Should your social media often current you with publishing-related content material, you’ll have noticed proofs for Natasha Brown’s Universality in your feed final autumn. The thrill with which varied “bookfluencers” clutched them was twofold. Brown appeared on the Granta Better of Younger British Novelists checklist in 2023, and Universality is the follow-up to her 2021 debut, Assembly, which noticed her shortlisted for a Goldsmiths, Orwell, and Folio prize: its vital and business reputation has undoubtedly created a way of anticipation for this subsequent guide. However alongside that truth was the sensation that the proof itself provoked as an aesthetic object: placing and slender, with its reflective gold jacket and spectrally engraved lettering. “Oh, it’s a guide,” a member of the family of mine exclaimed on holding it, having been intrigued by what I used to be carrying round. It wasn’t an absurd response. These early copies had been long-established to appear like bars of gold, in reference to the truth that the primary 49 pages are delivered within the model of {a magazine} function a couple of younger man who makes use of one to bludgeon the chief of a bunch referred to as The Universalists, a faction of political activists (or squatters, relying on who you ask) making an attempt to type a self-sustaining “microsociety” on a Yorkshire farm through the Covid-19 pandemic.
It’s the type of story that might set social media alight for days, or fairly, as Brown wryly notes within the guide’s second chapter, two weeks: “a contemporary parable [that exposes] the fraying cloth of British society”. Every element is extra eye-popping than the final. Each the farm and the gold belong to a banker named Richard Spencer, a person with “a number of houses, farming land, investments and automobiles […] a family workers; a fairly spouse, plus a a lot youthful girlfriend”. An ideal image, in brief, of “the extreme fruits of late capitalism”. Jake, the younger man doing the bludgeoning, is the son of a reactionary British journalist, Miriam “Lenny” Leonard, whose columns are designed much less to impress thought and extra to go viral on-line. The Universalists themselves share DNA with Extinction Insurrection, and do exactly pretty much as good a job at polarising the nice British public. On the centre of all of it is that gold ingot, with which, post-bludgeoning, Jake absconds after police raid the farm. Therefore the flashy proofs. Besides – not likely. Engraved on the again of every copy is a quote from the penultimate chapter: “Phrases are your weapons, they’re your instruments, your foreign money.” After the primary part the self-esteem of {a magazine} function drops, with succeeding chapters instructed from completely different characters’ views. We study to learn rigorously.
It’s value, on this case, not spoiling the rest of the plot. Brown labored in monetary companies for a decade, and her novels to date inherit as themes the mediums by way of which she has earned her dwelling: the circulation of cash, and language – each their very own salient types of capital. However, Brown is aware of that her readers’ biases are probably the most satisfying foreign money she can commerce on and so creates, in a mere 156 pages, a formidable matryoshka doll of a narrative, the place every established truth is progressively re-rendered with growing element and nuance.
Meeting was a equally slim novel a couple of Black feminine banker lately identified with most cancers who prepares to attend a celebration at her boyfriend’s mother and father’ nation property. It drew comparisons to Mrs Dalloway, however ought to rightfully have been learn towards French thinker and linguist Roland Barthes: Brown’s self-professed intention when she started writing was to evaluate whether or not “language can be neutral” within the context of Twenty first-century identification politics. Regardless of a profitable job and a dynamic thoughts, as an unwell Black girl the narrator of Meeting functioned as a discrete semiotic system on to which different characters (and, regrettably, varied readers) projected, to cite Barthes, “the burden of a gaze conveying an intention that [ceased to be] linguistic”. Numerous well-meaning remarks uttered by different characters betrayed a sequence of flawed insights concerning the narrator’s standing, potential, well being, emotional wellbeing and needs. “I grew up grime poor, you realize […] So I get it. I get the grind. All this – it’s as international to me as it’s to you,” a piece colleague tells the narrator, regardless of having no discernible information of her upbringing or earlier work historical past. That such utterances had been rejected by the narrator herself went considerably satirically unnoticed by the general public who interviewed Brown throughout her publicity run for the guide. “Why topic myself additional to their reductive gaze?” learn one passage. “To this crushing objecthood. Why endure my very own dehumanisation?” Why not, in different phrases, attempt to be free?
This time Brown is having extra enjoyable throughout the constraints of our present sociopolitical discourse. Universality is much less measured than its predecessor, and trades on the inverse of its core query: nothing concerning the language in it’s impartial. Pronouncements on “wokeism”, on meritocracy, on race and tradition wars fall from characters’ mouths like bombs. Due to the novel’s ingenious construction, the extra you hear them, the extra you realise how inhibiting they’re, and the way soul-crushingly tiring it’s to spend your one treasured life negotiating their deployment in a rigged and completely ineffective system: a realisation just one character income from, although dangerously so.
It’ll be fascinating to look at Brown navigate her publicity run in an period of tech bros heralding a really specific mode of free speech. If Meeting was a meditation on the linguistic building of cultural myths that dominate our present-day understanding of identification, then the ultimate two chapters of Universality efficiently consolidate this new novel as an observational satire concerning the language video games that allow that course of. To this finish, Brown is considered one of our most clever voices writing at the moment, capable of block out the short-term chatter round each identification and language with the intention to excavate far more uncomfortable truths. And regardless of how genuinely satisfying it’s to look at her deconstruct the world as we all know it now, Universality arouses in me an pleasure over what might occur ought to she ever select to stray from social realism. What ought to we be doing with language? How would possibly issues look in any other case?
