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The Gods of Mars

After the long exile on Earth, John Carter finally returns to his beloved Mars. But beautiful Dejah Thoris, the woman he loves, has vanished. Now he is trapped in the legendary Valley Dor, an Eden from which none ever escaped alive.

Forthcoming in the Edgar Rice Burroughs Authorized Library .

Synopsis © Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Trademarks John Carter®, John Carter of Mars®, Dejah Thoris®, A Gods of Mars®, and Barsoom® Owned by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.

Disney’s Tarzan Characters © Disney and Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Trademarks Tarzan®, Tarzan of the Apes®, Lord of the Jungle®, Tarzan and Jane®, John Carter®, John Carter of Mars®, Barsoom®, Pellucidar®, The Land That Time Forgot®, Carson of Venus®, Edgar Rice Burroughs®, Edgar Rice Burroughs Authorized Library™, Edgar Rice Burroughs Universe™, The Wild Adventures of Edgar Rice Burroughs™, and others owned by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. Associated logos, characters, names, and the distinctive likenesses thereof are trademarks or registered trademarks of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.

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Why Did It Take 100 Years for John Carter to Make It to the Big Screen?

Disputes and misfires kept the hugely influential sci-fi tale from reaching theaters until now.

It's been 100 years since Edgar Rice Burroughs created John Carter, who makes his big-screen debut in a film of the same name tomorrow—which makes the character older than pop culture icons as indelible as Superman, The Lone Ranger, James Bond, and Burroughs's own Tarzan of the Apes. But if John Carter isn't as prolific as those heroes, it's not for lack of trying. John Carter 's long, strange journey to the big screen is arguably as interesting as the stories themselves. For 80 years, the John Carter rights have passed from filmmaker to filmmaker, whose various thwarted attempts at a John Carter film have made A Princess of Mars the cinematic equivalent—in both allure and potential for misfortune—of the Hope Diamond.

John Carter first appeared in a magazine submission by a young pencil-sharpener wholesaler named Edgar Rice Burroughs, who worked on his stories in secret. The serialized narrative that would eventually be collected as A Princess of Mars ran its first installment in pulp magazine The All-Story , where it was christened "Under the Moons of Mars" and credited to "Norman Bean." (To celebrate the centenary of its publication, Library of America is reissuing A Princess of Mars with a new introduction by Junot Diaz; as A Princess of Mars ' actual copyright has expired, thriftier fans can read the entirety of the book for free at Project Gutenberg.) Buoyed by the story's success, Burroughs wrote many more Barsoom stories, which were collected in a further 10 books over the years.

The many, many fans that Burroughs's Barsoom stories amassed included a young boy named Bob Clampett, who went on to work as an animator for Warner Brothers in the 1930s. Clampett, then in his early 20s, arranged a meeting with Burroughs and successfully convinced him that animation was the only way to render A Princess of Mars on the silver screen ("There is no other medium that allows you to exert such control over every frame of film," Clampett recalled arguing decades later). With no budget, Clampett enlisted his fiancée and Burroughs's son to help prepare the animation samples for his help. His passion for the project is evident in every frame: the final, hand-drawn test footage, which can be viewed on YouTube, was well ahead of its time—conveying realistic, dramatic action at a time when most cartoons centered on comedy. But ironically, the success of Burroughs's Tarzan came at the expense of his John Carter; MGM executives eventually asked Clampett to draw a Tarzan cartoon instead—which he never completed ("I just lost my enthusiasm for the new project," he said in a later interview).

Though John Carter didn't make it to the big screen, he spent the next few decades exerting a considerable influence through the printed page. A generation of science-fiction writers, including Ray Bradbury of The Martian Chronicles and Arthur C. Clarke of 2001: A Space Odyssey , cited Burroughs's Barsoom stories as a key influence. And filmmakers, like writers, continued to fall under John Carter's spell. Legendary stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen discussed an adaptation in the 1950s. Disney executives approached Die Hard director John McTiernan about a big-budget John Carter film in the 1980s, with Tom Cruise as a possible star (the full story is documented in David Hughes's essential book The Greatest Sci-fi Movies Never Made ). In 2004, when Paramount and Columbia—each convinced that special effects had finally reached the point at which John Carter film could be made—engaged in a fierce bidding war for the rights to the series, which Paramount eventually won. But over the next two years, three filmmakers—Robert Rodriguez ( Sin City ), Kerry Conran ( Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow ), and Jon Favreau ( Iron Man )—each failed to bring the project to fruition.

