In novel, perhaps in redemptive, forms, new kinds of art and thought [could] contribute to a revised and properly cosmopolitan definition of what Europe was and what its values would need to be in the future. Culture could reacquaint Europe with the humanity from which it had been comprehensively estranged.
(Gilroy 2013: 123)
Brexit did not divide the nation, it simply gave voice to existing social, cultural, political and economic grievances within society. The forces of politicization ramped up public dissatisfaction with the EU, often with regards to pre-existing issues affecting the body politic. For Michael Zürn, politicization involves this transportation of ‘an issue or an institution into the field or sphere of politics – making previously unpolitical matters political’ (2016: 167). The referendum result was the manifestation of over three decades of Euroscepticism, resistance to mass migration from Eastern Europe and the Middle East, impotent rage regarding the Eurozone crisis, and the corresponding failures of the left to either wholeheartedly endorse European integration or acknowledge the values of modern patriotism.1 As Darren McGarvey writes, on the morning after the referendum result, ‘multiple crises were announced simultaneously by middle class liberals, progressives and radicals, who were suddenly confronted with the vulgar and divided country the rest of us had been living in for decades’ (2017: 148). Goodwin is correct in asserting that ‘most people never really had an interest in exploring what underpinned Brexit’, with much analysis focusing solely on post-truth tactics employed by the Leave campaign rather than the historical roots of the result; however, this criticism cannot be directed at Remain-supporting academics alone (Goodwin 2018). Leave support did not solely consist of working-class voters opposed to an elitist system; the campaign itself was run by Westminster elites implicated in the very systems responsible for ingrained economic inequalities to which Leave voters were so opposed.
For political commentator Robert Peston, the vote gave a voice to millions of disenfranchised voters ‘who quite liked the idea of giving a bloody nose to the posh boys’ (Peston 2017). In this light, Brexit emerges self-flagellating pleasure or revenge fantasy fuelled by the Conservatives’ increasingly austerity-driven political programme. Moreover, members of the left shared UKIP’s fears of an ‘ever closer union’ but for differing reasons, perceiving the organization not as a progressive forum for cosmopolitical debate but an exclusive, injurious and undemocratic capitalist club. The EU has, nonetheless, been championed as a valid attempt to reconcile existing tensions between national and cosmopolitan forms of belonging and identification. Daniele Archibugi goes so far as to hail the EU as ‘the first international model which begins to resemble the cosmopolitan model’ (1998: 219). The supranational polity arguably translates cosmopolitanism’s universal abstractions into pragmatic practices, evident in the legislative frameworks, transnational projects and trade agreements established between nations. However, as Chris Rumford has persuasively argued, EU policy-makers ‘almost never refer to cosmopolitanism’, its politicians ‘tend not to allude to Europeans as cosmopolitans’, and its reports in general ‘eschew the language of cosmopolitanism’ (2007: 4). The top-down bureaucratic mechanisms of the EU lead Beck and Grande to suggest that a ‘deformed cosmopolitanism’ emerges, produced by ‘egoism of the member states, economic self-interest and the asymmetries in influence on political decisions’ (2007: 20).
At the core of the Brexit debate was the question of national borders: How should they be controlled? In a globalized world of transnational mobilities are porous borders an inevitability? Or is the maintenance of existing borders a form of defence from acts of global terrorism and undocumented immigration? For many British citizens the ongoing Syrian refugee crisis encapsulated these concerns and fuelled nationalist rhetoric. Angela Merkel described the crisis as one critical element of ‘our rendezvous with globalisation’ and acknowledged the importance of this battle (reflected in her subsequent forthright refusal for a post-Brexit Britain to opt out of freedom of movement): ‘we will have to take on more responsibility in an open world for what happens outside our European borders’ (Merkel 2016). Brexiteers maintained that the nation state could become a so-called Global Britain without relying on restrictive regulatory obligations to the EU or suffering further cultural influence detrimental to British ways of life. Theresa May’s blueprints for a Global Britain, predicated on these suggested trading ties outside Europe’s domain, intimated an inherent opposition to cosmopolitan ideology: ‘If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere’ (May 2016b).
The Brexit vote became a convenient catch-all for a range of internal struggles hindering the political functionality of an increasingly, inappropriately titled United Kingdom – a belated expression of a well-established structure of feeling. Building on the issues discussed in previous chapters, including the inheritance of a deeply entrenched cultural Euroscepticism, ongoing struggles to define contemporary modes of Englishness, anxieties over the failing integrity of the Union, and the backlash against EU and non-EU migration, this final chapter will examine the ways by which the first wave of post-Brexit fiction provides an immediate response to the referendum result. The chapter will also demonstrate how writers are confronting associated developments which impacted and led to the Brexit vote, including legitimate grievances relating to radical inequalities of access and socioeconomic imbalance, fears surrounding authoritarian populism and simplified notions of British national identity. As the introduced explained, these selected works could be more accurately termed post-referendum fictions, given that withdrawal did not occur on 31 December 2020; however, Brexit has come to be associated with that fateful date of 23 June 2016, when Britain finally gave voice to the Euroscepticism which had haunted its post-war identity.
Established literary figures such as Ian McEwan, Hilary Mantel and Zadie Smith all immediately engaged with the charged political events of 2016, speaking out on Britain’s apparently troubling act of national self-harm. J. K. Rowling labelled the rhetoric deployed during the referendum campaign ‘uglier than I can remember in my lifetime’, while Scottish poet Jackie Kay described the news of the result as ‘a bereavement [. . .] It’s a trauma. A body blow to the country’ (Elgot 2016; Kay 2016). Numerous authors and poets also contributed to A Love Letter to Europe (2019), a collection of pro-European think-pieces on Britain’s political withdrawal, including Alan Hollinghurst, Sebastian Faulks, Margaret Drabble, A. L. Kennedy and Alan Moore.2 In comparison to the post-war literary scene, many writers and artists believed Europe should be embraced not rejected and further debate was required before any withdrawal agreement could be ratified. Former Labour Party MP Denis MacShane, who arguably coined the term ‘Brexit’, expresses the feelings of many writers when he points out Leave voters did not truly constitute the majority: ‘Of the 44.56 million British voters, 27.1 million did not vote for Brexit – they either voted Remain or did not vote at all; 17.4 million voted for Brexit and 16.1 million voted against’ (MacShane 2019: 36). While he is undoubtedly correct in questioning the legitimacy of an advisory referendum in a parliamentary democracy, decisions are made by those who show up, and it is difficult to argue that an overall turnout of over 72 per cent is unrepresentative of the ‘will of the people’. Nevertheless, the majority of post-Brexit literary works indicate a pronounced disgust with the national turmoil continuing to embroil British politics and betray an authorial resistance to the outcome of the referendum.
Post-truth, populism and the culture war
In this era of post-truth politics, an unhesitating liar can be king.
A number of caustic autofictions responded directly to the consequences of the referendum and their impact on a shell-shocked Britain. Rachel Cusk’s Kudos (2018) is inhabited by various characters who dismiss Leave voters as uninformed nationalists while Olivia Laing’s semi-autobiographical Crudo (2018a) concentrates on the tumultuous summer of 2017 following ‘the car-crash of Brexit’: an environment in which events ‘still happened, but not in any sensible order [. . .] and anyway the space between them was full of misleading data, nonsense and lies’ (2018a: 62; 240). Laing adopts the unusual approach of combining elements of her personal life with that of American post-punk writer Kathy Acker to condemn the deployment of post-truth political rhetoric in a feverish, incessant news cycle. The wonderfully understated remark, ‘A lot had changed this year’, positions Brexit as merely one development in a radically changing and increasingly absurd political landscape: ‘Twin victories for Trump and Brexit had inaugurated a season of chaos, cartoonish, frightening and increasingly violent’ (2018a: 63, 2018b).3 While it seems counter-intuitive for a cultural critic to turn to fiction in order to analyse the post-Brexit chaos, Laing explains that while non-fiction does indeed instil ‘order and perspective, clarity and objectivity’, the ‘only way to capture the feeling of chaos, confusion and paranoia was by way of inhabiting an invented character’s consciousness’ (Laing 2018b). Literary fiction’s power thus lies in its capacity to create ‘room to reflect and regroup’, provide ‘therapy or catharsis’ and snatch ‘back the truth’ in a post-truth era (Laing 2018b). As Laing succinctly puts it (quoting American modernist painter Philip Guston), ‘That’s the only reason to be an artist: to escape, to bear witness to this’ (2018a: 87).
Both the run-up to (and immediate aftermath of) the Brexit vote also witnessed the first forays into fiction by numerous mainstream political commentators. Andrew Marr and Stanley Johnson (father of Boris) penned overwrought political thrillers occupied with the fallout of the referendum result. Marr’s Head of State (2015) offers satirical glimpses of the inner workings of pre-Brexit dealings while Johnson’s Kompromat (2017) and James Silvester’s Blood, White and Blue (2018) vilify the EU as a Janus-faced and treacherous organization. Chris Mullin’s The Friends of Harry Perkins (2019), a sequel to his 1982 semi-comic political thriller A Very British Coup, continues the trend of political figures delving into the sphere of literary fiction. Mullin, a former Labour MP for Sunderland South, projects a gloomy vision of a post-Brexit future where withdrawal from the EU has failed to alleviate internal ailments affecting the body politic. Whereas A Very British Coup chronicled the trials and tribulations of Harry Perkins, a socialist Labour prime minister in the 1980s (now considered to be a fictional forerunner for the unlikely rise of Jeremy Corbyn), the sequel imagines a Britain that has finally completed its negotiation period and exited the EU but without reaching any significant trade agreements. Mullin paints a depressing but predictable picture of a post-Brexit British economy striving to react to its recent political retreat:
The symptoms were unmistakable. Long queues of lorries at custom posts [. . .] A succession of announcements by British business that they would be relocating to the Continent. Regular crises on the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic when the new technology that was supposed to have resolved the customs problem failed to work. The triumphalism that had once surrounded Brexit had long since faded. (2019a: 135)
Mullin’s political stasis of 2025 looks frighteningly similar to the stagnation characterizing post-Brexit negotiations. If the ‘great Armageddon’ prophesized by passionate Remainers has not quite emerged, then neither has the ‘economic miracle promised by the Brexiteers’, and the ‘long, steady decline into insularity and irrelevance’ proves to be just as painful and debilitating (Mullin 2019b). Like the prescient political analysis within A Very British Coup, Mullin’s post-Brexit sequel offers a pragmatic prognostication of the deadening bureaucratic process which Britain must endure before a new national chapter can begin.
Such sensitive narratorial balance is certainly not evident in Ian McEwan’s Cockroach (2019) which clearly speaks to a much smaller literary audience to expound a decidedly pro-European political commentary. The novella subscribes to the Swiftian political tradition, with Pynchonian comedic elements thrown in for good measure, providing a searing slice of anti-Brexit satire written for Remain-supporting voters unable to locate any sense or reason in Britain’s act of political isolationism. McEwan, a prominent critic of the post-Brexit process who has been vociferously opposed to Eurosceptic meddling for decades, admits to being in denial about the referendum result, labelling Brexit ‘the most pointless, masochistic ambition ever dreamed of in the history of these islands’ (McEwan 2019b). Rather than attempting to seek answers for the nation’s slide into populism, he makes plain his views on the political farce that has engulfed British politics, suggesting any EU withdrawal on the basis of an advisory referendum is tantamount to an abnegation of political responsibility.4 Set in the present day following the events of the Brexit vote, Jim Sams, a grotesque parody of Boris Johnson, finds himself tasked with delivering the referendum result. From the opening line, the novella’s political take on Kafka’s The Metamorphosis is clear; however, McEwan inverses the process and Sams awakens to find himself in 10 Downing Street. McEwan’s utilization of a cockroach inhabiting human form proffers an oblique commentary on the ways by which those that thrive on squalid societal conditions exploit the insalubrious political landscape for personal gain. By operating as one body, Sams and his metamorphosed far-right cabinet operate reinforce McEwan’s disparaging critique of the hive-mind mentality buttressing populism.
As leader of the Reversalist Party, Sams champions the bizarre economic theory of Reversalism – by which consumers are paid to purchase goods and in turn have to pay employers to work – in order to somehow generate national renewal. This inversion of the financial system clearly gestures to (what McEwan perceives as) the economic illiteracy of Brexiteers in perceiving a brighter financial future outside of EU control. Brexit and Reversalism are one and the same beast. The Clockwise Conservative Party, in a direct mirroring of the pre-Brexit political landscape, finds itself dragged to the right in order to counter the insurgence of Reversalists, eventually promising a referendum on the reverse of money flow in order to placate wavering factions in their ranks. In place of ‘Take Back Control’, the Reversalist slogan ‘Turn the Money Around’ becomes an omnipresent slogan, uniting disparate sections of the nation in a tenuous alliance:
The old, by way of cognitive dimming, were nostalgically drawn to what they understand to be a proposal to turn back the clock. Both groups, poor and old, were animated to varying degrees by nationalist zeal. In a brilliant coup, the Reversalist press managed to present their cause as a patriotic duty and a promise of national revival and purification. (McEwan 2019a: 29)
By running on a populist platform, Sams successfully stirs up enough nationalist fervour that Archie Tupper, a poorly veiled Donald Trump, threatens to reverse the US economy in turn. However, the eventual reluctance of other nations to follow Britain’s lead and adopt the policy leaves the nation once again isolated and adrift, promising trade deals which will never be implemented and practising a humiliating form of ‘Reversalism in One Country’ (2019a: 31).
Curiously, despite the novella forging multiple parallels with the post-Brexit moment, from a creeping anxiety and weariness over EU negotiations, to vague threats regarding prorogation, to multiple nationalist attacks on serving politicians, McEwan fails to provide an originating impetus for this pursuit of Hard Reversalism. Sams simply feels impelled ‘to embrace a mystical sense of nation’ and free the British from their ‘elective captivity’ to the EU: an organization guided by a dangerous ‘arid rationality’ (2019a: 21; 22). When the wearied and exasperated German chancellor asks Sams: ‘Why are you doing this? Why, to what end, are you tearing your nation apart?’, McEwan simply furnishes his metamorphosed protagonist with a hollow and meaningless explanation: ‘Because. Because that’s what we’re doing. Because that’s what we believe in. Because that’s what we said we’d do. Because that’s what people said they wanted [. . .] That, ultimately, was the only an swer: because’ (2019a: 86–7). The cockroaches only leave their human hosts once the Reversalism Bill is passed into law and Britain completes its act of political isolationism, leaving the reader with more questions than answers as to their purpose. For McEwan, the efficacy of his novel is clear: ‘As the nation tears itself apart, constitutional norms are set aside, parliament is closed down so that the government cannot be challenged [. . .] a writer is bound to ask what he or she can do. There’s only one answer: write.’ (McEwan 2019c).
In McEwan’s defence, he concedes his novel avoids delivering a ‘balanced view’ and prefers post-Brexit novels which attempt to locate the intersection between ‘despair and laughter’ rather than delve into the minds of Eurosceptics: ‘I’d much rather read a savage satire on Remainers from a Brexiter’ (qtd. in Lynskey 2019). It may be, however, that Brexit is beyond satire – the absurdities of the contemporary political moment proving to be poor ingredients for satirists – and McEwan, often referred to as Britain’s national novelist, seems more bewildered than ever by recent events. His implication that the Brexit vote was a moment of political akrasia, with the British people voting against their best interests, reinforces the criticism that liberal authors perceive the populace to be gullible and unwitting pawns manipulated by their base instincts. Unlike his earlier works, The Cockroach lacks McEwan’s acerbic acuity and his bitterness regarding the referendum seeps into the novel; by savagely mocking proponents of Leave, the novel does little to bridge the fracture within our post-Brexit society, nor does it make any attempt to understand Leave voters.
The global political landscape of 2016 created unique conditions for populist leaders to tap into public disenchantment and mobilize widespread electoral support, evident in the electoral success of several European political parties, including the Danish People’s Party, the Sweden Democrats and the Austrian Freedom Party. Norris and Inglehart position the Leave campaign as a populist movement stimulated by a combination of ‘economic grievances’, evidenced in the widening gap between London and more economically depressed regions in Britain, and a ‘cultural backlash’ by older generations threatened by the rapid changes in contemporary culture and the loss of established traditions (2019: 459). The two factors reinforce one another in deepening this national cleavage. Time of Lies (2017) by Douglas Board and Perfidious Albion (2018) by Sam Byers envision worlds in which Brexiteer-minded populist movements have maintained their political momentum and an inherent breakdown in Britain’s cosmopolitan optic continues to run unchecked. Both novels engage with the emergence of authoritarian reflexes as a reaction to the gradual shift towards more socially liberal values, as well as the sinister tactics authoritarian leaders employ to suppress dissent and strengthen their political footing.
Board, a former civil servant, started work on Time of Lies in 2013, identifying early a ‘big gulf of ignorance contempt between the ruling class and ruled [. . .] long before Brexit’, yet he defines the work as a post-truth novel which also responds to the shocking political events of 2016 (Board 2017b).5 Set in a post-Brexit Britain, the darkly comic novel charts the rise of the Britain’s Great party, projected to achieve a landslide victory in the 2020 UK general election. Running on a populist platform geared around controlled immigration, tighter border policies, the reclamation of British sovereignty, and the abolition of the House of Lords, Britain’s Great takes advantage of the power vacuum created by the erosion of support for UKIP following Brexit and the evaporation of Labour’s red wall due to Corbyn’s divisive leadership. The party is spearheaded by Bob Grant, an ex-football hooligan who holds his political rallies in his beloved Millwall FC stadium; the party’s adoption of Millwall’s football chant ‘no one lies us, we don’t care’ echoes Conservative peer Chris Patten’s comments that Theresa May’s dogmatic approach to EU negotiations had created a ‘Millwall Britain’ (Chakelian 2017). Stirring up a vitriolic anger directed at neoliberal bankers, the sickly influence of generic foreigners and the shadowy machinations of Europhilic organizations – effectively ‘saying boo to the IMF’ – Grant rides the populist tide to become swiftly installed as PM, testifying to the lingering discontent and disenfranchisement long after the Brexit vote (2017a: 98).
