Now take our new Prime Minister. Does he have a favourite book? Pre-election profiles suggested, unexpectedly, that he carried a flame for James Kelman’s 1989 novel A Disaffection: the Glaswegian writer’s virtuoso monologue, which voices a young teacher’s dark night of the soul. Legal colleagues have reported that the former DPP admired and absorbed Franz Kafka’s The Trial (not such a surprise). Then a cagey interview in The Guardian portrayed an opaque figure with no particular novel or poem to champion.

The Kelman salute allegedly came from Starmer’s 2020 appearance on Desert Island Discs. Listen to the episode in question, however, and you find that, in addition to his “luxury” (a football), the future PM actually picked as his reading-matter not existentialist fiction from Scotland but “a detailed atlas, hopefully with shipping lanes in it” — so that he could plan an escape. His affection for A Disaffection seems to derive from a Labour Party fundraiser in Camden in 2019, which featured a Desert Island Discs-style event.

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The two lists — one for his local party comrades, the other for Radio 4 listeners — reveal other notable discrepancies. Among his musical picks, Beethoven’s Emperor concerto and Jim Reeves (a favourite of his mother’s) survive. But Starmer’s NW1-based love for Desmond Dekker’s ska classic “The Israelites” and Shostakovich’s second piano concerto — genuinely interesting choices — gave way in the BBC studio to a dismally predictable nod for the Lightning Seeds’ “Three Lions”.

So the verdict on James Kelman from 10 Downing Street remains — as with much about its new incumbent — a matter of speculation. But if Starmer does understand and appreciate the 78-year-old novelist, short-story writer and social activist, so much the better for him. An easy “gotcha” trap looms here that it would be wise to avoid. Famously, Kelman is a radical socialist and internationalist, albeit with a fiercely anti-state, even anarchistic, streak. In works such as the Booker-winning How Late It Was, How Late, he deploys the abrasive and profane vernacular of the West of Scotland to express the pain and rage of poor people crushed by overweening power. And Starmer is — well, we know what, in political if not personal terms. Kelman, whose protagonist in his latest novel inveighs against “elitist fuckers, racists, monarchists, imperialist bastards”, has over the five decades of his published work exhibited sub-zero respect for London lawyers, Labour politicians or senior UK state officials. Starmer neatly ticks each box.

So: bland centrist apparatchik loves potty-mouthed hard-Left diehard who would happily string him up with his own red tape? Let’s hold back on the sarcastic sneers for a moment. What matters is not Starmer and Kelman’s notional positions on the light-pink to deep-red spectrum, but the novelist’s rare ability to endow the inner lives of people “left behind” by money, status and power with grace, depth, even grandeur. All politicians should take heed of such a gift. Kelman is not just a polemicist and campaigner — courageous and stubborn, for instance, in his support for victims of workplace asbestosis poisoning — but a deeply serious literary artist. A disciple of modern literature’s giants of innovation in language and vision (Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Knut Hamsun), he invests the working-class life, thought and speech of post-industrial Scotland with all the nuance, scope and subtlety that Marcel Proust attributed to Parisian aristocrats or Virginia Woolf to the denizens of upper-bourgeois Bloomsbury.

Always a voracious reader, Kelman laboured on building sites and in factories (one, in Manchester, exposed him to asbestos) before, in the early Seventies, he joined open creative-writing classes in Glasgow run by Philip Hobsbaum. This poet-academic had a quite extraordinary record as a literary mentor. In Belfast, his apprentices had included a young teacher named Seamus Heaney. In Glasgow, Kelman’s classmates would constitute a galaxy of future Scottish stars, from the poet Tom Leonard to the artist-novelist Alasdair Gray. So Hobsbaum’s writing students have won the Nobel (Heaney), the Booker (Kelman) and now, via the film adaptation of Gray’s Poor Things, four Oscars. By 1973, Kelman had published a volume of stories while still working as a bus driver. He got no advance, but his 200 author’s copies arrived just as he set out for a winter dawn shift.

