Demo

by Alison Miller

November, 2002, and sixteen-year-old Clare is travelling from Glasgow to Florence with her older brother Danny to be a part of the anti-capitalist demo. Amidst the crowds they meet Julian and Letitia, two alluring and seductive anti-capitalists from down south. Over the next few years the lives of Danny, Clare, Letitia and Julian become impossibly tangled in the personal and the political as each decides what is and what's not worth shouting about. But how will they come to shape the world - and how will the world come to shape them?

288 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Alison Miller grew up in Orkney and now lives in Glasgow. She worked for the WEA (Workers Educational Association) in an adult education project in Castlemilk, Glasgow, and more recently co-ordinated the counselling and group work service in the Centre for Women's Health.

In 2003 she graduated with Distinction from the M.Phil in Creative Writing run by Glasgow and Strathclyde Universities. Now, as well as writing, she works freelance as an adult educator and counselling supervisor.

Her first novel, Demo, follows a sixteen year old Glasgow girl caught up in the demonstrations against the Iraq war. It was shortlisted for the Saltire Best First Book Award. She’s had stories commissioned and broadcast on BBC Radio Four and published in a variety of anthologies, including Stolen Stories, Forest Publications; 21 Revolutions, Glasgow Women’s Library; Between Islands, An Lanntair; Reel to Rattling Reel, Cranachan.

Reviews

[Baba · Rating 3 out of 5]

A sort of dark off-beat romance set in the world of the 21st century 'protest movement' against the G7, Iraq, Bush etc. Tells the story of a 16 year old girl, her brother, his friend and his friend's ex-partner as they go to Florence for a 'demo' which results in the complicating of all their love lives; and then the resulting tensions, outcomes and stories that ensue over the following years to the backgrounds of their involvement with peace movements. Good contemporary read. 6 out of 12

[Lucy · Rating 5 out of 5]

You can't beat a book where the author has wished you Happy Birthday on the first page.

Demo is a gorgeously nostalgic ride back through your late teens through the eyes of Clare, a determined, lost and searching girl from Glasgow, and another female character who becomes intwined in Clare's life.
First, through a clear and touching Scots narrative, we experience the anti-capitalist demo in Florence in 2002 with Clare, her brother and two English friends. Between coffee, culture and demos, Clare's identity is tested and forged as she falls for the eloquent yet wankerish Julian (didn't we all, at 17 though?) and she discovers both fantastic sex and the crushing insensitivity and silence of someone who was never going to be yours: "It's funny how you can be dead close to somebody, then it's like you don't even know them."

Alison Miller's dialogue between the sexes is a wonder and could have been lifted from diaries of girls across the western world. I have never read anything that so accurately captures the light years of misunderstanding around sex in your teens and that heavy, desperate, sinking feeling when you realise everything is completely wrong.
Despite his chronic lack of compassion (or human emotion), Miller manages to create sympathy for Julian, whose social manipulation is sometimes off the mark, and he becomes trapped in a narrow life he probably doesn't want.

Julian goes back to his southern girlfriend, Laetitia, via a clumsy reallocation of hotel rooms during the demo and their brief split has emotional consequences for both Clare and her brother Danny. In a revealing narrative switch, the reader relives this agonising scene through first Clare's and then Laetitia's eyes, before Laetitia carries on the narrative. She gives us an insight into her far from perfect home life and despite her treatment of Clare, allows the reader to feel a flash of sympathy for her too. "I am a truly horrible person, she thought. This is a sixteen year old."

In amongst the intense emotional journey of your late teens, where you spend a lot of time gazing at things and trying to work out if you actually like anyone you've shagged or if you were just momentarily bowled over by awe, admiration or plain hero-worship (or in this case, dreadlock envy and wine), sorry, Clare's emotional journey, Miller weaves a contemporary and vivid plot around racism, social politics and the class system in the UK.