The widespread support for populist parties reflected the sentiment that the political class should be held answerable to the democratic will of the people. After all, ‘democratic politics is politics in the vernacular’, as Will Kymlicka stresses, suggesting ‘that the more political debate is conducted in the vernacular, the more participatory it will be’ (2010: 441). Yet Grant’s rapid rise and electoral support is dependent on questionable assertions and a loose association with the truth. His fusion of neoliberal ideology with the brute force of authoritarian populism recalls the much-quoted dictum that bringing facts to a culture war is like bringing a knife to a gun fight. For Sarah Helm, Boris Johnson’s ‘half-truths’ during his time as a Brussels correspondent in the 1990s served a similar function, creating ‘a new reality [. . .] shaping the narrative that morphed into our present-day populist Euroscepticism’ (qtd. in Freedland 2016a). Grant’s socially conservative and ethnocentric values (which share empirical links with authoritarian populism) serve as a counter to the perceived dominance of liberal lifestyles which threaten British cultural traditions, and symbolize a resistance to the supranational pluralism of the EU which undermines the legitimacy of the nation’s democratic institutions. In depicting himself as a political outsider, disillusioned with the mainstream parties and willing to offer radical solutions in alleviating national grievances, Grant draws on populist rhetoric to align himself with working-class people staging an ideological battle against elitist, Eurocentric vested interests. Donald Trump, and Nigel Farage to a lesser (and less successful) extent, ran on similar platforms and relied on complementary narratives, leading an insurgency against bureaucrats, intellectuals, fake media and political correctness. As Donald Trump Jr wrote in 2019, ‘you could say that Brexit and my father’s election are one and the same’ (Dallison 2019). Gove’s declaration that ‘Britain has had enough of experts’ stems from the same populist impulse, implicating the Conservatives in this tactic of manipulating democratic energies to destabilize established democra tic orders (qtd. in Mance 2016).
Although the Leave campaign’s success robbed UKIP of its raison d’etre, the delay in implementing Brexit led Farage to establish the Brexit Party, applying further pressure on a gridlocked parliament unwilling to enact the will of the people. Support for authoritarian-populist parties clearly remains strong even after the cathartic release of the Brexit vote. Parallels can be drawn between the transformation of the Brexit Party and the populist language and authoritarian rhetoric of Britain’s Great, which occupies the political space UKIP once held. As Mondal argues, Farage’s declaration that 23 June 2016 was Britain’s ‘independence day’ evokes ‘ideas of colonial dependency’ but ‘also enacts a reversal’, projecting a Britain ‘for so long held to account by the forces of “political correctness”’ (2018: 82). For Norris and Inglehart, populist sentiments can exert a positive influence, helping to ‘reduce corruption, strengthen responsive governance, expand the issue agenda [. . .] and reengage participation among groups alienated by mainstream party politics’; however, by exploiting fears relating to national loyalty and security, authoritarian populism generates ‘a combustible mix’ which leaves a power vacuum and opens the door ‘for rule by strongmen leaders, social intolerance, and illiberal governance’ (2019: 461). An inward-looking nativism or protectionism emerges that fails to rebuild trust in either the media or the political system and simply leads to entrenched dogmatic attitudes, the curtailing of democratic freedoms and the silencing of the press (as evidenced in the political policies of Marine le Pen in France, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey and Viktor Orban’s ‘illiberal’ democracy in Hungary).
Accordingly, while Grant’s social policies initially speak to the material realities affecting British society – such as a plan to protect economically depressed areas of the country by offering priority housing to British citizens – his strong-man leadership soon assumes an autocratic Putinesque edge, and he threatens to nuke Brussels for its disclination to support British interests. A bottom-up populist protest vote directed against the establishment is thus transformed into a top-down authoritarian populism which exploits socioeconomic grievances and fails to alleviate national divisions. In retaliation, the fictional president of the European Commission promises that the EU will be ‘as creative as the UK is insolent’ and plans are put in motion to avert a subsequent Frexit by positioning Britain as the problem-child of Europe: ‘It is as if Europe has had a miscarriage. But now we can move on. We have cut the umbilical cord’ (2017a: 138; 230). Grant’s chokehold over Britain slowly loosens (much to the delight of his Guardian-reading, left-leaning brother Zack) in spite of LKGB’s (Labour for the Kinder, Gentler Britain) policies failing to resonate with voters. A coup masterminded by the Civil Service ensures Britain’s Great is eventually supplanted by a national coalition of established parties which promises a second Indy Ref, indicating once again that Scottish devolution is the most likely legacy of this slide into populism. It is significant that the eventual reclamation of the centre ground is only achieved via a coup, rather than a paradigm shift in the political consciousness of the electorate, potentially deepening a resentment of the bureaucratic meddling of a London-centric elite and disregarding the motivating factors which led to the Brexit vote.
Sam Byers’ Perfidious Albion reinforces this attack on a post-truth political culture, directing his ire at those political factions ‘waxing lyrical about a “lost” England comprised entirely of hedgerows and loam’ (2018: 6).6 The cover of Byers’ novel references the Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Tower of Babel, yet bastardizes the infamous painting by depicting a stagnating post-Brexit Britain still-under-construction, littering the edifice with empty political slogans and corporate waffle, appropriate for an increasingly post-truth culture. Set in a near-future following Britain’s recent departure from the EU, the dystopic yet disturbingly plausible narrative centres on a dilapidated East Anglian housing estate, Larchwood, in the sleepy fictional town of Edmundsbury. The estate is under threat of redevelopment and gentrification by a global tech company, Downton, while a multinational tech giant Green (its name sardonically evoking popular visions of an idyllic, rural England) is slowly insinuating its way into the lives of Edmundsbury’s inhabitants, harvesting personal information in a manner redolent of Cambridge Analytica.
Darkin, an elderly, white working-class male, refuses to vacant the estate yet is manipulated by far-right media commentators, such as journalist Hugo Bennington, into perceiving immigrants as the root cause of his plight as opposed to the austerity programmes and public sector cuts instigated by a progressively conservative, corporate political culture.7 Bennington utilizes his newspaper columns in a popular tabloid to launch incendiary attacks on Muslims, strains to the NHS and politically correct liberal dogma. In peddling simplicity to his readers, Bennington contrasts the perceived horrors of contemporary England with ‘another historical England, which had once made him proud and secure’: ‘Through nostalgia, he was selling the politically equivalent of escapism. And through reductive blame-mongering, he was, he knew, selling a potent combination of the two’ (2018: 103). Bennington soon translates his public support into electoral success via the creation of a nativist, Eurosceptic political party, the UKIP-lite England Always, which derides Westminster elites and draws on Brute Force – a civilian vigilante militia parodying the English Defence League – to enforce control and intimidate voters. As a pint-drinking, chain-smoking everyman, Bennington is a clear caricature of Nigel Farage, running his party on an anti-immigration platform which proves enticing to Edmundsbury’s threatened inhabitants. England Always aims to reignite the pre-Brexit revolutionary mood that has been dampened by endless negotiations and media prattle, ensuring the concerns of disenfranchised voters are not forgotten:
chests puffed with post-exit pride, had begun their transformation from a party concerned with redefining England’s place in the world to a par ty preoccupied with people’s place in England, and had moved from shaping England’s post-Europe future to recapturing its pre-contemporary pomp. Brexit was over, but the energy it had accumulated had to be retained. Fears needed to be redirected. Hatred needed to pivot. (Byers 2018: 119)
Disillusioned communities such as Edmundsbury naturally become a prime location for the targeted tactics of populist England Always: the small town ‘was home to fewer immigrants than almost anywhere else in the country, yet anti-immigration sentiment had never been higher’ (2018: 106). Byers demonstrates just how easily cultural wounding develops into white rage and thoughts of white supremacy, exposing the questionable values of his nominally inclusive nation. Appropriately, negative attitudes towards immigration were a significant predictor of populist values in relation to both the Leave vote and the success of UKIP in the 2015 and 2017 general elections, often focused in areas which had seen the lowest rates of immigration. The unnuanced rhetoric of populism is also well suited to online social media; unsophisticated populist soundbites draw together heterogeneous groups motivated by related grievances under the same broad (if amorphous) umbrella. As Timothy Snyder points out, this sociopolitical movement can be more accurately defined as ‘sadopopulism’, whereby voters ‘can believe that he or she has chosen who administers their pain, and can fantasise that this leader will hurt enemies still more’, converting ‘pain to meaning, and then meaning back into more pain’ (2018: 273). Voters such as Darkin direct their displaced rage at immigrants or pro-EU quislings and miss the real target. When Thomas Mair, the murderer of MP Jo Cox, announced to the courtroom that his name was ‘Death to Traitors, Freedom for Britain’, he was responding to this same deluded fear of invasion and the misguided perception that Britain had been reduced to a vassal state. The Sun headline during post-Brexit negotiations, ‘PUT EU HANDS UP, claiming German officials desired Britain’s unconditional surrender in Brexit talks’, testifies to the role of media figures such as Bennington in stoking these anxieties (Hawkes 2017).
Trina, a black British tech worker and fellow resident of the Larchwood estate, resists what she perceives as ‘the tsunami of whitewashed nostalgia and chocolate-box history’ espoused by England Always, tweeting ‘#whitemalegenocide. Lol’ in response to Bennington’s claim that white men are being culturally and politically marginalized by recent multicultural and gendered developments in British society (Byers 2018: 134). However, her tweet is weaponized by Bennington as evidence for the exact ultra-liberal prejudice he considers responsible for diminishing his beloved England and he marshals his bigoted forces to expel Trina from the estate. Yet Bennington is not simply inciting racial hatred or asseverating post-truth rhetoric in order to win electoral seats, he genuinely experiences a cruel nostalgia for a culture he longer recognizes. Faced with expulsion from his own party, Bennington gradually realizes that for:
all the years he’d spent banging on about how much he loved England [. . .] he hated England: its hordes of immigrants; its filthy street markets of foreign tat [. . .] its prancing, marrying queers; its blaring, feral, feminist bitches [. . .] that was the platform on which he should have stood: not England Always but England Eroded, England Besmeared. (2018: 316)
Perfidious Albion thus demonstrates how quickly and conveniently in-group dynamics between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ come into play when tribal securities are placed under threat by elected representatives or foreign influence. As Byers notes, ‘Both remain and leave became surprisingly inflexible identities for people [. . .] which helped them make more straightforward sense of what up to that point might have been quite complex political positions’ (Personal Correspondence 2020). In predicting potential national developments as a result of recent illegal data harvesting, corporate privatization, online misogyny, the gig economy and post-truth politics (the consequences of which are already germinating in British society), Byers’ panoramic novel treads a fine line between reality and fiction, leaving the reader to wonder whether his visions tend towards the portentous or the absurd.
The referendum also contributed to a resurgence in speculative political-dystopia novels, continuing a Eurosceptic trend established in post-war British fictions such as Edwina Currie’s The Ambassador (1999), which imagine potential futures for a culturally isolated Britain ruled by a European superstate. In such fictions the referendum is now a passing everyday reference, illustrating the extent to which the fateful vote has already reshaped the landscape of present-day Britain and been immortalized in the social history of our isles. William Gibson’s Agency (2020) projects an alternative 2017 in which Brexit (positioned as the darkest timeline) did not occur, while Jeanette Winterson’s science-fiction novel Frankissstein (2019), a speculative reimagining of Mary Shelley’s seminal work, suggests the overpowering and omnipresent staccato-like syntax of post-truth media threatens to overshadow genuine developments in AI technology. Narrated by Ry Shelley, a transgender doctor, the novel alludes to a ‘Small-minded, smug, self-righteous, unjust’ England that ‘hates the stranger’ (2019: 247). In G. L. Kaufmann’s A Hard Fall (2018) the Britain of 2025 is a splintered nation in social and economic decline; any citizen Verified Not British is cast out of the country while a cosmopolitan resistance movement is reduced to operating under the gaze of an authoritarian Home Security network. For Kaufmann, the referendum was ‘a failed conversation’ which exposed the corrosive effects of post-truth politics; in its place, stories ‘can captivate, convince, and coax in a way that political rhetoric and expert discussion cannot’, providing an alternative vision to a bleak prospective future (Kaufmann 2018b). Heinz Helle’s Euphoria (2017) is an early effort at depicting what a post-apocalyptic, post-Europe future may resemble, while Mark Billingham’s crime novel Love Like Blood (2017) envisions a disproportionate rise in racial attacks and xenophobic hate crimes as a wave of nationalist triumphalism follows the referendum vote.8
John le Carré’s A Legacy of Spies (2017a) and Agent Running in the Field (2019) mark a return to the Cold War themes of his earlier work, re-evaluating England’s turbulent relationship with Europe during the twentieth century, but purposely speak to the contemporary moment and the rise of post-truth rhetoric.9 Le Carré makes no qualms about revealing his own political outlook, gesturing to the deceitful application of affect memories by the Leave campaign in securing an exit from the EU:
I’m not just a remainer. I’m a European through and through [. . .] If Johnson and his Brexiteers had their way, it would be declared St Brexit’s Day. Church bells across the land would peal out the gladsome tidings from every tower. And good men of England would pause their stride and doff their caps in memory of Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, Trafalgar, and mourn the loss of our great British empire. Empires don’t die just because they’re dead. (le Carré 2020)
In A Legacy of Spies, George Smiley, le Carré’s customary protagonist, alludes to May’s infamous Conservative Party conference speech in 2016 contemplating exactly whom he was serving in the intelligence service and which nation state held his loyalty: ‘whose England? Which England? England all alone, a citizen of nowhere? [. . .] If I had an unattainable ideal, it was of leading Europe out of her darkness towards a new age of reason. I have it still’ (2017a: 303). Speaking in 2017, le Carré explains how Smiley, who ‘has spent his life defending the flag in one way or another’ and is now exiled in Freiburg, ‘feels a stranger in his own country, and that’s why we find him and indeed leave him in a foreign place’ (le Carré 2017b). Like his author, Smiley detests the rise of populist orators like Farage and Trump, and watches helplessly as his dream of a unified Europe and legacy of his Cold War espionage is undone by far worse post-truth treacheries. Le Carré joined a long list of writers, including Neil Gaiman, Max Porter, Marina Lewycka and Philip Pullman, in signing an open letter to The Guardian pleading voters to support the EU in the 2019 European parliamentary elections. The letter points to the fact that 60 per cent of UK publishing revenues are generated from book exports (with 36% of physical book exports heading to European markets) and ridicules the post-Brexit negotiation process: ‘We are the people who spend our lives making things that are not true seem believable, and we don’t think Brexit is even a good effort’ (Flood 2019).
Mind the gap: London and the rest
As a center of steady economic productivity and conduit to the world’s economic, London has often been compared to the goose that laid the golden egg. It has simply been too valuable to kill. Until June 2016, when the majority of UK voters decided to strangle the goose.
(Toly 2017: 46)
The fact that most London boroughs voted to remain in the referendum – with eight London boroughs among the highest ten Remain rates – raises urgent questions about the capital’s troubled relationship with the rest of the UK.10 Tim Shipman immediately characterized the result as a ‘victory for outsiders over insiders’ and a violent repudiation of both the political class and liberal, metropolitan London (2017: 583). Zadie Smith’s ‘Fences: A Brexit Diary’, first published in The New York Review of Books in August 2016, offers a levelled and vigorous response to Britain’s sudden and unexpected political isolationism, denouncing the referendum as ‘a very ineffective hammer for a thousand crooked nails’ (Smith 2018: 25). The article acknowledges the capital’s unique role as a model for cross-cultural conviviality – an ‘outward-looking city [. . .] so different from these narrow xenophobic places up north’ – and its increasingly awkward position in the national constellation: ‘around here change is the rule. The old grammar school up the hill became one of the largest Muslim schools in Europe [. . .] Waves of immigration and gentrification pass through these streets like buses’ (Smith 2018: 22; 27). Smith concedes that for too long an affluent London-centric elite has chosen to ‘lecture the rest of the country on its narrow-mindedness while simultaneously fencing off its own discreet advantages’, engendering a ‘London vs. the rest’ attitude which merely serves to deepen existing class divisions; and yet, the referendum revealed the ‘painful truth [. . .] that fences are [also] being raised everywhere in London’, exposing the existing inequalities within the capital (Smith 2018: 27; 31). Although Smith slightly misinterprets voting data (positioning Brexit as a ‘working-class populist revolution’ and neglecting the integral role played by affluent middle-class liberals in southern counties), her core argument, echoing the claim reiterated throughout this study that Brexit reveals ‘a deep fracture in British society that has been thirty years in the making’, is certainly valid (Smith 2018: 25; 27). A. L. Kennedy’s Serious Sweet (2016) and Jonathan Coe’s Number 11 (2015), both published in the run-up to the referendum, echo the work of Smith in diagnosing the pre-existing ailments of contemporary London, interrogating Tory spending cuts and prevailing fiscal attitudes within the capital.
