All That Follows was published by Picador in 2010. Leonard Lessing is a jazz saxophonist in his fifties, living a comfortable domestic life with his wife in an English city. Watching television news of a hostage crisis, he recognizes one of the hostage-takers as someone from his own past — connected to a political action during the anti-Iraq-War protests years earlier in which Leonard participated.
The novel moves between past and present: the radicalism of the protest years, when Leonard was young and believed that direct action could change the world, and the comfortable present, where he teaches music and avoids confrontation. The question the novel poses is personal and political simultaneously: what happened to the energy of protest? Was it dissipated by age, by comfort, by the simple exhaustion of maintaining conviction against a world that refuses to change?
Crace is honest about the limitations of political commitment: Leonard’s radicalism was always partly performance (he is, after all, a performer), and his retreat into domesticity is not entirely betrayal but partly maturation. The novel refuses both the romantic valorization of youthful activism and the cynical dismissal of it — insisting instead that political engagement and personal compromise coexist throughout a life without resolution.
Collecting All That Follows
First edition (Picador, London, 2010): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$35
- Very good: $10–$15