There is, in fact, a John Carter film that beat John Carter to the punch: 2009's Princess of Mars , a live-action, direct-to-DVD release by The Asylum—a company primarily famous for low-budget "mockbusters" like Transmorphers and Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus . The Asylum's adaptation, which is fully (and ironically) titled Edgar Rice Burroughs's Princess of Mars , stars underwear model Antonio Sabàto Jr. as John Carter and former porn star Traci Lords as Dejah Thoris, and casts its hero as a U.S. sniper in modern-day Afghanistan. The company's films are typically budgeted at "well under a million dollars." It shows.

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But the path that finally led John Carter to the big screen—where it rightly belongs—began in 2007, when Disney reacquired the film rights to Burroughs's Barsoom stories 30 years after the company had first tried and failed to adapt the material. John Carter came into the hands of Wall-E director Andrew Stanton, who had first read and loved the Barsoom stories as a child . Like Bob Clampett, Stanton's passion for the material is evident: His original cut of the film (which cost a reported $250 million) was nearly three hours long, and there are tentative plans for at least two more sequels.

As John Carter finally reaches the big screen, a full century after the character first inspired countless dreamers across the country, it's hard not to feel sentimental. After all, it's not just the dreams of Stanton that are finally being realized: It's the dreams of countless other writers, producers, and filmmakers before him. As befitting a man whose story began with a trip from Earth to Mars, John Carter 's journey to the silver screen has been sprawling and epic. And if John Carter manages to take hold of imagination the way A Princess of Mars first did a century ago, there's no limit to the dreamers it could inspire in the future.

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John Carter

Arizona, 1868. A US Civil War veteran is transported to Mars and discovers a planet inhabited by giant barbarians. Finding himself a prisoner of the creatures, he escapes, only to encounter a princess who is in need of a saviour.

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John carter: adventures on mars, edgar rice burroughs.

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John Carter of Mars

Fictional character who appears in the barsoom novels / from wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, dear wikiwand ai, let's keep it short by simply answering these key questions:.

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John Carter of Mars is a fictional Virginian soldier who acts as the initial protagonist of the Barsoom stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs . A veteran of the American Civil War , he is transported to the planet Mars, called Barsoom by its inhabitants, where he becomes a warrior battling various mythological beasts, alien armies and malevolent foes. Created in 1911, the character has appeared in novels and short stories, comic books, television shows and films, including the 2012 feature film John Carter , which marked the 100th anniversary of the character's first appearance.

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I don't see any way to begin a review of "John Carter" without referring to "Through Time and Space With Ferdinand Feghoot." That was a series of little stories that appeared in the magazine Fantasy and Science Fiction from 1956 to 1973 and had a great influence on my development as a critic. In one of the Feghoot adventures, the hero finds himself on Mars and engaged in bloody swordplay. He is sliced in the leg. Then in the other leg. Then an arm is hacked off. "To hell with this," Feghoot exclaims, unholstering his ray gun and vaporizing his enemies.

I may have one or two details wrong, but you understand the point: When superior technology is at hand, it seems absurd for heroes to limit themselves to swords. When airships the size of a city block can float above a battle, why handicap yourself with cavalry charges involving lumbering alien rhinos? When it is possible to teleport yourself from Earth to Mars, why are you considered extraordinary because you can jump really high?

Such questions are never asked in the world of " John Carter ," and as a result, the movie is more Western than science fiction. Even if we completely suspend our disbelief and accept the entire story at face value, isn't it underwhelming to spend so much time looking at hand-to-hand combat when there are so many neat toys and gadgets to play with?

But I must not review a movie that wasn't made. What we have here is a rousing boy's adventure story, adapted from stories that Edgar Rice Burroughs cranked out for early pulp magazines. They lacked the visceral appeal of his Tarzan stories, which inspired an estimated 89 movies; amazingly, this is the first John Carter movie, but it is intended to foster a franchise and will probably succeed.