The political shift in the nation following Brexit reflects the socioeconomic and racial tensions evident in Smith’s Swing Time (2016), as well as her earlier works such as NW (2012) and The Embassy of Cambodia (2013), and influences subsequent readings of these pre-Brexit novels. The Embassy of Cambodia in particular captures Smith’s fascination with the localized ethics of British cultural engagement. The novella follows Fatou, a domestic servant from the Ivory Coast, in her day-to-day duties for an affluent London family. To escape the drudgery and isolation of her restricted domesticity, Fatou regularly visits a swimming pool and becomes intrigued by the embassy of Cambodia she passes on her route. The embassy comes to represent the reflexive and interconnected relationship between local and global spheres within London, once again emphasizing how the prosaic and pedestrian often operate in tension with sweeping globalism and transnational fragility in Smith’s fiction. For Barbara Korte, the story ‘registers the social rifts in Britain that preceded the Brexit vote’, capturing an emergent ‘structure of feeling’ which was to define the events of 2016, namely a rising public dissatisfaction with perceived increases in immigration levels and a simmering anger towards refugees (2020: 25).11 By employing the first-person plural ‘we’ throughout the narrative – ‘We are from Willesden. Our minds tend toward the prosaic’ – the story emphasizes Smith’s continued efforts to impose a cosmopolitan empathy upon the capital and its residents, establishing a counter-narrative that works in opposition to the prevailing political climate and enduring racial divisions.
Smith’s subsequent post-Brexit offering ‘The Lazy River’ provides a less covert metaphor for the ongoing stagnation and political follies tearing apart an increasingly absurdist Brexit Britain. The short story follows a group of Leave-voting British tourists on a package holiday in Southern Spain, critiquing the short-sighted, insular mindset that gave succour to Eurosceptic political factions in Westminster: ‘most of us voted for Brexit and therefore cannot be sure if we will need a complicated visa to enter the Lazy River come next summer’ (Smith 2019: 28). Though the contingent contains ‘a few souls from London, university educated and fond of things like metaphors and remaining in Europe and swimming against the current’, Smith bemoans the fact that Europhilic factions of British society were beginning to resign themselves to defeat or refuse to accept the brute political implications of Brexit in 2017, even while they are swept away in the same currents of populism and atavistic nationalism: ‘It’s a pose: it can’t last long’ (Smith 2019: 26). Smith’s characters ultimately remain floating in an uneasy state of suspension, forced to contemplate the absurdity of our current political turmoil while the reader is left to lament the questionable ethical legitimacy of our current fortress mentality.
A YouGov poll released on 11 July 2016 found public backing for the idea of London splitting off to form its own country (Cecil 2016). Support was particularly strong among Remain supporters; 29 per cent of respondents also favoured a devolved London Parliament with similar decision-making powers to the Scottish Parliament. A number of post-Brexit London fictions gesture to the cultural divide opening up between the capital and its troublesome outer regions. Linda Grant’s panoramic account of life in contemporary London, A Stranger City (2019), captures a capital darkened by growing nationalist sentiments – sentiments out of step with the cosmopolitan optic of its populace. Although it is only explicitly addressed once in the novel, the spectre of Brexit looms large and haunts narrative events, affecting the lives of London’s inhabitants who encounter ‘old triumphalist signs embedded in all the fields and hedgerows. Leave leave leave leave leave’ when they dare to escape the confines of the capital (2019: 129). A Stranger City gives shape to Grant’s own concern about Britain’s ideological retreat and the related rise in xenophobic abuse: ‘my anxiety about Brexit has spilled into absolutely everything’ (Hughes 2019). Grant’s novel opens by detailing the tragic death of an unnamed woman who commits suicide by jumping off London Bridge, her body later dredged from the Thames attached to the chains of HMS Belfast. The woman is later revealed to be Valentina Popov, originally from the border between Romania and Moldova; born a few metres away from the borders of the EU, Valentina is thus an illegal immigrant deprived of free movement and the right to work in Britain. The mournful incident sets the tone for a wide-ranging novel which articulates fears relating to the Syrian refugee crisis and the Windrush scandal to systematically expose the emergent fault lines across a city which, for some British citizens, has seen its ‘essential Englishness [. . .] permanently breached’ by ethnic diversity (2019: 24).
Brexit places an indirect strain on the marriage of native Londoners, retired policeman Pete and his wife Marie, due to their contrasting views on Brexit. Marie wishes to escape the overwhelming multiculturalism of the London bubble in favour of the predominantly white Lake District and its absence of ethnic minorities, her anxieties correlating with shifting racial demographics in the capital. Goodhart points out that ‘as recently as 1971 the white British made up 86 per cent of the London population [. . .] In 2011 it had fallen to 45 per cent’ (2017: 136). Pete, on the other hand, recognizes that depriving London of its transnational associations would simply leave ‘some lily-white National Trust mock-up’ predicated on a disconcerting ethnonationalism (Grant 2019: 302). Weaving together multiple strands to locate London’s voice in Brexit times, Grant suggests a burgeoning Euroscepticism is mutating into a rejection of multicultural paradigms more broadly: ‘Europeans were only the start. The rest would follow on later’ (2019: 167). This fictional London is not an inclusive cosmopolis of cultural hospitality and empathetic receptivity; Lo ndon may indeed be a city of strangers, but strangers loosely connected by increasingly frayed bonds which fail to override national configurations of space. As the nation withdraws back into itself ‘like a mollusc to its shell’, repudiating the multicultural liberalism associated with contemporary London, A Stranger City gestures towards a grim future in which the growing ideological divide between London and the rest of the country is exacerbated, cultivating the conditions for ‘a united Ireland’ while England is left isolated in a ‘little whites-only rump state’ (2019: 242; 319).
The evident socioeconomic disparity between ‘London and the rest’ also inspires Amanda Craig’s timely novel The Lie of the Land (2017). The narrative concentrates on a failing marriage of a seemingly privileged middle-aged couple, Lottie and Quentin Bretin, who decide to relocate from metropolitan London to a cheap cottage in Devon after losing their jobs due to the credit crunch. Published on the one-year anniversary of the referendum, The Lie of the Land swiftly turns its attention away from the infidelities of marriage to the regional inequalities of Brexit Britain. The Bretin family experience an instantaneous culture shock when they arrive in the fictional village of Trelorn, missing the cosmopolitan buzz of the capital and dismissing Devon as a ‘foreign’ country, ‘poorer than Romania’ (2017: 30; 99). When Lottie’s daughter Stella melodramatically demands to know if they will ever return to England, Lottie can only offer the inadequate reply, ‘London isn’t England [. . .] This is England, too’ (2017: 50). Given that Craig began work on the novel almost seven years before the referendum, she is well-positioned to cast a critical eye over the palpable social signs of a burgeoning sociocultural and economic divide between London and the rest of Britain’s regions. Paraphrasing Cecil Rhodes’ famous dictum, Quentin recognizes the beneficiaries of English life to be progressively confined to the south-east: ‘if you’re English, you have won first prize in the lottery of life [. . .] Well, it’s even more true if you’re a Londoner’ (2017: 313).
Lottie’s mixed-race teenage son, Xan, the product of a previous failed relationship, takes a temporary job in the local pie factory, the appropriately named Humbles (a figurative reminder of his previous entitlement), being immediately mistaken for a non-European illegal immigrant on account of his skin colour in an overwhelmingly white region. Working alongside Eastern European migrants on zero-hours contracts such as Polish Katya, who emphasizes her desire to work rather than claim benefits, Xan gradually learns to cast off his perceived misconceptions towards England-outside-London. A strident Remainer, Craig wrote the novel to challenge the predominant assumption that Leavers were ‘stupid, jingoistic, racist fools’: ‘They are brave people who work and labour the land. I don’t agree with the way they voted but I respect their views’ (McGlone 2017). Her novel consequently empathizes with a plethora of reasons why the Leave vote gained such traction in Devon: local farmers bemoan the mountains of EU paperwork required for subsidies; precarious workers threatened by the spectre of post-2004 EU immigration ‘vote UKIP, because nobody else cares’; young couples whose futures are impeded by the housing crisis and middle-class squeeze; and frustrated parents struggle to find school places for their children, despite having resided in the area for generations: ‘You want to know why we want to leave Europe? That’s why’ (2017: 151; 202). Craig’s novel is more than simply a hand-wringing state-of-the-nation affair, espousing a narrative hospitality for those vulnerable individuals who have attempted to make Britain their home, and suggesting how the tentative microcosmic adjustment of the Bretin family’s perspective to Devonshire life hints at the potential for national reconciliation.
Martyn Waites’ folk-horror-infused crime novel The Old Religion (2018) marks a similar sociocultural tension between London and the south-west, specifically. Set in a bleak, rural Cornish village named St Petroc, whose inhabitants feel economically disenfranchised and left behind by the pace of contemporary Britain, the novel employs a distinct Brexit analogy to indicate how a community can abandon rational thought and become swept up in a collective delusion, implementing drastic measures to counter prevalent threats to local traditions and values. Waites, who defines his novel as ‘Brexit Noir’, purposely situates the narrative in Cornwall, which he claims is ‘the area of the country most heavily reliant on EU subsidies’ (Waites 2018). The influence of folk horror, involving the dislocation of characters in rural environments, is thus a ‘perfect metaphor’ for the ‘collective Brexit-inspired economic and social death wish’ of the south-west (Waites 2018). By utilizing St Petroc as a microcosm for the battles being waged internationally, Waites forces a reconsideration of the ways by which an imagined community can redraw the boundaries of their territory.
Anthony Cartwright’s The Cut (2017) is a unique post-Brexit novel in that it was specifically commissioned by European publisher Peirene Press to provide a direct response to the vote and construct ‘a fictional bridge between the two Britains that have opposed each other since the referendum day’ (2017: n.p.). Cartwright dramatizes the media-reinforced divide between nationalist and cosmopolitan forms of identification within his native Black Country landscape, picking through the industrial strata to indicate how class inequality continues to run deep and informs the public mood towards European integration. Cairo Jukes, a labourer on a precarious zero-hours contract in Dudley, and Grace Trevithick, a documentary film maker (and personification of an elite British media) from Hampstead in London, give voice to the two competing discourses of this fractured post-Brexit nation. The Cut encapsulates how geographical inequality emerged as a crucial factor in the referendum result, echoing John Lanchester’s insightful remark in his article ‘Brexit Blues’ that ‘the primary reality of modern Britain is not so much class as geography. Geography is destiny. And for much of the country, not a happy destiny’ (Lanchester 2016). Those left out of the national narrative have little reason or motivation to continue its story. After all, it was England-outside-London which tipped the balance in favour of a Leave vote, indicating the evident disconnect between the capital and the rest of Britain. O’Toole (2018a) notes that in the Midlands the percentage of constituencies with Leave majorities was the highest in the UK at 87.6 per cent. The Leave campaign secured its strongest regional support in the West Midlands in particular, the setting for Cartwright’s novel, gaining 5 3.9 per cent of the vote. Whereas the south-east of England has enjoyed the benefits of global economic interdependence, in post-industrial edgelands of the north, Midlands and Wales – areas which had failed to recover from Thatcherite policies – a sense of powerlessness and impotent rage fuelled unexpectedly high turnouts.12 As John Harris comments, it ‘may have been easy to miss in the London-centred haze of the “knowledge economy” and the birth of the digital future, but this is where millions of lives have been heading since the early 1980s’ (Harris 2016).
Support for Leave was partly mobilized by the financial marginalization and social deprivation of an underclass confronted by a ‘lack of educational qualifications, low incomes and bleak economic prospects’, resulting in a backlash against EU membership which had failed to improve their daily lives (Goodwin and Milazzo 2017: 457). Research by Goodwin and Heath (2016b) clearly indicates that the Leave vote was substantially higher in economically deprived areas; also, 75 per cent of those without educational qualifications voted Leave compared to 27 per cent of those with the highest qualifications. It is worth reiterating, however, that the overall ‘proportion of Leave voters who were of the two lowest social classes was just 24%’, providing a sobering corrective to overly simplistic media claims that the ‘left behind’ and anti-establishment working class were primarily to blame for the Brexit vote (Virdee and McGeever 2018: 1803). Cartwright’s realist narrative renders the lived experiences of those citizens left behind by globalization, ‘Tired of change, tired of the world passing by’, conveying just how easily a destructive nostalgia can stimulate a belligerent national autarchism as a psychological defiance to socioeconomic disparities (2017: 100–1). For Craig Calhoun, nationalism is often ‘denigrated by proponents of transnational society who see the national and many other local solidarities as backward or outmoded, impositions of the past on the present’ (2007: 170). But nationalism itself operates as a source of social integration ‘insofar as it structures collective identities and solidarities’ and should not be treated as ‘a sort of error smart people will readily move beyond – or an evil good people must reject’ (2007: 7; 152). For many undecided and floating voters in 2016 it was difficult to perceive the benefits of a vague supranational identity when their regional and national identity was much more tangible and intrinsically tied to their cultural memory and day-to-day lives.
Although the nation is often conceived of as an imagined community (following Anderson), Cartwright’s novel captures the attachments and affection individuals continue to hold for their local communities and national customs in place of more rootless forms of citizenship, which seem to be the purview of privileged elites alone. The narrative articulates this resistance to visions of a Global Britain advanced by Westminster, signalling a defiant challenge to London-centric discourses and media reports of Leave-supporting areas. Victor Seidler argues traditional areas in the North and Midlands viewed London as ‘another country’, a ‘city-state that somehow thrived in ignorance of what was going on in the rest of the country’, and such communities were ‘ill at ease with the urban cosmopolitan multiculturalism that had been celebrated in response to the terrorist attack of 7 July 2005’ (2018: 23). Individuals who attracted the attention of the media for voting Leave, such as Cartwright’s fictional community, found they had become ‘the objects of the research process’: ‘research came to speak in the same language as the political elites; and it was a language often regarded with suspicion, if not disdain’ (2018: 25; 26). In reinforcing the need for a heightened consciousness of the regional inequalities and political peripheralities still existing within our divided kingdom following a prolonged period of economic decline, Cartwright accentuates how any contemporary analysis of the Black Country and its inhabitants can only be achieved via an appreciation of its socioeconomic and political past in comparison to the concentration of wealth within London. For Toly, global cities ‘have in some ways become the elegant façades of their national contexts, accompanied by deeply shadowed regional backstages. This regional dynamic can lead to resentment of and alienation from global cities and the open global economic system that has fuelled their rise’ (2017: 144). Uneven regional development lends itself to the perception of an incommensurate democratic deficit, particularly in England following the policy failures of the Northern Powerhouse and the Midlands Engine. Successive generations of communities in deindustrialized areas experience an inheritance of loss as their local material practices now enjoy a diminished value, with professional opportunities relocated to larger cities.
The Cut reminds us that ‘the England of frivolous Etonians, the swollen House of Lords and the London-based elite is not the only England’ (Marquand 2018). Working on a ‘wasteland’ amid the canals of Dudley – open scars of a battered post-industrial landscape – Cairo is unable to relate to either metropolitan Grace or a wider world that has ignored and forgotten the presence of his community (Cartwright 2017: 37). Facing the slow cancellation of his future, and locked out of the British success story, Cairo almost exists in a separate, economically poorer country. His quiet desperation and resentment capture how bitter social and political histories worked to radicalize the people’s revolt and stoked the desire for structural change away from failed economic models. Cartwright utilizes his narrative to engage in a dialogue with his earlier Black Country fiction, reiterating the ways by which the spectral past infringes on the present and assumes a hauntological edge.13 Lingering social memories and scattered spatial memoranda of a region which ‘used to be somewhere’ hinder any forward momentum, trapping Dudley in a backward-looking inertia and reducing its inhabitants to a liminal presence in the narrative: ‘here were the ruins, and here were the ghost people among them, lost tribes’ (2017: 44; 100). As Linkon reminds us, ‘People and communities are shaped by their histories – by experience, by memory, and by the way the economic and social practices of the past frame the structures, ideas, and values that influence our lives long after those practices have ceased to be productive’ (2018: 1). Engaging in a mournful flanuerism through the forgotten architecture of the industrial past, Cairo assumes a spectral presence, curating the decline of his region and grappling with the legacies of austerity that have exenterated his community.
The desolate landscape itself becomes a monument to the democratic deficit existing between English regions, while also serving as a reminder of the Black Country’s former industrial glory. By giving Grace a tour of these post-industrial sites – remnants of his cultural heritage – Cairo is forcing her (and thus the implied media) to bear witness to the deindustrialization that continues to destabilize working-class communities outside the London bubble. Yet as Baucom writes, if a ‘nation’s memory resides in its architecture’ then ‘memory must be understood as both the recuperation of the past in the present and the redemption of the present in the future’ (1999: 73). To interpret Cairo’s flaneurism in a more positive sense, he is seeking a form of psychological protection from the landscape, reinscribing the identity-defining sites as evidence that the working-class continue to possess some latent power in affecting political events, fortifying a spatial understanding of collective identity and securing his own identity in the process. Cartwright acknowledges that his accentuation of the psychogeographical ‘aspect[s] of the landscape, concentrating on the decline and the ruin, is an aesthetic decision, but it is also a political one, and you can’t really separate them’ (qtd. in O’Brien 2015: 402). Accordingly, Cairo’s lament for the decline of regional industry recalls Gilroy’s diagnosis of a resurgent ‘postimperial melancholia’ ingrained in the national psyche and its influence in shaping a political narrative: ‘A lot of it is gone, erased. The industrial past [. . .] Now you act – we act – like there’s some sort of shame to it all. The rest of the country is ashamed of us. You want us gone’ (2004: 109; Cartwright 2017: 111). His involvement in Grace’s documentary, and assertion that the approaching EU referendum signifies ‘the weight of the past on the present, a sense of betrayal [. . .] of retribution on some grand, futile scale’, is a desperate attempt to justify both his own life choices and a passionate defence of his abandoned community: ‘He wanted to say something, about the sense of his world being made invisible, mute’ (2017: 24; 30).
