By comparison to Endland,
Luke Brown’s Theft is an almost antithetical beast. In fact, it’s
dizzying to read the two books back-to-back while considering that they share a
publisher. Whereas Endland is absolutely fragmented — every story, every
scene, and nearly every sentence is a shard of an incomplete whole — Theft
prizes swift action, stylistic polish, graceful narrative movements. Where Endland’s
characters are really just caricatures, horrid and unbelievable, Theft
invests in pathos and three-dimensionality; and where Endland is
contorted by its own rage and despair, its bitterness and vitriol, Theft
is more nuanced, more guarded, if still pessimistic, in its assessment of what
ails today’s Britain. It’s also wry and knowing in its approach to the novel of
socio-political commentary. Its narrator is an aficionado of nineteenth century
literature, and, in a telling exchange with his flatmate, he laments his
lacklustre love life in the tone of an Austen aristocrat. Although his flatmate
chides him, “It’s not the nineteenth century”, he retorts: “It’s not not the
nineteenth century either”. Well, then, Theft is not not a nineteenth
century novel. That being so, what is it? It might best be described as
a novel of the present, dressed in twentieth century aesthetics, with a hope of
revitalising the disposition of nineteenth century liberalism for our febrile
political moment.
To be fair, beyond its references
to Dickens and the Brontë sisters, there are some technical ways in which Theft
is indebted to the nineteenth century novel. Foremost among these is its
intricate arrangement of characters representing various social and economic
strata with conflicting interests. Its narrator is Paul, a thirtysomething
part-time bookseller and occasional writer. Although he now lives in London,
Paul and his sister Amy are originally from Lancashire. Although, growing up,
they lived in a relatively deprived part of the country, they enjoyed
relatively privileged adolescences as the children of middle-class
professionals. Although Paul struggles with renting a room in a city
sharehouse, he and Amy, now orphans, have inherited their family home from their
parents, making them property owners. Although Paul is a property owner,
regional inequalities make the house an almost worthless asset for someone
anchored to the south of England. And although he clearly sees both the
opportunities and the misfortunes that have brought him to his current impasse —
single, nearly middle-aged, not gainfully employed — Amy will have no truck
with being a prisoner of fate: she is pregnant, planning a life of
independence, and has built up a property portfolio as an amateur developer. All
those althoughs are important. They reflect Paul’s multivalent position
in a range of demographic categories: regional, generational, socio-economic.
By way of this multivalence, Theft is able to construct a partial cross-section
of contemporary Britain using a limited cast of characters.
Of course this cross-section
expands as other characters enter the picture, although they, too, are
multivalent in a way that allows Theft to keep its cast reined in. The
narrative proper revolves around Paul’s relationship with an alluring young novelist
named Emily. Emily has left behind her own modest background for a more opulent
life with an older man, Andrew, in upscale Holland Park. Andrew is an historian
and public intellectual of some renown, and it is through him that Paul meets
Sophie, Andrew’s university-age daughter, together with her friend Rochi. Naturally,
sexual tension abounds. Will Emily cheat on Andrew with Paul? Will Paul sleep
with Sophie, betraying his friendship with Andrew? Sometimes, but surprisingly infrequently,
this tension evolves into sexual activity, so that Theft reads much like
a version of Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends (2016) centred
around older millennials rather than undergraduates. But more abundant than its
sexual escapades are the complications of its characters’ movements between
demographic categories. Despite her ideological commitment to Marxism, Sophie cleaves
to her haute-bourgeois entitlements. Rochi’s family’s wealth sets her
apart from peers with comparable immigrant backgrounds, and Emily’s literary
successes don’t relieve her of the fear that she is guilty of both class
betrayal and artistic self-debasement. In the charged interactions between
these few characters, Theft expands the scale of its initial demographic
cross-section, enlarging a socio-economic snapshot into a panorama.
There are other ways, too, in which Theft follows the nineteenth century playbook. It is replete with Wildean wit and repartee — when Paul’s flatmate tells him, “Your problems will not be solved by a woman”, he quips: “My problematic lack of a woman would be” — and the prose in general is crisp and vivacious, a little sardonic and a little satirical. The novel also carefully calibrates the conflicts between its characters, and the conflict within each of them, to make them pulse with moral potency. What of its moral outlook? Boilerplate Guardian editorial, unsurprising for a narrator of Paul’s bent: Britain has been debased by intergenerational exploitation, as millennials have been shafted by a variety of amoral Boomers: buy-to-let landlords, beneficiaries of the gig economy, and Brexiters. While it’s true that the narrative is sparked by literal thievery, when Paul steals one of Andrew’s books from the shop he works in, the novel repeatedly gestures towards a more nebulous type of theft, an existential type. This is the intergenerational theft of prospects, of social mobility, of security, and of hope — specifically the hope that, for thirtysomething millennials like Paul, one’s remaining years needn’t all be fed to a life of precarity.
