This week, whenever I’ve gone for a morning walk, I’ve taken a tennis ball with me. Usually the ball stays in the living room, next to my desk, to be kneaded, tossed, and bounced whenever I’m stuck on what to write next. The only thing it does not, nor will ever do, is the thing it was actually made for: to play tennis. Now, each morning, the ball goes on an impromptu safari, the envious dogs of Paddington Recreation Ground straining. What I am fighting, during these walks, is the desire to reach for my left pocket, tilt my head slightly, and check the latest CENTCOM updates, TLAM stock estimates, or whether the Assembly of Experts have announced the next Supreme Leader of Iran. In other words, to monitor the situation.

I’m clearly not alone. A cursory search reveals an array of tools dedicated to monitoring the situation with a latency and granularity that normal news services cannot hope to match. My favourite is ‘monitor-the-situation.com,’ a site built around a live map of the world – in dark mode, naturally –not dissimilar to that in the 1983 nuclear techno-thriller WarGames, or the pre-mission cutscenes in the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series. Zoom into the Middle East, where the war between Iran, Israel and the US is about to enter its second week and there are orange icons tracking the ships and planes involved; yellow dots marking sites that have been hit by bombs or missiles; and green dots, for the more vanilla spots. On the top right of the map is a rolling ticker-tape detailing the latest prediction market betting odds. There is also a chat function, in which at the time of writing 798 situation monitors anonymously provide their own updates. ‘Dubai missiles have been hit,’ anonymous user Bold Ibis has just messaged. After a quick check of Flightradar24, Storm Ferret is quick to confirm the intel. Calm Ape, presumably in the Middle East, has other concerns: ‘where to buy gas masks.’

The group chat belongs to an august tradition. In De Rerum Natura, Lucretius told of the comfort of watching a ship founder from shore, knowing it is not you drowning in the hold. The same impulse, he argued, applied on a grander scale: ‘It is comforting also to witness mighty clashes of warriors embattled on the plains, when you have no share in the danger.’ In Waiting for the Barbarians, Cavafy’s citizens monitor their borders, waiting for the barbarians — only for the horde to rudely take a rain check. In 1942, Stefan Zweig, perhaps the twentieth century’s greatest situation monitor, put it most starkly: ‘What occurred thousands of miles away leaped before our eyes in pictures. There was no protection against being constantly drawn into events; no country to which one could flee, no quiet one could purchase.’

Reading the novelists of the Second World War, the default response does seem to be a sprint to the extremes . There are the firehose drinkers: the situation monitors par excellence, who in their attempts to live at the speed of events, end up consumed. Waugh has a neat line in these figures: in Put Out More Flags there’s the spiv and scoundrel Basil Seal, desperate for a commission worthy of his world-historical station; or Sword of Honour‘s Brigadier Richie Hook, the one-eyed psychopath and leader of men, who, desperate to biff his way to Berlin, biffs his way instead to an early grave. Then there are the head-in-the-sand types: who ignore the world entirely before it crashes through the ceiling in the form of an SC250 or V2. My favourite of these has to be the eternally hopeless Guy Pringle in Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy: a British Council lecturer and casual spy who stages ever-more ambitious plays as the Axis armies march ever closer and all of his friends begin to mysteriously die.

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Perhaps my favourite of the anti-situation monitors is the family in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September, published in 1929 but set during the Irish War of Independence. The novel takes place in Danielstown, a country estate in County Cork. Its inhabitants resemble less the figures of a high literary romance than the dinner party guests in Carry On Up the Khyber, busy passing the port and sharing reminiscences about Pune as the residency is blown to smithereens around them. Here the goings-on are of a less bawdy variety: tennis, teas, and dances, as well as an enjoyable will-they-won’t-they as the niece of the house, Lois, tees things up nicely with local British officer Gerald, all whilst the IRA are busy burying guns in their gardens. The logic is simple: narrow your gaze, live a ‘life with the lid on,’ and you might just be saved from the obvious outside your front door. ‘Are you sure we will not be shot at if we sit out late on the steps?’ one of the characters, in a rare moment of self-knowledge, asks. The entire family laugh in response. The gong goes for dinner. Such distractions in the end don’t help them. Gerald gets a bullet, and the house burns down.

Bowen herself was a much cannier figure than the inhabitants of Danielstown, and perhaps the twentieth century’s best example of how to live through history without being consumed by it. Born in Dublin in 1899, her father’s breakdown brought her to England seven years later. Here she spent most of her life, save regular trips back to Bowen’s Mount, the family seat that formed the inspiration for Danielstown. Like most of the Anglo-Irish of her generation, she never really knew a time without the pull of history. By World War II, she had become a professional situation monitor, working for the Ministry of Information to draft confidential reports on Irish neutrality.

You might expect from her, then, the kind of neuroticism that punctuates Zweig’s later work, or the chat feed of Bold Ibis and Storm Ferret. Instead there is something rarer: a weaving together of the personal and historical unmatched, in my opinion, in twentieth-century literature. Bowen’s fiction has often been denigrated as domestic miniaturism — ‘the moral intransigence of the interior decorator,’ as Elizabeth Hardwick once enjoyably put it. But Bowen herself knew what she was doing. ‘I am, and am bound to be, a writer closely involved with place and time,’ she wrote in a preface to The Last September. ‘For me these are more than elements, they are actors.’

The first example I’ve already mentioned – The Last September, or Carry on up The Country House – admirably dispatches the head-in-the-sand impulse. The second of her three tier-one novels, the ‘pre-war’ Death of the Heart (1939) turns its aim directly on the firehose drinkers. A teenage girl called Portia moves in with an emotionally stilted set of relatives, seeking to cope with an admittedly tough start to life by observing the minute detail of the world around her. It is a novel filled with illicit observation: from Portia’s own monitoring of her hosts the Quaynes, to her betrayal at the hands of her aunt, who finds and reads her diary. Most importantly — for those of us who find ourselves reaching for the tennis ball — Portia’s observations make absolutely no difference to her fate. The Quaynes still don’t want her. Her love, Eddie, still betrays her: ‘in that full sense you want me I don’t exist,’ he tells her plainly. The world is indifferent to her attention.

