Early last year I read Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy and loved it so much I bought two more of her books. But when I picked up her 1979 novel Vida, it took a while for me to get into. This was not a fault with the writing, the topic or the characters. It was simply too tense a read when I was a little stressed. It was only on the way home from holiday, and in the week that followed, that I was relaxed enough to let this story completely absorb me.

At the start of the book, it’s the end of the 1970s and Vida is a left-wing activist who has been on the run from the law for almost a decade. She is always on the move, changing her appearance and name, constantly weighing up the risks she is taking to be fed and sheltered.

She’s been separated from her husband Leigh for years, but is reluctant to accept that his girlfriend is the main woman in his life now, while Vida is the secret occasional liaison. Leigh is a talk show host at a small radio station, a minor celebrity living a safe, comfortable life.

“She would have liked to walk on the promenade and stare at the lights of Manhattan, where she longed to be, to watch the freighters on the East River, to take in the Brooklyn Bridge, but she was always wary in New York and must stay inside as much as she could. This walk had sharp edges enough, that sense of danger in things. With brown hair and glasses she did not need, any friend, any old acquaintance could still recognise her. It had happened. It must not happen tonight.”

Aside from Leigh, the other person Vida risks her safety to stay in touch with is her sister Natalie. They were activists together throughout the 60s. In fact, Natalie was Vida’s entry point.

Through flashbacks, Piercy fills in the background of Vida’s activism, and when she crossed the line from marches and pamphlets to break-ins and bombs. She started out in the early 1960s as a member of Students Against the War (SAW) – a real-life organisation of thousands of protestors. She was a beautiful, charismatic leader who made speeches and gave interviews to the press.

As the 60s progress, Vida and Natalie’s cadre of friends start to fight on more fronts than just the Vietnam War. They create a new group – the Little Red Wagon – and begin to agitate for civil rights, Native American rights, women’s rights and against nuclear power. But they don’t all care about all issues equally. They disagree about what kinds of direct action to take and who should be involved. And they’re all sleeping with each other, cheating on each other, getting jealous over each other. It gets messy.

When an action goes wrong, Vida and other core members flee for their lives. At that point they form the Network – an organisation that both provides shelter for the fugitives and continues their activism. The added danger of being actively hunted by the FBI makes every interaction heightened.

“Barbarians, a professor at Columbia had called the Movement in the Times that morning. Maybe the barbarians, the savages, were always those who had less lethal weapons. Bows and arrows versus tanks and artillery. Their own lithe bodies dancing in front of tons of metal. That made them savages: lacking the metal. Lacking armour, lacking armies, lacking the underlings to do it for you.”

Back in the “now” of 1979, Vida reaches a safe house where she meets fellow fugitive Joel. He’s 10 years younger than her and doesn’t have the same long, storied history of fighting the establishment. But there is a spark between them. For the first time in years, Vida sees a potential future with someone other than Leigh.

The other major plot thread is that some former members of Little Red Wagon have been arrested, while others have been killed trying to escape capture. Vida and her fellow Network members are terrified they might be killed next. And terrified of what might be revealed by those arrested. There is deep distrust – and the flashbacks begin to show why.

Piercy clearly knew this world well. There is a lot of detail about the power struggles at play in this series of protest groups. The committees that make decisions aren’t as democratic as they claim. There’s a deep vein of misogyny among the men, with the threat of rape ever-present for the women. There’s a general acceptance of women sleeping with each other, but less so men doing the same. Vida herself has had female partners, some of them long-term.

Vida isn’t necessarily the most sympathetic main character. She seems to care more about pleasing her sexual partners than any particular issue. But I did find her very interesting, and she’s certainly three-dimensional.

I was a bigger fan of Natalie and would love to have spent more time with her. Natalie married young and found herself balancing motherhood with activism in the 60s. She began to be excluded on the assumption that she couldn’t dedicate time to the Little Red Wagon. A decade later she’s running a women’s shelter, focusing her efforts on one issue where she is able to do real good. It’s a stark contrast with the frustration of the other activists seeming to achieve nothing.

This is a fascinating book about complex characters fighting with everything they have for what they consider to be the right thing, and what happens when people draw different lines in the sand. It takes a little time to get going, but once it does, it’s gripping.

First published 1979 by Summit Books.

Source: PM Press