1Sarah Upstone and Peter Ely’s Community in Contemporary British Fiction: From Blair to Brexit gathers nine chapters that explore some of the new questions raised by the writing of communities over the last three decades. The volume’s wide range of references successfully delineates the dynamic interplay between communities in contemporary life and in contemporary writing. The three parts engage with a compelling variety of texts, genres and subgenres and set out new conceptualisations and interdisciplinary perspectives that will be of interest to 20th and 21st literature scholars.
2‘Rewriting Community in an age of crisis and nostalgia’, Ely and Upstone’s comprehensive introduction, expectedly opens with a reference to Tony Blair’s famous 1994 speech as newly elected leader of the Labour party. This starting point leads towards an exploration of the unsuspected disruptions and contradictions involved in communal living in Britain, as well as a detailed examination of the literary productions and experiments that attended to social and narrative variations. While there are few references to critical studies on the writings of communities in the 20th century (e.g. Martín Salván et al., 2013; Jiménez Heffernan 2013), the introduction does offer an in-depth presentation of the major theoretical references, from Benedict Anderson’s classic volume to Agamben, Derrida and Nancy, whose works are confronted to ministerial reports, sociological studies and the future-thinking perspectives of Ali Smith and others. The authors refer to historical events such as the 2001 riots, the Grenfell Tower fire and Brexit as significant challenges to community life; and if other social sciences—such as the social psychology of group membership or place-identity—may have bolstered the analysis of the politics of nostalgia, this substantial introduction does clearly set out the emergence of ‘neoliberal subjectivity’ (5) and the subsequent development of counter discourses, such as Sara Farris’ femonationalism (7). According to Ely & Upstone, this multi-layered and conflictual context prompted ‘the return of the writer as a public commentator’ (14), which also inspired critics to re-examine the complexity of popular cultures and their intertextual networks, while re-asserting the ‘field of literature as a distinct sphere of artistic activity’ (14) be it only because of its wide-reaching social and political implications.
3‘National Community’, the first part of the volume, shows how the expected tropes of national writings have been disputed by recent fiction. Chapter 1, ‘The Little Links Are Broke’ jointly explores the representations of nostalgia, fantasy, violence, despair and possibly warnings in three different novels, from three different subgenres, Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall (2018); Barney Farmer’s Drunken Baker (2018) and Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord (2020). After exploring the complicated representations of the English world view in ‘BrexLit’, Eaglestone’s conclusion posits that ‘no state-of-the-nation novel is possible’ (41) and that each novel’s ‘profound and painful nostalgia’ (41) might be read alongside Hannah Arendt’s comment that the ‘“visible and invisible thread” of society were severed’ (42). Chapter 2 offers a novel discussion of Northern Ireland’s ambivalent relation to colonialism through the prism of magic realism as a postcolonial genre (50). After redefining magic realism as ‘a hybrid mode’, Garden’s chapter invites her and O’Donnell’s and McGill’s readers to look beyond binaries and consider the ‘clouds of possibility’ in the writings of homes and domestic spaces before offering an elegant demonstration of how the individual adds texture to community memory (61) and writing. Chapter 3 opens on the dramatic demographic shift that took place in Scotland in the late 1990s onward and highlights the subsequent paradoxical attitudes towards communities, English colonialism and diasporic groups (67–69), and explains that while community is positioned as a ‘key thematic concern in Scottish literary representations’ (68), new literary strategies help reconsider ‘local and national communities’ (69). Baker’s paper relies on four texts: the first two revolve around rural communities while the last two are cosmopolitan fictions. This comparative method allows him to focus on human and non-human agents, revisit the notion of self-defined communities and highlight the difficulty and necessity of communal living involved in each text. As each novel offers its own triangulation of immigration, nomadism and settling, Baker’s reading of the importance and fragility of belonging along with his examination of community as a form of knowledge enable him to consider readers as ‘privileged denizen[s]’ (82), holding that the paradoxes of fractured communities can be uniquely addressed by fiction (83).