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Yet when the situation seems bleakest, the need for monitoring most urgent, Bowen comes up with the goods. In 1944’s The Heat of the Day, we get Bowen’s thesis on how to live through history, and survive it intact. It’s an unusual spy novel: there’s no dingy office, not dead drop, nor cut out, nor any real sense that Stella Rodney, a love-triangle trapped spook, is in physical danger, even when taut psychosexual duels are interrupted by bombs splitting buildings in two with a ‘cataracting roar’. The characters simply pause for breath before continuing their scene.

Bowen’s insight is that in dangerous times, those who separate personal and the historical will be forced to choose. Her lover Robert Kelway, both a traitor and a bore, is so desperate to feel he is meeting the moment he betrays his country, ending up in a dive from a roof. His loathsome family, locked in isolation in a grand country house, are helpless to post a letter properly, let alone intervene and save their doomed son. Stella’s achievement is to refuse the choice. She understands that in moments freighted by history, escape is fanciful. We exist in the world, and when the world vibrates at a higher frequency, we can’t help but catch the energy. As she puts it in the best paragraph she ever wrote:

“There is no such thing as being alone together. Daylight moves round the walls, night rings the changes of its intensity, everything is on its way to something else — there is the presence of movement, that third presence, however still, however unheeding in their trance two may try to stay. Unceasingly something is at its work. Even, each beat of the other beloved heart is one beat nearer the destination, unknowable, towards which that heart is beating its way, under what compulsion, what — to love is to be inescapably conscious of the question. To have turned away from everything to one face is to find oneself face to face with everything.”

Stella’s battle, and ours, is not to fight the energy but to channel it: to turn consumption into something better. When Harrison, a counter-intelligence agent, tells her that her lover is a traitor, Stella keeps her counsel. She does not investigate, does not confront, does not act. But monitors, at arms length: her strategic detachment keeping her intact.

Bowen took her own advice. Her other major wartime work, 1945’s The Demon Lover, is a collection of short, strange stories, many of them ghost tales in the Henry James tradition. In these the successful characters channel their anxieties into their selves, their relationships, and lives. The unsuccessful either bury them completely or become obsessives. Either way, they are doomed. When it was published, Bowen was asked to provide a postscript. ‘During the war I lived,’ she wrote, ‘both as a civilian and as a writer, with every pore open.’ The resulting stories were less, as she put it, ‘war stories’ than ‘wartime’ stories — studies of the climate of the time and the ‘strange growths it raised,’ the product of treating a specific moment ‘more as a territory than a page of history,’ a moment of ‘lucid abnormality.’

She looked at history sideways: and as the world got stranger her work got stranger still. What she offers is neither the oblivion of the ostrich nor the compulsion of the addict, but a way to remain porous without dissolving. And, thankfully, a reminder that procrastination is not inevitable. Bowen’s output between 1929 and 1945 was extraordinary by any measure. All that, without a tennis ball.

Hi everyone,

Hope all’s well, and apologies for the gap in programming.

I’ve got quite a bit of new writing to share this week: on Saturday I was in the Ruffian making the case for bad behaviour as fundamental to intellectual life; and yesterday, in the New Statesman, on 28 Years Later, and the return of the English strange.

This month I’m also in the London Magazine, writing about the time New Labour invited Cameron Mackintosh, Richard Curtis and Stephen Spielberg to 10 Downing Street, and the show the trio came up with.

Today I thought I’d share something about an old favourite: Rumer Godden.

Thanks as ever, for reading,

Aled

When Martin Scorsese talks of films, only a few get the top shelf treatment. It’s not always clear what’s required to earn his admiration: try to draw a link between Ugetsu and Ashes and Diamonds, and you’ll likely come up blank. A few common threads do, however, recur when you press your finger into his lifelong Anglophilia. One is his obsession with the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. The other, with the screenplays and adaptations of novels by Rumer Godden.

There are two Godden adaptations in particular to which Marty keeps returning. The first is Powell and Pressburger’s 1947 psychological horror Black Narcissus. A band of nuns are sent to a mountain-top palace called Mopu in the Himalayan foothills, tasked with setting up a convent. The enormity of both their endeavour and their surroundings slowly but surely drives each nun mad. The second, Jean Renoir’s The River, came out four years later. It’s a coming of age classic, told from the perspective of a girl, who – like Godden – spent her childhood on the banks of the Bengal river. Marty saw it when he was nine. Later he would call it one of the most formative film experiences of his life.

It is rare for anyone to remember Godden at all. Go to the National Trust website for the house she worked from for much of her later life, Lamb House in Rye, and you’ll find her pipped to top billing by a more illustrious previous resident: Henry James. Fair enough. The second name is not hers, but E.F Benson. Reader, I’m going to confess I’d never heard of him. You have to do a bit more clicking around to finally find a mention of Godden who, in exchange for a cheaper rent, agreed to show any travelling Jamesians around once a week.

Born in Eastbourne in 1907, and shipped to India at six months old, Godden was the Raj orphan who wasn’t. The First World War dissuaded her parents from sending her back to England for fostering and boarding, so she grew up in Narayanganj, a town in what is now Bangladesh. After a brief spell back in England, she returned to India, set up a dance school in Calcutta, and began to write. Black Narcissus, published in 1939, was her first novel, followed by another sixty books written over the next forty years.

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The great creative period of her life was comfortably her unhappiest. Her first husband ran up debts, saddled her with most of them, and left. During World War II she retreated to India: a broke single mother, settling with her two daughters in a tiny cottage next to a lake in Kashmir. Soon after they arrived, the cook began to poison them, each day slipping opium, marijuana and eventually powdered glass into their food. Surviving this, she returned to England, married a civil servant (‘a nice, ugly man’ who would ‘do anything for me’ - a compliment I’d probably take) and settled into a rather disciplinarian writing career, in which she would alternate between novels and children’s books.

Godden’s great obsession was faith in times of crisis. We rarely meet her characters at their lowest ebb. Instead their faith is so full, it runneth over. In Black Narcissus, Sister Clodagh, leader of the nuns of Mopu, is confident of her abilities to shepherd her flock both wisely and well. In the River, twelve year old Harriet holds her belief that she can remain forever in the idyll of childhood so tightly, you almost believe she’s right. In In This House of Brede, Philippa Talbot, a senior civil servant about to take the veil, is almost giddily strident in giving away her earthly belongings to whoever will take them.

