Reading The London Magazine and Seeing America's Trumpist Future

 Yes, politics may be too much on my mind. Reading Katie Tobin's essay Tory Britain’s Literary Post-Mortem from The London Magazine leaves me with two thoughts.

First, is in my title: that what I am reading what the Tories did to Great Britain is what our conservatives, especially the MAGA crowd, will do to this country.

‘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.

This paragraph is where I really started thinking about the Tories and MAGA:

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.

 Now for my second thought, where are the American writers corresponding to the English novelists described in this essay?

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?

 This is a story beyond me. I was in prison for most of Obama's Presidency and all of Trump's. All I know of the country outside of federal prison is the aftermath, not its causes.

sch 9/7