Motherland by Jo McMillan(John Murray, £16.99)

THOUGH described as a novel — “Imagine growing up on the losing side of history” its blurb proclaims — Motherland is more akin to a personal memoir than a work of fiction. Its protagonist Jess is a teenager living in the small Midlands town of Tamworth during the ’70s. Her teacher mother, single and a committed and passionate communist as well as an avid peace campaigner, is portrayed as being insulated and isolated from the real world. 

Jess follows in her footsteps, selling the Morning Star at weekends in the town square, joining the Young Communist League and accompanying her mother on several trips to East Germany, where she helps organise further education courses for teachers of English. 

McMillan depicts the nitty-gritty of what growing up in that environment was like but it’s infused with a large dose of jaundiced hindsight which doesn’t necessarily ring true — was the Young Communist League of the mid-70s really still using Stalin as a model 20 years after Khrushchev’s revelations?

Her descriptions of her mother as a rather dotty, warm-hearted but naively utopian believer in the dawning revolution is a sad caricature. Alexei Sayle’s similar descriptions of his communist family are at least leavened with genuine humour but this story is a tedious traipse through a very muddy field. 

It’s as if a teenager’s diary entries have been strung together as an overlong essay. A positive or more sympathetic story of communists and a communist upbringing would not of course be touched by a mainstream publisher and here McMillan, consciously or not, feeds the seemingly insatiable desire for denigrating and belittling descriptions and a portrait of the GDR that underlines the cliches of mainstream narratives. 

It’s not that McMillan distorts the facts so much as that what she selectively describes are the superficialities of life which, taken as a whole, convey a desolate and melancholic reality — all the East Germans are depicted as cold, inscrutable or devious. 

There’s no character development or the profundity of perception a worthwhile novel contains, merely casual observation and sketchy portraits. The description of her mother’s brief love affair, cut short by the inhuman intervention of the GDR authorities, reveals a rare moment of novelistic imagination but it has nothing to do with the factual reality of the rest of the book. It will, though, feed the propaganda image of a callous and inhuman system.