Burroughs' hero is a Civil War veteran who finds himself in Monument Valley, where he has an encounter that transports him to the red planet Mars. This is not the Mars that NASA's Rovers are poking into, but the Mars envisioned at the time Burroughs was writing, which the astronomer Percival Lowell claimed was criss-crossed by a system of canals. Luckily for Carter, it has an atmosphere that he can breathe and surface temperatures allowing him do without a shirt. In a delightful early scene, he finds that his Earth muscles allow him great leaps and bounds in the lower Martian gravity.

This attracts the attention of the inhabitants of Mars, represented by two apparently human cities at war with each other, and a native race called the Tharks, who look like a vague humanoid blend of weird green aliens from old covers of Thrilling Wonder Stories. They have four arms, and it was a great disappointment to me that we never saw a Thark putting on a shirt. John Carter feels an immediate affinity for the Tharks and also gets recruited into the war of the cities — choosing the side with a fiery beauty named Dejah Thoris ( Lynn Collins , who is the movie's best character).

John Carter is played by Taylor Kitsch , who co-starred with Collins in "Wolverine." Yes, I agree Kitsch is a curious name for a star in action movies. Still, that is his real name, and one can wonder how many fans of "Wolverine," for example, are familiar with the word or its meaning. As an actor, he is perfectly serviceable as a sword-wielding, rhino-riding savior of planets.

The film was directed by Andrew Stanton , whose credits include " A Bug's Life " (1998), " Finding Nemo " (2003) and "WALL-E" (2008). All three have tight, well-structured plots, and that's what "John Carter" could use more of. The action sequences are generally well-executed, but they're too much of a muchness. CGI makes them seem too facile and not tactile enough. Although I liked the scene where Carter was getting his Mars legs with his first low-gravity steps, the sight of him springing into the air like a jumping jack could inspire bad laughs.

Does "John Carter" get the job done for the weekend action audience? Yes, I suppose it does. The massive city on legs that stomps across the landscape is well-done. The Tharks are ingenious, although I'm not sure why they need tusks. Lynn Collins makes a terrific heroine. And I enjoyed the story outside the story, about how Burroughs wrote a journal about what he saw and appears briefly as a character. He may even turn up in sequels. After all, he wrote some.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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John Carter (2012)

Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action

132 minutes

Samantha Morton as Sola

Dominic West as Sab Than

Willem Dafoe as Tars Tarkas

Thomas Haden Church as Tal Hajus

Lynn Collins as Dejah Thoris

Ciaran Hinds as Tardos Mors

Taylor Kitsch as John Carter

• Mark Andrews

Directed by

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A Princess of Mars

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1912

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The Time Has Come to Appreciate John Carter As the Goofy Throwback Epic It Is

Every two weeks for the foreseeable future, Vulture will be selecting a film to watch with our readers as part of our Wednesday Night Movie Club. This week’s selection comes from writer Roxana Hadadi, who will begin her screening of  John Carter on March 9 at 7 p.m. ET. Head to  Vulture’s Twitter  to catch the live commentary.

There was a brief, delightful time in the early 2010s, before the expanded Marvel Cinematic Universe and the Star Wars film franchise had fully secured their formulaic stranglehold on the blockbuster as we know it, when Walt Disney Pictures was still willing to get weird with its big-budget, live-action theatrical releases. It wasn’t always good, to be honest. Alice in Wonderland shaved minutes off all our lives by inventing a breakdancing Mad Hatter. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time broke new ground in whitewashing, and The Lone Ranger ’s leading duo of Armie Hammer and Johnny Depp now seems rather cursed.

But there are treasures hidden amid this era of rubble, too. Nicolas Cage is an utter delight as a modern-day Merlin in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice . Tron: Legacy is a fantastical neon dream with a soundtrack from Daft Punk that still resembles a frequency beamed in from a faraway world. And John Carter , the colossal bomb that lost Disney $200 million , now seems far from the creative disaster it was dismissed as back in 2012. Meticulously crafted and earnestly conceived, John Carter presents its protagonists as agents of chaotic good in a place and a time that don’t always reward such morality. The result is a satisfyingly goofy throwback epic that uses the big feelings at its center — love, regret, courage — for immersion and intimacy.

