Owen Hatherley, Hope and Defeat — Sidecar

Skip to main content

https://doi.org/10.64590/3nwHope and Defeat<br>Owen Hatherley<br>22 July 2026Culture

John Berger had one of the longest and richest lives among British writers, but he never quite made it to 100. In his absence, the centenary of his birth this year sees a flurry of publications and republications. Verso have put out a, so far, thirteen-volume series of reprints and new editions; Tom Overton’s long-awaited biography is due in the autumn; and a series of illustrated books have been published or republished by Objectif, run by the filmmaker, artist and Berger collaborator John Christie. Among these is a new book that is perhaps the strangest of the anniversary publications: Four Horizons, an account of Berger and Christie’s journey to Le Corbusier’s Chapelle Notre-Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, in the company of two Benedictine nuns from Connecticut. One quality of Berger’s later works – off-putting to some – was a certain folksy soulfulness, and this account of an actual pilgrimage brings out especially sharply what is both significant and frustrating in the writer’s voluminous late works.

Berger’s reputation is assured and immovable on the basis of a series of books, documentaries and films, largely of the 1970s: above all, two unimpeachable works, the audacious popularization of Walter Benjamin’s aesthetics and feminist theory Ways of Seeing (1972), and the account, with the Swiss photographer Jean Mohr, of immigrant lives in Europe, A Seventh Man (1975). The new Verso editions reveal just how consistent Berger’s preoccupations were, even when writing about subjects to which he would seem ill-suited. Art and Revolution (1969), for instance, sets itself up as an account of Soviet Constructivism – about which Berger was ill-informed, forgivably, given how little had then been translated – but then moves into territory he is far more passionate about, the Khrushchev-era ‘severe style’ of the modernist-realist sculptor and Gulag survivor Ernst Neizvestny. Corker’s Freedom (1964), meanwhile, inhabits a similar petit-bourgeois London world to that of the mid-1960s British New Wave films of Karel Reisz or Tony Richardson, but centres on dreams of sex and travel as an escape from the boredom of wage labour and the pressures of the metropolis. The human body – suffering, pleasure – as represented in art and connected with the miseries of capitalism, (sometimes) Stalinism and the dream that things could be otherwise recurs throughout, before it eventually finds its apparently natural home in Berger’s many works on the peasantry, after his permanent relocation to rural France in 1974.

I have always found much of this subsequent work harder to take, caught between being moved by its hard humanity and irritated by its sententiousness. Re-reading Berger’s collection of sketches and essays Hold Everything Dear (2007), I admire much more now the trenchancy of his positions – especially on Palestine, to which Berger was a frequent visitor. There are statements of immense courage – in the West Bank, Berger reflects on being ‘among not the unconquered, but the defeated, whom the victors fear’, and with his family’s Jewish roots in Central Europe, stating that ‘here I unhesitatingly identify myself with the just cause and the pain of those whom the state of Israel (and cousins of mine) are afflicting to a degree that is tragically totalitarian’. Here, we could wish he were with us today, knowing how powerfully he would have written about the complicity of his home country in the devastation of Gaza. But alongside this power and acuity, there are moments of gnomic piety, evoking a comfortably-off Londoner living in a French farmhouse writing about others’ misery. ‘Today, the infinite is beside the poor’, he tells us. ‘The lives of the poor are mostly grief, interrupted by moments of illumination’. Here is a writer who could sound like Platonov one moment, the next like Alain de Botton.

One welcome constant of Berger’s work was brevity, a conscious avoidance of pomp. His many, many books did their best to break with what Benjamin, a key imaginary interlocutor, called ‘the pretentious, universal gesture of the book’ – their paper is cheap and standard, the photographs are, in Berger’s words, ‘simple memoranda’ and not artworks, and in later books, his own sketches have the quality of the lithographs in old paperbacks. Portraits (2015) and Landscapes (2016), the two excellent collections of Berger’s essays edited by Overton, sit oddly on the shelf next to a row of these economical slim volumes. Nobody seems to know how many books Berger published – the Verso volumes contain a list of 28 books, but I can see on my own shelves several that aren’t included: from Railtracks (2011), a delightful prose poem written with Anne Michaels, on trans-European train travel, to At the Edge of the World (1999), a tribute to his close collaborator Jean Mohr. But unlike, say, Slavoj Zizek,...