Apologies for the radio silence on the blog: the year has gone awry… This is a slightly tidied up version of the paper I gave at the Uses of Literature conference on 3-5 November 2021. It is still a work in progress, in all respects, but the ‘class’ element might usefully be read in conjunction with (or even against) the forthcoming special issue (294) of Vector on ‘SFF & Class’, for which I’ve written a guest editorial. The ‘comfort read’ part is something I’ve recently become interested in as a by-product of thinking about self-reflexive writing, which started me thinking about different types of reading (in the knowledge that ‘critical reading’ as taught in my discipline is not in itself the solution to all problems or even any of them). The ‘Break-up of Britain’ part is another long-term obsession, but particularly relates to a different, earlier version of this paper given at the British Association of Contemporary Literary Studies (BACLS) What Happens Now? (WHN) Conference on 2-3 September 2021. Alternatively, feel free to skip all of this and just read the last section of the paper on M. John Harrison’s brilliant novel, The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again (2020).
The Break-Up of the English Class System as a Comfort Read
Nick Hubble
Introduction: The Dunkirk Mentality
Last year during the early days of the Covid pandemic, during a period in which we now know that the UK Government and Local Authorities had resigned themselves to hundreds of thousands of fatalities, there was a kind of uncanny familiarity to what was happening. For example, half the car park at our local hospital was barriered off to install a field-station portacabin straight out of the film, 28 Days Later. I found myself recalling a passage from J.G. Ballard’s The Wind from Nowhere (1962):
They had the Dunkirk mentality, had already been defeated and were getting ready to make a triumph out of it, counting up the endless casualty lists, the catalogues of disaster and destruction, as if these were a measure of their courage and competence. (57)
The uncanniness of the situation was due to the recognition that we, in Britain, found ourselves living within a version of one of the most dominant and persistent postwar British genres, the ‘cosy catastrophe’. According to Brian Aldiss, in the classic form of this genre – John Wyndham’s 1951 novel The Day of the Triffids for example – ‘the hero should have a pretty good time (a girl, free suites at the Savoy, automobiles for the taking) while everyone else is dying off’ (Aldiss and Wingrove 2001: 280). But other versions, such as those written by Ballard have been darker in tone. Over the years, the form has attenuated to something more similar to the zombie apocalypse, such as 28 Days Later or The Girl with All the Gifts, but the basic idea still has a key place within the British, or perhaps we should say English, imaginary.
The reason for this became blindingly obvious during the pandemic when everyone with a house and a garden and a professional job that could be done from home had an opportunity to feel like the hero while others, disproportionately those poorer or from BAME backgrounds, were dying off. In this respect, the pandemic was just a more intense version of what has passed for normal life in Britain since at least the 1970s. This was something I realised during the pandemic, In other words, ‘cosy catastrophes’ are not so much a popular cultural form as social realism in the class-based unequal country that I live in, where the heroes do get to have a pretty good time while everyone else is slowly dying off.
Putting the Inequality in Social Inequality
Of course, one might argue that, to a greater or lesser extent, all countries are affected by social inequality. However, what distinguishes England from many other European countries, including Scotland and Wales, is that it is ruled by an ideology that values ‘inequality’ above the ‘social’. As Margaret Thatcher famously said in 1987: ‘There’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.’ Therefore, in England it is possible for Boris Johnson to say repeatedly of Covid that he wants to ‘let it rip’ – a policy which has now been followed in England since 19 July 2021 – and retain popularity because a big enough percentage of the population are primarily motivated by defending their position as cosy heroes in the slow catastrophe that has always characterised the country.
What Tom Nairn (1977) called ‘The Break-Up of Britain’, which should be understood socially and psychologically as well as territorially, has been ongoing since at least the 1970s, as I noted in The 1970s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction, while summarising the argument of Raymond Williams in Towards 2000 (1983):
What had been Britain was no longer ‘a whole lived order but a willed and selective superstructure’ merely sufficient to maintain the necessary level of social and economic order for the international market to function (191). (Hubble 2014: 44; quotes within quote from Raymond Williams, Towards 2000 (1983)).