Every scene in filmmaker Andrew Stanton’s passion project pulses with vibrant life and megasize emotion: the Lawrence of Arabia– mimicking narrative of a military-trained white man being exalted by an Indigenous community, the capital-R Romance. Every frame pushes the limits of contemporaneous special effects: the crowds of Tharks crowding desert camps and arenas, the large-scale battle scenes between dragonfly-winged ships. And every moment relies on the roguish smile, gentle heroism, and tangible physicality of Taylor Kitsch, whose ascent to A-list stardom came to a thumping halt after the double-whammy box-office failures of John Carter and Battleship .

The latter film from Peter Berg was a scraping-the-IP-barrel project that even a deep ensemble cast (including Kitsch, Alexander Skarsgård, Jesse Plemons, and Hamish Linklater) couldn’t save. But in John Carter , based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’s 1912 novel A Princess of Mars , Kitsch’s enthusiasm is infectious. The film tosses at him one strange thing after another from Burroughs’s expansive imagination. As the titular former Confederate Army captain turned interplanetary traveler, Kitsch’s reactions to his new ability to fly leaps and bounds in the air, to being treated as a hatchling infant by the green Martian Tharks, and to fighting for his life in a gladiator arena all have a winking “Can you believe this shit?” vibe. That slow half-smirk and raised eyebrow — Kitsch hallmarks from his time as Tim Riggins on Friday Night Lights — reassure us that, yes, this is all outlandish. But they also promise that, yes, this spin on the swashbuckling genre will be worth it. Lucky for us, he’s right.

You just have to get through the beginning of the film, which cycles through three different introductions before settling in. First: Mars as Barsoom, a planet caught in 1,000 years of civil war between good city Helium and bad city Zodanga while desert tribes of Tharks watch “red men” kill one another. Second: New York City in 1881, where a suavely dressed John Carter evades the tail pursuing him but then mysteriously dies, leaving his journal to his nephew Ned, a nickname for Edgar (Daryl Sabara). Yes, this is a meta moment in which the author of the book version of this story is now in the movie version of this story. Third: After all this setup, John Carter gets properly going when Ned starts to read his uncle’s journal and the narrative jumps back in time to the Territory of Arizona in 1868 and then, finally, back to Barsoom.

The mechanics of how Carter is transported from a cramped cave on Earth to a rocky valley on the Red Planet do matter from a plot perspective. There’s a magical medallion, and some stuff about Barsoom’s religious beliefs, and shape-shifting alien baddies led by Mark Strong, and this gigantic holy tree that looks simultaneously organic and carved out of circuit boards. (This film was “dedicated to the memory of Steve Jobs,” after all.) But one could ignore the somewhat convoluted plot to focus only on how effectively John Carter shifts into adventure mode and how entertaining Kitsch is as a cross between Brendan Fraser in The Mummy and Vin Diesel in The Chronicles of Riddick , and honestly one should .

Kitsch isn’t in every single one of the film’s 132 minutes, but John Carter is so reliant on the tension caused by his literal and figurative transformation from Earthman to Mars Guy that it’s better when he is. When the film positions Carter as a stranger in a strange land, with a supercut of embarrassing trips, stumbles, and falls to the ground as he struggles to acclimate to altered gravity. When the bathing ritual administered by the Tharks includes a plume of powdered soap to the face and a gigantic bottle of psychedelic milk. When it asks him to be protective (saving Lynn Collins’s Princess Dejah Thoris from more than one fall off a spaceship) or ruthless (slicing and dicing foes while chained up as a gladiator). And a scene where Kitsch encircles Collins’s body with his arms during a forbidden little jaunt to a Thark temple? Blasphemy never looked so good!

As a film, John Carter doesn’t hide its myriad influences — Dune , Return of the Jedi , Dances With Wolves — and it doesn’t reinvent the fantasy genre so much as just remind us of Burroughs’s influential role in crafting it in the first place. Still, the resulting mishmash of steampunk ship design, Orientalist architecture, and tiptoeing-toward-fetishwear costuming remains unlike anything Disney has dared to release in the decade since. Absorbing a couple hundred million dollars in losses from a single movie has a way of making a studio a little more conservative, and as Disney’s risk-taking diminished after John Carter , so too did Kitsch’s attempts at a leading-man career. That was a shame then, and it is still a shame now. Join me in revisiting the familiar-yet-immersive, goofy-yet-ambitious John Carter and admiring how Kitsch carries the film on those appreciably muscled shoulders; I’ll save you and “nice monster dog” Woola a seat.

