Katie Tobin

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Tory Britain’s Literary Post-Mortem

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‘Iceberg lettuce in blond wig outlasts Liz Truss’, a Guardian headline hollered just 45 days after the former Prime Minister first arrived in office. Donning a blonde wig and googly eyes, the lettuce was crowned victorious in a ‘bizarre competition after outlasting Liz Truss’s tenuous grip on power’. This is a fittingly morbid testament to the state of British politics over the past fourteen years; so ridiculous and deeply unserious that, these days, the truth reads much stranger than fiction. It’s also something that had cropped up a lot in the run-up to the election – not the Truss lettuce, exactly – but the absurd spectacle of Conservative rule. Brexit, Grenfell, the pandemic and the ensuing Partygate revelations; all of these present a grim diagnosis of the Tories’ tenure, inviting the question of how writers have chosen to chronicle it.

One of the defining traits of this period has been the way language itself has evolved. Specifically, the way activist language has been misappropriated and weaponised against those seeking justice. In recent years ‘wokeness’ has become the spiritual successor of ‘political correctness’, transforming calls for social awareness and empathy into pejorative labels. It’s only predictable, then, that some of the biggest free speech advocates are figures routinely accused of racism, misogyny and transphobia. Former Tory MP Lee Anderson, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage and failed Mayoral candidate Laurence Fox are among the most vocal campaigners. All three claim that free speech in the UK is under attack; all three have also had reports of hate speech made against them to the police.

For writers, it makes sense that this hotbed of contradictions would make for interesting literary material. In Tell Me I’m Worthless, Alison Rumfitt gets at this in an unwieldy, breathless passage:

free speech, de-platforming, suing students for calling you a TERF, getting an OBE but still being silenced, getting a book deal but still being silenced, wearing a mask which says CENSORED but still being silenced, being the establishment and the anti-establishment too, all at once, the King and the revolutionary as well, the whole discourse cycle one long endless ouroboros sucking on its own clit.

There is indeed almost a masturbatory pathos to modern politics; free speech martyrs sacrificing themselves on the altar of cancellation. Tell Me I’m Worthless typifies this kind of persona through the character of Ila, a gender critical activist who is radicalised following an incident at a haunted house with friends Hannah and Alice. Ila is widely revered among anti- trans circles, a celebrity of sorts, and goes on Radio 4 to decry transwomen. (‘Sometimes in the worst moments I ask if the TERFs are right,’ Rumfitt writes in a section narrated by ‘You’, ‘because I’m a self-centred male monster and I want to be in bathrooms and changing rooms.’) It’s not hard to draw parallels to the real-life figures who bemoan their cancellation on every platform willing to give them airtime – usually the kind that, like Farage and Fox, would otherwise say nothing about the issues women face. All this is absurd, but Rumfitt knows it is absurd. It’s why horror is a genre that befits this kind of narrative so well; in the same way that the novel straddles digital and real life, it moves between lacerating satire and something uncannily close to today’s cultural discourse.

Another of the novel’s most admirable feats is the link Rumfitt draws between colonial Britain and modern-day fascism through the haunted house, Albion itself. Albion literally consumes Hannah – cis, white, straight – on that fateful visit with Alice and Ila three years earlier, an abject proclamation on who belongs and who ought to be kept out. But more than that: it’s an indictment of the economic divisions spawned by capitalism and how the places we live function as a literal reminder of this. ‘The most famous haunted places in the world tend to be the big houses and castles,’ Rumfitt writes, ‘because rich people lived in them and the collective blood on their hands.’

Housing – or rather the state of Britain’s rental market – is also a recurring theme for several other writers. Holly Pester’s The Lodgers explores the pitfalls of renting in a spectral novel populated by precariously housed single women, the group most disproportionately affected by Britain’s housing crisis. Pester’s doctrine for tenants even reads as explicitly gendered; ‘You must adapt and hide [your] needs rather than dig down,’ she tells us, ‘simply hover without much substance, meekly occupy.’ But if The Lodgers yields to the brutality of renting, then Ella Frears’ Goodlord – sitting somewhere between a soliloquised novel and a poem – finds its comedic value in the absurd. Both feel grounded by a similar poetic taxonomy – both Frears and Pester are poets by trade, after all. Both novels also look to expose the inequalities entrenched in renting. Ideas of privacy, consent and surveillance are tied up into broader discussions of bodily autonomy and property ownership, revealing how control (or lack thereof) over intimate spaces can expose our own fragility.

