Before I begin, I have a confession to make which many readers may find appalling – before I had read this novel, I thought that it might represent a prime opportunity to do a hatchet-job. ‘An anti-globalization novel,’ I thought, “Ha! That makes about as much sense as scoring baseball by awarding points for artistic expression.” Polemical literature has always left me cold. I’m a product of an interpretive tradition which holds that literature is not about ideas, but about words. Of course, there are countless examples of great literature which feature both great language-use and profound ideas, but the question remains – is the language a vehicle for the idea, or is the idea a vehicle for the language? On a less abstract level, I’ve seen far too many opportunists, bad writers, make a living by saying things that were completely obvious, and expect to be congratulated for it. This experience then, coupled with my vindictive and sometimes childish nature, made me look forward to the possibility of doing my smug git routine and dismissing this novel on the basis that it was too polemical. However, I now find that I cannot write such a review. This novel is simply too well-written. The sentence-construction is exquisite.

While the narrator (as distinct from the author) is very forthright in his opinions on the subject of globalization, this never comes across as clumsy. It’s actually very good characterization. It puts muscles on the narrator’s back, makes him more physically ever-present in front of us. In this way, amongst others, this novel reminded me again and again of Dickens’ Hard Times. Dickens’ narrators were also typically forthright in their opinions, and whether we agree with those opinions or not, or simply think them ludicrously obvious, this increases our faith in the narrator’s willingness and ability to tell the story – it does what all great novels do – it makes the narrator human, and makes us feel that we’re in a safe pair of hands. I’m still a little iffy about the whole concept of an anti-globalization novel, but I’ve always had a real weakness for the big societal novel. I’ve always loved novels of that description for their sheer ambition, and The Fountain at the Centre of the World is the big societal novel par excellence. Half-way through, I strongly suspected that Newman used a particular turn of phrase repetitively, at the beginning of successive sections, in order to doff his hat to Dickens, as if to say, “Yes, this is a big societal novel. This is the tradition I’m working in.” What’s more, Newman succeeds in holding the narrative together despite the daunting breadth of his material, the number of different social-landscapes and thought-collectives. That’s something that not even Charles Dickens could achieve most of the time.

Technically, Newman displays a wide repertoire of styles here, while still preserving the narrator’s voice. No multiple-personality disorder here. For example, using quotation-marks for dialogue on one page and discarding them on the next, or moving between past-simple and present-simple, both devices to create a more immediate physical tone where it’s needed – this sounds straight-forward, but most writers move through these different gears with some degree of awkwardness -disguising the technique is extremely difficult. With Newman, however, these transitions are seamless. And then the narrator just captures little snapshots of human physicality perfectly – for example, in one scene, a fourteen year-old character named Daniel Salgado, having escaped from the police in Mexico and gotten to England, is asked by a group of anti-globalization activists if he wants to travel with them to Seattle, where the World Trade Organization is meeting, in order to search for his father. The narrator continues – “That’s what I want, said Daniel, nodding vigorously like a boxer assuring the referee he can go on.” Later on, during the tear-gas and rubber bullets of Seattle, one of the English contingent is watching the police pepper-spray protesters – “The slow deliberation with which the police sprayed the heads of those sitting next to and behind her looked bizarrely careful, like front-stage festival security chucking water over the mosh-pit in case the kids overheat.” Finally, in coordinating her movements with others during the protests, the same character is trying to negotiate a copied street-map of Seattle – “We can probably take the intersection if we skirt around here, said Monica, her Pacman finger traveling up and around two photocopied blocks to Fourth and Pike.” Again and again, the narrator gives us lines which, on a minutely physical level, just seem so apposite. He hits the nail on the head with these turns of phrase, and gives the novel a real sense of facticity in so doing.

Part 4 of the novel, entitled The Battle of Seattle, is reminiscent of the second part of Norman Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago, an account of the 1968 political conventions, including the Chicago anti-war protests which resulted in some of the most blatant police-brutality in modern American history. Like Mailer’s book, it borders on straight reportage, but the narrator never loses control of the text.

The only weaknesses I could discern were the proliferation of coincidences (but then again, if coincidences are required to make a story hang-together, so be it – it is, after all, a story) and that when characters other than the narrator get around to discussing globalization, it can get laid on a little too thick. Better to leave the polemic to the narrator.

This novel is also a resoundingly successful attempt to construct a dramatic relationship between the public and the private, to provide a social backdrop in which a dramatic sequence of events becomes meaningful. This is something which all big societal novels must attempt. What marks this one out is just how successful the attempt has been – among other things, it’s a superior family-tragedy. Finally, the plot heats up very quickly and doesn’t slow down again. Rest assured, you won’t be bored. All in all, then, this is probably the best contemporary novel I’ve read for about two or three years. Reading it was both exhilarating and a little saddening – even a naturally confident journeyman such as myself can’t help but feel inadequate when confronted with something this good. Whatever about his future career as an anti-globalization activist, Robert Newman’s future as a literary talent looks bright.