This transformation had been very sudden. During the years 1977-8, the Gini coefficient measuring income inequality reached its lowest ever level for British households, the number of Britons living below the poverty line also reached its lowest ever level, and social mobility peaked (Beckett, 409-10). At that point in time, Britain was one of the most socially equal countries in the world; one of the most socially equal countries the world has ever seen. It’s a measure of how fast that was unravelled, that Williams was already bemoaning the destruction of the social-democratic values of postwar Britain only a few years afterwards. However, concentrating on the destructive effect of Thatcherite neoliberalism obscures a less intuitive insight, which is that this mid-late 1970s period of social equality and social mobility was itself destructive to the postwar British social order. The result of everyone no longer knowing their place led to chaos and existential angst as reflected in what is arguably the most significant condition of England novel written in the 1970s, Margaret Drabble’s The Ice Age (1977):
Not everyone in Britain that night in November was alone, incapacitated, or in jail. Nevertheless, over the country depression lay like fog, which was just about all that was missing to lower spirits even further, and there was even a little of that in East Anglia. All over the nation, families who had listened to the news looked at one another and said, “Goodness me,” or “Whatever next,” or “I give up,” or “Well, fuck that,” before embarking on an evening’s viewing of colour television, or a large hot meal, or a trip to the pub, or a choral society evening. All over the country, people blamed other people for all the things that were going wrong—the trades unions, the present government, the miners, the car workers, the seamen, the Arabs, the Irish, their own husbands, their own wives, their own idle good-for-nothing offspring, comprehensive education. (59)
I don’t have time for a reading of this fascinating novel [but hopefully in a longer version of this piece, in which I will have space to be slightly more nuanced about it than I am here!] but it is basically a beautifully written, impeccably middle-class liberal version of Heart of Darkness which latently expresses absolute horror at the very idea of working-class mobility and the decentring of its own narrative voice from a position of unquestioned privilege (but in a very polite and liberal way). A related version of the same reaction to equality and mobility – but coming from a different political perspective – can be seen in Eric Hobsbawm’s 1978 article in Marxism Today, ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted’, which bemoans the collapse of the male-centric, cloth cap and football ‘common style of proletarian life’.
Contextual Continuity: The Strange Afterlife of ‘The Common Style of Proletarian Life’
But although that working-class structure of feeling might no longer be dominant it still remained a residual component of English social and political life into the 2010s as can be seen from the instance of ‘Len’, one of the subjects of James Hinton’s account of seven lives from the contemporary (post-1981) Mass Observation project. Despite widespread belief that Mass Observation skews unrepresentatively left and liberal, three of Hinton’s subjects including Len turned out to have been UKIP voters at one time or another. Hinton describes Len as representative of people who hated both the social liberalisation of the 1960s and the economic disruption of the Thatcher years (despite often benefitting financially from then in the long run) and therefore ‘felt themselves and what they stood for marginalized, excluded, and politically unrepresented’ (Hinton 2016: 93). To summarise a long history in a sentence, the process of industrialisation was so gradual in England, dating back into the 18th century, that the subordinate condition of the working class became a second nature. As Hinton suggests, Len can be ‘seen as a man who had internalized a narrow and life-denying subaltern consciousness’ (Hinton 2016: 108).
But didn’t the 1945 Labour Government and the establishment of the Welfare State change all that? Well, no, obviously not and, arguably, they even entrenched a rigid English class system which might otherwise have broken down earlier. This is not surprising because as David Edgerton convincingly demonstrates in The Rise and Fall of the British Nation (2018), the defining feature of the emergent British state of the 1930s and 1940s was nationalism and the resultant ‘actual post-Second World War United Kingdom was in some ways better prefigured in the programme of the Tories and the British Union of Fascists (BUF) than that of the Liberals or the Labour party’ (xxxiv).
All of which led to Brexit and the otherwise inexplicable public support for the current Johnson-led government happy to see hundreds of thousands of people die rather than compromise British values, which are actually the values of the English class system, leading to the existence of what we can now call ‘Brexitland’. Sobolewska and Ford (2020) put Brexit largely down to hostility to immigration but while that was undoubtedly a key factor, I think the cultural roots are deeper. Moreover, despite the 52:48 ratio of the vote, Brexit does not represent a straightforward divide in society but rather the kind of process by which a fundamental incompatibility splinters apparent unity into a multiplicity of difference. Brexit, like the covid-pandemic, was an example of the type of event that punctures illusions of order and rationality. The best way to try and comprehend such events is through the type of fiction that constantly reminds us that what we fondly take for real life IS usually an illusion.
And in many ways, the fiction that does that in England is that persistent form of the ‘cozy catastrophe’, especially in its less-cozy variants as developed by 1960s New Wave sf writers such as Ballard. In retrospect, Ballard’s 2006 novel Kingdom Come is uncannily prescient of the political landscape that emerged in England following the 2016 EU referendum with its vision of a future dominated by competing psychopathologies and a rapidly emerging English nationalism, rooted in a nostalgia for a Fascist past that was never actually manifest but (as Edgerton shows) certainly latent within the British State that was formed in the 1920s and 1930s.
Ailsa Henderson and Richard Wyn-Jones’s Englishness: The Political Force Transforming Britain (2021) demonstrates how this English nationalism became hegemonic in a spectacularly short space of time:
In 1992, people in England described themselves as British rather than English by a ratio of 2 to 1. That is no longer the case. By 2011, data from both the FoES [Future of England Survey] and the BSAS [British Social Attitudes Survey] show that those in England are more likely to describe themselves as English. (38)
This surge of Englishness drove the surprise results of both the 2015 General Election and the 2016 EU Referendum. Ballard never lived to see this happen but the success of campaigners in transcending conventional political wisdom by linking cultural/identity concerns to material concerns in a way that persuaded voters to accept a nationalist response constituted what was in effect a Kingdom-Come-style revolution (or perhaps it should more accurately be labelled a counter-revolution).
It is therefore unsurprising Brexit has provided rich material for one of the remaining major New Wave writers, M. John Harrison, in his 2020 novel The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again – a title which is simultaneously ironic and a proclamation of the imminence of the millennium.