Then, with a flick of casual cruelty, the author takes it away. Sometimes it’s a death in the family. Other times it’s a lost love. Sometimes, as in Narcissus, it’s simply a move to new digs. A string is untuned, and away we go.

In Mopu the madness seeps in slowly, through ‘flimsy walls,’ and ‘thickets of silence,’ a place in which through ‘every crack the smell of the world crept in.’ The stolid Sister Philippa turns her garden of food into one of frivolity. Sister Honey starts fixating on the young children she’s tasked with treating. For Sister Ruth, it’s the swarthy local agent, Mr Dean, with his short shorts and never knowingly buttoned up shirt. ‘There’s something in the atmosphere that makes everything seem exaggerated,’ Mr Dean warns the nuns about halfway through the book, unfortunately far too late: the thin air and the sublime surroundings have already taken their grip.

True to how these things usually happen in real life, her characters’ trials are sneak attacks: against not the spiritual, but the temporal self first. In Narcissus Sister Clodagh returns to memories of a lost love, the event that triggered her to don the habit all those years before. ‘The first day I came I thought of him, the first time in years,’ she confides to Sister Philippa. Philippa blames Kanchenjunga, the mountain next door: next to something so old and timeless, what else is there to do but become time-struck? ‘He’s everywhere; before and about and in our house.’

In This House of Brede turns things up to eleven, with a narrative structure much closer that of Infinite Jest than one might expect. As soon as Phillippa Talbot enters the convent, time stops working in the conventional way. All we get is moment after moment of Sister Philippa’s life in the Abbey, structured according to the liturgical year. By the end we’re close to figuring out why Philippa took her vows. It’s the same thing that drove the other inhabitants of Brede Abbey to swap in their own secular lives for an eternal search for, as Augustine once put it: ‘the today which does not yield place to any tomorrow or follow up upon any yesterday.’

How should we respond to such moments – when an imperfect reality fails to align with perfectly laid plans? Godden helpfully gets one of the characters to just say it out loud, good and early. ‘There are only two ways to live in this palace,’ says the ever quotable Sister Philippa, ‘either ignore it completely, or give yourself up to it.’ Stick to the harbour, or ride out the storm. The destination, for the storm riders, is almost always humility: Sister Clodagh accepts her demotion at the end of Narcissus with a chastened sangfroid; Harriet understands what is lost, yet recommits herself to the river. Those who cling on are usually dashed.

In the years directly after Narcissus, her star rose. ‘A fine artist, one of the most accomplished of living English novelists,’ one reviewer wrote in 1952. Forty or so books later, all but the greatest diehards were burned out. Even Carlo Gebler, in a sympathetic review from 2000, found himself admitting ‘I cannot imagine she would find a publisher if she were starting out today.’

Today she finds favour with only three groups. There are the spiritualists drawn to the Catholic tinge of her later works (she converted at the age of sixty one); the children’s authors who still channel her (Godden’s greatest, and perhaps most devoted convert, is Jaqueline Wilson); and then, thanks in some part to Scorsese himself, the film-makers. For the rest of us, her stories of faith and salvation seem just a little dated, belonging to a lost world, swollen with faith, ever ready to be questioned.

While Godden remains very much out of favour, the narratives she loved the most: of ego against duty, certainty against humility, of what is demanded against what we want for ourselves – do seem to be making a comeback. In Wake Up Dead Man, it’s not so much the crime that Rian Johnson wants to draw our attention to, as the crisis of faith it precipitates. Conclave, the last Best Picture winner at the Oscars, is so on the nose I’m vaguely embarrassed to mention it. Godden would have dearly, dearly, wished, I think, to have written the Testament of Anne Lee.

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But such crises of faith no longer need to be spiritual in nature. As the man who wrote In This House of Brede’s narrative successor once put it: everybody worships. Perhaps my favourite TV show this year, Marvel’s surprisingly auteur-y Wonder Man, is the perfect study of an actor’s faltering faith in himself. He is driven mad not by the surroundings of Brede or Mopu, but the self-tape booths and smoky elote bowls of Hollywood. The lesson learned – to bend, not break – is the same too. The teacher is not God, but Ben Kingsley merrily playing a washed up thesp from Liverpool . ‘Get out of your head, stop processing, start enjoying,’ he extols to his faltering protege. Follow the ride, and you’ll probably be alright.

I suspect we’ll see more of this over the next few years, as crises of faith move from exception to rule. The story of the day for those who use our heads to put food on the table is that we are now on borrowed time. Give it eighteen months and we’ll all be subsisting off some combination of Substack posting and manual labour, or simply consigning ourselves and our progeny to a life within the ‘permanent underclass.’ On an even bigger canvas: that’s a nicely curated international world order you had there for the last thirty years. Shame if something happened to it.

In such a world the risk, Godden reminds us, is not usually the lack of a sense of direction, but rather too much. Sister Clodagh and Sister Ruth face the same wind, the same mountain, the same memories, and the same man. Yet one is able to sit with the difficulties of life with mystery. The other becomes, for lack of a better word, a doomer: someone for whom every strange development is merely further proof that catastrophe is inevitable. She’s certain she knows how the story ends. Why not get there faster?

Yet if you feel like you have the answer, Godden would say, you’re yet to ask the right question. As her often quite steely novels show, this is not as comforting as it might at first sound. There are no intellectual or spiritual shortcuts.

Halfway through Narcissus, the heir of Mopu palace decides to turn the tables, and tell the nuns a few truths. He starts with the most fundamental: ‘You have to be very strong to live close to God or a mountain, or you’ll turn a little mad.’ We might not live near God, but most of us now live within sight of a mountain. And so, as all of us try and fail, each in our own way, to will the world towards our own specifications, the ultimate seller of stories of contingencies may once again find herself with interested buyers.

Hi everyone,

This week, sharing something on 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (and the moon).

I’ve tried to keep it spoiler-free. I would say I’ve mostly succeeded. There are still a few minor spoilers (mainly about a scene, in a barn, that comes quite early on in the film), but nothing, I hope, that would detract from the viewing experience.

You can also read what I thought on the last film here.

Thanks, as ever, for reading,

Aled

One of the unexpected joys of parenting has been my reacquaintance with the moon. Thirty-three years had rendered it invisible to me. But it shines bright to my four-year-old. Much of the attraction comes from the frisson of rule-breaking that usually accompanies any sighting: see the moon, and it’s probably past her bedtime. Over the past few months I’ve regularly relented to her 7pm request for a quick walk (read: carry) outside, tiny fingers crossed that clouds have cleared, and we’ll be able to catch a glimpse of it.

