than a thinly-veiled front for the CIA.
The second part of the book sees Drummond aboard a ship to Arawak itself and by this point, he is embroiled in a love affair with Lee. There is a moment upon reaching the Caribbean islands when Drummond is overcome with the actualisation of his integral but precarious position, both in terms of geographical and personal landscape. There is a shift here in prose, too; a lyrical poetry emerging from the forward-rolling action and dialogue. A brief pause, a lingering moment in stillness, where we again glimpse Drummond’s inner self, his anima. It is in these moments where we gain a true insight into his psyche:
Up on deck, the beauty of the morning overwhelmed him. Again, he gazed upon the small islands, each completely covered with a thatch of green, glowing in the pristine morning light… The air, already warmed by the young sun, was pure balm, and Drummond wanted to gulp it in and rejoice in it. Then, sadly, he realised that he would never in his life know this moment again. The sun would rise in the sky, growing older and more oppressive, the clear light would thicken and become hazy; these islands would be left behind and he would never see them again.
This momentary quiet is only fleeting, as chaos begins to descend from all directions, both on ship and ashore – in the shape of libertarian religious faction leader Reverend Bassfield Thomas and his band of reactionaries, in the spate of on-board thefts and in the right-wing opposition to Arawak’s new democracy. This builds to a climax, but one perhaps from an unexpected direction and Drummond is once again returned to the contemplation of one hand waving free – but in what capacity?
This book is an accomplished political thriller which cleverly finds the liminal moments between lengthy dialogical exchanges between a diverse array of characters and a constantly evolving plot which mirrors the true political events of a tumultuous decade in global socio-economic history, while also undoubtedly, uncomfortably relevant to the here and now.
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Ken Fuller has been a baker, a merchant seaman, a bus driver and a trade union official. His first book, a labour history of London busworkers, was published in 1985. He has since published thirteen other books, including a three-volume history of the Philippine left (University of the Philippines Press), studies of Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammett, and Red Button Years, a trilogy of historical novels. With One Hand Waving Free is his fifth novel. He has lived in the Philippines since 2003.
Rachel Birchley is a Portsmouth-based neurodivergent creative writing PhD student working on a thesis which incorporates nature and urban landscape writing, ecofeminism, memoir and social commentary. She is part of the Pens of the Earth content creation team and has written for Star & Crescent, The London Magazine and Louder Than War.
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