“Literature is my Mirror”: Literature Helps Us Confront A Frightening World, Part 1 (YSJ Literature in Lockdown)

In the first of two posts, Level 5 student James Turner reflects on the books that have helped him to navigate the last few years of social and political turmoil and, of course, the global pandemic.

By James Turner 

About this time last year I started pulling books off my shelves. I was having a clear out of the books I now considered too childish to keep. Twilight can stay, but I’m afraid Famous Five has to go. After rearranging what remained I found I had one shelf empty. Over the last ten months or so, in dribs and drabs, books have begun to populate this shelf. Among some of the titles are Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor, Autumn by Ali Smith, Middle England by Jonathan Coe, White Teeth by Zadie Smith and the brilliant Elmet by Fiona Mozley.  You’ve maybe already drawn connections between them; they’re all set in the UK and, to lesser or greater degrees, preoccupied with the lives of ‘ordinary’ people.

I started to buy the first of the books after reading an article on the FT website. This article had the bold title of ‘Brexlit: the new landscape of British fiction’. Novels such as Autumn (labelled the ‘First Great Brexit Novel’ by the New York Times) and The Cut by Anthony Cartwright deal explicitly with the vote. Other novels (and I find these more interesting) such as Reservoir 13 and Elmet paint raw, uncompromising images of life in the ‘provinces’ at the time of the vote.

Being from the ‘provinces’ myself, I find this quiet ambience both captivating and relatable. I feel this most particularly in Reservoir 13, which provoked an emotional response I had not felt towards a novel before. The inciting incident is a teenage girl going missing whilst on holiday in ‘the hills at the heart of England’. In its own way, the novel surpasses any exact geographical location merely pinned as firmly rural. The girl goes missing, but village life must continue, and the novel follows the village life over the thirteen years since the disappearance. During these years traces of the girl resurface. The villagers remember and search again, then lose hope, then forget. But the memory of her can never rest. Characters grow, relationships end, children go to university then return. McGregor creates this entrancing feeling, conjuring this rural, repetitive, cyclical rhythm that makes us feel as if we are watching the passing of the seasons. The picture he paints is raw, honest, at points problematic. We see politics examined and get a real feel of the socioeconomic conditions people were living in at the time of the vote and the mindsets that helped give Leave the push to victory.

Currently writing in 2020, with Brexit now done and dusted (whether I like it or not) the boat for writing a blog post on this literary phenomenon has well and truly sailed. However, I think there are still points I can draw. Firstly, I didn’t seek these texts out knowing they would all be connected and knowing they would all be about the Brexit vote or this country at the time of the vote. Okay, some I knew would be on the subject, but with others it was as I read them that I started to think ‘is this saying something about the state of the United Kingdom right now?’ For example, The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth (first published in 2015, a year before the vote) functions on one level to expose the logical inconsistencies apparent in right-wind nationalistic rhetoric. The novel’s narrator and protagonist is Buccmaster of Holland, an Anglo-Saxon ‘socman’ (free-farmer) who owns three oxgangs (about 60 acres) of land. The setting is early 11th century England, and the plot involves him living through and railing against the Norman Conquest. He clings to the Old Gods, feels his culture is being assimilated by Christianity and mourns the drastic changes taking place around him. Much of what he says about British heritage being lost, corrupted or attacked by an alien ideology or system of thought sounds all too familiar. Kingsnorth uses Buccmaster to articulate rhetoric around ‘corruption of culture’ and ‘loss of heritage’ used to justify the adoption of an insular, inward-looking, white, Christian vision of Britain. Buccmaster feels Christianity is a foreign, invasive ideology. Many would hold Christianity as a corner stone of British society. The inconsistency is if Buccmaster can feel like the essence of Britain is being lost in the early 11th century, surely the essence we cling to now is the assimilated vision Buccmaster was violently railing against. We see that there is no fixed essence of Britain – any fixed essence (if there is one) was lost with Buccmaster, if not even earlier during the Angle, Jute and Saxon migration.

What unites The Wake and Reservoir 13 is their ability to reflect on the current state of British society, whether this be literal or metaphorical. So what? Literature has always functioned in this capacity. This can be seen in the ‘condition of England’ or ‘state of the nation’ written during the Victorian period aiming to reflect the socio-economic conditions of the newly industrialised country. Facilitated by Thomas Carlyle in Chartism and Past and Present, Carlyle utilised apocalyptic language when describing the conditions and warning about the consequences of the industrial revolution. This was furthered by writers such as Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell who used literature as a way of shedding light on the social issues of the time. Literature has always been a tool for finding truth when political discourse is polluted with fiction. As our present, contemporary situation unfolds (and I’m sure all of you will know what I am referring to here) I find I spend increasing amounts of time thinking about how this will impact the arts, literature particularly. Will we see plays in the years to come featuring characters in full Personal Protective Equipment? Will we see feelings of paranoia, but also unity coming through in texts? Will texts question ideas of civil liberty and the roll of the state? I would hope at least one text will tell the story of the medical worker, battling against the odds to save lives. These times are unprecedented, and I am sure it will influence art in an unprecedented and radical way. If literature is to continue reflecting ‘state of the nation’ then I am sure many writers are thinking about these times with trepidation, but also excitement. We are living through a universal experience that does, without doubt, give each of us a story to tell.

To Be Continued Tomorrow!