Holding the Line, by Barbara Kingsolver review: 'impassioned but one-sided'

The Arizona one was directed at the Mining Company Phelps Dodge. If the Miners Strike here was interpreted by the Government as being as much political as industrial, the Arizona one was initially concerned with traditional Union matters: security of jobs, recognition of Unions, conditions of work. Inasmuch as it became political, it was because of the readiness of the State Government and the Department for Public Safety to criminalise the strikers, to call out the National Guard, to use violence and to turn a blind eye to the often illegal action of Phelps Dodge. 

Arizona was a copper-mining State and conditions in the mines were harsh, the work dangerous. Labour relations had rarely been good, a situation made worse by the divisions between the white American and Mexican miners - there was a time when the former wouldn't share the showers with the latter.

By the early Eighties Phelps Dodge was in difficulties. One suspects it was a badly run company - it was certainly an unsympathetic one. Nevertheless, its difficulties were real: the mines had been well worked, some seams were exhausted, others demanding, and foreign competition was challenging. The Miners had no wish for a fight, and were even ready to accept a wage freeze, but it seems that PD was spoiling for a fight.

When the strike held, they brought in non-union Labour - "scabs", seen by the strikers as class traitors. A fair judgement, but it is hard not to feel some sympathy for the scabs, many of them men with families to feed. They don't, however, get sympathy from Kingsolver, who is wholeheartedly on the side of the strikers, supporting, especially the women, many of whom the young journalist befriended.

Her admiration for the women, mostly mothers with young children, and their determination to hold the line, whatever their hardships, is unbounded. You would have to be dull of spirit not to share it, for her depiction of life in what may be called a beleaguered community is unstinting, and she brings their commitment and endurance vividly alive. This is matched, fairly enough, with her contempt for Phelps Dodge, and the State authorities' readiness to resort to what was at best doubtful legal action. For Kingsolver these remarkable women were heroic figures at a time, one must remember, when in much of the USA women were still expected to be wives and mothers and not much else.

So, this is a committed book and one which, as is common with many committed books, is uninterested in the complexity of events. I am ready to believe that Phelps Dodge was a deplorable employer and that the State authorities were deplorably ready to bend the law, use force against the strikers, lock men and women up with little, if any justification, but Kingsolver, in her zeal for what she recognizes as justice and her admiration of the heroism of the strikers, never seems to have much interest in attempting to offer a balanced picture. There is indeed no balance: one side of the see-saw flies high, the other in grounded. It might - indeed would - have been fairer to recognize that a business in a declining industry - as copper-mining was in Arizona - will almost always be harsh, and often stupid, in what it perceives as self-defence. 

Perhaps it is unrealistic to ask for balance from the young partisan journalist who wrote this book very soon after the strike ended, but one wonders if the admirable novelist that the young journalist is now might have been tempted to add a judicious and less impassioned chapter to a new edition more than 30 years after the events described. Nevertheless, this is a fine, passionate, committed and always very interesting, often moving book. A one-sided account, you may think, while also concluding that the young journalist's chosen side was the right one. 

Holding The Line, by Barbara Kingsolver, Faber & Faber, £18.99