As the third chapter discussed, Cartwright’s previous novels help us to understand the key sources of voter frustration and the surge in electoral support for UKIP and rising memberships for other nationalist political parties: integral components in the decision to leave the EU. According to Ford and Goodwin, UKIP’s radical right revolt was ‘a working-class phenomenon’, ‘anchored in a clear social base: older, blue-collar voters, citizens with few qualifications, whites and men’ (2014: 175; 270). A strong argument can be made for the impact of Cameron’s severe austerity programme from 2010 onwards. As Mary O’Hara bluntly puts it, ‘Austerity was a choice made by the British government’ rather than an external body (2015: 5). Thiemo Fetzer also finds austerity and the dismantling of the welfare system under Cameron to be key drivers in the Brexit vote, going so far as to claim that the referendum ‘either may not have taken place, or [. . .] could have resulted in a victory for Remain, had it not been for austerity’ (Fetzer 2018). The Afterglow, Heartland and Iron Towns allude to the re-emergence of English nationalism in working-class industrial areas worn down by austerity and deindustrialization brought about by globalizing forces. According to Cartwright, The Cut marks the ‘end of this sequence, which runs 1979-2016 (although not chronologically)’, documenting the ‘ongoing political catastrophe that has been playing itself out in this country for 40 years or so [. . .] but in itself with much longer roots (in industry, empire, the class system)’ (Personal Correspondence 2020).
Socioeconomic deprivation fuelled anti-immigration rhetoric and the EU referendum provided disempowered and disenfranchised voters with the opportunity to direct their anger towards an external organization that could become a scapegoat for their various ills. UKIP (emerging from the ruins of the BNP) exploited this animosity and positioned themselves as a more respectable anti-immigration party in comparison to the far-right movements of the English Defence League and Britain First. While Grace’s intentions are seemingly genuine, Phil McDuff has identified what he terms a ‘prole whisperer’ industry, in which right-wing journalists exploit the socioeconomic concerns of specifically white working-class voters outside London to suggest immigration or cultural diversity is at the heart of their floundering narrative, rather than the internal neglect of successive governments (McDuff 2017). Goodwin and Milazzo (2017) correctly argue that a deeper anxiety lies behind this surface fear of immigration and EU membership: namely the erosion of national identity and traditional values rooted in the cultural imaginary. Characters across Cartwright’s body of fiction offer variations on the optimistic and stubborn refrain: ‘we’re still here’, voicing relevant concerns regarding corporate neoliberal policies and existing socioeconomic inequalities rather than immigration specifically. Crucially, Cairo is not a supporter of UKIP and feels no connection to either the Leave-supporting newspapers or perceived elites who treat the debates surrounding cultural loss as merely a game. He simply warns Grace, ‘people here will vote against whatever they think the perceived elite will vote’, even if the consequences may be disastrous (2017: 43). In this light, the resultant Leave vote again alludes to Snyder’s notion of sadopopulism and the desperate conversion of socioeconomic pain into meaning.
Grace’s initial implied repudiation of his concerns symbolizes the Remain camp’s dismissal of nationalist rhetoric as simple bigotry or evidence of Little Englander syndrome, ignoring the fears of many undecided voters and appearing out of touch to those outside the London bubble. As Cairo stresses in his interview, ‘all you people want to say is that it’s about immigration. That we’m all racist [. . .] You doh wanna hear that its more complicated than that’, insisting instead that disenfranchised citizens have identified a bogeyman in the shape of the EU at which to direct their impotent anger following the 2008 financial crisis and prolonged periods of austerity (2017: 24). Brexit became the most salient means for these characters to ‘take back control’ of their culture, their neighbourhoods, and their identities, voting for outsider parties who most accurately voiced their valid concerns. In his Orwell Prize-winning analysis of British austerity, Poverty Safari (2017), Darren McGarvey emphasizes this rarely discussed deficit in how class experience is reported and represented, leaving working-class individuals adversarial towards political parties, misrepresented by the media, and excluded from cultural debates, creating ‘a fertile bed of resentment from which anger and apathy have grown’ (95). When Cairo’s interview is broadcast on news cycles they place subtitles on the screen, ‘translated into his own language’, alluding to the media’s failure to understand or respond to the genuine fears of English voters (2017: 21). Cartwright appropriately deploys what O’Brien (2018) terms a ‘Dudley demotic’ to capture the regional dialect of his Black Country characters, juxtaposed by the received pronunciation of metropolitan Grace: linguistic markers of a dialectal divide which gesture to the complications in bridging the political and geographic disconnect facing a post-Brexit Britain, as well as an obstinate regional resistance to dominant structures.
In his study on the rise of populism in a divided Brexit Britain, The Road to Somewhere (2017), David Goodhart separates the nation into two main groups: Anywheres and Somewheres. Anywheres are effectively young, wealthy and rootless ‘global villagers’ or insouciant members of the political class, holding little affection for their nationhood or heritage. Predominately based in British cities (particularly London), Anywheres adhere to their ‘achieved’ identity, often determined by their job, elevated status or university education. Somewheres, in comparison, are socially conservative, place-bound authoritarians who have an ‘ascribed’ identity determined by their local communal ties and family structures. Goodhart maps his suggested Somewhere-Anywhere distinction directly to the Brexit vote, indicating that the Somewhere/Leave and Anywhere/Remain camps possess opposing views on immigration, the economy, national identity and even corporal punishment. While Somewheres suffer from rapid changes to the global marketplace, Anywheres benefit from greater cosmopolitanization and support multinational structures such as the EU. For Goodhart, working-class white citizens are most affected by the effects of globalization, being dispossessed of any ‘encouraging narrative of advance’, often due to widespread processes of deindustrialization: ‘skilled industrial employment which once provided a kind of social and economic ballast to our society has been largely swept away’ (2017: 177; 209). Goodhart’s premise is slightly unrefined: he treats the categories white and working class as co-equal, neglecting the complex and often contradictory role played by ethnic minorities in relation to these categories. Nevertheless, his argument captures the media’s binary typecasting of various groups based on their age, geographic location or social class in the fallout of the Brexit vote. Moreover, Goodhart’s distinction maps quite neatly onto Cartwright’s novel, exposing the ways in which opinions on Brexit are acutely divided between metropolitan London and provincial West Midlands towns, between university graduates and non-graduates, and between the cosmopolitan young and older, more conservative members of society.
Recounted in alternating chapters, ‘Before’ and ‘After’, the structure of The Cut pivots around the momentous Brexit vote. The novel’s title not only alludes to the post-Brexit divide but echoes the sentiments of Zadie Smith, A. L. Kennedy and Jonathan Coe in blaming Tory austerity for both the abandonment of the industrial order (the open ‘cuts’ of the canals signifying that ‘this place used to be somewhere’) and the subsequent neglect of the working-class in the north and the Midlands (Cartwright 2017: 44). But rather than play to established stereotypes, wallowing in an empty nostalgia or longing for the restoration of Britain’s industrial past, the novel challenges expectations surrounding class-based politics and place-bound identities by the British media in the wake of the Brexit vote. Cartwright’s focused engagement with the Brexit vote gestures towards the need for regional devolution and a revision of the political process in order to address geographic inequalities and the democratic deficit within Britain. After spending time with Cairo and his community, Grace begins to question her own preconceived perceptions of the Black Country, recognizing how the referendum exacerbated pre-existing regional divides: ‘She felt like there was some kind of invisible veil between her and these people. These people [. . .] prejudice on the scale of a whole country’ (2017: 19 – emphasis in original). By forcing his characters to re-evaluate their sociocultural prejudices, Cartwright opens a space for dialogue and offers a modicum of hope for cultural recuperation and regeneration.
The Cut thus reinforces this study’s claim that the historic referendum on the fate of the nation was, in fact, a referendum on the state of the nation, reviving socioeconomic, cultural and political grievances that had lain dormant for decades. Despite Cairo and Grace’s burgeoning relationship during the novel, the reconciliation between the two opposing sides (Cartwright intimates that – while it is not explicitly stated – Grace supports Remain while Cairo votes Leave) is ultimately deferred by a rather melodramatic denouement (Personal Correspondence 2020). Cairo’s self-immolation in the final scene – following Grace’s revelation that she is pregnant with his child – is replete with political intent, reinforcing the psychogeographical ties between his community and their landscape: ‘[t]hey voted to re-light the fire. He will be the furnace and the flames’ (2017: 127). On the one hand, his desperate act is the result of a miscommunication, reinforcing the breakdown in dialogue between Dudley and a distant London; on the other hand, through Grace’s pregnancy, the seeds of communication are (potentially) sown. Nevertheless, Cairo’s suicide, a symbolic act of frustration and disenfranchisement, arguably forecloses the potential for democratic revision, encapsulating the burning anger and resentment of those who have been cut out of the national narrative. As Goodhart warns us, ‘if people feel the game is stacked against them, they often just refuse to play’ (2017: 153).
Glen James Brown’s multi-layered, intergenerational Ironopolis (2018) transposes these same social anxieties on to a dilapidated north-east landscape, mapping the dark history and gradual decline of the Burn council estate in post-industrial Middlesbrough following the recent closure of local iron and steel industries. Early returns on referendum night revealed the Leave campaigns enjoyed extremely high levels of support in areas of the north-east such as Hartlepool and Sunderland. Middlesbrough, once a solid Labour heartland, returned a strong 65.5 per cent Leave vote: the natural consequence of a region ravaged by Thatcherite social policy and subsequent failures to rectify structural unemployment. Brown’s fictional estate is haunted by an ageless Peg Powler, a grotesque witch-like figure of folklore who drowns her victims in the River Tees: a metaphor for the spectre of class struggle which continues to pervade the post-industrial landscape and the powerlessness of working-class communities to her siren call. Surrounded by tower blocks satirically named after past prime ministers whose systemic failures progressively weakened the region, Peg’s power begins to wane, testifying to her symbolic resonance as a fading emblem of working-class culture: ‘without a stable community to pass down her name, she is about to vanish forever’ (Brown, Personal Correspondence 2020).
Middlesbrough, once nicknamed Ironopolis in its industrial prime, has continued to suffer from international competition, with the British chemical company ICI recently dismembered and sold off to foreign competition in the years leading to the referendum. Brown’s novel therefore attests to the fact that pre-Brexit ‘disaffection was already there, prior to the crash, in many parts of the country – especially the former industrial Labour strongholds that never recovered from 1980s de-industrialisation’ (Goodhart 2017: 168). Commenting on Brexit and its relation to the novel, Brown hopes his compassionate portrait of a post-industrial community not only changes perceptions of working-class culture, but communicates the multiplicity of working-class experience. Alluding to the widespread unemployment, zero-hours contracts and brutal welfare cuts which have gutted Teesside since Thatcher’s time in office, Brown argues that the novel’s engagement with socioeconomic decline and the ‘bubbling grievances’ surrounding the referendum ‘are two sides of the same coin’ (Personal Correspondence 2020). By employing multiple, interlocking narratives, delivering myriad perspectives on the slow depredation of the region, Ironopolis demonstrates how working-class culture cannot be reduced to a single story.
In the immediate aftermath of the vote, much media attention concentrated on the northern working-class resentment, an apparent nativist response to immigration, and a general rejection of the post-war liberal consensus, as the major drivers for a strong Leave vote. Yet this narrative was swiftly challenged and widespread evidence shows it was not the left behind or a disaffected working class alone who delivered victory to the Leave campaign. Drawing on data concerning deprivation levels by parliamentary constituency in England, Dorling and Tomlinson (2017) report that the greatest support for Leave came from middle-class voters in leafy Tory shires; within Middle England, roughly 80 per cent of constituencies returned a Leave majority, indicating it was the squeezed middle which secured Britain’s exit from the European arena. Evans and Menon concur, pointing to the privileged bleating of the ‘highly educated middle classes’ in particular in providing ‘the major source – some 59% in total – of the Brexit vote’ (2017: 84).14 The very notion of a ‘middle England’ is defined by its embodiment of an essentialized Englishness, operating in opposition to recent demographic changes, political correctness, multiculturalism and obstructionist EU bureaucracy. The institutional architects of Brexit were not from working-class backgrounds, but those located closest to the spheres of socioeconomic power, such as Nigel Farage, whose class posturing garnered the support of a heterogeneous People’s Army, fuelled by disparate grievances but united under the same banner.
As an immediate reaction to the post-Brexit moment, British authors have revived the state-of-the-nation novel, examining the motivations for the Leave vote, as well as the extent to which modes of remembrance and a deferential treatment of the national past transfigured the discourses and issues surrounding the referendum.15 Jonathan Coe’s Middle England (2018) is the most direct attempt to capture the zeitgeist of our turbulent times and the psychopathology that drives Brexit, deconstructing a febrile national landscape in which the political conscription of the past becomes amplified. Coe’s novel revives characters first seen in The Rotters’ Club (2001) and The Closed Circle (2004) and re-establishes the sense of a roman fleuve in his body of work. Documenting sociopolitical developments in British society between 2010 and 2018, the social satire offers a wide-ranging diagnosis of the rancorous condition of pre- and post-Brexit England, referencing a plethora of baffling yet much-cited tangential reasons for the evident decline in Britain’s tempestuous relationship with the Continent and explanations for the subsequent volatile Leave vote, including the interference of Vladimir Putin, the MP’s expenses scandal, the London riots, the first-past-the-post parliamentary system, the ban on fox hunting, an ongoing austerity programme, politicians trotting out the old adage that ‘we can never have a serious debate about immigration in this country’ and ‘the contentious result of the Eurovision song contest in 1968’ (2018: 5; 416). Coe’s Middle England landscape emerges as a site of quiet disaffection with national discontent often intimately tied to unforgotten local grievances surrounding immigration. By positioning the vote as a suburban revolt directed at cosmopolitan London, the novel suggests Brexit offers a form of salvation for those citizens desiring a return to the sacred past and a retreat from the rapid changes of contemporary Britain. Indeed, in an article for New Statesman, Coe jokes that the subtitle for Middle England could have been ‘Britain: where did it all go wrong?’ as his novel maps the ‘trigger points’ which enabled the radicalization of England-without-London (Coe 2019).
The novel directs its attention on Benjamin Trotter, a major player in Coe’s early novels, who sells up in London and retreats to a converted mill house near Shrewsbury – an area populated by National Trust houses and English Heritage sites – in order to complete a novel narrativizing unrest in European history following Britain’s accession to the Common Market. Benjamin’s house is situated by the River Severn, which assumes an almost anticipatory psychogeographical power. The river’s murmur turns progressively more turbulent as political tensions begin to rise during the referendum campaign: ‘supposing the river were to abandon its quiescent and reasonable habits [. . .] What form might that anger take?’ (2018: 22). Coe’s decision to utilize the Severn for this purpose becomes more telling when considering the river’s meandering route across the Anglo-Welsh border – the two nations which returned a defiant Leave vote – charting the directions in which anger can be channelled and spill over. Having retreated from the fast pace of London, Benjamin encounters a Middle England landscape determinedly attempting to hold on to outdated national symbols and ways of life.
Woodlands Garden Centre near Benjamin’s house becomes a sanctuary for those seeking a quintessential Englishness, encapsulating the cultural conservatism at the heart of Middle England and exposing the fear that external cultural influences are diluting the nation’s sacred, if intangible, essence (an English version of la France profonde). Serving traditional English fare, and trading in nostalgic items such as jigsaw puzzles of Spitfires, British war films and local history books, the centre is frequented by troubled conspiracy theorists who claim the EU is part of pan-European plot to eradicate the white race. By naming the middle section of the novel ‘Deep England’, Coe subscribes to Wright’s contention that the national past is defined ‘not just in relation to the general disappointment of earlier historical expectation [. . .] but the leading tensions of the contemporary political situation’ (1985: 2). Safe spaces such as the centre, with what Wright would term their ‘past-present alignment’, do not exist to stabilize an accurate representation of the national past; instead, they ‘mobilise a legitimising but abstract sense of “pastness” around present social and political events or issues’ (1985: 147). In the process, they refuse the encroachment of cultural change and sustain a monocultural representation of the national body. What emerges is a deformed invocation of a nation’s cultural history which ceases to cohere with the disorienting realities of twenty-first-century British society – replacing contemporary uncertainties with comforting simplicities where ‘the grey torpor of everyday life in contemporary Britain lifts and the simpler, more radiant measures of Albion declare themselves again’ – validating Wright’s claim that ‘a simplifying nostalgia can replace any principled democratic consideration’ (1985: 76; 244).
Yet Coe structures his novel by charting the lives of three generations of the Trotter family and a Dickensian cast of friends and relations around the Midlands, evincing the most crucial Brexit divides relating to age, geography and educational attainment. Benjamin’s ageing father Colin ensures his last act is to vote Leave in defiance of an increasingly liberal society; he considers the decline of the British Leyland car plant at Longbridge a chilling reminder of the decline of post-war working-class communities in the Midlands. For Charlie, working as a children’s entertainer at Woodlands garden centre, Britain’s fate was sealed following Thatcher’s rise to power in 1979, which established insurmountable fault lines within communities and unravelled any prospect of a consensual, cohesive society emerging from the ruins of deindustrialization. Doug Anderton, another of Benjamin’s old school friends and now an accomplished left-leaning political journalist, recognizes his impotent position as a metropolitan spectator. Cut off from ‘the common man’ in his multi-million-pound Chelsea pad and restricted by his narrow London-centric perspective on British society, Doug’s naïve think-pieces on the London riots fail to gain traction and he laments the ways in which Leave voters have been manipulated by post-truth politics and anti-immigration scare tactics: ‘There can’t be more than about twelve people in the country who understand how the EU works [. . .] This campaign is going to be won on slogans and soundbites, and instincts and emotions’ (2018: 269).
