SOURCE: Widgery, David. “Berty Khan's Revenge.” New Statesman and Society 3, no. 122 (12 October 1990): 42-3.

In the following review, Widgery offers a mixed assessment of Redemption, contending that too much of the novel “smacks of an adolescent desire to violate the orthodoxies the author once staunchly propounded.”

Comic novels about the left, like Ethyl Mannin's Comrade, O Comrade, about the 1945 split in the Anarchist Federation of Britain, have a habit of not being very funny. The wittiest accounts are, like Claude Cockburn's true. Tariq Ali's qualifications as the Evelyn Waugh of Trotskyism are debatable, though his publisher, whose idiosyncratic list's only theme is desperation for a bestseller, feels that some sort of intellectual bodice-ripper might prove profitable consolation for us distressed '68ers to curl up with.

Ali used to issue severe tomes with relentlessly red and black typography and titles like The Stalinist Legacy. Redemption is served up with...