UNIVERSALITY

A young journalist’s searing feature about a near-death attack at a rave on a Yorkshire farm at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic exposes the sociopolitical undercurrents of contemporary Britain.

Hannah, a struggling freelance journalist, is catapulted into quasi-fame after writing a buzzy exposé. The article seeks to understand the motive behind the violent attack with a gold bar—and discovers a tangled web involving an unprincipled banker, a controversial conservative writer, and an anarchist movement. The first third of the novel is relayed via the article itself, a form which is engaging but feels, at times, somewhat basic. The rest of the book explores the fallout from the article. With the money from its success, Hannah’s been able to buy a flat, but has drifted from her university friends, who don’t respect her work or her politics. Lenny, the provocative columnist somewhat responsible for the article’s nascence, experiences a sudden mainstream popularity different from her previous position on the fringe. Brown’s novel is strongest and most compelling in its sharp analysis of social relationships, of the ways in which we understand and fail to understand one another: Hannah’s friend Martin thinks, “That was the problem with Hannah, and the thing he couldn’t reconcile in all this. She was culturally clueless, practically allergic to the zeitgeist. How had she pulled it off?” Or when Lenny, interviewed by Martin, lashes out in a moment of viciousness: “I find that I’m leaning over to him, jeering: ‘Er, er, er...um, um, um...’ My voice is high-pitched and throaty, a cruel imitation of his stammer.” She recognizes, as soon as she’s done it, that “it was too far, too nasty.” At times, Brown’s political analysis is acute, although her characters are in danger of presenting as caricatures; Lenny, in particular, who fuels much of the antiwoke commentary, can appear a little two-dimensionally predictable, despite the book’s insistence that she defies labels constituting its own strategic predictability (“Yes to Europe, no to multiculturalism, maybe a yes to feminism? Pro-regulation, anti-affirmative action, pro-leveling up...It all comes off a little, hm, a little muddled,” the interviewer remarks).

A clever, though at times predictable, analysis of modern-day British politics.