Immigration again emerges as the ‘subject that divided people more than any other’, with Coe charting its galvanizing, substantial effects on the final stretch of the referendum campaign, giving voice to the pre-existing unspoken resentment characterized by ‘those most English of all qualities, shame and embarrassment’ (2018: 90). Benjamin’s niece Sophie, an art history lecturer and staunch Remainer, laments the racism and prejudice espoused by older voters, yet is suspended from the university after a false accusation of transphobia is levelled at her by Doug’s daughter Coriander, a spoilt and arrogant student union representative. Sophie’s partner Ian, on the other hand, lets his bitterness at being passed over for promotion in favour of a junior Asian female colleague lead to the breakdown of his marriage and he throws his weight behind the Leave campaign. Helena, Ian’s mother, reinforces his sense of disillusionment and impotent rage, quoting Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech in response to the subsequent influx of Eastern European workers into her quiet Middle England suburbs following the 2004 EU enlargement. Even Sophie’s liberal-minded university friend Sohan concedes that London no longer feels like a British city, citing foreign affluence as a casual factor in the sense of decline pervading society. Coe also parodies various players and groups implicated in the Brexit debate, including Ronald Culpepper, a withering caricature of Jacob Rees-Mogg. Coe’s overt critique of Culpepper’s pro-Brexit Imperium Foundation takes a swipe at the practices of the European Research Group, detailing how Brexit was not sustained by the will of the people, but stoked by ‘a disparate, amorphous coalition of vested interests’, harnessing and sustaining the vitriolic energy and hysteria gripping the nation (2018: 357).
During the course of the novel, the EU becomes the most viable threat to national heritage itself (and, more specifically, the English autostereotype), predicated on ‘ceremonies of remembrance and recollection’ (Wright 1985: 85). Coe’s lengthy deconstruction of the London 2012 Olympics Games opening ceremony in the Deep England section, however, merely highlights the extent to which the backward-looking tendencies of English nationalism were pre-existing conditions bolstered by a resistance to the heterogeneity of the present (serving as anathema to the right). In his welcoming remarks, Boris Johnson, then Mayor of London, boldly proclaimed, ‘London enjoys a diversity unrivalled anywhere in the world. This diversity [. . .] is now t horoughly twined into London’s DNA, both cause and effect of its phenomenal success and much-envied reputation’ (London Media Guide 2012: 7). As Michael Silk notes, the Games, designed for global consumption, functioned as ‘a highly affective, and extremely public, political, pedagogic, corporate and powerful media spectacle though which to define the parameters of the “sanctioned” nation’, and demonstrated how histories of ‘corporeal recollection and embodiment become ingrained with the discourses of nation, subjectivity, fear, regulation and consumption’ (2014: 69; 78). The ubiquitous coverage of athletes, draped in the treasured Union flag, marked an attempt to safeguard Britain’s structural integrity and thus mask the frailties of the trembling union. London’s ceremony, directed by Danny Boyle, juxtaposed rural, nostalgic visions of a fabled monoethnic Albion with contemporary visions of a multicultural, globalized Britain. Symbolizing an effort to incorporate progressive visions of the multicultural present into the treasured national fantasy of Britain’s hegemonic past, the Games were designed to confront: ‘where have we come from [. . .] what are we now and where are we going’ (Boyle 2012). Utilizing communal memories alongside mythical and discursive histories, Boyle’s ceremony not only constructed a microcosm of the national heritage (in the vein of Nora’s lieux de memoire) but narrated and negotiated complex and differing conceptions of Britishness, providing an inclusive spectacle which challenged essentialist forms of cultural identification and redefined who belongs in the national imaginary.
The broadcast of the opening ceremony in the novel provides the last moment of perceived national unity before the descent into the referendum, yet even this patriotic celebration of Britishness reveals the early warning signs of intergenerational factions emerging within Middle England. The opening chronological prologue, reminiscent of the 1951 Festival of Britain, depicted a bucolic, prelapsarian Britain, the widespread industrialization of the nineteenth century and a remembrance of the First World War: visual sources of identification for a beleaguered populace unsure of their position in the world. The self-referencing national indulgence of the ceremony also revealed a sense of cultural superiority, opening the national sensory pathways to more traditional times. Scenes of idyllic British village life, a Blakean ‘Green and Pleasant Land’, featured icons of cultural conservatism which could have been taken directly from England, England’s 50 Quintessences of Englishness. Conceding that the utopian rural scenes in this tableau were influenced by Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908), a ‘countryside we all believed existed once’, Boyle acknowledges how British nostalgia is dependent on a quasi-mythical popular imaginary as opposed to lived experience (London 2012 Media Guide).16
This ‘Green and Pleasant Land’ section of the ceremony with its adherence to the English sublime, drawing on images of Morris dancers and cricket to enforce a decidedly monocultural depiction of an archaic Albion, is immediately juxtaposed with the following ‘Frankie and June’ section, which follows a young mixed-race couple in contemporary Britain and seemingly celebrates tolerance towards diversity alongside a reinscription of British identity based on civic multiculturalism. While Sohan and Sophie revel in Boyle’s use of intertextual references to deconstruct youthful versions of Britishness, these later scenes within the ceremony sparks a strong defensive reaction from Coe’s older characters, who believe multi-ethnic citizens should be forced to adopt core British essentialist values and resent the destabilization of England’s mythical foundations. For Colin and Helena the inclusion of contemporary events such as the HMS Windrush (not just an historical moment but an ongoing ethnopolitical crisis affecting the nation) into the sacred national imaginary or celebration of athletes such as Mohamed Farah ruptures the belief in an ‘essentially incommunicable deep nation’ and is lambasted as the intrusion of left-wing bias and political correctness into the BBC (2018: 85). Coe is tapping into Wright’s contention that the ‘nation’ is not perceived as a ‘heterogeneous society’ which moves forward into the future, but ‘an already achieved and timeless historical entity which demands only appropriate reverence and protection in the present’ (qtd. in Hewison 1987: 141). The ceremony thus operates as a performative theatrical space for antagonistic, opposing versions of Englishness which would divide the nation only a few years later: a globalized Great Britain versus an endangered Little England.
This oscillation between nostalgic visions of quintessential Englishness and a progressive re-evaluation of contemporary England aligns with Littler and Naidoo’s notion of a ‘white past, multicultural present’: a formation which occurs ‘simultaneously as a lament and a celebration – a celebration of our nation being modern, young, hip and in tune with the globalised economy as well as harbouring a nostalgia and lament for a bygone contained, safe and monocultural world’ (2004: 338). The conjuring of these idyllic, pastoral English scenes in the opening segment of the ceremony – an attempt to stitch these quintessential templates of nationhood once again to the popular cultural imaginary – leads Sohan to divert his literary research in order to examine this elusive concept of ‘Deep England’: ‘a psychogeographical phenomenon’ as much ‘to do with village greens, the thatched roof of the local pub, the red telephone box’ as questions of cultural identity or citizenship (2018: 202). This retention and reconstruction of a stable and monocultural national narrative, which continues to linger in twenty-first-century Britain, allows Colin and Helena to defend their sacred sources of communal memory and resist more recent forms of multicultural heritage. Coe’s deconstruction of the Olympic Games thus recalls the pervasive presence of ‘post-imperial melancholia’ which continues to underscore contemporary debates surrounding national identity (Gilroy 2004: 109). Middle England’s lengthy concentration on the Games is not surprising; a re-examination of the ceremony provides fertile ground for discussions which would come to define the EU referendum. As Alan Tomlinson and Christopher Young state, a global sports spectacle ‘foregrounds the sculptured and commodified body and orchestrates a physical display of the body politic’ (2006: 3). The glossing over of regional differences, particular ly between constituent nations, signalled an attempt to narrate the nation: the affirmation of a false coherence which elided the socioeconomic and cultural contestations affecting a disunited kingdom. When it came to Brexit, the ceremony’s vision of a monocultural, pastoral Little England won out over the vibrant multiculturalism of a modern Great Britain.
With post-Brexit hindsight, Sophie becomes nostalgic for ‘that week in the summer of 2012 and the missed opportunity’ that it represented, as the optimistic vision of a cosmopolitan Britain rendered in the ceremony is unable to maintain its energy following the Games (2018: 411). The various reactions of Coe’s characters to the Olympic opening ceremony anticipate emergent fissures in the imagined national community between generations and signal an underlying resistance to a more inclusive Britishness accepting of multiple forms of identification. Yet we should also heed Scruton’s warning that ‘when people discard, ignore or mock the ideals which formed their national character – then they no longer exist as a people, but only as a crowd’ (2000: 67). It is Coe’s rendering of the referendum and its aftermath which consolidates these deep divisions in British society. After all, Brexit negotiations became ‘one long closing ceremony for games that refuse to end’ (O’Toole 2020: 356). The final section of the novel, the appropriately titled ‘Old England’, documents the post-Brexit condition of the nation in which a polarized atmosphere of backward-looking impulses continues to divide England long after the vote. Whereas for older characters such as Colin the vote symbolized an attempt to return to an earlier historical period before globalization and multiculturalism irrevocably altered the country they remember – an aggressive mourning for an accomplished national past in the face of the inferior present – members of the younger generation such as Sophie feel an integral part of their ‘modern, layered, multiple identity’ has been stolen (2018: 326). Sitting on a bench by the pier in Hartlepool, a strong Leave-voting constituency, Sophie acknowledges her ‘anywhere’ cosmopolitan identity and sense of estrangement from large swathes of her fellow countrymen: ‘She considered herself a Londoner, now, and from London she could not only travel by train to Paris or Brussels more quickly than she could come here, but she would probably feel far more at home on the Boulevard Saint-Michel or Grand-Place’ (2018: 369). After resorting to ‘Post-Brexit counselling’ with her estranged ex-husband Ian, recognizing their contradictory opinions on the vote ‘weren’t about Europe at all [. . .] something much more fundamental and personal was going on’, Sophie begins to understand her unconscious complicity in perpetuating social divides while Ian recognizes his internalization of Helena’s racial stance (2018: 325; 327). Coe’s novel therefore attests to the strain Brexit placed on familial relations and social circles, creating poisonous rifts that have yet to fully heal.17
On the one hand, Ian and Sophie’s eventual reconciliation and creation of their ‘beautiful Brexit baby’ intimates a ‘tentative gesture of faith’ by Coe that British society may overcome the painful fault lines disfiguring the face of the nation; on the other, Benjamin’s eventual decision to sell his property in England and relocate to France to open a creative writing school can be interpreted as a form of defeat (2018: 421). Brexit, after all, was not a swift and clean delivery, but a painful childbirth which traumatized the body politic. The closing scene of the novel, in which Benjamin shares an evening meal with Lithuanian, French and Italian friends, may appear an overwrought example of ‘European harmonization’, but it also represents a retreat from a Britain that has failed to reconcile its divided self (2018: 415). Further, while Benjamin acknowledges the democratic deficit in European political institutions in a think-piece on the referendum for a newspaper, he neglects to mention how such perceived deficits serve as a convenient proxy for pre-existing democratic structural imbalances within Britain. His stream of consciousness rant on the state-of-the-nation – debating ‘whether writers should attempt to be engagés’ or retreat from reality as ‘a means of responding to it, creating an alternative reality, something solid, something consoling’ – is a direct commentary on the role of the writer in the age of Brexit and it is tempting to view Benjamin as Coe’s fictional mouthpiece (2018: 337). Given that the novel was partly written during Coe’s residency in Marseille, funded by a French literary organization, Benjamin’s comments further allude to the need for writers to recognize their own political leanings and established assumptions when commenting on our moment of political rupture. Middle England thus serves as ‘a story of loss, of loss of privilege’, capturing the simmering resentment and ‘quiet rage of a middle class which had grown used to comfort and prosperity and now saw those things slipping out of their reach’ (2018: 19–20).
With this in mind, Brexit becomes a rather apt portmanteau, capturing the English electorate’s nostalgic longing for a return to the wartime spirit and their desire to exit a contemporary landscape marred by deindustrialization, structural inequality and widespread multiculturalism. Marina Lewycka’s The Good, the Bad and the Little Bit Stupid (2019) continues this concentration on the irreconcilable differences and toxic familial relationships arising from Brexit fatigue. Sid recognizes that the referendum has exposed a fissure, similarly evident in his parent’s marriage, which no amount of politicking can ever truly heal. Sid’s partner, Jacquie, hopes their ‘Referendum Baby’ will be a British citizen, but her sense of purpose to the NHS overrides any desire to leave ‘this grey foreigner-fearing island’ (Lewycka 2020: 82; 261). Lewycka notes that the novel marks an attempt to avoid the deadening political process and instead understand the reasoning behind the vote; literature, after all, ‘lets you walk in the shoes of the Other’ (Personal Correspondence 2020).
A poll conducted by the Creative Industries Federation in 2016 found 96 per cent of its members supported remaining within the EU (Creative Industries Federation 2016). It is unsurprising the British literary community in particular are so staunchly pro-Remain; organizations under Arts Council England have been the recipients of major funding from the EU for decades. In an article on Brexit and the decline of the English novel, David Martin Jones lambasts the Brexlit trend for its ‘contempt for the working classes’ on the one hand and ‘unqualified respect for Labour politicians, liberal journalists, the progressive European establishment or Remainer civil servants’ on the other hand, attacking the emergent genre for la cking real insight (Jones 2020). Commenting on the work of numerous authors covered in this chapter, including Coe, Ali Smith, Sam Byers, Olivia Laing and Douglas Board, Jones concludes:
No Brexlit character pauses to consider that the conduct of the European Commission might explain Brexit’s popular appeal. Instead, Brexlit saves its self-righteous indignation for the old, the white and the working class who spoilt their cosmopolitan dream. In Brexitland all Europeans and migrants receive bouquets, the brickbats are reserved for the dull, racist, nostalgia-obsessed, provincial Brits. (Jones 2020)
Jones also levels an attack on academic responses to Brexit (singling out Robert Eaglestone’s Brexit and Literature collection), claiming the Brexlit genre merely ‘reinforces the smug, self-referential worldview found in English literature departments, literary reviews and progressive publishing houses’, ensuring the ‘viewpoint of a cosmopolitan Remainer elite is thus Brexlit’s default mode’ (Jones 2020).18 Alice O’Keeffe adopts a related line of questioning, pointing to the difficulties faced by the ‘lefty metropolitan types [. . .] the arbiters of culture’ within the publishing industry in responding to pro-Brexit voters: ‘How can an industry so fervently remainer in spirit engage with the arguments in favour of leave?’ (O’Keeffe 2019).
Brocken spectres of the past
[C]atastrophe itself is its own anchor, a ruination self-willed is just a holed boat when everything is sinking anyway.
Author Adam Thorpe, a staunchly pro-European voice in the literary field, has been extremely vocal during the post-Brexit transition period, critiquing several motivating factors for the Leave vote, from the British government’s removal of support for heavy industry and material production in favour of the London-based service sector, to the media-driven xenophobia saturating the minds of the British electorate. For Thorpe, the referendum result was frustrating in that its consequences will impact those most in need of EU funding:
If I imagine myself as a rural conservative, or as a Welsh villager, or as a factory worker in a northern city left stranded by industrial decline, then logically I would see the EU as being a subsidy-providing benefactor with an ambient noise of social democratic goodwill, protecting my basic rights as a citizen to a minimum wage [. . .] But no, these very same people voted to leave the EU. They voted against their own interests. (Thorpe 2016)
Thorpe’s 2017 novel Missing Fay documents the distressing home life and eventual disappearance of a schoolgirl on a Lincoln council estate. The narrative ties her disappearance to several interconnected, ideologically opposed characters whose lives are (directly or indirectly) impacted by the event: Daily Mail-reading Sheena, the coquettish manager of a children’s boutique, considers ‘Missing Lincs’ to be ‘at least two decades behind the rest’ of Britain; David, an environmentalist, becomes obsessed with Fay’s disappearance during a frustrating family holiday; Mike, a snobbish bookshop owner, blames the EU for destroying the ‘sleepy, grassy little places’ of England yet dismisses local working-class council estates as undesirable no-go zones; Cosmina, a Romanian working in a Lincolnshire care home following her home nation’s accession to the EU; and Howard, a retired steel worker who lambasts the ‘European mollycoddling’ of EU healthy and safety regulation and laments the ‘[f]loods of immigrants’ into Lincolnshire, ensuring what he perceives as the ‘demise of the indigenous. Bye bye, England’ (Thorpe 2017: 53; 56; 163). While Missing Fay avoids painting simple caricatures or stereotyping communities, the novel communicates a glaring pro-European message and an authorial opposition to a prevailing Little Englander mentality is evident.
