Review: News from nowhere

News from nowhere by William Morris
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

A utopian novel, hence the title - "Nowhere" being the English translation of "Utopia". (Eighteen years before, Samuel Butler had titled his utopian novel set in New Zealand Erewhon , which is, more or less, "Nowhere" backwards).

Specifically, it's an anarchist libertarian socialist utopian novel, and even more specifically, a William Morris anarchist libertarian socialist utopian novel. It's partly a response to the industrialist state socialist utopian novel Looking Backward: 2000-1887 , published three years earlier, to which Morris had given a critical review in The Commonweal, the Socialist League's newspaper, in which News from Nowhere was first serialized.

I say it's very specifically William Morris because it carries all his hallmarks. The world of the anarchist communist future is strongly influenced by the Middle Ages (by which I think he intends the "high middle ages," since the Middle Ages went on for some time) aesthetically, though of course it's organized as completely differently as one could imagine, and religion is conspicuous by its absence; and part of the reason the whole thing works is that everyone is into arts and crafts, and has cultivated the enjoyment of whatever work they choose to do - a more-or-less reasonable counter to the frequent criticism of socialism that, without market incentives, people in a socialist utopia wouldn't choose to work. It's opposed to the industrialization that he hated, too. He even drops the occasional Morrisian medievalism into the text, such as saying "gave me the sele of the day" rather than "said good morning to me," or calling men "carles". By this point, writing like that was presumably a habit for him.

Having read several of his other works, I knew he was neither a misogynist nor a feminist, and here that takes the form of assuming - and stating the assumption - that women would naturally enjoy the work of being mothers and managing households, so that's what they mostly do, though we do see a female stonecarver, and of course there are no laws to say that they can't do whatever they like. There are no laws to say that anyone can't do whatever they like, nor is there any government or other apparatus to enforce those laws if they existed, but somehow everyone lives more or less peacefully, all the necessary work gets done by people who enjoy doing it, and society just regulates itself by peer pressure in its most positive form. Marriage is not a contract, and divorce requires no court, because there's no property and no law, so people move in and out of relationships freely. Love rivalries are more or less the only major source of continuing disputes, and occasionally someone kills someone else over them, but his neighbours all make him feel ashamed of it, and he does what he can to atone for it. Anyone who actually likes murder and violence is treated as being ill, but because it's a society of free and happy people whose freedom makes them healthy and well-adjusted, this is much rarer than was once the case. They also age more slowly, and are generally good-looking; the narrator admires various young women considerably, in a slightly creepy male-gazey way.

It's an optimistic view of human nature, one that I'm skeptical about myself. The transition from Morris's society to this one also proceeds in a way that I found implausible.

The transition happened, in the story, in the 1950s, about a century prior to the time Morris's narrator is transported to from Morris's own time. (The narrator probably represents Morris himself, since he gives his name as William - though he asks everyone to call him "Guest" - and is the age Morris was at the time of writing, 56. That's partly why I found his admiration of the young women slightly creepy.)

It's your basic socialist revolution, with labour organizing against terrible conditions, but organizing so effectively that it threatens the government of the day, leading to a civil war which the government loses - largely because the socialists wisely won't fight pitched battles, but instead get the sympathy of the vast majority of the people on their side. Over the following generation, society enters a transformation to equality and freedom, and gradually they decide, or realize, that in order to enjoy their work they need to approach it with a craft mindset. They get rid of any industrialization that doesn't serve the kind of society they want, and if anything requires work to be done that nobody wants to do without being forced to it, they do without that thing (or else invent a machine to do it for them, though that last point is de-emphasized). There's a handwaved and little-discussed invention that powers things with "force" instead of polluting steam, but most transport is powered by muscles, either human or animal. The resulting society is de-urbanized; most of London's buildings are removed and replaced with gardens, and many urban people return to the land, because that's where the work they want to do is. This raises the educational level of the country people, too, though by the time of the story, everyone is (as we would say today) unschooling; people, young and old, learn what they want when they want to, with no formal education system, though centres of learning remain.

