Universality by Natasha Brown review – a fabulous fable about the politics of storytelling

The Guardian

23-03-2025

Miriam Leonard, AKA Lenny, one of a tight core of characters at the heart of Natasha Brown's terrific second novel, would probably dislike Universality intensely. Then again, she might love it, because an unpredictability of opinion is her stock in trade: a newspaper columnist who has recently sashayed from the comment pages of the Telegraph to those of the Observer, her views on class, race, sex, the economy and, latterly, the iniquity of diversity, equity and inclusion programmes are uncompromisingly held and vociferously broadcast, but only opaquely coherent. To keep moving is the trick.
Lenny is making a better fist of survival than many of those around her, with her exceptionally neat formula for wooing readers, which involves alighting on a news story and making 'a lofty comparison': 'Obscure elements of European history are best, but a Russian novel or philosophical theory can be just as effective.' Certainly, she is faring better than disgraced banker Richard, cast out of his shiny-paned City office and his home in the Surrey stockbroker belt after a long read in which he has enthusiastically and, it turns out, foolhardily participated goes viral; the piece's author, struggling freelance journalist Hannah, is briefly propelled to something approaching professional and personal respectability but finds herself similarly becalmed once the click-frenzy moves on. And neither of them would want to swap places with Jake, Lenny's desperate and ne'er-do-well son ('a mass of wild hair, shambolic clothing and lifelong unaccountability', she thinks grimly as she once again pushes him away), or with Pegasus, the aspiring communard whose utopian dream has irretrievably fractured.
Hannah's piece, A Fool's Gold, forms the first section of Universality, its tone, vocabulary and contours immediately familiar to anyone who's read a newspaper or magazine in the last decade or so. An apparently outlandish story – in this case, a lockdown rave at a farmhouse that ends with someone stoving in another's head with a gold bar – mutates into an exercise in journalistic detection and deduction that showcases the writer's ingenuity while also allowing them to suggest broader sociopolitical themes. A touch of personal involvement is a given: 'Nothing at the supermarket can beat the warm, frothy taste of unpasteurised cow's milk, ladled fresh from the milker's bucket', writes Hannah of her bucolic upbringing adjacent to the now-desolate farm; it's not much of a spoiler to reveal that her memories are entirely invented.
But A Fool's Gold takes more significant liberties with the facts, and the extent to which that matters is teased out over the course of the novel's subsequent sections, in which we encounter a broken Richard, weeping on his suburban doorstep, meet Hannah's friends at a truly appalling dinner party in Edmonton and follow Lenny to a literary festival in which self-regard oozes from the marquee's pristine flaps. Brown is a talented satirist, for sure, and her commitment to contemporary detail is impressive, whether she's sketching the self-congratulatory informality of shepherd's pie and dusty Malbec bottles in a middle-class kitchen or the shuttered high-streets of London's less fashionable margins.
Among these settings, the zeitgeist's big topics abound: the obsolescence of political tribalism, the superficiality of a turbulent media landscape, the rebranding of once-vilified theories of genetic inheritance in the name of science. As Hannah unconfidently roasts a chicken for her horrible friends (an Alison Roman recipe, the book's notes tell us, in itself funny given Roman's much-shared recipes), John breezily talks about 'meatspace alignment' while basking in his own intellectual superiority: 'Of course reactionary outrage was preferable to admitting ignorance. He was glad he'd found other, better, sources of information. The books, blogs and podcasts that would follow the science wherever it led, even if – fuck it, especially if – the end result wasn't woke. A fear of facts was holding the country back. He looked into Hannah's dull, unthinking face; the inadvertent herald of western society's decline, stupidly chewing an olive.'
Brown's debut, Assembly, was equally compact and similarly capacious, and it earned her a place on Granta's list of the best young British novelists in 2023. Here, she zooms out from Assembly's tenser focus to present us not merely with a portrait of a society painfully and unproductively turned in on itself but with an incisive exploration of the power dynamics of storytelling, in which it's never entirely clear who has the upper hand, nor indeed why they want it. As a reader, you probably wouldn't trust any of them.
Universality by Natasha Brown is published by Faber (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply