The Booker Review

“The personal is anything that affects me. Everything else is political. And identity politics is whatever affects you, but not me.”

What is the zeitgeist of these strange times, and what “universality” of human experience does it point to?

This is, I think, the central premise of Brown’s second novel, its cast of characters to my eye deeply unlikeable, yet somehow fascinating. The story opens with a fictional magazine article charting an incident in which Jake, an anti-capitalist squatter at a farm commune calling themselves “The Universalists,” has attacked another member of his commune with a gold bar. (Yes, we see the irony.) In turn, we delve deeper by following Hannah, the struggling journalist who wrote the article; Richard, the philandering banker who owns the farm; and Lenny, mother of Jake and affair partner of Richard, whose own popular writings are successfully channelling the anti-“woke” backlash of the current political climate. Perhaps everything is not quite as it seems.

Capitalism is really nonsense, isn’t it?

This is both an underlying thread of the book and a thought I have frequently had whilst being unable to work this year. The rise of pointless work to plug the gaps filled by technological advances irritates me as much as the constant newspaper commentary panicking at the prospect of AI “taking” all the jobs. If computers can now do most of the hard work that actually needs doing for humans to live, why aren’t we receiving the gift of time and leisure rather than making up more work simply for the sake of keeping busy? And why are we constantly annoyed at each other rather than the ridiculous societal prisons that bind us? This story manages to capture perfectly the general misunderstanding of the word “privilege” which I sometimes suspect is fuelling the current anti-diversity backlash: No-one wants to be told they have an easy life.

Interestingly, the only one who isn’t really given their own voice in the narrative is Jake, the idealist and would-be attacker. Utterly rejected by his mother and cowering in a corner from the consequences of his youthful mistakes, I am left feeling rather sorry for Jake, wishing his choice of “living off the land” without the bullshit jobs of the modern economy could still be possible.

“We all want to be a little offended, don’t we?” muses Lenny, finally, on stage at her literary festival. I certainly found the preachy anti-diversity tone of this story deliciously angrifying, chiming beautifully with the “rage bait” model of the way we receive information in the modern world. Perhaps what it tells us about “universality” is how unlikeable we all are, sniping at each other over politics and grand ideals, while stupidly sacrificing ourselves to the master of Capitalism.