In the Eighties, sporadic critical acclaim did nothing to blunt his cutting edge. When How Late It Was, How Late took the Booker, to the outraged howls of various critics and even a couple of judges, journalists gleefully totted up its 4,000-odd “fucks”. “My culture and my language have the right to exist, and no one has the authority to dismiss that,” Kelman retorted. But the novelist — raised in Govan and Drumchapel, his father a skilled picture-framer and his mother a late-qualifying teacher — has never transcribed street talk into agitprop fables. On the contrary: his finely-wrought streams of consciousness and deadpan comic dialogue make uncompromising art from suffering and victimhood.

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Sammy Samuels, the blinded hero of How Late… dragged through a torturous “daymare” of arrest and imprisonment, descends not just from Kafka’s Gregor Samsa (in The Metamorphosis) but Milton’s Samson Agonistes. Kelman’s short stories — with collections such as Greyhound for Breakfast (1987) among the strongest of all his works — bring the sensibility of Beckett and Chekhov to the boredom, panic and fitful joy of joblessness or drudgery around the Clyde. A Disaffection met a warmer reception from what he would call “establishment” critics than his fiction often does; according to the author, because its glumly erudite protagonist, although of working-class origins, shared their frames of cultural reference. Still, its torrential soliloquy of thwarted love and hope hits hard.

Praise Kelman and you laud not some facile cheerleader for the traditional proletariat in eclipse but a refined artist who shows that the blows struck by economic, and political, injustice drive people into tragi-comic states of soul. That plight stretches the limits of literary language and fictional form. “The stronger artists always make a challenge,” said Kelman recently: “not only do they write of people from… the lower areas of society, they work within the languages of these same communities. They do not assimilate.” Don’t look to Kelman for feelgood fightbacks against rustbelt adversity, Full Monty-style — although Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff edges closer to his territory.

If Starmer does back Kelman, he votes not for condescending fairy-tales of pluckily-borne deprivation but tough, ambitious, experimental literature. The writer has spoken of his debt to “two literary traditions, the European Existential and the American Realist, allied to British rock music” — itself, Kelman notes, the offspring of Blues and Country-and-Western. From a British politician, a homage to any creative figure with such a complex pedigree would make a change. Besides, Kelman needs, and merits, the endorsement.

Even after the triumph of Kieron Smith, Boy — a searingly tender portrait of Glasgow childhood that, among other things, enabled Douglas Stuart’s Booker winner Shuggie Bain — his star faded and his income fell. His fancy publishers departed. Although one of his funniest, most approachable works, Kelman’s 2022 novel God’s Teeth and Other Phenomena appeared not from some grand imprint but a small California-based indie, PM Press. Piling insult on injury, it garnered hardly any reviews in UK media until this glaring neglect itself became a story, and prompted some catch-up coverage.

“Surviving is fucking hard,” muses Jack Proctor, the rebellious curmudgeon becalmed on a North American campus who narrates God’s Teeth… For Kelman, it has been, although his humour, outrage and resilience persist. Not quite a self-portrait, Proctor nonetheless sports several Kelmanesque traits, such as exasperation with his rep as “the chap who writes the swearie words” and a history of winning a posh accolade known as “the Banker Prize”. For Jack’s creator, some conspicuous applause — even from a metropolitan KC who heads what he would deem a sell-out party — might not come amiss.

In any case, Kelman’s work and stance may have something to teach the PM beyond the eternal sniping that Labour leaders expect from the Left. Notice that tribute to “Country-and-Western” in Kelman’s roll-call of the art he loves. In a talk to Texas schoolkids (given while he lived and taught in Austin), he numbered among his earliest inspirations Connie Francis, Buddy Holly, Sam Cooke and Fats Domino. Such musicians “sang in their own voice and for their own people”, motivated by “self-respect” and respect for their own culture. Scrupulously, Kelman refuses to draw any ethnic dividing-lines.

His sympathy with the downtrodden in a landscape of exploitation has always been utterly ecumenical. When he was 15, his family briefly emigrated to America. The teenage Kelman roamed hardscrabble California on formative journeys of discovery. Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” became his kind of folk as much as Clydeside ex-shipbuilders or, later, the Nigerian peasant farmers and village story-tellers celebrated by one of his own favourite authors, Amos Tutuola. Perhaps this ideal of underclass solidarity is a sentimental myth: Dirt Road, the picaresque 2016 novel that captures his musical passions, culminates in a festival that miraculously blends the sounds of black, white and Hispanic America into a redemptive harmony. If so, it now feels like a myth that heals.