Achingly adept and beautiful, Miller's prose is full of the realities of life; cold sores, shitty flats, unexpected blood, literary references, people who don't love you, families who do, good coffee, squashed cake and cheap wine. With so much social commentary, Miller leaves threads for the reader to examine at will and find a meaning that speaks to them.
As Julian and Laetitia become more permanent fixtures in Clare's family, she slowly untangles who she is, what she stands for, and what she wants. The way the rest of us do it; by fucking up and working out what she doesn't want, first.
Despite this, Demo radiates a warming love and positivity for a better future, both on a personal and global scale.

Best enjoyed when: searching for direction and hope

With: a cold beer

*all quotes from 'Demo', by Alison Miller

[Catriona Robertson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I persevered with this but almost wish I hadn't bothered. It was an ok book, nothing more. The sex descriptions were unnecessarily lurid and didn't add to the text. And there was no real story. Not a book I'd recommend.

[Lousie · Rating 3 out of 5]

i'm not so sure what to make of this. I read it easily in one night, though it wasn't that flimsy. I liked the Scottish voice of the narrators, though it certainly wasn't the difficult complete dialect immersion of, say, Irvine Welsh. It felt, as it was, that it was written by someone who didn't speak that langauge, for other people who don't speak that language.
My mixed feelings come from what happens: our narrator Claire, a 16-year-old readhead from a working-class Glasgow family travels to Spain for an anti-war protest. There's a typically skeezy lefty guy: dreadlocks, piercing blue eyes, arrogance, ruling class background and all. She's fascinated and confused. He sleeps with her, rapes her, and they sleep together again. Then she gets kicked out of his room for his ruling-class ex-girlfriend. Who has finally decided she wants him rather than our narrator's older brother. Who is pretty much an annoyingly idealised good-hearted emotionally uncommunicative working-class lad who can do no wrong. (Except for leaving his teenage sister alone with his clearly lecherous friend. But no one ever mentions that.)
Claire's state was portrayed well: her mix of feeling flattered, confused, hurt, excited and repulsed when sleazey hippy dude wants to play out his Henry Miller fantasies out on her. (Yes, really. He's almost a cartoon villain sleazey activist man - except quite possibly drawn from life.)
But the political setting wasn't so real. For a start, what are their politics? The rapist yells at a French communist for betraying 'us' in the Spanish civil war, but then sneers at some anarchists, so I guess they're maybe some kind of Trotskyites? They don't really talk about politics beyond some fairly common-level anti-war sentiments and a couple of anthemic drunken mass singalongs. This isn't so important - I wasn't looking for political diatribes and usually find them grating coming out of the fictional mouths of fictional characters. It's more that the rhythms of their lives didn't seem like those of people heavily involved in a political group, like the characters were meant to be.
Hey, two coachloads of people travel from Glasgow but our protagonists stay alone in a small pensionne, not a big cold warehouse of all crammed into a hostel together?
I also can't work out whether the tensions between Claire and her Muslim best friend over her decision to wear hijab is clumsily issue-based or not. Her friend's mock-traslation of her Punjabi placard 'Dreadlocks and hijab against war' was cute though.

[Sandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

The amazing thing about this was that I bought it in Shetland in 2006 and read it on the ferry back to Orkney - never knew a 6 hour ferry journey pass so fast.
And then, the sense of the B&B in Florence, the rooms the bed the sex and the dreds the doubt and confusion stayed with me ever since - I only needed to look at the book to remember that, although I couldn't remember much else except the likeableness of the heroine, Clare.
Re-reading, it was as if I'd never read the second part (I obviously had)and although Laetitia is (for me) a far less likeable character it does all come together in as long-term satisfactory manner as is reasonable. Not being at all political that aspect was alien but I could see how it mattered.

[Marc Nash]

A book about an anti-(Iraq) War demonstration and yet it turns into being about two spoiled brattish Trustafarians and their love life. The demonstration itself gets few words, despite it being a visually rich texture to describe - something I've done in my own book on political protest. But with this book, the key issue is shown not to be the ethics of a government going to war over the objections of its populace, but a dreadlocked girl being pregnant by a man she no longer loves. Dreadful, indulgent and manages to miss its own point, which is some kind of achievement.

[Ellen · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Really liked the first part. Preferred reading from Clares perspective over Letitias.

[Yvonne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent novel - helps if you know the Glasgow acccent.