Book Review | Journalist Solves Murder, Exposes State of World
Universality was on the Booker long list this year. Its one failing is that it’s a little too British
During the Covid lockdown in Britain, at an illegal rave party on the Alderton Farm, Jake Leonard bludgeons someone into stillness with a 400-troy-ounce — over 12 kilos — ingot of gold that’s worth upwards of half a million dollars. Then he takes off for parts unknown with the ingot, leaving behind several questions for the police, who tend to take lightly anything unrelated to the lockdown.
The cast of characters assembles quickly in the first third of the book. This is the story of what happened on the farm, entitled “A Fool’s Gold”, narrated by Hannah, a freelance journalist struggling to get by. To start with are the original owners of the farm, horrified by the crime-scene tape around the property. They had struggled to sell it and are now convinced the new owner is mixed up in crime.
Next up is Richard Spencer, speculator, present owner of the farm and the ingot, held culpable of breaking lockdown rules, and fined 10,000 pounds. He has been suspended from the stock markets while a possible scam is being investigated.
Next is conservative columnist, Miriam Leonard, ala Lenny. Jake is her son. Her book, No Mo’ Woke, a collection of her columns, has been a critical success. Hannah writes wryly of her chat with Lenny after Jake’s flight from the farm: “Apparently, the people who weren’t embarrassed to place No Mo’ Woke on their shelves didn’t, by and large, actually have bookcases.”
And then there are the Universalists, an essentially harmless fringe group of activists that took over the empty farm, led by someone calling himself Pegasus. Says a member, Indiya, “All these spaces — empty. It’s criminally wasteful, when so many people need homes.” At the end of Hannah’s article, Jake has turned himself in, legal processes are on, and the world is slowly turning the lockdown into the past.
The rest of the book is about the consequences of the success of “A Fool’s Gold”. From the flat that she’s moved into after her success, Hannah throws a little party for three friends, John, Martin, and Guin, from her university days. Under the strained politeness is the decay of friendship into disease that almost turns the party into a quarrel. The conversation wanders all over, from Buddhism to money, and even flirting with science. There’s talk of GenetIQ, a company which uses genes to predict the future of the owners of the genes. And, of course, here is what they think of Hannah: “When idiots like Hannah were the conduit [from science] to the everyday man, the ignorant were leading the stupid.”
Brown’s strength is the sharpness of her perception, which uses words as weapons to explore and use biases in her readers. She says in an interview that she wants to see whether language can be neutral in the context of 21st-century identity politics, and that exploration has given the world, in 156 tightly-written pages, a resounding “No!”
Universality was on the Booker long list this year. Its one failing is that it’s a little too British. Outsiders won’t enjoy it as much.
Universality
By Natasha Brown
Faber
pp. 161; Rs 1,436