A Jacob Wren novel is known for several things: narrators undergoing neurotic self-interrogation, a consideration of the gap between theory and practice, and a certain metafictional flair when it comes to signalling the work’s own existence as a radical text. All of these authorial trademarks are sent into overdrive in Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim, Wren’s introspective protest novel about the role that doubt plays in any political awakening.

Inspired in part by the Rojava Revolution in northern Syria and the establishment of its participatory democracy, Wren posits a scenario where an unnamed narrator (a writer by trade) decides that their years of engaging with theoretical abstraction and Western activism must come to an end if they want to truly confront the moral stagnation of the world. 

Boarding a plane for a war-torn country, the narrator wanders into the desert equipped with little more than a map leading to an area governed by eco-feminist revolutionaries. During this danger-laden pilgrimage, the narrator is kidnapped by mercenaries, invited to join a revolutionary political utopia, and tortured by his own government’s military forces.

The largest section of the novel describes the ethos of the revolutionary enclave and the many committees and protocols they have in place to ensure the success of their political experiment. In the course of their exposure to the freedom fighters and three female handlers, the narrator has many of their biases stripped away. Deeming them to be more or less pure of heart, the women instruct the narrator on how to operate assault weapons, go out on patrol, and farm the land using the self-sustaining principles of permaculture. 

“On either side of us there are dictators,” one of the revolutionaries explains, “and when we fight we’re fighting for this little oasis of real freedom in the middle of this landscape of fear and torture and unfreedom. When on all sides the governments work by killing and intimidating their citizens, the idea of not having a government suddenly doesn’t seem so far-fetched.”

In time, the narrator begins to understand the inherent contradictions of their position, and the privilege that allowed them to leave their comfortable home to join a civil war over a “thin strip of land.” At one point they are even accused of a kind of political tourism by one of the freedom fighters, who suggests the best thing the narrator can do is to return home and support the war from afar – at least this kind of solidarity will not romanticize  battles, or conflate such struggles for autonomy with the writer’s selfish need for validation or social currency.

“Our struggle here is real,” another revolutionary writes in a letter to the narrator. “It doesn’t need your approval or attention to make it any more real.”

Wren’s desire to explore activism’s place in contemporary society is best served when certain concessions are made to the conventions of narrative. As in his previous books, Rich and Poor and Polyamorous Love Song, Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim balances passages of exegetical political analysis with sufficient character development and propulsive action – planes inexplicably exploding from the sky, firefights in the mountains, therapy sessions with dissenting soldiers in prison cells – that the reader’s critical faculties experience the kind of “fermentation” that only a well-defined plot can provide in its capacity as a raising agent.

“I’m not against violence,” Goldman, the narrator’s mentor within the utopian cell, reveals in a moment of openness. “I am against cycles of violence, cycles of revenge.” This avowal of her radicalization, when paired with glimpses into the generational suffering her country has endured, is more likely to shake the reader out of apathy than any party manifesto, academic monograph, or nakedly symbolic rendering of the subject.

 The central problem faced by activists in influencing the wider world is echoed by the narrator of Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim when they acknowledge that at times they find their own zeal to be flagging – the point is, however, to renew one’s commitment to change and to resist the temptation to give in to despair. But one must first acknowledge and name this feeling of hopelessness in order to move beyond it, Wren warns.

“I know I’m just another broken idealist,” the narrator says in a moment of dramatically rendered self-awareness. “The greater the youthful idealism, the greater the disillusionment when it’s smashed or breaks.”