Oisín McKenna’s Evenings and Weekends occupies similar territory. At its least oblique the novel reads as a lament to fourteen years of Tory austerity, of which housing – and the sentiment of home – are a key concern. McKenna’s rotating cast of characters is anchored by Maggie and Ed, an expectant couple reluctantly moving back to their native Basildon from London. Their flat is described as ‘the best place [they’ve] ever lived. It’s also inhabitable. Both are true at once.’ Phil, meanwhile, lives in a warehouse where he and his housemates have no rights and no legal contract. It is all too ironic that the incumbent PM in the novel’s period setting of 2019 was Theresa May, who – for all her anti-migrant sentiment bolstered by her ‘hostile environment’ policy and accompanying ‘go home’ vans – could not guarantee her public the right to secure housing.

It would, of course, be neglectful to write an essay on the literature of Tory Britain without a mention of the NHS. Evenings and Weekends’ emotional climax arrives in the form of Maggie’s abortion:

She loves the NHS. She has choked back tears of gratitude during or after every medical appointment she’s been to for the past decade, and today is no different. She cries, thinking of the dream that every person deserves to be treated with care. She cries at the beauty of that dream and feels lucky to have lived a part of her life before the dream dies.
Oh sure. She is being nostalgic. But she’s entitled to her nostalgia, and to her free NHS abortion too. She’ll walk out of here today and she won’t pay a penny. She will be cared for and treated kindly, and no one will make her feel ashamed for being pregnant and poor at the same time. The nurse gives her a sympathetic look. She squeezes her hand. She thinks that Maggie is crying for the baby. She thinks these are tears of grief or regret or sorrow.
She’s right, to be fair. They are tears of grief as well.
She thinks of a statistic she recently read.
Since 2010, Tory austerity has resulted in 130,000 preventable deaths.

Though McKenna’s prose skews a little heavy-handed here, it’s still a point very well made. It’s also a moment that calls back to the novel’s throughline: how the financial crisis has exacerbated generational divides. For Phil ‘the idea of living in a place which felt like an actual home was such an abstract concept that he didn’t even consider it to be possible within his lifetime’. Maggie and Ed mourn the family they can’t afford to have. This is, as McKenna suggests, nostalgia – but also a yearning for a time not all of us can remember.

Although it would be easy to write off these novels as ultimately nihilistic, McKenna’s London amplifies the contradictory demands of city life – and what, against all practical reason, keeps us there. In a sort of flâneurian spirit, his characters amble around Hackney, Hampstead Heath, Deptford, Stratford and Waterloo; places many of us love and know well. Maggie charts London through its art world, ‘even though the demands of her full-time café job stamped that dream out years ago’. True, it’s difficult to survive – let alone make art – under the conditions McKenna maps out for Tory London in the late 2010s. But perhaps the most quietly humble achievement of Evenings and Weekends is the way it fosters hope; centring acts of interpersonal tenderness as the reason things must change and why we must keep telling these stories. As McKenna blithely puts it, ‘today’s queers have moved beyond the confines of the nuclear unit to imagine new and better models of kinship’.

What these might look like, though, isn’t exactly clear. McKenna shows us that romantic love need not be confined to monogamy; families can fall apart and come back together. But as for defying the material and economic reality of our present, literature can only go so far. In the move away from narrative foreclosure and didacticism, novelists these days are less keen to spell out what it is we should be aiming for than they used to be. The closest McKenna gets to this is having Phil text Maggie: ‘all I want is a corbyn government and a massive ass!!’.

To this extent, these novels are animated by a reactionary disillusionment. In the time that has lapsed between Evenings and Weekends’ period setting and today, the world has been rocked by a global pandemic, and seen Britain usher in four new Prime Ministers, one of whom was outlasted by a Tesco lettuce. Today, even without the Tories in power, novels like McKenna’s feel especially vital – especially at a time when the arts are chronically underfunded and undervalued. But this, if anything, proves the efficacy of literature; its power to inspire us to keep on going, keep on creating, even when there seems to be no point in doing so. Because if we don’t write about the past, then who will?
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Katie Tobin is an arts and culture writer based in London. She is a PhD student at the University of Durham, researching reproductive justice in fiction, and teaches English and Philosophy. Her work has also appeared in AnOther, Dazed, Elephant, Esquire, The Financial Times and Plaster among other places.