But the moon is inconsistent. Some nights it’s there, some nights it’s gone. Usually I can just blame the clouds. But sometimes, after another failed viewing, as I curse the weather while clutching the frustrated Romantic in Huggies night-times, I’m not even convincing myself. The skies seem clear enough to me. I can see a few stars. Where the hell is my moon?

It’s a frustration shared, at least. Shakespeare first gave voice to our lunar frustrations. When Romeo pledges his love by the moon, Juliet requests a do-over: ‘O, swear not by the moon, th’ inconstant moon, / That monthly changes in her circled orb, / Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.’ The Romantics felt the same. The moving Moon went up the sky, / And no where did abide,’ lamented Coleridge. Shelley resorted to pleading: ‘Art thou pale for weariness / Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth... / And ever changing, like a joyless eye / That finds no object worth its constancy?’

Percy, I know how you feel. So do Alex Garland and Danny Boyle, who at some point clearly received the same instructions from their small children: behold the moon, and do it now. Their previous film, last year’s 28 Years Later, kept its gaze firmly at ground level — Britain, its land, and its inhabitants, with all their intricacies and irrationalities. The Bone Temple, the latest in the series, directed by Nia DaCosta, gazes in another direction: upwards.

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The film begins shortly after where we left the last one: young Spike, played by Alfie Williams, has been abducted by a gang of Clockwork Orange cosplayers led by Jack O’Connell’s Sir Jimmy Crystal. They’ve brought him to an abandoned water park, the enjoyably named Rainforest Rapids. He is to undergo an initiation, albeit one owing more to Deer Hunter than to the Bullingdon Club. He is to fight for his life before the hollow king, aloft a bright orange plastic throne. ‘No children allowed beyond this point’ a sign overhead reads. Only fake ones.

Elsewhere on the island, the catastrophe has become decidedly cosy. Dr Ian Kelson — Ralph Fiennes’ amiable eccentric, slathered in iodine woad — is planning an experiment. ‘Do you have memories, a trace of who you once were?’ he muses, plucking arrows from the body of Samson, an ‘alpha’ zombie who he shares a patch with, excellently played by Chi Lewis-Parry. Samson doesn’t answer. Can’t answer. Or can he?

The film’s comic relief comes from this unlikely pairing: part stoner comedy, part father-son bonding tale, merrily set to Duran Duran. We need it. You sense the first thing DaCosta did after reading the script was rewatch Come and See. The second was to figure out how she could inflict the same punishment not on the inhabitants of German-occupied World War II Belarus, but on those of an English pastoral.

This farmhouse massacre is the darkest scene in the franchise so far (one review describes it as 'the most harrowingly violent scene in a mainstream horror movie this decade'). It is also my favourite. The north-east of England, freed of modernity, is compulsively repeating its own history: as seen in the allusion to St Cuthbert when Spike’s mother, Isla, wades into the sea off Holy Island in the first film, or the invasion of the Norse-men when Swedish troops arrive on the mainland.

Now we go full Viking, invited to gorge on the flayed, skinned-alive bodies I used to marvel at during childhood visits to the York, Britain’s great Viking city, and all its gory visitor attractions. In the flesh, it’s no longer so funny.

That’s not, however, the reason I love the scene so much. It’s how it ends: a desperate act from a character to protect a mother and her unborn child with the only tool at his disposal: a gas canister turned flamethrower. It’s kept ambiguous as to whether he’s the father or not. Nonetheless, he keeps the tradition alive, doing what almost all the characters in these films do: dying for a child whose future they’ll never know.

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It’s that question: what parents do and don’t do for their children, that has become the franchise’s obsession. In the first film, 28 Days Later, this was just one thread among many. Brendan Gleeson’s struggle to get his daughter Hannah to safety is treated, for most of the film at least, with an equal weight to Jim and Selina’s quest to simply survive another day. It’s only in Garland’s tragic ending: the drop of infected blood in his eye, Gleeson’s realisation that he’s turned, and his final act of fatherly love — to push his daughter to the ground and offer himself to death immediately — that the writer, I think, discovers what his franchise is really about.

In The Bone Temple, the act of original sin, the whole reason this malign gang are spreading their pestilence through the Cheviot Hills, was Jimmy’s father’s failure to even attempt to save his son and family, choosing to say a few prayers instead. As he puts it during his first, phenomenal, encounter with Kelson, it’s all he can really remember of his past: ‘a great army’ of the dead, with his father ‘at the fore.’ 28 Years Later opens with this moment: a young Jimmy hidden under the grate, clutching an upside-down cross, wailing ‘Father, why hast thou forsaken me?’

Contrast this with Isla, Spike’s mother, played by Jodie Comer in 28 Years Later. When her illness worsens, it’s to memories of her father she returns. ‘Do you remember the first time you showed me the Angel, Dad?’ she murmurs in the film’s great monologue, a recollection of a childhood visit to the Angel of the North, the massive steel sculpture in Gateshead that has become one of Britain's most iconic landmarks, so vivid the line between her dead father and alive son ceases to exist. ‘How many hundreds of years have we fallen this time? Is it thousands or more?’

And so, through parental encounter after parental encounter, the true villain emerges. Not a person, nor a zombie horde, but certainty. In the previous film it was certainty about an imagined past, a tonic heartily imbibed by the islanders of Holy Island: outsiders are evil, zombies are zombies, the old ways were better. The certainty in The Bone Temple is internal. Who are we? And can we ever change?

Kelson is the man of humility, a shrug and ‘how interesting’ his default response to anything beyond his ken. Like any true Romantic scientist, he sees consistency not as a virtue but as a straitjacket. It’s why he loves the moon so much, spending much of his time (in true Romantic form) off his tits on opium, staring at the skies with his unlikely Eliza Doolittle beside him.

Jimmy is his opposite: a creature of certainty. His demonology is less about any higher power than the basest of coping mechanisms, a dogma into which all the world can fit — Adam Smith’s man of system with a psychopathic glint and a dodgy wig. A world of evil is at least knowable, after all. ‘Everyone knows old Nick,’ Jimmy tells Kelson. ‘Do they?’ he replies.