4The second part is entitled ‘Speculative Community’ and begins with Ely’s chapter on ‘Queer community in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet’, which invites us to think beyond the multicultural nationalism that developed in the 1980s and depoliticized communities through its exclusive focus on the multicultural dimension of Britain that failed to address the growing importance of ‘normative kinship’, the exclusionary rhetoric and the growth of state power (93). Ely’s convincing mention of the shift in the reception of Kay’s ‘Planet Farage’, from parodic to scary, leads to wider considerations on the exclusionary function of the nation-state (97), the bonds of anticolonial solidarity (99) and the ‘constitutive unrepresentability’ of the trans community (103). His thought-provoking references to Muñoz and Berlant (107) help him propose new readings of the disidentification at stake in Kay’s novel and poems alongside the ‘vital and unrealized paths for political renewal’ (107). The following chapter, Lusin’s ‘Community versus Commodity’, starts with the harmful effects of neoliberalism on communities (e.g. the pervasive loneliness, [115] or the gentrification [121–2]) and eventually shows how both Kae Tempest’s and Fiona Mozley’s London novels ask us ‘to imagine how things could be different after all’ (126). Quoting Fisher’s concept of ‘capitalist realism’, Lusin shows how Tempest’s ‘bone metaphor operates at the level of the unconscious’ (115), as characters in both novels ‘fail to reconnect with familiar landmarks’ (122). In Tempest and Mozley, communities, she argues, are linked to lived and shared spaces and eventually gather as ‘communities of protest [or] purpose’ (124) as both novels open up ‘imaginative ways of resistance’ (126). Campbell-Hall’s ‘Writing othered Asian British skins’ begins with the question raised by Newland & Ross: ‘Does the writer have a responsibility to their community?’ (131). As a response, he considers communities of writers, sharing subject matters, and suggests that Asian British characters destabilise the unhelpful categories of European domination as they reject exoticism and resist fetishization. Drawing from Ricœur’s theory of the ‘validity of fictional representation’ (133), Campbell-Hall delves into different experiences of multiculturalism ranging from the domestic to the political in order to concentrate on a selection of British fiction and poetry that writes brown skins as a location (135) and ‘a signifier of resistance’ (148) that is ‘read and interpreted’ (137), or as means of mimicry and camouflage and eventually provides a ‘subversion of orientalist discourse’ (148), which could also be used for the study of other contemporary poets like Raman Mundair, Suhaiymah Manzoor Khan and many others. Not only are the essays of ‘Speculative Community’ ‘united by their sense of alternative modes of communal identification’ (17) but they also shed light on the aesthetic innovations fostered by community authors and writings.
5The starting point of ‘Precarious Community’, the final part of this edited volume, is Shaw’s reading of how Jonathan Coe’s novel Middle England links the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony with Brexit. The emphasis on the anglo-centric dimension of the ceremony—with Coe’s characters watching it alone—sheds new light on the notion of imagined communities. The political correctness at stake in Elena’s response to the ceremony is intertwined with the ways in which Coe crafts ‘middle England’ as a site of dissatisfaction. Shaw’s scrutiny of the symbolic appeal of Brexit as a personal and communal salvation illuminates Brexlit as a new form of Pierre Nora’s ‘lieux de mémoire’ (171). Chapter 8 centres on Ishiguro’s dystopian Klara and the Sun—a novel that conveys the depiction of the loss of community, which, as Horton suggests, should be read against the backdrop of our present time. Horton further claims that the text reinterrogates the relationship between the post-human and the notion of community, a theme that has incidentally also been recently addressed by Groes and several others, showing the relevance of Horton’s reading. The centrality of the relational within post-human thoughts and the core-centred affective economy are seen as two key paradoxes of the social affects in the pandemic era (186) and the post-Anthropocene ecosystem binding the human, the robotic and nature appears as a complex community, even if, in the end of the novel, ‘ideas of community continue to shift towards disregard and individualism’ (192). ‘Even the Ghosts’, the final paper by Upstone is a creative piece or reflexive essay that prolongs her previous work on the ‘transglossic’ and beautifully evokes Lefebvre & Régulier’s ‘rhythm to objects’ (200) Derrida’s responsibility (201) or Nancy’s singularity (210) while offering close analyses on Sharpe’s writings on wake, haunting and ‘the inheritance of horrors’ and opening new perspectives on Moten and Harney’s ‘undercommons’ (208) and on ‘failure’s radical possibility’ by Halbertam for instance.
6The strengths of this edited collection are undeniable. Overall, its chapters are extremely coherent and the volume adopts an original and engaging approach that thoroughly shows the importance of a multi-faceted dialogue between contemporary fiction, communal thinking and literary scholarship.