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Many fans will know of the movie John Carter but probably not for the reasons the filmmakers and studio wanted. The Disney live-action adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs's influential sci-fi novels stars Taylor Kitsch as a soldier from the American Civil War who finds himself transported to Mars and becoming involved in a war among various tribes.

RELATED:  Disney's Treasure Planet & 8 Other Movie Flops That Deserve More Attention

While the movie has plenty of defenders, it is mostly known as one of the biggest bombs in movie history. With its recent 10-year anniversary of release, many have looked back on the notorious project, revealing some things about John Carter that fans might not know.

Earlier Attempts At Adapting The Story

Many have pointed out the original source material by Edgar Rice Burroughs has inspired countless subsequent sci-fi movies, from Star Wars to Avatar . But the quest to adapt the material even predates those titles.

An article by The Atlantic takes a look at some of the attempts to bring the story to the big screen that ultimately failed. There was a time when Disney considered it as their first animated feature instead of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs . Animation icon Ray Harryhausen nearly made a stop-motion version in the 1950s. And Die Hard director John McTiernan also came close in the 1990s.

Stanton Convinced Disney To Buy Rights

With directors like John McTiernan and Jon Favreau circling the project at various points, it was Pixar alum Andrew Stanton who ended up directing the massive project. However, Stanton's passion for the project is what made it happen at Disney.

In a recent in-depth exploration of the movie and its production from The Wrap , Stanton admitted he was a huge fan of Burroughs's books. This led to him urging Disney to buy the rights to the movie and finally bring it to the big screen.

Tom Cruise Pursued The Lead Role

Despite the fact that many actors were considered for the lead role, very few names were made public before the casting of Taylor Kitsch in the titular role. However, Tom Cruise had a long association with the project.

RELATED:  Tom Cruise's 10 Best Movies, According To Metacritic

Cruise was initially thought to be playing the role in the 90s when John McTiernan was set to direct. However, according to The Wrap, when Stanton's version began to come together, Cruise reached out to the director to express his interest in the part.

Kitsch Was Cast Because Of One Friday Night Lights Scene

Though he faced heavy competition from A-list actors like Tom Cruise, Taylor Kitsch was always Andrew Stanton's first choice for the role. In fact, in the article from The Wrap, Stanton explained that he thought Kitsch was ideal for the role before he even signed on to direct.

Stanton explained that he saw a scene from Kitsch's hit show Friday Night Lights in which his brooding character of Tim Riggins is standing out in the rain. Stanton immediately recognized the image as similar to the cover of one of Burroughs's books.

Willem Dafoe's Gruelling Role

Though Kitsch was not a huge star when cast in the lead role, the movie managed to assemble a number of stellar actors in supporting roles, including Willem Dafoe. As Tars, the leader of the alien race of Tharks, Dafoe was unrecognizable in a motion-capture performance .

However, in an interview with Daily Actor , Dafoe describes the part as a physically demanding one. Not only did he and the other Thark actors need to measure the motion-capture suits and camera's but also had to walk on stilts to portray the aliens' tall stature.

Lynn Collins's Frustrations With The Shooting

Along with Kitsch as the star, Lynn Collins was an up-and-coming actor who was front and center in the movie as the Mars princess, Dejah. While the movie could have served as a big breakout role for Collins, she expressed disappointment with how her character was shaped.

While Collins had nothing but praise for Stanton as a director and collaborator, she explained to The Wrap that the movie's reshoots saw drastic changes to her character. She was given the impression that Dejah was "too strong" of a character for some of the executives and the attempts to soften her made it so Collins found it difficult to reconnect with the character.

On-Location Vs. Studio Filming

Unlike many notorious box-office failures, it seems like most of those involved with the filming of John Carter found it to be a very pleasant experience. However, when talking to The Wrap, cinematographer Dan Mindel found an early sign of trouble with the shooting locations.

While Mindel expected most of the shoot to be done on-location with Four Corners in the southwestern United States doubling for Mars, production began on soundstages. Mindel explained the trouble of trying to create the feeling of real location in such a setting and the damage that had been done when production eventually did move to Four Corners.

The Title Change

It seems as though another early sign of the trouble to come for the movie came with the drama surrounding the title. The title of the first novel in Burroughs's Mars series is entitled Princess of Mars which was changed in favor of John Carter Of Mars , but some controversy arose during production about that title as well.

