All that news happening, and nowhere to respond to it: what else to do than get writing?īut, like Smith, Jacobson realised that a straightforward mirror was not the best way to reflect the strangeness of the times: Pussy, despite a fairly unequivocal cover – a flaxen-haired and querulous-looking man, clad in a nappy and clutching a naked Barbie-type doll beneath his chubby arm – does not name the Donald, recasting him instead as a spoilt prince named Fracassus who spends his youth watching reality TV in a gilded palace. It was also, he recently told me and an audience at Jewish Book Week, the result of having, for the first time in 18 years, no weekly newspaper column to write.
Howard Jacobson, whose novella Pussy will be published in April, put aside the novel he had long been working on and rose at dawn for six weeks to articulate his astonishment at the election of Donald Trump. That doubleness – an ability to produce a novel so recognisably of a piece with her previous work, and at the same time a springboard into something new – is surely a clue to how any artist might be able to make a rapid response to new realities aesthetically viable.
At the same time, she was conscious of how the novel reflected her existing concerns, “about divisions and borders and identities”, and the uses, or abuses, of political rhetoric.
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Smith’s gaze fell on those Googling how to apply for an Irish passport, the graffiti of swastikas, the flag-waving, the disappearance of money, and the constant appearance of lines:Īll across the country, the country was divided, a fence here, a wall there, a line drawn here, a line crossed there,Īutumn was hailed as the first Brexit novel, and it’s certainly hard to see how anyone could have written one faster Smith has spoken of how, having embarked on the project, the dramatic unfolding of events forced her to petition her publishers for another month to deliver her manuscript. All across the country, people felt it was the wrong thing. Photograph: Antonio Zazueta Olmos Autumn was hailed as the first Brexit novel, and it’s certainly hard to see how anyone could have written one fasterĪll across the country, there was misery and rejoicing.Īll across the country, what had happened whipped about by itself as if a live electric wire had snapped off a pylon in a storm and was whipping about in the air above the trees, the roofs, the traffic.Īll across the country, people felt it was the right thing. “But I don’t know what I’m looking at.”ĭuring the course of the book, Burn quotes a novelist also known for his striking ability to metamorphose the everyday into the uncanny: “Given the unlimited opportunities which the media landscape now offers to the imagination, wrote JG Ballard, I feel we should immerse ourselves in the most destructive element, ourselves, and swim.” “I see what I see very clearly,” writes the novel’s narrator. But there are also appearances from those who might linger in the memory less concretely for those not intimately involved: “Super Smeato” – John Smeaton, the baggage handler who threw himself in the way of danger during the Glasgow attack Michael Barnett, who died from hypothermia after his leg fastened in a storm drain during the Hull floods Fiona Jones, the Labour MP and “Blair babe” convicted and later cleared of election fraud, whose alcoholism led to her early death.Įverywhere is detail, unstoppable, irresistible, kaleidoscopic. Here is an elderly, infirm Margaret Thatcher, walking in the park there is Tony Blair departing office and leaving Gordon Brown to deal with attempted terrorist attacks in London and Glasgow, a flooded country and an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease further afield, in a Portuguese resort, are Madeleine McCann’s parents making their stricken appeals for her return.