It’s why Jimmy, a man merely playing at childhood, so hates the real thing: children are the ultimate agents of uncertainty. Take the baby girl born in 28 Years Later to an infected mother. Is she human? Is she infected? Could she even be both? Or Spike, who impulsively brings his mother to Kelson, then refuses to return, choosing instead to travel cross country. It’s a credit to The Bone Temple that at its most heightened moments, we still genuinely have no idea what Spike will do next.

The fact the character’s dressed as Jimmy Savile, Britain’s most notorious paedophile for the entire film makes the point clear, but DaCosta brings subtler touches too. In the opening scene, as a character scrabbles for purchase on slick tiles while Sarabande strings play, Jimmy watching from his throne, you realise he’s cosplaying not only Savile but another great child-hater: Barry Lyndon, a comparison that becomes increasingly obvious as Jimmy’s bullshit schtick begins to crack. There’s nothing quite as repugnant as a child’s morality when combined with an adult’s certainty.

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There are, in this film, no real children available. Spike has already had his coming-of-age story. Kelson’s child, long dead, is nothing more than a photo on the wall of his nissen hut. What to do? Find a surrogate child instead. The relationship Samson and the good doctor share is already that of mine with my two-year-old son: checks for bumps and bruises, frequent negotiations to prevent something violent, and a sharing of the world in between The test Kelson sets for his charge is the ultimate one for any small child: say your first word.

Transfiguration is a difficult thing, especially on a six foot five behemoth. Dr Kelson does all he can, but in the end, efforts unrewarded, there’s nothing left to do but lie back and gaze at the moon. ‘Sleep well, Samson.’ Yet — like me and my four year old — when he gazes alongside Samson, they both see a different thing. And so the moon’s wayward nature, and perhaps all of ours, is redeemed. For after all, what is inconstancy, viewed from another angle, but serendipity?

In Chapter 11 of Mary Shelley’s classic, Frankenstein, the creature describes to his creator his first conscious moments. They are a confusion of pain and sensation. ‘I was a poor, helpless, miserable wretch; I knew, and could distinguish, nothing; but feeling pain invade me on all sides.’ What redeems him? What brings the first sparks of something different? ‘Soon a gentle light stole over the heavens and gave me a sensation of pleasure.’ Among the chaos one thing becomes clear: ‘the only object that I could distinguish was the bright moon, and I fixed my eyes on that with pleasure.’

Garland and DaCosta take this scene, and others, almost directly from Shelley — Samson even shares the monster’s fondness for wild berries. It is a reinterpretation truer to the text than many straight adaptations. Yet it comes with a twist. In their retelling, the danger becomes majesty, the ‘dim and yellow light’ of Frankenstein’s orb transfigured into the bright white glow of a Northumberland moon: our inconstant constant, both reminder and provider of uncertainty in a world sorely in need of it. Jimmy might be able to see the night skies. But the moon, to the last, eludes him.

There’s no better emblem for this, the latest in Boyle and Garland’s humanist horror series. Nor is there a better source of optimism. The challenge seems insurmountable, but even Samson had parents once; perhaps, just perhaps, able to reach beyond the grave one last time. After all, we have our children. We have our moon.

A second film haunts The Bone Temple: An American Werewolf in London. Like Samson, its protagonist is a creature transformed by the moon, a hirsute half-human caught between states. At the beginning of the film, the unknowing hikers, having arrived at Britain’s least friendly pub, quickly make their leave. Before they can get out the door, one of the locals pipes up. ‘Beware the moon, lads’. Thirty years later, we find ourselves with a perfect rejoinder. Beware the world without it.

Hi everyone,

Hope you had a great Christmas — and welcome to all new subscribers.

Enjoyably, I’ve been re-reading Nevil Shute over the break, so today I thought I’d write something about one of my favourites, No Highway, and the test pilots of the British aerospace industry.

Last week I also had fun writing this, on the wisdom of Home Alone, for the New Statesman.

Have a good one,

Aled

If modern aviation has a founding myth, it probably begins in 1946, over the Thames Estuary. Geoffrey de Havilland Jr is flying an experimental aircraft. He is named for his father, the engineer and designer behind de Havilland, one of Britain’s pre-eminent aerospace companies. The purpose of his flight is the same as most test flights of the time: to figure out how aeroplanes behave as they approach the speed of sound. It was dangerous business: in the years between 1946 and 1952, some 82 test pilots died. De Havilland Jr’s brother, John, had died two years prior.

We’ll never know if, as some argue on the stranger corners of online aviation forums, de Havilland managed to break the sound barrier on his final run. Or whether, as the British papers claimed and his father certainly believed, he became for a brief moment the fastest man alive. What we do know is what happened next. The DH 108 Swallow he was piloting vibrated itself to pieces, wreckage scattered over an area a mile wide. His body was found ten days later, washed ashore on a beach near Whitstable, clothes torn off, parachute pull ring untouched.

De Havilland’s name is now largely forgotten, but his death is not. The quest to break the sound barrier found a particularly devoted follower in director David Lean, who compiled his research into a notebook and handed it to Terence Rattigan, one of the most famous playwrights in Britain at the time. The notebook came with an instruction: write me a script.

In 1952 The Sound Barrier was released, a de Havilland-inspired tale of a test pilot pushed to death by his father-in-law in pursuit of supersonic speed. The film’s nerdy timbre has meant little of it survives in cultural memory bar its pivotal scene: a lightly fictionalised imagining of the death over the Thames Estuary, told from the cockpit. As the plane enters the dive, attempting to reach mach one, the vibrations begin to climb, those in the control tower watching on. The pilot’s gaze is fixed not on the windscreen but on the speed gauge: nine point six, nine point seven, nine point eight — willing himself towards the number ten. By the time he looks up, the ground is feet away.

Thirty years later, when Philip Kaufman adapted Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, it was this scene he turned to for his opening: the same cockpit view, the same gauge, but reflecting Chuck Yeager’s altogether happier outcome — a year after de Havilland’s final flight, he broke the sound barrier. And when Top Gun: Maverick began production, it was that same scene they turned to again, albeit bringing back the aircraft’s disintegration and making the gauge mean what it said this time: not mach one, but mach ten instead. De Havilland’s death, remixed for another generation.