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According to The Wrap, the marketing team behind the movie used examples of other movie failures like Mission to Mars and Mars Needs Moms as a reason for changing the title to simply John Carter . However, Stanton fought to include John Carter of Mars as the title card at the end of the movie, feeling it spoke to the character's journey.

Troubled Marketing Push

It seems as there were a number of factors that led to the movie failing to interest audiences, but an article from Vulture around the time of the release suggested the movie was doomed ever since its first trailer .

With very few effects and action sequences complete, the first trailer offered little to excite fans. The Vulture article also suggested Stanton's being given a certain amount of control over the marketing of the movie caused problems with one unnamed executive musing about the campaign that it felt they went "out of their way to not make us care."

The Planned Sequel

Before the movie was released, there were plans for a trilogy at Disney with Stanton working on all of them. Obviously, the financial failure of the first movie put an end to those plans quite quickly. But Stanton revealed to The Wrap for the first time what his ideas for the second movie would be.

Among his epic ideas, Stanton described the movie as beginning with the child of John and Dejah being abducted, John waking up on Earth following his funeral, and an exploration of a high-tech society living within Mars.

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• John Carter (2012)

• Cast & crew
• User reviews
• John Carter

Transported to Barsoom, a Civil War vet discovers a barren planet seemingly inhabited by 12-foot tall barbarians. Finding himself prisoner of these creatures, he escapes, only to encounter W... Read all Transported to Barsoom, a Civil War vet discovers a barren planet seemingly inhabited by 12-foot tall barbarians. Finding himself prisoner of these creatures, he escapes, only to encounter Woola and a princess in desperate need of a savior. Transported to Barsoom, a Civil War vet discovers a barren planet seemingly inhabited by 12-foot tall barbarians. Finding himself prisoner of these creatures, he escapes, only to encounter Woola and a princess in desperate need of a savior.

• Andrew Stanton
• Mark Andrews
• Michael Chabon
• Taylor Kitsch
• Lynn Collins
• Willem Dafoe
• 1K User reviews
• 440 Critic reviews
• 51 Metascore
• 2 wins & 8 nominations

• Dejah Thoris

• Tars Tarkas

• Matai Shang

• Tardos Mors
• (as Ciaran Hinds)

• Edgar Rice Burroughs

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• Trivia While filming at Big Water in Utah, the crew accidentally discovered a 60-foot-long sauropod dinosaur skeleton. The state's land management bureau took over.
• Goofs When John Carter is trying to pull the chain out of the rock in the arena, the ring fastening the chain has an obvious gap for him to unhook it easily. The gap disappears in the next shot.

John Carter : Stand behind me, this might get dangerous.

[John fights the Zodangans. When he loses his sword, Dejah takes it and kills the remaining enemies]

John Carter : Or maybe I ought to get behind you...

Dejah Thoris : [Cleans the blood off the sword with John's clothes] You let me know when it gets dangerous.

• Crazy credits The Disney castle logo at the beginning and end is tinted a deep blood red.
• Connections Featured in The One Show: Episode #7.40 (2012)

User reviews 1K

• May 31, 2012
• Isn't the surface of Mars supposed to be red instead of yellow?
• March 9, 2012 (United States)
• United States
• Official Facebook
• A Princess of Mars
• Moab, Utah, USA (on location)
• Walt Disney Pictures
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $250,000,000 (estimated)
• $73,078,100
• $30,180,188
• Mar 11, 2012
• $284,139,100

Technical specs

• Runtime 2 hours 12 minutes
• Dolby Digital
• Dolby Surround 7.1

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All Together Now? One Man’s Walk in Search of His Father and a Lost England – review

I n 1979, Labour prime minister James Callaghan remarked on the eve of a doomed general election: “There are times, perhaps every 30 years, that there is a sea change in politics. I suspect that there is now such a sea change – and it is for Mrs Thatcher.”

Two years later, with a recession biting and riots brewing, about 300 unemployed men and women marched from Liverpool to London under the banner of the People’s March for Jobs. One of the three key organisers was Pete Carter. A bricklayer from the West Midlands, he stood as the Communist candidate in Wolverhampton in the 1970 general election, against Enoch Powell; he played a role in the 1984-85 miners’ strike, and became the industrial organiser of the Communist Party of Great Britain. After his death in 2011, an obituarist described him as “the greatest working-class orator I have ever seen”.

