The power and the story

Should novels involve politics? You have no choice. How do you escape politics? It is all around us. It defines our relationships with government, with our employers, it shapes the exchanges we have with our friends and our families. Politics helps define what we think and even how we feel. In these days of massive industrialisation, it is present in the water we drink and in the air we breathe. We are social animals, and since politics is the study of the power dynamics in how we organise society, it’s there right at the base of all culture, including literature