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Lean’s attempt to memorialise the danger and drama of early British aviation has succeeded. The era’s most famous author has not. In the earliest days of de Havilland, when junior was not much more than a toddler, the company took on a young Oxford engineer called Nevil Norway. After a few years at de Havilland, he joined the doomed attempt to build a British airship, then set up his own aircraft company — ending up developing the trainer that most Bomber Command crews flew before being let loose on the Lancasters.

In addition to being the Forrest Gump of British interwar aviation, Norway was also a writer, publishing twenty-four novels and a memoir (of which, conservatively, 95% is devoted to planes and airships). For the world his novels inhabit, think Marvel, but with superheroes replaced by engineers, tinkerers, flyers, and builders — the inhabitants of 1950s Britain, teeth and all, using nothing more than their ingenuity and labour to pluck themselves out of obscurity, for a little moment at least. He’s mainly remembered today for two novels: On the Beach, a dread-tale of the last survivors of a nuclear apocalypse as they wait for the fallout to finish them off; and A Town Like Alice, a World War II romance that starts in Japanese-occupied Malaya, and is consummated, SimCity style, in an erotic burst of town planning.

Throughout his life, he treated his writing as something of a personal embarrassment, hence his use of his mother’s maiden name, Shute, instead of Norway, any time he did anything book-related (I’ll refer to him as Shute for the rest of this). Yet he became, quite comfortably, one of the best-selling novelists of the twentieth century, and certainly one of the most famous in the years following World War II. His novels found themselves adapted into Hollywood films (1959’s adaptation of On the Beach, starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, and an oddly convincing Fred Astaire, is the most well known), as well as setting regular records. His final book, Trustee from the Toolroom, published just after his death, had the largest first print run in UK history and spent five months on the New York Times bestseller list. Bar his two most famous novels, Shute is now forgotten.

Unsurprisingly, there’s hardly a Shute novel that doesn’t feature a plane in some form. There’s Round the Bend, in which a pilot sets up an early air-freight business and finds himself inventing a new religion along the way. The Rainbow and the Rose is a surreal tale of love and death from the biplane to the jet engine era. Even in Trustee, in which a mechanical hobbyist from Ealing makes his way to Tahiti to recover some diamonds, engineer Keith Stewart manages to stow away on a Douglas DC-6 freighter to Honolulu (’an unmitigated sheer delight‘) which the crew are more than happy to let him examine mid-flight.

The most successful of Shute’s aviation novels, however, is No Highway, published in 1948. Set mostly in the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, at that time probably the world’s leading centre of aerospace research, the protagonist is Theodore Honey, a researcher who discovers a defect in a passenger plane (the wonderfully named Rutland Reindeer) that threatens its airworthiness at a time when it forms the backbone of the nascent transatlantic route. The novel details Honey’s attempts, and those of Dr Dennis Scott, his boss (and narrator), to convince the powers that be — the government, the plane’s manufacturer, and its operator — that the fleet should be grounded before any more people die.

Of all Shute’s unlikely heroes, Honey might be the unlikeliest. A widower whose wife Mary was killed in 1944 by a V2 landing on their house in Surbiton, his affections now lie mostly with his twelve-year-old daughter, Elspeth. It’s difficult to dislike him: a true English eccentric who in happier times enjoyed long Sunday hikes, a spot of amateur photography, and regular morris dancing sessions, replete with ‘flying ribbons and little bells that jangled at the knee‘.

His colleagues, at the start of the novel at least, disagree, struggling to warm to the ‘uncouth little man‘, most famous within the team at Farnborough for his breathtaking ugliness (’he had a sallow face with the features of a frog, and rather a tired and discontented frog at that‘) and his mysticism — notably a belief that the world will end in 1994, when Jesus returns to his true home: Glastonbury. To Dr Scott, Honey is particularly irksome, regularly interrupting the buildup to the most important professional event of his life: delivering his paper, ‘Performance Analysis of Aircraft Flying at High Mach Numbers’, to the Royal Aeronautical Society.

Shute is rarely cruel to his characters, so you find yourself wondering why Honey gets it so rough. My read is that Shute’s playing a trick: putting distance between what Honey appears to be and what he really is. Not an engineer, but a successor to de Havilland Jr. An unlikely test pilot. You see, Honey’s worry about the plane is not actually borne out by any evidence. He simply has a hunch: that the metal at the plane’s tail will, due to its unusual design, fatigue after an oddly specific number of flying hours: 1422. There’s an experiment running, but it’ll take months to prove anything. His hunch, one that infects the entirety of the RAE, is science by faith alone.

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Honey, thankfully, survives his stint, but fails to obtain the necessary evidence. Not a problem. Dr Scott is convinced anyway. His gut is telling him something, and he’s in the mood to listen: ‘“Fifteen years in the aircraft industry,”’ I said. “One gets to know the smell of things like this.”’ And so he makes leap of faith after leap of faith, simply because of his belief in Honey and his thesis, despite having absolutely nothing by way of evidence.

At one point, as is common in Shute novels, Scott is asked for the answer straight: what makes him so sure Honey is right?

‘I could not relate the sum of tiny things that had built up my judgment, the strong hiking boots, the rocket thesis, the quality of his discourse upon automatic writing, his spartan mode of life, the beauty and intelligence of the women who had loved him. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve just got a hunch that he is right.”’

What makes Honey convincing is simple: he shows his working. On the Reindeer flight of horror he quite happily explains to two fellow passengers — a famous actress called Monica Teasdale and a stewardess called Marjorie Corder — how and why the tail might degrade, and if so, where they should sit to survive: the gentlemen’s lavatory. Upon landing at Gander airport, he fails to convince the pilot to ground the aircraft. So he sabotages the undercarriage himself. You don’t discover until the final pages whether Honey is right. But by then it doesn’t matter. We know Honey is right because we know Honey. A kind of perception now quite outdated: reading character as evidence.

At points the magnetism becomes farcical, Honey soon resembling Will Ferrell’s character in The Other Guys in his inexplicable attractiveness to women. Teasdale is so convinced by Honey’s mission that she flies straight back to London, relaying information from the man now stranded in Gander and helping care for Elspeth, who’s fallen ill — forgoing a ‘suite at Claridges’ for ‘cold meat and salad’ at Mr Honey’s rundown home in the suburbs. Shortly after, Corder joins them.