While it's a society not without its discontents (such as a grumbling old man the narrator's boating party up the Thames encounters at Runnymede), they're a minority, and the majority all easily agree on what is best to do - which is the thing that Morris thinks is the best to do, naturally. This was another difficult swallow for me. I've never seen a society that organizes itself without either central control or a market economy, of course, but I know neither of those produces optimal results all the time, or even that often, and I feel like there's a lot of handwaving involved in believing that this one could be optimal or anything close to it just because nearly everyone (in the aftermath of a civil war, remember) somehow shares a vision of what the good life consists of, without any indoctrination or philosophical disputation going on. I suspect that the nature of the good life seemed so self-evident to Morris that he didn't feel the need to justify it, even though he was such a minority voice in his own time, and even among his own socialist peers.

Another handwavey aspect is about exactly how the working classes are going to elevate themselves. As the boating party travels up the Thames, he continually fulminates about how much more beautiful it is without the ugly and pretentious "cockney" villas of the self-made industrialists - who came from exactly the same class that, supposedly, later had the socialist revolution that produced a society which universally adopted William Morris's neo-medievalist arts-and-crafts aesthetic. He does have an answer for this, and for my "but that's not how real people act" criticism: people's taste, and their basically good and cooperative human nature, are, in the present system, distorted away from the good by the fact that everyone is either oppressed or an oppressor. (I wonder which he saw himself as?) If everyone was free and equal, these issues would naturally go away.

That argument, of course, is not falsifiable without creating the entire society that Morris envisions and watching it fail. But small-scale experiments on similar lines do seem to suggest that people are always going to people - namely be petty, disputatious, jealous, and want to be in charge and get all the good things that are going at the expense of others - unless you take active measures to stop them, and indeed even then. Morris's characters don't act like real people (in this or any other book of his that I've read), any more than they talk like real people, and I think in this case that reveals a blind spot.

Still, I tried to keep an open mind as I read, and I did find some things to agree with. I think Morris is broadly correct in believing that if everyone was able to choose work they found fulfilling, they would be happier and healthier, and society would be better off. I also agree with him that this would usually involve putting creativity and pride into one's work, approaching it like a craft, or, if it was pure physical labour, as a form of pleasurable exercise with a useful result. The question I'm left with is: Do we have to wait for the destruction of capitalism in order for this to be true? And I'm inclined to answer "no". As, to be fair, I believe Morris was also.

Finally, does it work as a novel? Utopian novels aren't typically rich in plot; they're what's sometimes called "milieu" stories, about the exploration of a place and a situation. In this case, the place is a transformed version of one Morris and many of his readers were very familiar with, London and the reaches of the Thames; the house that the story ends up at is Morris's own house, Kelmscott Manor, which surely is symbolic. There's a little bit of romance, both in the form of a couple who are reconciling after the woman has gone off with someone else for a while, and in Guest's attraction to the daughter of the grumbling man at Runnymede. But mostly it's a journey through a landscape with attention being drawn to the differences for the better from the 19th-century versions of the same places, punctuated by history lessons in dialog form. One actually stops being narrated as a scene and becomes a dialog between two people as in a play, or perhaps a Socratic dialog - but without the disagreement, since Guest is already fully on board with the changes that have happened; he just wants to understand them better.

It's not everyone's meat as a novel, in other words, and the fiction is very much in service to the ideas. The characters in Morris always resemble medieval drawings - somewhat stiff and two-dimensional - and while the dialog here isn't as faux-medieval as in most of his works, as I've noted above, it does sport the occasional medievalism.

Still, I found it enjoyable, with well-written descriptions, especially of nature, or rather managed nature (like gardens and fields). Convincing as a philosophical argument? No. But as a window into the thought of a man full of contradictions but a considerable force in his own time, interesting.

View all my reviews