The Love Germ
By Jill Neville
Verso, 1998 (first published 1969)
149 pp., $19.95 (pb)
Review by Phil Shannon
"A fantastic, earth-shattering, dynamic, brilliant, beautiful, touching, unbelievably sensitive, outasight book written by my sister." So wrote, with ecstatic sibling affection, Richard Neville, editor of the '60s counter-cultural Oz magazine, about The Love Germ, a novel by his sister Jill.
Hyperbole aside, this re-released 1969 novel about love on the barricades brings with it the atmosphere of Paris "on the edge of revolution" in May 1968, when the air was full of both tear gas and happiness.
Polly, trapped in a meaningless office job in Paris, enters the months of revolutionary tumult confused and uncertain. She falls in love with Giorgio, an anarchist, and together they take in the sights of Paris in rebellion in May: workers occupying the Citroen factories, US Marine deserters from the Vietnam War, barricades, revolutionaries on the run from the police, petrol-starved cars sitting impotently in streets returned to the people, and the slogans chalked on every wall.
And there was "the Sorbonne: megaphones, Maoists, voyeurs, vandals, tourists, photographers, professors, thieves, poets, people. People straddled on Victor Hugo's shoulders, people holding flags, black flags, red flags ...".
The Grey Man, whom nobody in the office talked to except Polly, "feels a fugitive joy" at the eruption of social change and personal liberation, throwing over his quiet life of grim endurance in the Information and Records room to become a freelance writer. As a master of his own time, he sleeps, sleeps, sleeps "until he slept away all the reluctant early risings of his life" and then turned on the tap of his creativity that had been rusted shut for so long.
Unfortunately, as the germ of revolution spreads, so does the "germ" of sex — diseases such as gonorrhoea, revelling in unprotected sex with multiple partners. Giorgio is the main culprit, moving from woman to woman, leaving his venereal calling card at each stop.
Polly cops the love germ too, but the revolution germ also finds in her a receptive host. Society, once so seemingly solid and unchangeable, is changed, and Polly with it, by students and workers in revolt.
"She had picked society up, turned it over, examined it, as one would a beetle" and finds that "its feeble, wavering legs" are the once awesome "pillars of society" — Church, schools, press, police".
Neville's book is an intimate look at the May events in Paris, an intriguing artefact but one which is now showing its ideological age. The politics of the book, whilst joyously left wing, rarely rise above anarchist sloganeering.
It approaches a feminist critique of society, but the female characters a little too often lapse from the independent equals of men into merely admirers, applauders and sufferers at the hands of those who have yet to discover a feminist May.
Overall, The Love Germ has little of the substance, depth, reflection and artistry of the great and enduring political novel. Compared to, say, Les Misérables (by Victor Hugo, who also found inspiration in French insurrection), The Love Germ is a mere postcard. But even a postcard from '68 can remind us that joy and community are possible because revolution in an "advanced" capitalist country is possible.