What does Honey give them, and us? What all test pilots give: someone whose conviction you can witness. It’s why, I suppose, their story keeps being rewritten. A world of wind tunnels and simulations is undoubtedly better than Shute’s, in which pilot after pilot was fed into a human meat grinder of progress. But there’s a power to watching a person stake themselves — to making conviction visible — that Shute understood. It’s why he wrote. Like Honey, he showed his workings: what went on behind the planes, this new untrusted technology, that he and his contemporaries were asking a reluctant nation to believe in.

Such faith is contagious. In the final showdown it’s not Honey or Scott but another pilot, Samuelson, who saves the day: scotching a credulous bureaucrat’s tale by making clear that, no matter what the accident report said, he knew his friend, the pilot on that flight, had not crashed of his own accord. Such faith bleeds into the planes as well. When asked to explain metal fatigue mid-flight, the analogy Honey settles on is that the tail is dying of old age. When, several months after the novel’s main events, his test tail finally breaks, Honey leaves to ‘view the body.’

This, I suppose, is Shute’s method. How do you trust something you can’t possibly understand? You show them the person who builds it. The leaps of faith that technology relies upon never stopped. They just went offstage — into black boxes we’re asked to trust but never see inside. Perhaps that’s what Lean, Kaufman, and Kosinski are doing when they return to that same cockpit scene, refreshed for each generation: bringing the leap back onstage. Showing us what we can no longer witness. All we need is a test pilot. Even the most unlikely one will do.

Hi everyone,

Thanks to all the new subscribers over the past fortnight — it’s great to have you here. I’ve now emerged from the National Archives (more on that soon) and am back at the laptop plough.

Over the past two weeks I’ve had essays published in two other places: in Works in Progress, on the existential crisis Swiss watchmakers faced in the early 1980s, and what their story says about human craftsmanship in a world that often feels it no longer needs it. And in the Metropolitan Review, on the phenomenology of Tom Cruise, and why in Mission: Impossible films, the villains have to Google things and the heroes do not.

Below, something on Knausgaard, Faust, and Glen Powell.

Have a great rest of the week,

Aled

In November 1974, John Stonehouse, the Member of Parliament for Walsall North, decided he’d had enough. Out of government, in dire financial straits, and battling to escape a past which we now know involved working as a spy for the Czech secret service, he flew to Miami, and vanished from the surface of the earth — the only clue to his fate being a suspiciously neatly folded set of clothes left in a beachside cabana next to what is now a Soho House. For a few weeks his disappearing trick succeeded, until a bank teller in Melbourne figured out that ‘Clive Mildoon,’ the man mysteriously depositing vast sums of money, was not who he said he was. Stonehouse was arrested, and brought back to London.

Today, the rogue MP is mainly seen as just another of those oddities that prospered in the strange, decayed politics of 1970s England. I confess to feeling a little more sympathetic. In fact, for most of the past few centuries, this does seem to be the default way to have escaped one’s problems. Get into debt, destroy a marriage, or do something even more shameful; not to worry, a change of location will solve most problems, if not forever. You could become the mayor of Middlemarch, lord of Patusan, or even seduce Lady Lyndon over a game of cards. Nor was political life a disqualification. In Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her?, after George Vavasor loses a by-election, breaks his fiancée’s arm, and attempts to murder her ex, he takes the only way out: a steamer to America. Punishment enough, in Trollope’s world at least.

This was the world Stonehouse wished he still inhabited, in which the impulse to disappear was not purely fantastical. In all fairness, he wasn’t far wrong. The only reason the canny assistant for the Bank of New South Wales checked in with her boss was that two weeks earlier another pillar of London society, Lord Lucan, had disappeared in the night. Lucan caught the boat, the MP for Walsall North missed his. Now, due to the terms and conditions of entrance into modern life, the boat no longer exists. The ability to jack it all in, up sticks, and become an entirely new person is essentially a fantasy. Nowadays, the change has to come from within, altogether a much harder task.

The world is better for it. Yet, what to do with all that unexpended desire? Use it to tell stories. Have Dick Whitman steal the identity of a dead comrade, travel to New York, and set up shop on Madison Avenue. Have Walter White start wearing a hat, shack up in a Fleetwood Bounder in the desert, and make it as Heisenberg. Rust Cohle keeps his name, at least, but he ran away from the rest of his life long before True Detective started. Even when it’s not meant to, the idea somehow finds a way in: on the official Succession podcast after Logan Roy’s death, Brian Cox let his pet theory be known: Roy had faked his own death, setting himself up for a ‘new life for himself somewhere in the north of Scotland.’ Every study of male interiority, it seems, must come with an escape rope attached.

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My favourite example so far this year is Glen Powell’s unexpectedly enjoyable comedy series, Chad Powers. Russ Holliday, quarterback for the Oregon Ducks, makes such a grievous error that his career is not just over, but any chance of a life in the public eye is gone entirely. Yet Russ must play football, and so joins a new team, the enjoyably named Georgia Catfish, as quarterback Chad Powers — literally cooking moulds and gluing on prosthetics each night, Phantom of the Opera (or Mulan, occasionally) playing, to build himself a new body and become a new person. As his coach puts it at the end of the first episode, channelling Heraclitus: ‘Life is a river, son. Tonight, you become a catfish.’

Fortunately for Powell, he now finds himself with a new ally: Karl Ove Knausgaard, who in The School of Night, the latest in his Morning Star series, returns to the theme of escape. This is ironic, given the previous three books in the series (all of which I loved) have generally done the opposite. Indeed, when reading them, you often feel the characters should be much keener to escape than they actually are. There’s Emil, the child-dropping daycare assistant who should probably take another role not only for his sake, but for Bergen’s children as well. Turid, a nurse who chases a patient into the woods, only to stare, transfixed, upon finding him being anointed by an ox-headed man. Run away, Turid! Or nineteen-year-old Line, who sleepwalks her way into a death metal concert all too heavy on the death and light on the metal.

Knausgaard’s Russ Holliday is Kristian Hadeland, a world-renowned photographer. Everything’s gone wrong for Kristian, and so he’s decided to escape, ditching his car somewhere near Bristol and doubling back to one of the remotest islands off the west coast of Norway. His job now, as island hermit, is to tell us how he got there.

