Lilac and Flag: An Old Wives’ Tale of a City was published by Pantheon Books in 1990, completing the Into Their Labours trilogy. The novel follows the grandchildren of Pig Earth’s peasants into the unnamed metropolis — “Troy” — where they live in slums, work precarious jobs, and struggle to maintain human connection in an environment designed to atomize and exploit them.
The circle is complete: the peasants whose community was destroyed by industrial capitalism have become the migrant workers whose exploitation sustains that capitalism’s metropolitan centers. What began in A Seventh Man as documentary analysis becomes in Lilac and Flag narrative art — the same phenomenon seen from within, through characters whose interior lives are rendered with the same attention Berger brought to the peasants of Pig Earth.
The novel’s urban world is neither realistic nor allegorical but something between — a city that is all cities, a condition that is modernity’s condition. The characters navigate violence, poverty, drug economies, and institutional indifference, but they also create beauty, maintain solidarity, fall in love, and resist the dehumanization that their circumstances impose. Berger refuses to render them as victims; they are agents, even when their agency is constrained to the margins.
The title suggests the novel’s tonal range: lilac (beauty, tenderness, the persistence of natural life within the concrete) and flag (political struggle, collective identity, the refusal to accept degradation as permanent).
Collecting Lilac and Flag
First edition (Pantheon Books, New York, 1990): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First US edition in dust jacket: $10–$25
- Signed copies: $30–$80
- UK first (Granta, 1990): $10–$20
- Complete Into Their Labours trilogy: $40–$100