BOOK REVIEW / In brief

Free Enterprise by Michelle Cliff, Viking pounds 13. Michelle Cliff does some long-overdue revising of African- American mythology and charting of historical backwaters in this well-researched novel. We learn that John Brown's notorious raid on Harper's Ferry - that doomed armed insurrection of Southern slaves in 1859 - was jointly inspired and totally financed by the formidable Mary Ellen Pleasant. Brown had a communist dream of an ersatz African utopia in Kansas; Pleasant was a skilled capitalist. She nurtured a respected San Francisco hotel empire by embodying 'Mammydom' (though the terminology galled her), while secretly harbouring runaway slaves and pouring her profits into the liberal cause. As an impressed Malcolm X, who throughout the novel drops in on her in hologram form like a ghost from the future, says: 'Why didn't I know about you?'

The Loves of Faustyna by Nina Fitzpatrick, 4th Estate pounds 9.99. In which a slice of communist Polish history starting in 1967 is saucily represented as the sexual exploits of a frisky psychologist called Faustyna. Though she is conducting research into memory, Faustyna's own absent-mindedness (and capricious hormones) make her a bad dissident and a terrible spy. Inadvertent flirtation with a government informer leads her to an internment camp, and there is even a chapter 'in which both Faustyna and the People's Rebublic Endure Coitus Interruptus'. More parable than plot, more clever than funny, this picaresque satire doesn't so much work at two levels as feel schizophrenic at one.