Atop a Paris car factory stands a conical wooden structure with stairs running around the outside. A spotlight picks out a woman dressed in brown sacking that leaves one of her breasts exposed. She picks her way slowly, painfully up the steps, sweating: a metal pole has been placed across her shoulders, at each end of which a rusty car door is suspended on ropes. Far below, opinion is divided on the performance. It is decadence. It is art. It is a strip show, taking far too long to get going. This last view, expressed in earthy terms by a group of disappointed workers, highlights the strange and fragile alliance – students, political radicals, trade unions – that forged a major 20th-century moment of protest: May ’68.
It is a testament to the strength of Gavin McCrea’s characters, taking shape in snappy exchanges, that a moment much dulled by decades of dramatic recreation – whether fawning or scornful – is raised here to such raw, new life. Protesters thrill to the sense that, as in China not so long before, history may at last be about to turn in France. The police – les flics – have other ideas. One girl is flung to the ground, two policemen jumping up and down on her chest until she vomits blood.
McCrea’s first novel, Mrs Engels (2015), recreated the London life of Friedrich Engels from the point of view of Lizzie Burns: a working-class Irish woman who became Engels’s partner after her sister, his lover, passed away. The Sisters Mao, too, is historical fiction with two siblings at its heart. Iris and Eva are leading lights of the Wherehouse commune in London, experimenting with radical theatre. Mao is an inspiration: the mastermind behind a culture war that started out small but won big. For the Wherehouse members mingling with the crowds in 1960s Paris, Europe’s revolution begins here, with sit-ins, lengthy speeches and strenuous performance art. The streets, plastered with images of Mao, Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara, evoke for Eva their commune at home, its “interior exploded outwards”.
When she returns to London, she is struck by “the insularity of the place, the triviality. London is asleep”. And yet it remains the centre of the sisters’ world: home to a thick and testing swirl of relationships – most importantly with the girls’ mother, a well-known actress, against whose world view they hatch a plan to rebel. The Sisters Mao is powered by this intertwining of the political, the personal and the performative. McCrea’s observations are a joy – a man plants a kiss on Iris’s ear and she feels “the tickle of his beard as far away as her toes”.
But he excels, too, in conjuring dialogue between characters where the register shifts in disorientating, intriguing ways, suggesting speakers that don’t always know, from one moment to the next, whether they are chatting with each other, or lecturing, or performing.
