by Orlando Reade, Jonathan Cape (London, 2024), Hbk, 230pages, £22.00.
Reviewed by David Rhodes
My relationship with Milton’s Paradise Lost is quite recent; I first read it six years ago and have done so a couple of times since. At first it was a challenge but it’s turned into a pleasure. I love the style – though I admit it can get tedious at times like in the big battle, but, hey, it’s nothing compared to wading through those battle scenes in the Illiad which I did for my degree course. There’s the great debate in Hell at the start – how do we respond to a devastating defeat? And the beauty of life for two in the Garden of Eden – a little gardening, cool evening breeze, and plenty of food and love making in the bower. And the sadness turning to hope at the end as mankind starts its epic journey. There are ambiguities and contradictions around fundamental questions of free will, and kingship and revolution. It’s this last point – revolution – that Orlando Reade takes up in this pacey, entertaining take on The Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost. As he writes in his introduction: “Because of his role as a champion of Parliament in the English Civil War, sometime claimned to be the first modern revolution, Milton has been a cornerstone of the Western political tradition, and his epic tells a story about the crises and contradictions of that tradition”. In each of its twelve chapters, Reade focusses on one prominent character, or mostly a group of them, who were influenced by Paradise Lost in different ways as they sought to change the world. There’s only space to mention a few here.
Our first character is Thomas Jefferson, revolutionary and author of the Declaration of Independence. His writings show his fascination with Satan. At the start of the poem, Satan and his forces are in torment and pain, cast into what was to become Hell – the revolt against the tryant God had been comprehensively defeated. When the poem was published, the democratic revolt in England had also been comprehensively defeated. When will it rise again? To Jefferson Satan represented the never-give-up spirit; “All is not lost”, he says. Even in the burning lake, Satan defies his enemy, the one who “Sole reigning holds the tyranny of heaven”.
But Jefferson was a slave owner. He may have championed Satan in his revolt but wasn’t a slave society a sort of hell? The great abolitionist Olaudah Equiano used lines from book 1 to decribe the island of Montserrat:
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace And rest can rarely dwell. Hope never comes That comes to all, but torture without end Still urges…
The chapter on Dorothy Wordsworth touches on several poets of the Romantic movement. No-one had a more involved relationship with Paradise Lost than William Blake. Blake and his wife Catherine were fond of acting in their garden, playing out scenes of Adam and Eve, dressed for the parts. Dorothy and William Wordsworth enjoyed the same thing. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake says what has become the modern interpretation of Milton: “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it”.
The Wordsworths were great supporters of the French revolution: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven”. But they despaired as democracy became a sham and led to authoritarian rule. They saw this reflected in Satan as democratic debate gives way to Satan manipulating the assembly to give him autocratic control. Reade’s telling of the debate in Hell – how to recover from defeat – is riveting and the best bit of the book, I think. With the revolution going off course in France, and political repression at home, William Wordsworth starts a sonnet:
Milton! Thou should’st be living at this hour: England hath need of thee: she is a fen Of stagnant waters…
But unlike the Wordsworths, Milton never gave up on revolution.
The strangest chapter follows the fortunes of a group set up to celebrate carnival. In 1857 six white businessmen met in New Orleans to form The Mistick Krewe of Comus. It was the start of what was to become the hedonistic Mardi Gras. In the first parade, the Krewe played out scenes from Milton’s Comus. Another year there were masked men with Satan borne aloft, with tableaus from Paradise Lost: the creation of the world; the expulsion of Adam and Eve; the conference between Satan and Beelzebub; and the devils’ council at Pandemonium. There follows a weird story of how the society turned to cheerleaders for the Confederacy, to white supremacy, to joining with the Ku Klux Klan. Strange where Milton can lead!
The final chapters take us on a whirlwind of modern revolutionaries influenced by the poem. Reade’s main evidence for this influence is that they quoted from Paradise Lost. Malcolm X gets his own chapter. C L R James, author of The Black Jacobins compares how a European visitor would first see the island of what became Haiti to Satan’s first glimpse of Paradise. Leon Trotsky and Fidel Castro add to the line-up.
This is an engrossing read. It’s a bit scattergun, and it’s wide rather than deep. Reade’s strategy is to interleave the narrative of Paradise Lost with narratives of his historical characters in broadly chronological order. He makes a valiant attempt. I’m not sure it always works, but I didn’t mind. You don’t need to be familiar with the poem as he tells the story well, but I think it would encourage you to take the time to read it.
And the title? At the opening of the poem, Milton seeks inspiration from his muse:
What in me is dark Illumine, what is low raise and support, That to the height of this great argument I may assert the eternal providence, And justify the ways of God to men.
David Rhodes is a retired computer software consultant and trainer living in Dorchester – a wavering Christian, and quiet SOF member for thirty-odd years