Read Kelman, as we should assume Starmer has, and you will learn the many meanings of disaffection: not just estrangement from a system that rejects its economic outcasts and cultural backsliders but from others and, eventually, from oneself. Social crisis becomes spiritual crisis. Where dominant institutions and — crucially — the language they wield inflict a widespread sense of worthlessness and failure, a new job or a new house alone may not staunch the inner wound. Kelman speaks from the unyielding Left but his diagnosis may help explain the West’s revolt on the Right.

His writing channels the lacerating emotions of humiliation and disempowerment that go with membership of despised, or sidelined, classes and communities. An essay on the apartheid-era South African writer Alex La Guma reminds us that “Nothing is more crucial nor as potentially subversive than a genuine appreciation of how the lives of ordinary people are lived from moment to moment”. The prime minister of a country in which 40% of citizens declined to vote at all needs to know that. Political disaffection will haunt the Starmer years. He should seek a “detailed atlas” of disgruntled souls. Kelman might help him draw some accurate maps.

The massacre of Algerian demonstrators by police in central Paris on 17 October 1961, and its decades-long cover-up, burns all those who touch it. This October, on its 60th anniversary, President Macron’s guarded avowal that the killings represented a “crime” unleashed the wrath of Marine Le Pen and other nationalists. Since then, it is the Right-wing maverick Éric Zemmour, who comes from an Algerian Jewish family, who has set the tone for next spring’s presidential election — even if his candidacy fails, as it will.

Millions of French people, like Zemmour, descend directly or have close links to the pieds-noirs: European Algerians who resettled in France after the brutal independence war led to French withdrawal in 1962. Millions more belong to Arab and Berber families with Algerian roots. The intimacy and intensity of this almost-domestic quarrel explains much about the country’s recent politics.

In 1954, when anti-colonial revolutionaries of the FLN began hostilities, Algeria became an early example of those causes that, in the age of mass media, polarise opinion not just in their own backyard, but among rival tribes of impassioned onlookers. As French paratroopers routinely turned whips and blowtorches on suspects plucked from the Casbah of Algiers, as settler militias murdered their Muslim neighbours, and as FLN guerrillas executed “traitors” by the score and planted bombs in cafés packed with European families, the now-familiar rhetoric of “With-us-or-against-us” and “Whose side are you on?” carved its acid path through a worldwide language of partisanship and recrimination. There it remains, its corrosive power massively enhanced by social media, which has glamorised the fury of the bystander — the vicarious passion that drives so many battles for the moral-political high ground that spill over their original borders.

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For that reason, the tormented but always-lucid responses of Albert Camus to the agonies of his native land have lost none of their vigour and value. Famously, Camus chose not to choose between the commitments of his Arab and his European friends. He detested racial and social inequality, the “institutional” abuses of colonialism (his adjective), and the laws that enforced them. He demanded democracy and self-determination for all Algerians in a federation of free peoples. But he opposed formal rupture with France, and stoutly defended the rights of European Algerians to flourish in the only homeland they had ever known. For Camus, all Algeria’s peoples “must live together where history has placed them, at a crossroads of commerce and civilisations”.

When his refusal to share the “bitterness and hatred” of either settlers or revolutionaries isolated him, he fell silent on the subject closest to his heart and mind for well over two years. “I have passionately loved this country, in which I was born and from which I have taken everything I am,” he said in his final public statement in Algiers in 1956, “and among my friends who live here I have never distinguished by race”.

Camus was the impoverished Algiers-born child of a father who (in his infancy) died on the Western Front, and a deaf, illiterate mother who cleaned houses. He could never conceive of himself and his working-class peers as part of an oppressive colonial elite. He could, and from an early age did, not only recognise but fight against the racially-coded injustices of French rule. Indeed, his outspoken 1939 reports on famine and hardship in the Kabylia region for the Alger républicain newspaper got him blacklisted by the colonial authorities, and prompted his move to France.