The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again
Fifty-something protagonist Shaw is going through a ‘rough patch’ (3) that isn’t really a breakdown but ‘too late to be a midlife crisis’ (5). His desultory relationship with forty-something Victoria satisfies neither so she leaves London to take on her late mother’s house in a town in the Severn Gorge in Shropshire and he moves to a new bedsit ‘in a quiet suburban Badlands between East Sheen and the Thames’ (5-6). On the one hand, this dual structure allows Harrison to satirise both the contemporary suspension of life in a London where everyone is ‘someone else’s subtenant’ (7) and in a provincial Midlands town, which Victoria variously describes as ‘very Brexit’ (60) and ‘very English Heritage’ (97).
Shaw sells print-on-demand copies of a book called The Journey of Our Genes, which is a badly compiled cut and paste selection of varied sources, which hints at a strange divergence in human evolution incorporating a kind of fish people. As he admits to Victoria, ‘It’s not really a job […] it’s what everyone has these days’ (188). Through a series of weird encounters and transactions with the would-be entrepreneurs of ‘the abandoned high streets of the post-2007 austerity’, Shaw uncovers a sub class of Thatcherite middle-class-proletarians, the products of the break-up and ongoing recalibration of the English class system:
Their real obsession lay in the idea of commerce as a kind of politics, expression of a fundamental theology. They had bought the rhetoric without having the talent or the backing […] denizens of [1980s] futures that failed to take, whole worlds that never got past the economic turbulence and out into clean air, men and women in cheap business clothes washed up on rail platforms, weak-eyed with the brief energy of the defeated, exchanging obsolete tradecraft like Thatcherite spies. (32)
These people really do exist in England. Despite the fact that many of those who had their own shops and businesses in the 1980s, have ended up operating out of their garages or spare bedrooms in the 2010s, they still voted for Brexit and the promise of free trade. Harrison transcends satire by showing the logic of this system in the absence of any other source of meaning. This world interconnects with Victoria’s experience of the middle-aged builders renovating her mother’s house and the various dealings she has with people whose entire value systems are purely calibrated to transactional gain and yet also think that they are ‘the future now’ (121) in a society in which ‘now everyone will stand a chance’ (121).
This novel more accurately represents the current condition of England than anything else – in terms of the collapse of the common culture – that I have read fictional or journalistic or sociological. However, while it is very funny and pointed, it is also by turns whimsical and endearing, linking back to the nineteenth century fiction of Charles Kingsley and evoking even pastoral feelings; in short, it is ALSO a comfort read. While Harrison reveals our present as a ragtag of flotsam and detritus left behind by the ebb tide of the break-up of the class system over the postwar decades, the text is nonetheless littered with generally affectionate references to phenomena such as ‘behaviour from the fifties and sixties’ (10), ‘ABBA in 1979’ (100), ‘a Virago book cover in 1982’ (112), ‘Olga Korbut’ (119), and ‘horrible [club] nights in Lewisham in the 1990s’ (221). The temptation to just go with the flow is almost irresistible. It’s almost as though readers are being challenged to abandon pretensions to taste or intellect and just immerse themselves in the car-boot-sale nostalgia and garden-centre social sphere of contemporary English culture.
But then that is the challenge. It’s not that the English are going to be able to reform their way out of the catastrophe and back to a common culture supported by state institutions and a stable class structure. But what they might do is learn to live with that catastrophe in a different way to seeking simply to survive it heroically while others die around us. In being a different kind of cosy catastrophe and a different kind of comfort read, The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again is able to be a different kind of condition of England novel, which seeks to break the tyranny of the temporal frame of a present forever orientated to its immediate industrial past, and open up possibilities beyond a Ballardian consumer fascism in a wider landscape of the imagination. In this respect, one of Victoria’s dreams presents us with a vision of a possible future beyond the break-up of the English class system:
She was to understand, Victoria knew, that she was seeing a future. People had found fresh ways to live. Or perhaps it wasn’t, as far as the [Severn] Gorge was concerned, a future at all, only an intersection of possibilities, unconformable layers of time, myths from a geography long forgotten or not yet invented. (108)
And how is this landscape accessed: through the ‘familarity, generic commonality, even predictability’ (Felski 2008: 5) of … comfort reading.
Works Cited
Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove, Trillion Year Spree, House of Stratus, 2001.
J.G. Ballard, The Wind from Nowhere, Penguin, 1974 (1962).
Margaret Drabble, The Ice Age, Knopf, 1977.
David Edgerton, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, Allen Lane, 2018.
Rita Felski, Uses of Literature, Blackwell, 2008
M. John Harrison, The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, Gollancz, 2020.
Ailsa Henderson and Richard Wyn Jones, Englishness: The Political Force Transforming Britain, Oxford UP, 2021.
James Hinton, Seven Lives from Mass Observation: Britain in the Late Twentieth Century, Oxford UP, 2016.
Nick Hubble, ‘The Ordinariness of the Extraordinary Break-Up of Britain’
in Hubble, McLeod, Tew (eds), The 1970s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction, Bloomsbury, 2014.
Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain, New Left Books, 1977
Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford, Brexitland, Cambridge UP, 2020.
Prospective Cultures 