Where Theft is least
impressive is in its efforts to anchor dramatisations of these concerns in
real-world settings. Probably in order to avoid awkward exposition, Brown ends
up relying on a sort of Zoopla shorthand to indicate characters’ relative
prosperity, name-dropping London suburbs as signifiers of accumulated wealth
and presumptive stability. Readers are simply expected to know what it means,
socio-economically and sometimes politically, for a person to live in Clapham rather
than Mayfair, or in Hackney, or to have moved into Dalston fifteen years ago;
or, indeed, for Rochi to say that her family lives in Kilburn, only to have
Sophie correct her by pointing out that her house isn’t really in
Kilburn. And, along similar lines, Brown opts for a form of verisimilitude that
sometimes looks like a collage of newspaper headlines. It’s not enough that the
narrative plays out against the backdrop of the Brexit referendum of 2016,
complete with references to specific events like Boris Johnson’s backing for
the Leave campaign. Some characters also end up re-enacting actual lives from
the daily news: Paul’s ex gives birth in her car while working as an Uber
driver, emulating the
Lyft driver who did the same thing, and Sophie’s travails are reminiscent
of a range of tabloid stories about pseudo-celebrities. While all of these qualities
make Theft very contemporary, even urgent, they also make it feel a bit
over-determined, especially for a novel with a down-to-earth premise that
doesn’t need to earn plausibility.
But where Theft shines
brightest is precisely where Endland goes dark: in its openness to
equivocation, to representing “how it was & is” without pretending to have
any real answers about why things are the way they are or, for that matter, how
to respond to them. Paul encapsulates this openness when he breaks his
first-person narration for a moment, perhaps to address the reader directly or
else to address the culture at large. As his colleague, Leo, latches onto him
and embarks on a monologue, he has this to say:
I’m a sponge for this sort of oration; men and women are always explaining things to me. [Leo is] saying something about Israel. I know I’ll agree with him, but not enough for his liking. He is so certain about everything. You’re all so certain.
Who, exactly, is implicated in that “you”? It includes, at minimum, all the other characters in the novel. Andrew makes waves as a metropolitan Remain campaigner who flatly disregards any reasons that regional voters might have for using the Brexit referendum to upset the status quo. Sophie lectures Paul on gender dynamics in working-class communities, righteously dismissing his anecdotes about growing up in one of those communities. Amy buys, renovates, and flips properties without any misgivings about the ethics of her behaviour, or its broader socio-economic impact, even as her brother bears the brunt of the housing affordability crisis. Nobody seems to slow down long enough to truly consider whether or not they’re doing the right thing at any given moment, or to consider whether they even have any idea what the right thing might be. Everyone steamrolls their way through the world, determining a direction to move in and then charging ahead at full speed. None of them allow themselves what is, for Paul, the only honest response to the conditions of the culture we live in: confusion, from which there follows ambivalence — or, again, multivalence — about any possibility of commitment to any course of action.
This situation plays out in
interesting ways in Theft. They’re interesting because they’re uncommon,
and also because they’re uncharacteristically hopeful for a book that otherwise
flirts with hopelessness. The situation looks something like this. Ours is an
age of political atomisation, and among the misshapen outgrowths of this
atomisation are the certainties of our culture — certainties about who people
are and how they behave. To dig deeper: there exists a wealth of socio-economic
data which can calculate the probabilities of various demographic political
leanings — data that is disseminated, in part, via the cultural reach of social
media algorithms — and yet these probabilities lead us astray in daily life. People
employ demographic generalisations drawn from data sets to make judgments of
others in face-to-face interactions, but because the data is not totalising,
and in any case can only calculate probabilities, any individual person
is bound to evade one or another data point.
The scene of Paul’s first encounter
with Sophie offers a stark illustration of this problem. Paul intrudes on a
private political discussion between Sophie and Rochi. When Sophie brings Paul
into the conversation and presses him on the subject of “male on female
violence being statistically high in poor communities”, she implicitly judges
him a misogynist because he is a man from a poor community. When he replies to
her with individual case studies rather than broad statistical measures,
sharing stories about the lives of other men he knew during his boyhood up
north, she berates him for not clearly particularising the circumstances and for
trying to present “an exception for everything” — in other words, for offering flesh-and-blood
outliers to statistically-supported demographic probabilities. But human lives,
as lived, are always statistical exceptions in some measure, on some
score. It would be an exceptionally rare individual who actualises every
probability from every demographic category into which they might be placed. Yet
we can’t see this if we go about our days relying primarily on data to inform
our raw impressions of other people — not least because, in doing so, each of
us risks limiting our own horizon of possibilities.
Paul senses this last limitation,
and repeatedly points to it. Sometimes he points to it in jest, for self-deprecation:
he jokes that, once evicted from his sharehouse, he’ll have no choice but to
“[m]arry a sensible woman from the Home Counties”, and, when pressed on where he’ll
find her, he says, “There’s this thing called Guardian Soulmates?”