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However, his great works of fiction in the 1940s — first L’Étranger and then La Peste — quickly attracted not just acclaim but doubtful scrutiny. Critical readers argued that they masked or dodged the realities of the Algeria he so loved: in the unspeaking anonymity of the “Arab” gratuitously killed by Meursault in L’Étranger; or in the sidestep into allegory undertaken when Camus depicts pestilence raging in Oran in La Peste. Later critics, from Conor Cruise O’Brien and Edward Said to the Algerian writer Kamel Daoud — who in 2013 brilliantly rewrote L’Étranger from the perspective of the victim’s family in his novel The Meursault Investigation — have found large, non-European elements of Camus’s native land “of happiness, energy, and creativity” missing in the stories that he told about it.

In his essays, public statements and journalism, however, Camus lays bare the internal divisions that tore his pied-noir soul in two. A new Penguin Modern Classics collection of speeches and lectures, Speaking Out, collects interventions on the burning topics of his day: from post-Second World War cultural despair, to the them-and-us blind loyalties of the emergent Cold War; from the obscenity of state violence against workers’ uprisings in the Communist countries of eastern Europe, to the growing respectability — which disgusted Camus, whose mother had Spanish origins — of Franco’s still-vicious dictatorship in Spain.

It also contains his remarkable “Appeal for a Civilian Truce in Algeria”, delivered in Algiers in January 1956. When it came to the future of his birthplace, Camus did not so much sit on the fence as dance naked in no-man’s-land. Exposed to raking fire from every side, he spoke with the almost-naive courage that had carried him through the war as a Resistance activist and editor of the underground journal, Combat.

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His “Appeal for a Civilian Truce” is the classic testimony of an embattled pluralist who will resist political and ethnic tribalism to his last breath. Camus looks on aghast at the “fratricidal struggle” that has locked “the two peoples I love” — European and Arab Algerians — “in mortal combat”. For him, “The endless dispute over who committed the first wrong becomes meaningless”. He appeals beyond militants and partisans to a wider “community of hope” that embraces diversity. Camus re-states his faith “in differences, not uniformity, because differences are the roots without which the tree of liberty withers and the sap of creation and civilisation dries up.”

Camus well knew how deeply rancour and suspicion suffused both camps. He asked, for the moment, not for any cessation of hostilities; merely a promise by combatants not to target civilians with terror or reprisals, because “no cause justifies the deaths of innocent people”. As he spoke, in the hall of the Arab-owned Cercle du Progrès in Algiers, diehard settlers heckled him. Outside, a large crowd of angry demonstrators brandished placards demanding “Death to Camus”. At this stage, though, Camus still enjoyed protection from the FLN. One of their more conciliatory leaders — his old friend Ferhat Abbas — later joined him on the platform.

But the FLN did not listen; neither did the militant settlers; still less the French army. The round of atrocity and counter-atrocity — what Camus elsewhere calls “the bloody marriage of terror and repression” — rose into a spiral of ever-intensifying savagery. Even independence in 1962 failed to stem it: thousands of harkis, Algerians who had fought with the French, were slaughtered, along with their families, after the colonial administration packed its bags.

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Distraught and despairing, Camus said and wrote nothing on Algeria between early 1956 and mid-1958, when he collected his articles and speeches into a book. Behind the scenes, he interceded with French ministers to show leniency to Algerian fighters sentenced to the guillotine. By 1958, however, no one in a with-us-or-against-us climate of mutual detestation wanted to hear from the sad guy in the middle of the road. The publication flopped; and it took until 2013 for these Algerian Chronicles to appear in Arthur Goldhammer’s first-rate English translation. It remains an exemplary, even inspiring, act of conscience and of witness.

Camus’s Algerian dilemmas had nothing to do with “centrism”, with compromise or with even-handed detachment. He knew, he loved, and he suffered with, both irreconcilable sides. Riven to the core of his being by divided allegiances, Camus the Algerian appears, in hindsight, to be as much of a tragic figure as any of the existential heroes he created in works such as The Fall or The Just. Posterity, and reputation, has sometimes blunted the force of the wrenching ambivalence that he felt about his homeland and its fate. Read his own words and this conflicted integrity comes into dazzling focus.

