[In the following review, Hashmi outlines the major themes of Redemption.]

Tariq Ali comes to fiction from a respectable writing career in politics, history, biography, and, most recently, stage drama with a sharp focus on the contemporary world. On Christmas Eve 1989, in Paris, [in Redemption,] as the seventy-year-old Trotskyist patriarch Ezra Einstein watches on TV a Ceauşescu executioner make the sign of the cross, he seems even to forget the bliss of his late married life, he whose “fingers had rested more often on the keys and body of his antique writing aid [his fifty-five-year-old typewriter] than on the more intimate sections of the female anatomy.” He issues a letter forthwith to convene a congress to discuss the world situation following the collapse of the East European regimes and the changes in the Soviet Union. As the oppressed classes have generally failed to be responsive to their program, the brigade considers changing its methods. Ezra himself proposes “that we go into these religions and fight to establish a connection between Heaven and Earth,” because “one of the weaknesses of Marxism and all other isms descended from it has been a lack of understanding of ethics, morality, and, dare I say it, spirituality.”

The possibility of redemption, however, is always considered tongue-in-cheek, and the gloom caused by the collapse of the Alternative System is beaten out with wit and banter. Although the new challenges include the formation of a new goulash religion called Christ-lamasonism and moving into the Catholic Church itself, the world congress falls short of evolving any workable theme or strategy; but there is a plenitude of jokes born of an earthy realism, as most matters are thought worthy of being “sorted out through friendly negotiations under the quilt.”

While the larger issues of ideas and society are far from being resolved, solace and even blessedness (with a real halo over Ezra's infant daughter's head) are found in the formation of positive personal relations and private worlds. Ali's novel itself [Redemption] is a detached commentary on the enterprise. Dissentient comrade Cathy Fox refuses to attend the congress or join the excavation of Trotsky's grave in Mexico in search of some documents, but she views the dying ideological world with hope: “Something will be reborn … but how and when and in what shape it is impossible to predict. The whole world has to be remade.” The New Life Journal is cited as derriding Kundera's sexist and nihilistic attitudes, and Maya, Ezra's wife, notes (in “The Chapter of Learning and Forgetting”—an obvious parody) her own reservations about the new cult novelist. The entries cited from the Encyclopedia Trotskyana and the narrator's comments together make up a hilarious text which is mock-learning and police work at the same time. This clever device also provides for a latter-day dramatic aside and a metafictional source of both fact and its factitious extensions. The lie about the existence of the Trotsky letters turns out to be a truth, even if their contents are different from those presumed and announced. Although the Movement and its saints must all be seen without their robes, as well as frequently without their undergarments, all the gains are in achieving true humanity of character, with Ezra preaching plain morals and finding his peace amid his family, earnestly if comically lactating and feeding Ho, his baby. The ending, with Maya reading Ezra's journal written for Ho's tenth birthday, contains a poem, an exhortation ascribed to Goethe in which Ali, with all his riotous energy and wit, has found the right note with which to cure a cynical world: “Build it again, / Great Child of the Earth, / Build it again / With a finer worth / In thine own bosom build it on high! / Take up thy life once more: / Run the race again! / High and clear / Let a lovelier strain / Ring out than ever before!”

Beneath the poetic fancy, the narrative suggests screen adaptations and a simpler field-sequential of events. Surely, if Goethe and Trotsky gang up together in the “Bandung File” (BBC's Channel 4 program which Tariq Ali produced for several years), a redemption will become inevitable.