Underneath his joviality, though, there is real concern about how closely his individual
trajectory might track his demographic probabilities, simply because he can’t
conceive of alternative ways to be:
I have always worried that I am destined to become my father. I am like him a white male from the north of England, small town, moribund, working class-cum-middle class, with books on the shelves, schooled in low aspiration in lessons and high aspiration at home, a reader, an autodidact, a would-be escapee.
There is a list somewhere of secondary-school English teachers with my name waiting to be added. If my father’s hadn’t been there already, if I hadn’t seen two graves filled, that’s exactly where I would be, and my life might have been all the better for it.
But Paul isn’t a teacher,
and doesn’t become one. Nor does Rochi necessarily hold her demographically
probable opinions on trickle-down economics. Nor does Emily exhibit the class
condescension suggested by her current socio-economic status, especially in
matters of sex. Nor does Tony, an acquaintance of Paul’s, accept any part of
the identity he might be expected to hold as an underprivileged black man from
northeast London. As Paul learns from Tony’s brother, Tony has begun populating
his Facebook page with
videos about the problem with Islam and feminists and Jeremy Corbyn and the Guardian. He was all in favour of Brexit, and Donald Trump’s election campaign, and this was regarded by some people as such a strange look for a black man that he was frequently accused online of being a white supremacist, hiding behind the profile photo of a black man.
Tony’s beliefs are sincerely held,
if inculcated by propaganda, and the more he is expected to conform to his own
demographic probabilities, the more determined he is to escape them. Whatever
one may think of his individuality, he is an individual and he will not
be contained in a data set or reduced to data points.
So what happens when one resists,
or even shakes off, the habit of orienting oneself toward others using the
expedient crutch of data? Theft doesn’t answer that question, but it
enacts one possibility as Paul — embodying radical uncertainty — watches the
received narratives of our culture dissipate.
One of these narratives holds that
people, especially millennials, can be nice without being acquiescent to
their own disadvantage. Although Paul initially affects an air of niceness, and
appears to have done so for a long time, he comes to see that his conciliatory
attitude and his wit are, at best, coping mechanisms for his loss of hope, and,
at worst, fig leaves for his inability to assert his own self-worth: “I had
maintained a positive attitude for the last ten years and it had kept me afloat”,
he says. “But no longer. I could feel myself shifting to a new way of seeing
things” — a more sceptical way, with more empowered effects.
At the same time, another narrative
holds that Paul’s interests are inextricably, irresolvably at odds with those
of the generations above him, and he also breaks with the absolutism of this
notion. “By we I refer to [the booksellers’] customers, our milieu, not
to me and my friends”, he says, distinguishing himself from an upwardly mobile
clientele whose members support the Remain campaign because they benefit
economically from the cheap labour of EU migrants. But then, he admits, he and
his friends “do not feel the distance we probably should from our wealthier
associates. … We secretly hope that we are down-at-heel members of the same
group; we suspect our interests are aligned; we may become like them one day.
We. Me. Who am I kidding?” But, despite their economic incompatibility,
the popular successes of the Leave campaign end up uniting these divided
parties and, importantly, they lead Paul to cast his lot with his
generational adversaries: “Though tense, the atmosphere in the shop has even
become a bit happier than usual. People are animated. They sense the approach
of something they won’t like; it’s exciting.” Because there are no convincing answers
readily available to any problem in everyday life, there is no single-value
position to be taken on any given issue. Everything, for Paul, is a
half-measure, and taking half-measures is the most authentic, most humble way
to be.
In a roundabout way, then, Theft
wants to present a vision of civic commonality for the twenty-first century.
This would be a commonality defined not by the menacing presence of a mutual
enemy, but by the day-to-day, person-to-person, face-to-face negation of the
zero-sum divisions that our culture supposes are encoded in demographic data,
and by a sloughing off of the prefab identities that data sets would confer on
each of us. The positing of this strain of civic commonality — which must be
worked upon, laboured over, nurtured in the fine grains of momentary
social experiences — is what makes Theft finally so different to Endland.
The roots of each book are tangled in the soil of similar cultural concerns,
concerns about the elite exploitation and degradation of the politically
disenfranchised, but while Endland accepts the status quo
wholesale and exacerbates the worst of it, Theft encourages us to
acknowledge it, all the better to lift our gaze and look beyond it in our daily
doings. Brown’s novel doesn’t simply make a plea for greater humanity in civic
life, for more civil interactions at street level; it also lives its
humanity — it is temperamentally humane — in its efforts to rescue human
vulnerabilities from the moral certitude we swim in. If it is less
aesthetically experimental than Endland, it is also not so beholden to
the tyranny of an absolutist political outlook. It’s more open and more free — more
at ease with its own being, so as to offer its readers the liberty of
responding to it provisionally, or partially, or even contradictorily, true to
the multivalent state from which it speaks.
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