In 1957 — as Algerian Chronicles though not Speaking Out explains – Camus ran into trouble after he had travelled to Stockholm to accept the Nobel Prize. At a press conference the next day, an FLN journalist attacked his stance. Camus responded by reaffirming his belief in “a just Algeria in which both populations must live in peace and equality”. But he also condemned “blind terrorism” in Algiers. “People are now planting bombs in the tramways of Algiers,” he said. “My mother might be on one of those tramways. If that is justice, then I prefer my mother”.

Le Monde, however, reported a twisted paraphrase of what he had said: “I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice.” Worse, a grossly distorted version of his meaning passed into political folklore when later writers pretended Camus had stated: “Between justice and my mother, I choose my mother.” Yet the thrust of his remark was to show that indiscriminate violence against civilians never counts as “justice”. Divided souls, even one as eloquent as Camus, may struggle to get their message of balance, nuance and plurality across. Now, in another age of fervent faith and monocular vision, we need to hear it again.

As such, his works offer something to the 21st-century reader in a complex, insecure world where the urge to embrace any “ism” that purports to explain everything is ever-present.

Born into poverty in a remote area of French Algeria, Camus began his political life as a man of the Left. He was active in the French Resistance to the German occupation during the Second World War and, from 1943 to 1947, edited the movement’s newspaper Combat in Paris. Camus would later oppose General Franco’s dictatorship in Spain and resigned in principle from his work with Unesco over the UN’s acceptance of Spain as a member.

Yet Camus’ most important contribution to 20th-century thought derived – like Orwell’s – from his attacks on the fashionable theories of the mainstream (French) Left. His suspicion of grand historical narratives – which viewed the individual as disposable – is worth holding on to when the complexity of contemporary life increases the temptation to throw one’s lot in with revelatory, all-encompassing explanations and solutions.

Camus fell out with his fellow Leftist intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre in 1952 over the latter’s acceptance of state terror as an acceptable price to pay in the name of the Communist ideal. In his 1947 novel The Plague, Camus mocked those who, like Sartre, justified the concept of the ‘necessary murder’ for political ends.

“But I was told that these few deaths were inevitable for the building up of a new world in which murder would cease to be. That was true up to a point, and maybe I’m not capable of standing fast where that order of truths is concerned,” Camus wrote sarcastically. By contrast, Sartre likened anti-Communists – with their delicate humanist scruples about the sanctity of human life – to “dogs” .

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Predictably, the French Left could not forgive Camus for his anti-Communist heresy, and although The Plague sold hundreds of thousands of copies, the pompous intellectual set orbiting around Sartre and his partner, the feminist author Simone de Beauvoir, greeted subsequent works by Camus frostily. Sartre commissioned a faithful underling to trash Camus’ 1951 philosophical masterpiece The Rebel, a book-length humanist critique of the totalitarian impulse.

In his sordid rejoinder to Camus’ response to totalitarianism, Sartre forgot a point that Orwell had made a decade and a half earlier: that some things are true even if The Daily Telegraph says they are true. “Yes, Camus, like you, I find these camps inadmissible,” Sartre wrote of the Soviet gulag system, “but equally inadmissible is the use that the ‘so-called bourgeois press’ makes of them every day.”

In other words, one ought to stay quiet about Stalin’s gulags, lest the information be used as ammunition by Communism’s enemies. A similar line of thinking, if one can call it that, is discernible today. In our increasingly partisan political climate, lies are frequently given a veneer of truth by political activists if they are considered helpful to one’s own side. Those who have championed particular policies or causes in disparate countries – Venezuela, Yemen, Syria, Iraq – typically fall silent when the time comes to count the pile of corpses produced by those policies or causes. Candidly to account for one’s errors of judgement may discredit the cause. And besides, what’s a little injustice now in the service of justice in the future?