In the autobiographical Notes from the Cévennes (2018), Thorpe writes at length on his pastoralist way of life (protected by EU funding and the Rural Development Programme) in southern France, his home for over twenty-five years since emigrating.19 Forging explicit parallels between the two countries, he cites economic precarity and racial tensions as key factors in the development of ‘a feeding ground for the extreme right’ and expresses the fear that, without a stable EU, Europe will return to the habits of the past (2018: 208). For Thorpe, our British Isles are simply ‘splinters off a massive core to which we also belong’ and he has spoken passionately on the struggle to inhabit ‘these Brexited minds’ for whom the EU is ‘primarily a foreign force’: ‘To put myself in their shoes, I have to allow an algal growth of emotional anger and blatant prejudice, mixed with wilful blindness, to cover the clear waters of thought’ (Thorpe 2016). The setting of Lincolnshire is, therefore, rather appropriate: not only did the region return exceptionally high Leave votes, but, like the Cévennes, contains ‘the essence of the neglected provinces [. . .] hollowed out by factory closures and agricultural change [. . .] prowled by the far right’ (Thorpe 2018b).20 Fay embodies both the frustrated spirit of a Lincolnshire people, overlooked and ultimately abandoned by a Westminster bubble, and an emblem of the unrepresented white working-class more broadly, relegated to the margins of British politics for decades. Despite its tangible response to Brexit, the novel takes place in 2012 at a point when any exit from the EU was wrongly perceived as a dubious fantasy. By exposing these pre-existing class divisions in Lincolnshire, Missing Fay suggests regional squabbles were as much of a motivating factor in the EU referendum as Euroscepticism or xenophobia, complicating the argument that Brexit was a singular animating force in the creation of a broken Britain. Although Thorpe admits any pro-European hopes have ‘long drained away in the seemingly endless, smooth curve of decline’, it is quite possible that such a decline contains the seeds of a vigorous, unanticipated renewal; cultural and political responses must offer ‘a fresh language to combat despair, to defeat the cynical, to wash us free of that deadliest of acids’ (Personal Correspondence 2020).
Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13 (2017) unintentionally echoes the plot of Missing Fay (published earlier the same year) and assumes a similar narratorial approach. The novel chronicles the disappearance of a thirteen-year-old girl, Rebecca Shaw, on New Year’s Eve in an unnamed Derbyshire village and its subsequent longitudinal effects on the local community. Whereas Thorpe establishes a distancing strategy in directing narrative attention away from Fay or her potential demise, traces of Rebecca remain in the community’s social memory and her absence continues to inform the unfolding present. The rural landscape itself becomes a spectral site as recurrent sightings of Rebecca continue years after her disappearance. Given McGregor’s oft-repeated ‘allergic [reaction] to trying to make points in fiction’, avoiding ‘great state-of-the-nation’ pronouncements, it seems erroneous to classify Reservoir 13 as Brexlit; and yet, the referendum and the social issues relating to that historic vote haunt the margins of the narrative – ghostly reminders of the turbulent world outside of this carefully nurtured rural locale (McGregor 2017b). McGregor admits that the prevailing political atmosphere began to seep into his writing process, debating whether his characters would be Remainers or Leavers: ‘I started looking at them while I was editing [. . .] and realised that yes, I probably could tell’ (McGregor 2017b). Further, although the bleak fate of Syrian refugees attempting to reach British shores is relegated to background media noise and fails to take precedence over the minutiae of everyday life, the interruptive power of the outside world is evident in the lingering economic crisis affecting the farming community; the secluded valley is subject to the same precarious market logistics as the rest of the country. The agricultural rural rhythms of the village are not only broken by Rebecca’s disappearance, but by an insidious form of austerity-driven, imperceptible violence gradually eating away at the fabric of the community. In this sense, valid political and ethical parallels can be drawn between a troubled nation’s attempt to introduce an inward-looking protectionism, and a vulnerable local community which is ‘not, despite appearances, closed in on itself, sovereign and autonomous, but dependent on the wider world’ (Ganteau 2018). Both Thorpe and McGregor’s novels seem incapacitated from providing a sense of closure – communities trapped in a state of suspension until the root causes of their loss becomes clear.
Melissa Harrison’s All Among the Barley (2018), the winner of the European Union Prize for Literature in 2019, offers a situated perspective on what she terms ‘the dangerous allure of nativism, nostalgia and xenophobia’ in ‘politically unstable times’ (Harrison 2019). The novel’s hauntingly atmospheric and deeply evocative portrait of 1930’s rural life in East Anglia – a love letter to a time gone by – is offset by the impending threat of fascism. Harrison’s narrator Edith Mather, a quiet and awkward adolescent living on Wych Farm, ‘a world of ancient and immovable rhythms and beliefs’, casts an eye back on the village of Elmbourne in the summer of 1933: a community still reeling from the economic and personal impact of the First World War (Harrison 2018: 96). All Among the Barley reinforces how cultural responses to Brexit so often engage with the legacy of the world wars; in the post-millennial national imaginary the wartime period remains the most significant point at which a united England resisted the external threat of Continental dominance. The spectral sound of the ‘gone away’ haunts the footsteps and livelihoods of the farm’s inhabitants and a yearning to retreat ‘back in time to the olden days [. . .] to be granted a temporary reprieve from all the anxieties of the modern age, the sense of things speeding up and going wrong’, speaks equally to our globalized present (2018: 2; 61). It is therefore tempting to read Wych farm, ‘entire unto itself’, as an explicit metaphor for a bounded and backward-looking English nation in the age of Brexit (2018: 225). Harrison, however, refrains from espousing the traditional discourses espoused by Little Englanders, choosing not to position Wych Farm as an idyllic site of English fortitude and cultural heritage; instead, the introduction of mechanization in farming offers a welcome respite to a community depleted by wartime loss and highlights the necessity for even rural communities to reject cultural stasis and embrace national developments.
The parochial tenor of the farm is ruptured by the appearance of Constance FitzAllen, a young woman from London hoping to document and thereby preserve fading rural practices. Despite her metropolitan upbringing, Constance echoes Stanley Baldwin in bemoaning the erosion of ‘the old ways’ in the countryside and the estrangement of the English from their ‘birth-right’, preaching of the necessity to preserve ‘our ancient way of life [. . .] England is the country, and the country is England’ (2018: 91). In a series of related articles for a London journal, Sketches from English Rural Life, Constance valorizes the farming community as a potent repository of self-sufficiency and source of national pride, supplementing her aim of constructing a ‘perfect English Arcadia’ (2018: 243). Positing a preference for archaic traditions rather than a reliance on intellectual elites in the cities, she echoes the rhetoric of Brexiteers aiming to move away from international systems of regulation and control. Crucially, rather than bowing to Constance’s assumptions and rendering a halcyon vision of a self-sufficient, contained English community governed by the rituals of rural life, the novel documents the economic precarity faced by farmers in inter-war Britain and intimates the distant yet influential role played by international politics in shaping regional dialogues. Following Constance’s arrival, Edith begins to note the encroachment of European politics into family discussions and how it serves as a proxy for various pre-existing ills affecting the health of her farm community. Her father and brothers debate the intrusion of Westminster politicking into the lives of rural citizens, what they term ‘Farming from Whitehall’, instead advancing a narrative of national self-sufficiency; Harrison thereby establishes clear parallels between the need for ‘prop er import controls to protect our native English farmers’ from international financiers and the current protection of farmers from EU law (2018: 44; 113).
But Constance’s alien presence on the farm administers a stark and timely warning as to how easily fascism can emerge from the familiar stirrings of national protectionism and cultural conservatism. Her claim that she is not simply propagandizing backward-looking elegies for a mythical Englishness, and instead aims to remake the country in a new image, again mirrors the rhetoric of Brexiteers whose plans for a future-oriented Global Britain was predicated on isolationist economic policies and nostalgic reveries of imperial grandeur. During a public meeting in the village, she advocates the actions of the Order of British Yeomanry, a group of ‘honourable patriots’ protecting ‘the health and purity of our English soil’ by preventing international financiers or European markets from encroaching into national systems (2018: 299). In a historical note to the novel, Harrison explicates how the Order of British Yeomanry may operate as a fictional society within the novel, but similar unnamed groups and movements existed in socioeconomically deprived areas of 1930s Britain. Capitalizing on a widespread sense of disenfranchisement and cultural paralysis, such disparate groups ‘drew from a murky broth of [. . .] nativism, protectionism, anti-immigration sentiment, economic autarky, secessionism, militarism, [and] anti-Europeanism’, attracting members from all sides of the political spectrum (2018: 329).
Constance also begins to operate as a mouthpiece for the British Union of Fascists, who championed a prelapsarian return to an agrarian utopia free of the corrupting cultural influence of immigration, and her arrival marks an insidious rise in xenophobia within the sleepy English village. When an indigent Jewish family settle at the abandoned neighbouring property of Hullets they are immediately subject to suspicion and vilification, becoming the scapegoats for socioeconomic anxieties. As Harrison comments, ‘When people feel they have no voice and no agency at all, they will find a way to take some’, intimating how virulent strains of English nationalism are manipulated and sustained by disaffected factions within society (qtd. in Ferguson 2019). Constance’s unsubstantiated claim that hordes of outsiders are now arriving in the countryside responds directly to right-wing media rhetoric in the build-up to the referendum and exposes the exclusionary forces at work surrounding issues of English heritage. By denying the Jewish family a voice in the novel, Harrison cements their role as spectral figures, existing in a liminal space on both the margins of both the farm and the narrative: a symbolic bordering of the cultural other that speaks, albeit indirectly, to the Calais refugee crisis. In casting the undesirable Jewish family from the village, Harrison reveals how human rights are often suspended for outsiders, who serve as a floating signifier which encapsulates the potential threat of external cultural influence more generally: ‘they’re not from here, and if we’re not careful they’ll mar the character of England forever’ (Ferguson 2019: 199 – emphasis in original). For farmers faced with the threat of bankruptcy and poor returns in the inter-war years, such rhetoric sowed the seed of nativism and national protectionism. The novel’s swift and brutal denouement, detailing the outbreak of a devastating fire on Wych Farm and Edith’s incarceration in later life for mental health problems, points to the vulnerabilities of victims caught up in struggles over national ideologies, and the futility of preserving outdated practices or pursuing isolationist policies. Looking back on the period from within 1980s Thatcherite Britain, Edith continues to dream of the ‘lost Eden’ of her childhood, yet recognizes the danger in Constance’s backward-looking fantasies: ‘you can never go back, and to make an idol of the past only disfigures the present’ (Ferguson 2019: 324). Harrison’s microcosmic examination of the rhythms and rituals of English rural life ensures Edith’s personal and localized tragedy supplies a broader commentary on the historical roots of post-Brexit Britain’s ongoing national trauma, substantiating the epigraph’s assertion that the past continues to inform and shape our contemporary moment.
Sarah Moss’ Ghost Wall supplies a related commentary on the historical impulses of political events such as Brexit, untangling the traumatic roots of the national past to decipher the turbulent present. Set in the 1990s, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the novel evokes a world recovering from the removal of borders, and the immediate desire to raise new ones in their place. The novel follows Silvie, a seventeen-year-old from Burnley, forced by her abusive father Bill to join an experiential university archaeology course researching the prevalence of Iron Age ritual sacrifice in rural Northumberland. Moss’ intense concentration on, and deconstruction of, outdated historical practices and belief systems, preserved in the British mindset like Bronze Age relics in the bog and peat, delivers an indirect rebuke of the danger in celebrating an idealized past or resurrecting old rites to face contemporary concerns. Unlike Professor Slade leading the course, with his detailed academic knowledge of the Iron Age, Bill relies on an instinctual perception of the era, twisted by his own psychological distrust of immigrants, a staunch belief in the purity of hereditary nationality, and a distaste for feminist ideology. For Moss, who grew up in northern areas which returned strong Leave votes, the desire to satirize these widespread ‘national myths of origin and racial purity’ is necessary given the rise of increasingly nationalistic political discourses in the wake of the referendum (Moss 2019). Nursing a predilection for ‘dead things’, Bill prizes himself on the stubborn use of offensive racial terms and drags his daughter to the memorial sites of abandoned imperial English landmarks in order to mark their decay: ‘Look at this [. . .] Used to send ships all over the world from here. Look at it now’ (Moss 2018a: 25; 44). As a result of her father’s misplaced fetishization of an idyllic and isolationist British past, Silvie is denied ownership of a passport and confused by the other students’ talk of inter-railing across Europe.
It is revealed that Bill named his daughter after Sulevia, an ancient British goddess, as he wanted her to have ‘a proper native British name’, neglecting the fact that Sulevia is itself corrupted from the Latin (2018a: 19). In an argument with Professor Slade, Bill obsesses over inter-tribal battles which ensured darker skinned peoples were prevented from inhabiting Britain for millennia, in his mind drawing clear parallels between Bronze Age struggles and the threat of contemporary immigration. He even bristles at the suggestion that Hadrian’s wall was more of a physical symbol to mark the edge of Europe than a national defensive barrier built by foreign slaves (before current nation state formations were even developed) and rejects any attempt to vilify or deconstruct Britain’s fabled borders, failing to acknowledge that the Ancient Britons themselves were Celts originating from Ireland and France:
Foreigners coming over here, telling us what to think. He wanted his own ancestry, wanted a lineage, a claim on something. Not people from Ireland or Rome [. . .] but some tribe sprung from English soil likes mushrooms in the night. (2018a: 45)
His veneration of ancient Britain as an island nation not only contradicts England’s blurred, fragile margins and the brute geographic reality of Doggerland, which once formed a Neolithic European bridge from Denmark to Northumbria, but misguidedly attempts to lock Englishness in stasis.
Moss has been vocal in her acknowledgement of how the novel resonates with contemporary meaning and channels a damning indictment of isolationist practices and bordered discourses deployed by Western governments. The notion of tracing or locating an ‘original British identity’ in order to escape foreign influence is a wasted endeavour, exposing the evident critique underlying the novel: ‘When, I wonder, was that? Before the Windrush? Before the Empire brought people from India and Ireland and parts of Africa to live and work in Britain in the nineteenth century? Before the transatlantic slave trade?’ (Moss 2018b). On the one hand, Bill functions as a mouthpiece for the nativism animating British politics, fruitlessly striving to scrape together the foundational myths of our nation and honour the still-beating heart of a lost heritage. Such a reading is supported by the novel’s psychogeographic mapping of the Brexit divide; Bill’s mood improves as he leaves Remain-voting urban areas and instead draws strength from Hadrian’s wall, ‘a physical manifestation of Ancient British resistance still marked on the land’ (Moss 2018a: 26). However, although the novel’s ideological divide provides a clear parable for the split between nationalist belonging and more cosmopolitan forms of cultural identification encapsulated by the Brexit vote, the novel speaks to older historical divisions, including the cyclical nature of historical violence and the preservation of national imaginaries. Moss’ underlying critique of Brexit rhetoric, encapsulated by Bill’s anti-cosmopolitan outlook, thus alludes to the public’s more general rejection of post-war social progress.
Bill’s resurrection of patriarchal structures and abusive tendencies take a darker turn towards the end of the novel; under the Professor’s guidance he directs the students to re-enact a series of historical practices performed in Iron Age Britain. Their initial reconstruction of a ghost wall – a palisade of ancestral human skulls designed to deter foreign invaders – merely serves to highlight the impotence of the island mentality in resisting either contemporary globalization or supranational structures which challenge Britain’s proposed isolation. Further, the ineffectual construction of the simulated wall not only attests to the danger in placing trust in nativistic forms of cruel nostalgia, but the falsity in erecting a bulwark to preserve cultural tradition and reinforces a critique of the wider global desire to erect symbolic defences to resist change. Such historical reconstruction (echoing the narrative events of England, England and Speak for England) ensures English heritage itself ultimately settles as a spectral presence in the novel, haunting the actions and mindsets of the nation’s older inhabitants: ‘that was the whole point of the re-enactment, that we ourselves became the ghosts’ (2018a: 34). By collapsing history in such a manner, recalling the willed preservation of a mythical Englishness evident in Kingsnorth’s The Wake, Moss’ novel delivers an anachronistic treatment of the ways by which the past bleeds menacingly into the present.
However, it is when Professor Slade and Bill subsequently decide to re-enact an Iron Age ritual sacrifice, roping and cutting Silvie on the moor, that Moss delivers her most potent critique of the destructive psychological impulses powering the Brexit agenda. The willing participation of two students in the performative sacrifice attests to the collective power of a mob mentality, in this case literally energized by the drum-beat and war cries of atavistic nationalism, satirizing the almost ceremonial reverence with which shadowy aspects of British history are treated. The sinister re-enactment symbolizes more than a selfish desire to destroy that which is soon to be lost – sacrifice as a means of ownership and preservation – it creates a historical parallel between the Iron Age bog victims sacrificed for unknown reasons and the scapegoating of ethnic minorities or EU citizens in order to protect and preserve the English tribe. Silvie simply becomes another victim of nationalistic violence (her fate all the more feasible following the brutal murder of Jo Cox). The arrival of the police, alerted to the disturbing re-enactment by a female student, prevents the reconstruction from reaching a darker conclusion and leaves open the question of how far a toxic nationalist ideology may proceed if left unchecked.
