Fiction is the ultimate rebellion, because it insists on rejecting reality, creating new worlds. Novelists are rebels, and readers are co-conspirators. And if fiction is an act of rebellion, novels about riots are the ultimate Molotov cocktail.
My debut novel Graffiti Palace reimagines the Odyssey amid the 1965 Watts riots and the graffiti rebels of Los Angeles.
I taught at a high school in LA for two decades, and reading Homer’s epic with poor, mostly Latino kids turned out to be an adventure – rewarding in ways I never expected. My students identified with Odysseus fighting monsters, human and otherwise: men bewitched into pigs because they treat women like objects, false friends who try to steal your beloved. Tie yourself to the masts, kids – you’re about to read the world’s first novel!
I imagined my modern Odysseus as Americo Monk, a young black man trapped in thecity when the riots explode. Cops and gangs vie for the secrets of his notebook filled with graffiti – the writing on the wall foretelling a city’s destruction. Monk outwits his cyclops, a drug kingpin with an eye patch, and is bewitched by the soul-singing sirens calling to him from the clubs along Central Avenue.
Graffiti Palace is new and ancient, an American Odyssey, but it is our myth: wanderers all, bruised, defiant, we need to find a way home, through the riots and darkness, back to family and the loved ones who wait for our return.
Here are 10 of my favourite novels about riots and rebellion.
1. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
An exquisite poison candy – both a black comedy and a surreal condemnation of violence, authority and groupthink. Alex and his illiterate gang riot through the night. Burgess’s Joycean slang (“I would like to give them the old in-out in-out with lots of ultra-violence”) seems prescient today, in an age of texting and emojis. The dystopian state brainwashes the joy from Alex’s life – music, sexual attraction. Which is more evil?
2. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
Saleem, born at the stroke of midnight as India wins independence, can’t escape history. His actions, even his blood, not only reflect India’s story, but sway it as well. Time runs riot, disjointed like the mobs that rock India. His odyssey mirrors his country’s history: from British rule to the appalling violence of partition. Rushdie’s India is all of our homelands: riot-stained, with clashing religions, languages and cultures. Beware, lest the beauty and horror of history break you, like Saleem, “unable to live or die in peace”.
3. Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon
Pynchon’s novel is an anarchist’s bomb, gleefully exploding notions of plot and character. The riots of the historical Ludlow massacre in Colorado, where an iron company has paid for an attack on striking miners in 1914, fuels a kaleidoscopic exploration of wonderful Pynchon obsessions: authority and freedom, technology, sex and death.
4. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
An epic about 19th-century 99 percent-ers – “the Wretched”, the homeless – students rioting in the streets, good people persecuted by corrupt police and hunted down for the crime of poverty. Hero Valjean lugs the wounded rebel Marius down into Paris’s sewers. The insurrection is doomed, but the novel leaves us hopeful that democracy and the human heart will prevail.
5. High-Rise by JG Ballard
Dr Laing lives in a tower block outside London. Lower-class families occupy the bottom levels, professionals such as Laing enjoy their mid-level stations and the top floors are for the upper crust. But small social ripples, like trash thrown from balconies, propel people to violence; dwellers form tribes to raid up and down floors. Is the high-rise a monstrous experiment narrated by cold Dr Laing? Fighting his way to the top floor, Laing searches for the architect named Royal. But up here also roost carrion-birds and death.
6. The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
Roth’s alternate history speaks to today’s intolerance. In 1940, aviation hero (and antisemite) Charles Lindbergh joins the America First party (sound familiar?). He becomes the surprise celebrity Republican candidate for president. Wildly popular in the midwest and south, he’s elected. Young Philip’s Jewish family is torn apart under the new regime. Jewish boys are shipped to southern farms to be “Americanized”. Entire Jewish families are relocated. Riots and resistance tear lives apart. Personal and public, the Roth family’s story is America’s.
7. Little Scarlet by Walter Mosley
The Watts riots have just ended, and LA smoulders. Black detective Ezekiel Rawlins walks the charred neighbourhoods. He’s as torn as his city; a lawman, he sat the riots out, but he knows the uprising was a revolt against LA’s sunny racism. A black woman has been murdered. The suspect is a white man, and Rawlins is afraid the city’s tensions will explode again. Mosley’s prose is dark and crisp, illuminating the inner riot that sometimes rages within us.
8. The Warriors by Sol Yurick
Yurick’s 1965 novel is a blast of teen angst, a funhouse mirror of West Side Story. On 4 July, the Thrones, New York’s biggest gang, call together a summit: unite into one uber-gang and stick it to the Man! But the gangs erupt into riots, and the Dominators gang must fight to get back to Coney Island. Retro fun ensues – Mercedes Benz hood-ornament gang medallions, cigarettes used for secret signals – but it’s also dark and violent. Yurick was inspired by the Xenophon, and comic books. Timeless: imagine a great group of people coming together to celebrate a vision of unity, only to dissolve into tribal hatred.
9. Blindness by José Saramago
A mysterious epidemic in an unnamed city blinds almost everyone. The government quarantines the afflicted. Mobs and riots flare: food is bartered for sex, anarchy reins. The doctor and his wife (who alone inexplicably retains her sight) must survive among the city’s blind, barbaric hordes. No one has names. “Blind people need no names,” Saramago tells us. But when their sight and identities mysteriously return, they (and we) must see the darkness within us.
10. Battle Royale by Koushun Takami
Future Japan is a dictatorship. To instil terror and obedience, 50 junior high-school students are forced by the government to fight each other to the death. Collars locked around their necks will explode if all but one victor aren’t dead in three days. Takami’s social barbs sting: the brutality and cruelty of teenage school students; the fragility of trust; children victimised by adults. A world that has become numb to mass murders.
Graffiti Palace by AG Lombardo is published by Serpent’s Tail, priced £14.99. It is available from the Guardian bookshop for £12.74 including free UK p&p.
