Figures of Catastrophe by Francis Mulhern review reasons to be cheerless

A short but intense study of fiction by a stalwart of the left draws EM Forster, John Fowles and Ruth Rendell into its gloomy prognosis

In the late 1970s, Francis Mulhern’s The Moment of Scrutiny was mandatory if daunting reading for English Literature students who wanted to think of themselves as socialists. In dense but eloquent Marxist prose, Mulhern wrestled with the legacy of FR Leavis and tried to marry the rigour of Leavisite literary criticism with a commitment to the class struggle that Leavis sadly lacked. Mulhern was still in his mid‑20s and seemed a confident prodigy of leftist learning. Surely he would become a leading cultural prophet?

In the years the followed he wrote for and edited the New Left Review, and taught in the US and Britain, but faded from even academic notoriety. Where the unaccountable tendency of the working classes to vote Conservative rather than agitating for socialism spurred many of his NLR comrades to new theoretical outpourings, he went quiet. Now he publishes a short but intense book that returns to the old battleground - literary culture – and for some of the old reasons. “This is an essay in Marxist formalism,” the preface sternly announces. What can the politically engagé extract from English fiction of the last century or so?

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