Ghost Wall thus delivers a stark warning as to how cultural misconceptions and veneration of British history can lead to the re-emergence of archaic practices in the present, resulting in dangerous abuses of power and its mutilatory effects on the younger generation. Moss’ concentration on experiential archaeology establishes how closely a modern society can effectively recreate the mistakes of the past: an attempt to restore authenticity resulting in a radically inauthentic re-enactment of the era. Tellingly, both Moss and Harrison employ young female narrators who forensically excavate our ancestral heritage to uncover truths relevant to the current state of the nation, providing a youthful glance at the curious belief systems of older generations and exposing the intergenerational divide at the heart of Brexit debates. Although it is difficult to wrest some optimism from Moss’ bleak tale of regressive patriarchal control and self-destructive nativism, Silvie’s eventual emancipation from her father’s clutches gestures (however tenuously) at the possibility of escaping the backward-looking cultural imaginaries dominating public and political discourses and moving beyond ‘the crossroad of our sacred ways’ (2018a: 81).21
Sarah Moss’ subsequent polyphonic novel, Summerwater (2020), retains this concentration the weight of British history on contemporary paradigms of national identity. Set over a 24-hour period, Summerwater captures the boredom and anxiety of several characters each confined to their separate cabins in a holiday park near Loch Lomond as they wait for the incessant rain to stop. The park, of course, serves as a microcosm for the wider nation, scaling down the class-based, racial, political and generational divisions scarring British society. The spatial and social detachment between the cabins gestures to the lack of dialogue between disparate factions in post-Brexit Britain as well as Anglo-Scottish tensions regarding the vote. As an elderly Scottish GP asks driving along a ‘fine EU-funded miracle’: ‘How could the English be so stupid [. . .] how could they not see the ring of yellow stars on every new road and hospital and upgraded railway and city centre regeneration of the last thirty years?’ In capturing the sense of isolation and paranoia experienced by the families trapped in their separate cabins, Moss forms explicit parallels between the referendum and the Covid-19 pandemic: ‘Brexit is a form of lockdown [. . .] the narratives overwrite each other, but actually encode a lot of the same anxieties about foreignness and invasion’. She continues, ‘After all, a virus is an invader, which is a foreign toxin coming into the body [. . .] the Brexit narrative sets out a canvas on which we paint COVID’ , borne out of the same fears of infiltration and cultural infection. Moss has questioned whether a national ‘society’ still exists given recent events, but suggests a pandemic may ‘show us what “fabric” remains’ (Moss 2020; Personal Correspondence 2020).
Broken Ghost (2019) by Niall Griffiths offers the most haunting rendering of the troubled post-Brexit period, documenting the malaise of those left behind on the margins of contemporary Welsh society. Griffiths projects a seething authorial anger towards ‘tax-dodging Bullingdon Club restaurant-smashing fucking stinking’ hypocrites responsible for vicious public service and welfare cuts: ‘fuckin Farage and fat Boris . . . all these cunts that do their best to defer blame, to fuckin weasel out of everything bad that they’ve done’ (2019: 55; 65). Given that Griffiths began work on the novel in 2014, it is clear that, as this study has repeatedly stated, the animating energies that engender such bitterness long precede the events of 2016. In ironically celebrating the vision of a ‘bright new Brexit Britain’ which fails to inject new hope into the fragile socioeconomic environment of Wales, Griffiths makes clear his denunciation of those who merely exploit the fractious political landscape to further their causes and exacerbate the lives of his protagonists (2019: 215).
Returning once again to the regions surrounding Aberystwyth (the favoured locale of his early fiction), Griffiths provides a convincing case in suggesting that the Welsh Brexit vote was motivated by a long legacy of broken social contracts. The narrative opens in the wake of an overnight rave in the mountains, as three stragglers, Emma, Adam and Cowley, stumble home at dawn and unexpectedly witness a radiant vision of a floating, glowing woman suspended in the air. The ghostly apparition speaks a series of seemingly unconnected words including bridge before dissipating. As Emma reasons, the symbolic resonance of a bridge rings false at a moment when ‘we’re building mostly walls’, later interpreting the word to be a signal for a rejuvenated sociopolitical resistance: ‘bridge is not a noun. It is an instruction’ (2019: 97; 171). For Emma, a single parent and part-time carer struggling to survive on benefits, the spectral encounter equips her with a new sense of spiritual resolve and her subsequent online blog posts detailing the experience begin to trend on social media, with her followers attaching an almost religious fervour to her faith in the vision. If we attend to Griffiths’ comment that the ‘voices online are just the sounds of people searching for meaning’ then the novel’s subtle critique of Brexit swiftly becomes clear (2019: 150). The sudden intrusion of aggressive online message board conversations into the narrative indicate the increasingly disconnected national conversation taking shape around the vision and the means by which mediatized digital platforms often reduce citizens to shallow stereotypical caricatures.
The ghostly encounter initially has a reduced effect on the two male characters, who return to their separate lives and dismiss the apparition as the effects of their late-night exploits. Adam, a recovering addict sporadically volunteering at a rehab centre, relapses into his old social patterns and returns to a shadowy life of using and dealing narcotics. Yet it is through Adam that Griffiths voices his most direct attacks on the Brexit vision, holding the Conservative government accountable for the vulnerable socioeconomic conditions in which his protagonists find themselves: ‘The politicians blether on about the great new opportunities for Britain outside of the EU [. . .] Endless shite. And in all the fuckin job centres up and down the land not one thing changes’ (2019: 137–8). Travelling through England, with its quiet suburban greens and St George’s flags ‘hanging limp in the gardens’, Adam recognizes how a slumbering populace were manipulated and enervated by the referendum, the ‘dull and diffuse docility’ of Middle England easily swayed by ‘state-approved mass distraction and intoxication’ (2019: 224). Adam’s concluding assessment that Britain is ‘dead and it doesn’t realise [. . .] Brexit is just fucking digging up the corpse’ speaks volumes about the attempt to read an epiphanic vision into a political event which instead merely reveals the disturbing shadows of our national past (2019: 225). In comparison, Cowley, a labourer with a violent streak, obsesses over his increasing marginalization in the building trade, his work slowly being undercut by Eastern European immigrants. His dwindling fortunes and xenophobic stance towards ‘cabbage suckers [. . .] thousands of-a cunts all swarmin’ in’ motivate him to evince some Leaver sentiments but he remains largely indifferent to the fact that Britain has ‘said tara to fuckin Ewrop’ (2019: 86). When Cowley hears an expert on TV dismiss his ghostly apparition as a brocken spectre, an atmospheric phenomenon projecting the observer’s shadow onto a patch of cloud, his only comment is that the expert should have just spoken the words ‘broken ghost’ in place of the foreign-sounding words, articulating the underlying Goveian resistance to expert analysis during the referendum campaign.
By suggesting that the ghostly brocken spectre satiates ‘the contemporary need for something transcendent [. . .] To offer meaning in uncertain and turbulent times’, Griffiths is clearly insinuating the ways in which Brexit operates not as a national epiphany but a conduit for a misplaced confrontation with personal grievances and blighted socioeconomic pasts (2019: 264). It may be that the apparition is simply a broken ghost for a broken Britain – an ignoble vision that falls well short o f the sublime – enabling citizens to buy into a spectacle that ultimately offers nothing and leaves an absence of catharsis. Griffiths concurs that the ‘tawdry, empty, salvationist ideology’ of Brexit and the Brocken Spectre ‘appeal to very similar urges’ relating to:
some legitimation of existence [. . .] I see that quest as being fundamentally undermined years before the Brexit vote with the constant proclamations from the Cameron government of what, in effect, constitutes a meaningful life: the colourless tyranny of work in ‘alarm clock Britain’, ‘strivers v skivers’, Gove’s hollow praise of those who ‘get on in life’. (Personal Correspondence 2020)
He goes on to confirm that the three protagonists of Broken Ghost symbolize various aspects of the atomized society that emerges, and under such conditions ‘we flounder for something to touch’ (Griffiths 2020). The hauntological intrusion, however, serves a deeper purpose, kindling a spiritual regeneration in some while simultaneously igniting a passionate defence of nationalist self-determination in others. The fact that the vision is later revealed to be the product of heroin affecting the protagonists’ opioid receptors, mixed with sounds playing on a nearby iPod, is almost immaterial; Griffiths’ symbolically rich brocken spectre (very much like the figurative significance of Brexit) projects the profound with the absurd, provoking both a healthy scepticism and near-revelatory zeal. As Sebastian Mitchell explains, the brocken spectre as a literary device has a long heritage of ‘encapsulating a global political threat’ and ‘of contrasting the nature of optical deceit with inspired revelation’ (2007: 169). Given that the shadow cast by its effects often appears ‘inflated’ and occurs in conditions ‘where it is difficult to judge distance and perspective’, we can perceive Griffiths’ brocken spectre to possess a crucial interpretative function, once again illustrating how Britain’s national past continues to cast long shadows over the tumultuous political present (2007: 168).
In the final section Cysllt, meaning contact, Griffiths reunites his scattered protagonists at the site of the ghostly apparition. A spontaneous and organic counter-cultural commune which crosses political and ideological lines begins to take shape on the mountain, created by heterogeneous groups who trust in the veracity of Emma’s experience, with attendees suddenly find themselves filled with a curious empathy for their fellow man. Holding ‘flags aloft of crosses and dragons and the EU stars’ (2019: 262), the gathering effects a revolt against societal atomization via a neoromantic attachment to the landscape and sociocultural regeneration strategies. The Conservative government immediately try to discredit the commune and limit its viral influence by falsely suggesting illegal immigrants are utilizing the site to escape the authorities, reporting that the gatherers should instead support the government during EU negotiations. Nor is the British public fully supportive of the commune, with several nationalist factions fundamentally opposed to its development voicing their disapproval online, dismissing the notion that public or common land should be occupied for this purpose: ‘Bunch of whingers/hypocrites/parasites/libtards. Bet theyll be Remoaners. Get them down NOW [. . .] Traitors must lose all rights!!!’ (2019: 293). While the commune is far from utopian, Emma, Adam and Cowley experience a series of cathartic encounters with figures from their past and present, gaining some semblance of psychological release from past traumas and their precarious positions at the edges of Britain’s eroding social fabric. Just as the gathering reaches a frenzied peak, however, the authorities launch a brutal attack on the commune in an effort to clear the site, shattering an unlikely post-Brexit mood of tolerance and inclusiveness. Referencing the Battle of the Beanfield, Orgreave, the London riots and pre-referendum Brexit skirmishes, Griffiths situates the violent confrontation within a chequered history of governmental abuses of power, signalling how the first victims of cosmopolitical power plays are those in the most vulnerable circumstances.
Despite the violent and disturbing denouement, Broken Ghost contains a genuine literary spirit of ethico-political possibility and serves as the most uplifting post-Brexit fiction published thus far. Looking beyond the ‘void, a spread of black nothingness’ that accompanies the destruction of the commune, Griffiths imbues his narrative with a small modicum of hope for the eventual resuscitation of progressive dialogue in our splintered national community, healing divisions across established generational, racial and class divides (2019: 345). On the one hand, through the commune Griffiths gestures towards a possible redemptive future for Britain, where ‘a sun burns brightly and waits to rise again’ once the nation has learned to overcome its long legacy of regional and cultural disunities (2019: 356). On the other hand, the subtle deconstruction of the brocken spectre articulates the danger in blindly following someone’s else’s vision (particularly when that vision is later revealed to be predicated on misinformation). At the very least, Griffiths resists the temptation to accept, passively and obediently, the continuation of regional inequalities or post-austerity measures diminishing an already ailing Welsh economy. In yearning for new forms of community to overcome our bordered moment, Broken Ghost hints at something on the sociopolitical horizon though we may not yet be able to perceive its true form.
The need for connective values in overcoming the construction of borders (both physical and psychological) is central to Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet: Autumn (2016), Winter (2017), Spring (2019) and Summer (2020). Smith’s quartet is both timely and timeless: embedded in the tradition of English literature but intimately tied to the urgent present due to its dynamic temporal and palimpsestic play.22 The first instalment, Autumn (arguably the first significant post-Brexit novel), offers a sustained mediation on the anus mirabilis that changed the political and cultural landscape of twenty-first-century society, embedding the divisive events of the EU referendum within a wider cyclical process of British history and natural decline. Smith acknowledges her novel ‘had to (and I had to, too) square up to what was happening if the notions of contemporaneousness in it were to mean anything at all’ (qtd. in Anderson 2016). In directly referencing a range of recent events from the murder of Jo Cox to the refugee crisis (with tourists ‘holidaying up the shore from the dead’), Smith immediately places the reader in a post-Brexit landscape where ‘a new kind of detachment’ dictates social interactions (2016: 12; 54). As in Coe’s Middle England, the celebratory memory of the London 2012 Olympics has been eroded and betrays the inward-looking melancholia behind the outward-facing façade: ‘now you couldn’t tell that any of these summer things had ever happened. There was just empty field. The sports track had faded and gone’ (2016: 115). Smith’s own festering authorial anger at the political elite is evident throughout Autumn as she looks ahead to a forthcoming winter of discontent: ‘I’m tired of having to wonder whether they did it out of stupidity or did it on purpose’ (2016: 57). Autumn may also claim the title of the first British ‘post-truth’ novel, alluding to the conscious manipulation of national newspapers like the Daily Mail with their simplistic Beaverbrookian rhetoric pitting British citizens against homogenous foreign ‘others’. Smith’s characters are aware that ‘Facts don’t work’, identifying right-wing nationalistic propaganda as a contributing factor in the demise of democracy as a pragmatic form of political governance (yet could equally serve as a rebuke of the left’s failure to foster a dialogic and collaborative tone during the campaign): ‘It has become a time of people saying stuff to each other and none of it actually ever becoming dialogue. It is the end of dialogue’ (2016: 112; 137). This is a Britain in less splendid isolation.
The narrative begins with the fallout of the Brexit vote – the opening lines serving as a riff on Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities (‘It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times’) – following the lives of Elisabeth Demand, an art history lecturer in London, and Daniel Gluck, an older neighbour from her childhood (2016: 3).23 The divisive consequences of the referendum are complemented by the collage-like, disjointed temporality of the narrative structure, with brief, fragmentary chapters shifting from Daniel’s youth in 1930s Europe to Elisabeth’s childhood in 1990s England, emphasizing that their relationship ‘[is] about history, and being neighbours’ (2016: 45). These memoryscapes enforce a backward-looking focus on the narrative, interrogating the national pathology that resulted in the referendum campaign and subsequent fracturing of the populace:
All across the country, there was misery and rejoicing [. . .] All across the country, people felt it was the wrong thing. All across the country, people felt it was the right thing. All across the country, people felt they’d really lost. All across the country, people felt they’d really won [. . .] All across the country, people looked up Google: what is EU?’ [. . .] All across the country, people said it wasn’t that they didn’t like immigrants. All across the country, people said it was about control. (2016: 60–1)
The tense parochial interactions of Elisabeth’s village serve as a microcosm for Britain’s deteriorating relationship with the EU, revealing a community split between hospitality and hostility. The words ‘GO’ and ‘HOME’ are daubed over a cottage in the village, under which someone later adds ‘in varying bright colours’ representative of a resistant multiculture: ‘WE ARE ALREADY HOME THANK YOU’ (2016: 53; 138). While the ‘wild joyful brightness painted on the front of that house in a dire time’ suggest a resistance to such nationalistic fervour and the possibility of communal empathy in the aftermath of such a divisive political campaign, moments of cultural conviviality are punctuated by the frenzied imperial invective of angry nativists long after the referendum has passed: ‘Rule Britannia [. . .] Britannia rules the waves. First we’ll get the Poles. And then we’ll get the Muslims. Then we’ll get the gyppos, then the gays’ (2016: 197).
The erection of an electrified chainlink fence on common land near the village, topped by razorwire and security cameras, operates both as a territorial reminder of a nation divided and an allusion to the enforcement of toxic anti-immigration policies on the horizon. Enclosing ‘a piece of land that’s got nothing in it’, the fence soon doubles in size and is patrolled by a security agency named S4FA who are unable to adequately explain the fence’s purpose (2016: 55). The decision by Elisabeth’s mother, Wendy, to defy its presence by throwing a stockpile of antiques at the fence in the closing scenes, ‘bombarding that fence with people’s histories and with the artefacts of less cruel and more philanthropic times’, symbolizes a resistance to borders both figurative and corporeal, both internal and external to the nation (2016: 255). Smith has spoken at length elsewhere of the writer’s responsibility to practice a form of narrative hospitality, reiterating this outlook through Daniel’s neighbourly guidance of Elisabeth: ‘always try to welcome people into the home of your story’ (2016: 119). As Smith’s polemical stance makes clear, if good fences make good neighbours, then the need for cosmopolitan hospitality becomes an urgent necessity in a post-Brexit world.
Winter marks the point in the quartet where Smith begins to probe the deep-rooted historical divisions within British society and the motivating impulses of the referendum. Referencing the ‘ordinary everyday terribleness’ of the ongoing refugee crisis, the Grenfell Tower fire, the rise of Donald Trump and the proliferation of fake news, Winter plays out the antagonistic binaries that persist long after the vote has been decided (2017a: 30). The events of Grenfell in July 2017 testified to the ongoing devaluation of the most vulnerable in British society, particularly within Kensington and Chelsea, the country’s richest borough, exposing the empty sentiment behind George Osborne’s claim ‘we are all in it together’. The tragedy forced a renewed concentration on the pain of everyday austerity, yet even this ethical turn was short-lived; the revanchist nationalism associated with Brexit continued to dominate political proceedings and an official re-evaluation of lacklustre social welfare within London failed to materialize.
Smith’s narrative details a tense and fractious Christmas in Cornwall, as retired businesswoman Sophia Cleves welcomes her estranged sister Iris, her son Art, and his mysterious friend Lux (whom he has hired to masquerade as his girlfriend Charlotte) into her home.24 The family surname immediately gestures to the state of cleavage and political mourning in which the nation finds itself. Smith’s characters are representative of various polarized groups and factions at the heart of the Brexit debate: Sophia, a defiant Leave voter, relies on the questionable media narratives of Daily Mail journalists; Art, a nature writer, is politically uninformed about current events; Iris, a rebellious eco-activist and equal rights campaigner, detests her sister’s lack of cosmopolitan empathy; and Croatian-Canadian Lux questions the British tendency to slip into protectionist rhetoric when confronted with global flows of immigration, dismissing the ‘empty gestural’ goodwill advocated during the Christmas period (but denied to global masses abandoned on Europe’s shores) (2017a: 195).25 Fragments of Brexit discourse are riven deep into the national conversation – particularly a clear linguaphobia which has only intensified since the vote – as the characters see their Christmas disturbed by Dickensian visitations and reminders of the irreducible ideological gap separating the British electorate. It is rather fitting that Smith pays homage to Dickens’ A Christmas Carol; after all, Brexit is as much a confrontation with the ghosts of our national past as it is with our troubled present.
