The Invoice: A Novel by Jonas Karlsson (Hogarth 2011)

It was such an incredible amount, 5,700,000 kronor. Impossible to take seriously. I assumed it must be one of those fake invoices, the sort you hear about on television and in the papers. Unscrupulous companies trying to defraud people, often the elderly, out of their money.

It was very well done. There was no denying that. The logo looked genuine, at least to me. I don’t really know, I don’t get much post, apart from the usual bills. This one looked pretty similar. Except for the amount, of course. W.R.D., it said in large letters, and the bit about conditions of payment was very convincing. The whole thing had that dry, factual tone, just like something from a genuine organization.

But if it was genuine, there must have been a massive mistake. Some computer must have gotten me mixed up with a big company, or maybe a foreign consortium. 5,700,000 kronor. Who gets bills like that? I chuckled at the thought that someone might actually pay that amount of money by mistake and never question it.

I drank a glass of juice, dropped some advertising leaflets into the recycling box, all those offers and brochures that somehow managed to get past the “No Ads, Please” sign, then put on my jacket and went off to work.

'I can see dystopia on the map, where the fuck's utopia?

Clicking on the Books section of the Guardian's website, I see that the latest in the regular series of Top Ten book listings is Toby Green's top ten utopias and dystopias.

In the main, I've tended to shy away from this genre of literature, though I would always recommend Marie Louise Berneri's 'Journey Through Utopia' as an excellent primer on utopias and dystopias, from the Ancient Greek world up until the immediate post World War period which is when Berneri's book was written, being posthumously published after her premature death in 1949.

Looking at the list itself, I can only admit that I've only ever read one of the books in the list all the way through, Zamyatin's 'We' and even that - which though undoubtedly a masterly novel - was a bit of a grind to get the whole way through, what with the deliberately dehumanising aspect of Zamyatin not giving his characters names but coded numbers in his dystopian fantasy. I guess I should get round to reading at least another four of the books on the list but I know it is not going to happen between now and me getting a ten stretch in a Prison with a top of the range of library.

Why mention this particular top ten, then? Well, apart from using it as an excuse to post another message to the blog and give the illusion of industry, I guess I have always been fascinated with this genre of literature in connection to the revolutionary politics I support. What's the connection? Well, William Morris's 'News From Nowhere' gets the obligatory mention in the top ten (make it a fifteen year stretch in a Open Prison to get me round to finally ploughing through that particular book.)

What I am in fact waiting to be written is the utopian socialist novel that deals with such fantastic flights of fancy as a quorate Branch meeting; a Party Conference without handbags at ten paces; a public meeting organised by the SPGB that doesn't mention Tony Turner*; and - and this pushes the proposed book into the realms of magic realism - an SPGB candidate retaining his or her deposit at a Parliamentary Election.

I know - all fanciful stuff:

"You may say I'm a dreamer,

but I'm not the only one.

A saved election deposit,

And Peter Snow will exclaim: the SPGB are more than just a bit fun"**

*Tony Turner, a SPGB member who was considered one of the best outdoor speakers - bar none - in his heyday of the thirties and forties, especially at Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park. Sheila Lahr, in her online memoir, wrote of him: "Tony Turner, the Socialist Party of Great Britain speaker, who always has the highest platform and the biggest and most attentive crowd in the Park. He silences any would-be hecklers with wit. When, during the war, a soldier took exception to some of his remarks and shouted at him "I’m fighting for the likes of you!" Tony replied calmly "I give you my full permission to stop fighting for me this instant!"

** I couldn't get "Peter Snow's swingometer" to rhyme with anything - damn.