Mike Carter, a Guardian journalist, is Pete’s son. As a child, he idolised him, but that changed. He grew to hate this self-pitying firebrand of a father; later, after Pete walked out on the family, Mike blamed his desertion for the cancer that killed his mother. In 2011, in their final encounter, Mike “reeled off grievance after grievance, the anger and hurt he had caused to me, my mum and [sister] Sue”. Pete replied: “I sacrificed everything for the struggle… You don’t understand.”

“The fucking struggle,” Mike said, “it’s all we ever heard. Look around you. It’s all fucked. Your life’s work. Was it worth it?”

A fortnight later, riddled with lung cancer, Pete died on his narrowboat, after he fell and hit his head. “By the time I got there from London,” Carter writes, “the body was gone.”

On 2 May 2016, Carter set out to retrace the route taken by Pete and the People’s March for Jobs 35 years earlier. If the political landscape seemed familiar, his father’s footsteps were not. All Together Now ? is a quest to take the pulse of a nation after six years of austerity, and to plot a familial reconciliation.

Carter is the author of two successful travel books; the first inspired by a midlife crisis, the second a farewell bike ride around a Britain so inspiring he found it, ultimately, impossible to leave. Here, he is at ease traversing 330 miles across the heart of England in four weeks – every inch by foot – savouring everything from the salt marshes of the Mersey to the faded grandeur of our post-industrial cities. There are astute reflections on the borders of our accents; our fight-or-flight impulse; how the price of a pint of beer rises a penny a mile heading south, and on our “desire paths”, the illicit trails we carve into the landscape in defiance of ordained boundaries. His struggle to locate Pete – both internally and within the landscape – reveals a vulnerability that will resonate with many who have lost a parent they never really had.

From Liverpool to Widnes, Salford, Macclesfield, Birmingham, Northampton, Luton, and on to the capital, Carter is hosted by original marchers (some still cradling commemorative mugs), and by those fighting the good fight today – social workers, teachers, labourers, council workers and church volunteers.

The bigger picture is bleak: All Together Now? maps a country in crisis. It is a searing critique of how 40 years of neoliberalism has ruined the lives of ordinary people. In health, jobs, housing, transport, our public spaces, welfare state and sport, the working class, Carter finds, have been disenfranchised or priced out to such an extent that England has suffered a moral, financial and spiritual collapse.

In Salford, while buy-to-let investors “up from the south for the day” snap up entire streets for their portfolios, Victorian illnesses have resurfaced, in the form of rickets and beriberi. In Northampton, Birmingham and Stafford, the homeless and mentally ill are clustered in churches and doorways. With Tory cuts wrecking council budgets, Sonia, who works at a drop-in centre for the over-50s in Bedford, has to plead for grants from private trusts. “We do everything but sell our bodies,” she says.

In Stockport, the Hat Works museum is pretty much all that remains of an industry that sustained the town from the 19th century to the 1990s. There are similar fragments in the Potteries, where 50,000 jobs have disappeared since the 1970s. In Stoke, on the eve of the 2016 EU referendum, the chief executive of the YMCA warns: “People are waiting to be rescued.” But he knows they need to be empowered, not bailed out; that Vote Leave was decades in the making – a rejection of a top-down approach that failed to deliver a trickle-down windfall. In Nuneaton, a retired factory foreman tells Carter: “If the economy goes down the toilet, at least those bastards [in London] will finally know what it feels like to be us.”

Carter is a lovely writer, with an engaging, lyrical style; his tone is sympathetic but rarely sentimental, and the chapters are evenly spaced out along the route. There are no countervailing voices, however, and we occasionally lose sight of the landscape, and Pete too, as he embarks on a lengthy disquisition about the ravages of the free market.

Ultimately, he finds the London he returns home to “a simulacrum of a city, really, a soulless plutocrat’s Potemkin village”. As Mike enters Trafalgar Square, there is a tentative sense that his desire path has brought him a step closer to his father. I wish he had gone a little further – half a mile down Whitehall. Because this important, disturbing and frequently heartbreaking book should be read by every politician in Westminster. The English patient is on the brink.

Adrian Tempany’s And the Sun Shines Now: How Hillsborough and the Premier League Changed Britain was shortlisted for the Orwell prize.

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