Sophia desperately tries to resist facing the fractious state of the nation by clinging to the cultural imaginary of the English Sublime, willing it to assume a new relevance: ‘That red postbox on the front of the Radio Times: why does it mean so much and at the same time so little? She wants it to mean again like meaning used to mean’ (2017a: 125). For Iris, however, Brexit and Trump operate as the twin forces of atavistic nationalism, hovering like a spectre over ‘England’s green unpleasant land’ with the core Leave aesthetic of insularity threatening her more utopian dreams of ethical communal living (2017a: 208). The chronological narrative is persistently interrupted by memories, visions and hallucinations, including a disembodied head which both forces Sophia to reflect on the reverberations of historical causality and alludes to the inability of the British public to perceive objective reality. Art’s real girlfriend Charlotte also experiences troubling visions, describing a recurring dream where she cuts herself open until she represents ‘a quartered kingdom’, disfigured beyond repair, and laments the ways in which ‘pre-planned theatre is replacing politics’ (2017a: 56; 57). Indeed, Smith points the reader towards the overt structural allusions between Britain’s moment of crisis and Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, ‘a play about a kingdom subsumed in chaos, lies, powermongering, division and a great deal of poisoning and self-poisoning’ (2017a: 200). Employing Lux as her fictional mouthpiece, Smith suggests Shakespeare’s ‘tangled-up messed-up farce’ is writ large in post-Brexit Britain:
it’s like the people in the play are living in the same world but separately from each other [. . .] But if they could just step out of themselves, or just hear and see what’s happening right next to their ears and eyes, they’d see it’s the same play they’re all in, the same world, that they’re all part of the same story. (2017a: 201)
The allusion to Cymbeline does, however, allow a modicum of hope to seep into the national narrative; as Art recalls, Shakespeare’s tragedy may revolve on treachery and deceit, but it gestures towards ‘the balance coming back. The lies revealed. The losses compensated’ (2017a: 315). For Smith, the novel form plays a minor role in restoring this tentative equilibrium, altering the reader ‘to the workings of the people who make fictions of our world and call what they’re doing truth’ (Smith 2017b).
Lux draws attention to this recent devolution of language into political soundbites and empty rhetoric until it is devoid of signification, singling out Boris Johnson as a man not ‘interested in the meaning of words’ but ‘one whose interests leave words meaningless’ (2017a: 285). The disruptive presence of social media is threaded throughout the novel as Smith carefully attends to the role of digital platforms such as Twitter – a fertile playground for alt-right or extreme nationalist commentators – in spreading fake news, amplifying public discontent, and giving voice to alienated citizens. Art’s girlfriend Charlotte criticizes his decidedly apolitical nature writing blog; her subsequent development of the blog demonstrates how such platforms also enable counter-narratives of grassroots resistance to emerge, transforming hatred into a progressive impetus for positive change. Over the course of the novel, however, Art (read art) develops an awareness of the consequences of the referendum. As Smith writes, ‘I think all art is political [. . .] and that anyone not responding in their aesthetics to a time of immense political ferment and speed-of-sound change and regression like this one we’re living through is acting every bit as politically as anyone who is’ (Elkins 2019). For Smith, literature functions as an antidote to the political fictions masquerading as truth. During a family argument on the post-truths of the referendum campaign, Art seems to perceive ‘a slab of landscape’ above their heads, crumbling onto the dining table below. His fantastical vision, serving as a moment of revelation for a character seemingly oblivious of the societal implications of Brexit, captures the precarious fate of a nation left hanging in the balance, ‘suspended by nothing’ (2017a: 217).
In the third chapter, the study argued that the third instalment of the quartet, Spring, captures the divergence of Anglo-Scottish ideological stances towards emergent crises of the twenty-first century. Though the maintenance of a unitary order will prove a challenge for an increasingly disunited kingdom, Smith utilizes her familiar trope of a spectral Other, evident in There But For The (2011), to infiltrate inward-looking institutions and point towards new possibilities for affective narrativization and engagement across staunchly defended political lines during Britain’s moment of constitutional and cosmopolitical crisis. Like Lux, the character of Florence in Spring inhabits the narrative as a mysterious presence, moving through policed checkpoints and established barriers in ways which defy the fortified present. The arrival of the stranger, however ghostly or spectral, necessitates a level of hospitality, and operates in radical opposition to the cosmopolitan notion of being at home in the world.
Summer (2020) completes the quartet, set just as the Covid-19 pandemic begins to take hold and exposes ‘borders and passports’ to be as ‘meaningless as nature knows they are’ (345). Commenting on the Black Lives Matter movement, the Windrush scandal and the inexorable rise of Dominic Cummings, Summer follows the Greenlaw household in Brighton, continuing the literary trend of capturing how Brexit exacerbated underlying familial divisions and created domestic sites of conflict. Mother Grace, a Leave voter, is abandoned by her Remain-voting husband Jeff; teenage Sacha questions and abhors Britain’s hostile environment; while her younger brother Robert emerges as a Johnson-acolyte, dismissive of the hardships faced by the populace. For Peter Boxall, the novel form possesses a ‘uniquely powerful capacity to critique the cultures from which it emerges and within which it is read’ (2015: 10). Smith has previously emphasized the necessity to recognize a ‘conflict in almost everything’ in order to develop the narratorial debate; states of conflict, then, also produce ‘a conflict of possibilities’ (Smith qtd. in Beer 2013: 138). While summer resists a ‘kinder finale’, Smith accentuates that the word derives ‘from the Old English sumor, from the proto-indo-european root sam, meaning both one and together’, reflected in the reconciliation of several characters as her quartet draws to a close (2020a: 263; 289 – emphasis in original). With this in mind, Smith goes some way to explaining the socioemotional arrangement of her seasonal cycle: ‘start with Autumn, so we could end on the open leaf, the long light days of summer [. . .] Leaves. Bare branches. Frost. Buds. Leaves again’ (Smith 2020b). For Smith’s tetralogy, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
In crystallizing our traumatic political present, her works of political allegory are powered by contemporary pressures and indicate the ways by which novels can be socially and politically transformative: ‘if you can read the world as a construct, you can ask questions of the construct and you can suggest ways to change the construct. You understand that things aren’t fixed’ (qtd. in Laing 2016). As Daniel explains to Elisabeth in Autumn, ‘whoever makes up the story makes up the world’ (Smith 2016: 119). Smith’s quartet, however, contains dreams of Remaining. The sentiments within the quartet appear to be out of step with the majority of the electorate; cosmopolitan values may never be needed more, but never wanted less. Smith appears to project the first two stages of grief: denial and anger; acceptance is far from her mind. Though the quartet has been charged with advancing its author’s own political bias, as opposed to reaching out across both sides of our polarized society, there are flashes of redemption and mutuality amid the disorder and decay. As the quartet unfolds Smiths slowly develops an intricate collage-like web of textual interconnections. For example, in Winter Art works for SA4A, the shadowy conglomerate which first surfaced in Autumn; sections from Florence’s notebook arguably emerge in earlier instalments of the quartet; and Summer sees the return of Iris, who houses homeless asylum seekers impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic and Britain’s hostile environment. The collage-like construction of Smith’s quartet contains elements of what can be termed a transglossic framework, involving the alignment of aesthetics and ethico-political imperatives, a productive optimism of renewal and a deep simultaneity committed to the contemporaneous occupation of multiple positions (Shaw and Upstone 2021). By forging bonds of connectivity and establishing forms of dialogue between characters on both sides of our divided Brexit Britain, Smith communicates the potential for emergent modes of political recuperation and captures a more radiant vision of the power of literature.
The study of contemporary fiction, rather like the immediate analysis of a political climate, is inevitably vulnerable to hindsight. If Brexit has effectively eroded the meta-narratives of European cooperation, centralization and supranationalism, what forms of new narrative will emerge to legitimize the relevance of cultural interdependence? The EU referendum, after all, forced the electorate to choose between a more cosmopolitan allegiance to a remote European family and a more tangible attachment to the nation. Author Sunjeev Sahota perceives Brexit to be ‘a stain on our national identity, our sense of ourselves and our place in the world’, but gestures towards literature’s capacity to interrogate how we relate to one another across national and cultural boundaries, offering an imaginative space for the envisioning of political futures: ‘I think writers will continue to write globally and won’t be hemmed in by these boundaries that politicians try to impose on our minds. I think writers will write truth to power’ (Shaw 2017). It is not altogether surprising that the longlist for the Man Booker Prize 2017 contained several novels which immediately engaged with a post-Brexit world. One would expect that planetary challenges requiring the mobilization of a global citizenry (or at least a re-embrace of a European demos), such as climatological risk or viral pandemics, will undoubtedly stimulate this form of literary response, as well as the inevitable emergence of Scottish, Northern Irish and Welsh devolutionary fictions that forge new dialogues with the question of British cultural identity. And yet, the risk remains that the literary discussion of such critical national and global concerns will simply create another leftist echo chamber that neither heals nor speaks to an already fractious nation. Several post-Brexit fictions appear overly schematic in their attempt to give voice to various groups within society yet “are” merely depicting, rather than interrogating, the very divides which gave rise to the referendum.
As the previous chapters have argued, Britain (and British literature) employed a jamais vu mindset towards the EU; familiar and repeated attempts at European fraternity were viewed as novel developments threatening national sovereignty. Rather than engaging with the larger realities of European life, the first wave of post-Brexit fiction largely seems to be detailing the specific frailties and parochial trivialities of an insular and diminished small island – updated forms of state-of-the-nation novels that retain a narrow focus on British society and its isolation from the continent. The British public have witnessed what happens ‘when the subtle checks and balances of representative democracy are subordinated to the crude majoritarianism of referendums’ (Dorling and Tomlinson 2017: 240). Brexit is arguably a self-inflicted wound which withdrawing from the EU will not heal. However, as opposed to late-twentieth-century works of British Euroscepticism, this chapter has suggested that certain post-Brexit fictions betray a fur ther purpose, gesturing towards more inclusive and diverse forms of public culture, identifying the social divisions affecting the nation, and engaging in a struggle with our prevailing political climate. The first wave of post-Brexit fiction seems to find itself in the predicament of l’espirit de l’escalier, espousing an outward-looking cosmopolitan engagement as a belated form of resistance to an increasingly nationalistic and inward-looking cultural landscape.
Notes
1 Nonetheless, the campaign did play a vital role in shaping the narrative. In the run-up to the 2015 UK general election, the market research organization Ipsos MORI found that fewer than 10 per cent of British voters named the EU as a ‘top three’ issue affecting their decision (Ipsos MORI 2015).
2 Literary responses to Brexit were, of course, not limited to the novel form. Yet David Wheatley, a contributor to the anthology Wretched Strangers (2018), suggests poetic responses have been more muted and queries the lack of an immediate response from ‘pro-Brexit bards’; he concludes that, given the enmity of the campaign, ‘Brexit is a place where language goes to die’ (Wheatley 2018). Nonetheless, figures such as Jackie Kay, Gillian Clarke, Imtiaz Dharker, Benjamin Zephaniah and John Agard have all produced work engaging with the referendum. The most significant Brexlit poetry collections are Jane Commane’s Assembly Lines (2018), Charly Bishop’s The Ballad of Brexit and Other Brexit Poems (2018), Hugh Dunkerley’s Kin (2018), Vidyan Ravinthiran’s The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here (2019) and David Clarke’s The Europeans (2019). By articulating a nuanced consideration of Brexit’s stimulants and provocations, and inhabiting the lives of diverse others, these collections demonstrate the capacity of language to stem (if not heal) bleeding wounds. Similarly, although the study does not have the space to delve into the realm of theatre, much can be said about key works including My Country by Carol Ann Duffy and Rufus Norris; Jamais Vu (2017) by James Ellis; People Like Us (2018) by Julie Burchill and Jane Robins; Brexit: A Play (2018) by Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky; A Strong Exit by James Graham (2016); Lear in Brexitland by Tim Prentki (2017).
3 Laing’s passing reference to Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism suggests an authorial critique towards those citizens who allegedly voted against their interests.
4 In Machines Like Me (2019), McEwan reinforces his distaste for governments which decide ‘policy by plebiscites’, imagining a counter-factual history of the 1980s in which Prime Minister Tony Benn masterminds Britain’s exit from Europe.
5 The novel is dedicated to the memory of Jo Cox MP.
6 The archaic, pejorative phrase perfidious Albion (its current usage first associated with British acts of perfidy during the French Revolution) re-emerged during post-Brexit negotiations, pointing to acts of diplomatic disloyalty among the Westminster elite.
7 For Brian M. Hughes, Brexit is ‘psychological, not political’, affected by personal and collective social attitudes towards events, revealing the dangers of groupthink, confirmation bias and casual attribution bias, and a reliance on an availability heuristic which simplified complex perceptions of the EU (2019: 151).
8 A similar strain of dystopic Brexit fiction has emerged in Germany. Tom Hillenbrand’s sci-fi-inflected Drone State (2014), published two years before the referendum, offers a chilling Orwellian vision of a European superstate forty years in the future which monitors the movements of citizens in thirty-six member states. While his fictional British withdrawal is a smooth operation, Hillenbrand jokes the chaos o f post-Brexit negotiations ensures ‘the real Brexit is actually much more dystopian’ (qtd. in Oltermann 2019). His subsequent post-Brexit novel Hologrammatica (2018), set in 2088, continues the efforts of Britain to position itself post-Europe, renaming itself New Albion and resorting to radical privatization in order to retain some semblance of national wealth in a future threatened by the heightened effects of climate change. Sibylle Berg’s GRM Brainfuck (2019) adopts a related stance, mapping the rise of the far-right in deindustrialized regions of a post-Brexit Britain.
9 Brexit has inspired a number of spy thrillers including London Rules by Mick Herron (2018), Curtain Call (2019) by Graham Hurley and Accidental Agent (2019) by Alan Judd.
10 Only Barking and Dagenham, Bexley, Havering, Hillingdon and Sutton – council areas on the fringes of London – returned Leave votes.
11 Smith’s 2013 short story ‘Meet the President’ in Grand Union adopts a dystopic angle on potential near-futures for our bordered island nation, envisioning a post-Brexit Britain in which Felixstowe is no longer an important hub for European connectivity but a radically reduced rural settlement unable to maintain its ties with the Continent. The ‘sad little town had retreated three miles inland and up a hill’ while Britain itself has been left behind by an ever-adapting globalized world: ‘The only people left in England were the ones who couldn’t leave’ (2019: 160).
12 According to Goodhart, ‘eight out of the top ten high-wage low-welfare cities are located in the South East, while nine of the bottom ten low-wage cities are in the North or the Midlands’ (2017: 151).
13 The hauntological presence of the past is particularly evident in Cartwright’s debut novel The Afterglow, which concentrates on the closure of Midlands’ steelworks. Collective social memories of industrial communities linger on in the narrative as spectral remnants of industrial heritage while the physical structures themselves – ‘disused factory buildings [. . .] the corpses of outlandish beats decomposing, rotting into the black ground’ – are dismantled and erased (2004: 155).
14 That being said, as Goodwin and Heath (2016b) outline in their study ‘Brexit vote explained: poverty, low skills and lack of opportunities’, it was undoubtedly voters who were struggling financially that were most likely to vote Leave.
15 A similar response emerged following the 2008 financial crash in works such as Amanda Craig’s Hearts and Minds (2011), John Lanchester’s Capital (2012), Sebastian Faulks’ A Week in December (2009), as well as Coe’s earlier novel Number 11 (2015).
16 The ceremony also utilized literary narratives to negotiate tensions surrounding citizenship, community and identification with the nation, featuring characters from works by authors such as J. K. Rowling, J. M. Barrie and Lewis Carroll, reinforcing the fictional basis of our national heritage.
17 Following the referendum, the relationship support Charity Relate reported 20 per cent of their 300 employees had offered counselling to couples divided over Brexit (Worley 2016).
18 Jones lambasts the comments of several contributors within Eaglestone’s collection but curiously fails to cite my own chapter on Brexlit despite engaging with the same texts.
19 In this sense, he follows in the footsteps of John Berger who claimed that, with regards to Brexit, he ‘voted with his feet long ago’ by relocating to the French Alps in the 1970s (qtd. in Kellaway 2016).
20 Boston in Lincolnshire returned the highest Leave vote in the country (75.6%) and experienced an extremely high rate of demographic change in the years leading to the referendum. Its non-British population rose from 1,000 in 2005 to 16,000 in 2015 (Goodwin and Milazzo 2017: 455).
21 Fiona Mozley’s Elmet (2017), offering an empathetic insight into the plight of rural citizens attempting to protect their forest grid from wealthy external influences, speaks to these same urgent nativist urges.
22 Smith admits she had planned to write a seasonal quartet for decades (qtd. in Elkins 2019).
23 Elisabeth’s surname comes from the French – de and monde – alluding to the notion of being a cosmopolitan citizen ‘of the world’ (2016: 50).
24 In 2016, 56.5 per cent of voters in Cornwall supported Leave despite the region’s evident history of EU funding assistance.
25 Lux’s name derives from the Latin referring to a unit of illuminance: it is a foreign-born citizen who brings Britain’s cultural myopia so arrestingly to light.