The posthumous recognition of Camus as a great 20th-century philosopher in France hinges, at least in part, on his rejection of totalitarianism when so many of his contemporaries were disgracing themselves by justifying (usually from a great distance) the use of extreme violence to remake society along altruistic lines. In this sense, Sartre and others resembled the Communist fellow-travellers whom Arthur Koestler had likened to peeping toms, “peering through a hole in the wall at history while not having to experience it themselves”. The great feats of the new society were celebrated uncritically, while the horror stories were either rubbished or interpreted as a price worth paying. This kind of historical ignorance/revisionism goes on: just last week students at a London university described the Soviet gulag system – which worked over a million people to death – as “compassionate”.

But Camus’ contribution to anti-totalitarian thought extends beyond the internecine squabbles of the 20th-century Left. His embryonic theoretical approach, which led to his rejection of totalitarianism, is discernible in his early writings on suicide, and these have as much value today as when they were first written. The appetite in life for resolution, unity, and for an absolute reconciliation of life’s various chaotic threads, drives a person inexorably toward one of several conclusions. He or she may attempt to escape altogether from existential anxiety through death, or else by dedicating his or her life to hopes that are projected on to the future (by embracing religion or the urge to embody life with a higher purpose).

This offers a lesson to those who wish to improve today’s world. The desire itself is admirable. However, allowing ‘the cause’ to consume every facet of one’s life (aiming even to “politicise sleep”, as it was joked the Bolsheviks wanted to do) can also be a misguided attempt at negating life’s absurdity.

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Embracing the absurd needn’t lead to resignation and depression, however. Camus cannot accept that “refusing to grant a meaning to life necessarily leads to declaring that it is not worth living”. Instead, he urges readers to enjoy the beauty, texture and ambiguity that ordinary life has to offer, despite its essential meaninglessness. Orwell was aiming at something similar – albeit in a far less theoretical way – in his literary focus on the beauty of “solid things” and small worlds: the art of Donald McGill, the local pub, English cooking.

Camus uses the example of Sisyphus from Greek mythology to make his point – a point that eastern philosophers also make – about the power of acceptance. Sisyphus was punished by the gods for imprisoning death in chains. Once captured, Sisyphus is condemned by the gods to the futile task of pushing a large boulder up a mountain, only for it to roll back down again. He must do so over and over again; there is no escape. In using the example of Sisyphus as the tragic hero, Camus holds up the absurdity of Sisyphus’ fate and his acceptance of it as a wider lesson for life itself. One needn’t passively accept injustice; however, there is no ultimate resolution, no nirvana, paradise or classless society in which all conflict will finally be resolved.

In his later, more explicitly anti-totalitarian treatise, The Rebel, Camus takes aim at those who seek a political antidote for the condition of mankind in what Hannah Arendt had described in The Origins of Totalitarianism as “a suicidal escape from…reality”. The urge to rebel is an inherent feature of modernity, Camus maintains.

“Modern times begin with the crash of falling ramparts,” he writes of the French revolution. But surveyed from amid the rubble and bloodshed of the mid-point of the 20th century – the midnight of century, as the Russian revolutionary Marxist Victor Serge had phrased it – Camus notices that the desire to rebel often comes pregnant with the urge to dominate. “The slave starts by begging for justice,” Camus writes, “and ends by wanting to wear the crown.”

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The Rebel wasn’t an indictment of rebellion so much as an examination of the way in which revolutions frequently attempt to negate the tension inherent in political conflict, and in life itself. At some point, triumphant revolutionaries abandon pluralism for “complete negation or total submission”. Totalitarian ideologues have an undeviating view of life which seeks to exchange the fragmented duality of liberalism for human perfection.

“Since the world has no direction, man, from the moment that he accepts this, [believes he] must give it one which will eventually lead to a superior type of humanity,” Camus writes. Ideas such as Communism are, as Friedrich Nietzsche described them, merely degenerate forms of Christianity – yet another attempt at forging certainty out of the absurd.

What Camus offers the modern reader is a reminder that the temptation to think of a single political creed as the solution to our deepest longings is a dead end. Not only that, but it is a dead end that comes steeped in blood, however altruistic the proclamations of its adherents. Beware those who say that an ideology or movement has given them “something to live for”, for this is simply another evasion.