Kristian is, as we are left in no doubt, very good at taking photographs. His secret, however, is that he’s had some help along the way. Knausgaard, unlike Powell, makes the source explicit: The School of Night is a Faust story: the first man to truly transform himself without needing to change his postcode.

Like Marlowe’s doctor who wowed the Elizabethan crowds, Kristian is a moody European who travels to London to charm, enchant, and devastate. His Mephistopheles is a cheerful one: a genial, if direct, drifter with a penchant for Norwegian speed skating called Hans, capable of delivering such lines as ‘your soul will become only grubbier and grubbier’ with an easy smile. Kristian himself is harder to like: a narcissist who mistreats his benighted parents, cheats on his wife with the casualness of habit, and matter-of-factly informs his four-year-old that death will one day come for him. It’s a testament to how much of a generational freak Knausgaard is as a writer that we never quite resent him. His narcissism, as we read, becomes our own. Plus, we know the fall is coming. Hans has told us so.

Kristian also has some help from other quarters. The novel is set mostly in 1980s Deptford, the grubby, haunted London usually reserved for M. John Harrison. It’s a treat to view the city through Knausgaard’s eyes. Guinness gets a mention (‘almost a meal in itself’) as well as other drinks (‘England was an instant coffee nation’), as does the ‘ear splitting screech’ that any good tube-going Londoner will know and loathe. There’s an Arthur Machen ritual played for laughs involving the boiling of a dead cat, ABBA gets a pasting at one point, and the only mention in literary fiction, to my knowledge at least, of the phrase ‘touching cloth.’

There’s something else that helps Kristian, I think. When Faust is retold today, writers generally take one of two paths. The first keeps things faithful: the protagonist gets something unearned. Think of the powers God bestows on Jim Carrey in Bruce Almighty, the pill Bradley Cooper takes in Limitless, or the abilities Remy the rat gives Linguini in his quest to wow the critics of Paris in Ratatouille (surely the closest we get to a happy Faust?).

Ratatouille aside, such unearned success is usually difficult to stomach. So the contemporary Faustian pact offers something different: not the ability to obtain talents or powers, but the chance to use the talents the character already has, usually after having had them taken away. No one can question, after seven seasons of Mad Men, that Don Draper is pretty good at writing ads. Nor, after six episodes of Chad Powers, are we under any illusion that Russ Holliday was not a world-class dual-threat quarterback before he put on the Powers prosthetics.

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In The School of Night, Knausgaard keeps things ambivalent. Hans gives Kristian a nudge here and there creatively, but towards the end of the book, when we see the entire sweep of his work, it’s clear that much of this is Kristian’s own. The only moment of true inexplicable intervention instead is, like for Don or Chad, is a literal get-out-of-jail card. The question then becomes a simple one: does Kristian deserve a second chance?

By the end of the book, it’s abundantly clear he doesn’t. Unlike Faustus, the undoings are firmly Kristian’s own: a heady desire to show off his own genius to those he hardly knows; and a gross inattentiveness to the only person he knows beyond himself. Hans is only there to, in a sense, provide one final last gift to Kristian, as he finds himself alone on his Norwegian island.

It’s at this point I should probably mention the last time we visited the island Kristian retreats to, or its real life inspiration at least. It’s in the fifth book of Knausgaard’s other major series, My Struggle. Here the character is not Kristian, but Karl Ove. A moment of infidelity leads to a phone call in the night. His wife Tonje is listening in. Their young marriage disintegrates. Karl Ove decides the only way to exit this catastrophiser’s dream is to escape. And so he leaves Bergen, catching a series of boats until he reaches Bulandet, the furthest island from the Norwegian mainland.

It’s not exactly hard to see why Knausgaard’s taken us back there. Two men, both at their lowest ebb, each with their own deals with the devil. Kristian’s we already know. Knausgaard’s is his attempt to write his way into a new life, regardless of the cost to the scores of intimates and minor acquaintances, each gunned down alike, in one of the great drive-bys of literary fiction. Whilst Kristian, we know, does not deserve his chance, Knausgaard, by the end of My Struggle, hopes we believe he does: the several thousand pages we’ve just read, his case for the defence.

I suppose that’s what keeps drawing us back to Faust each year, particularly in a time when the do-over is no more, and everybody, even Kristian and Karl Ove, have to leave their island eventually. We might not be able to pack it all up to some foreign shores, or do a deal with the devil to obtain powers beyond our own earthly limits, but that doesn’t mean change is an impossibility. That’s the good news.

The bad, as Knausgaard can’t stop telling us, is that such change, the internal kind, is so difficult to achieve. And even if you do - Chad Powers takes the Catfish to unprecedented success, yet when his deceit is discovered by his closest confidante, she tells him she wished he had killed himself - you probably won’t get thanked for it.

Most writers choose one or the other: the Faustian fantasy of transformation or the grinding reality of what it takes to be yourself with more skill. The best refuse to choose.

Our favourite family day out is the RAF Museum in Hendon. Just a twenty-minute drive up the Finchley Road is a lovingly curated array of the world’s most lethal machinery, a café, and a playground, all for free. It’s hard to predict children’s first memories, but if I had to place a bet on our two-year-old Henry’s, it’s probably the moment he first touched the Vulcan bomber in Hangar H3. The megaton-capable nuclear bomber, comfortably his favourite plane, hums with lethal energy, facing the corner of the shed like a naughty schoolchild from the olden days: Just William, if he’d jauntily turned Moscow to glass on a whim. Once or twice a day, even now, he’ll suddenly remember the encounter and mutter the same two words: ‘touch plane.’

A strange thing has happened with many of the agents of our nuclear annihilation: we have, somehow, come to love them. I remember visiting a nuclear bunker north of St Andrews as a child, joining a stream of underground pilgrims all eager to experience ‘Scotland’s most exciting visitor attraction.’ And at university, walking into the common room to find it commandeered for a screening of Threads, the 1984 BBC shit-scarer in which Sheffield is bombed back to the Middle Ages.

Among Britain’s nuclear artefacts, one stands above all others: Orford Ness, a ten-mile spit of shingle and rusted metal south of Aldeburgh. For the second half of the twentieth century it served as the proving ground for the nation’s comically named nuclear weapons — Blue Danube, Yellow Sun, Green Grass, Red Snow. Given its past, you might expect revulsion any time a visitor steps onto this strange bit of shoreline. Yet it has quietly become one of Britain’s most beloved locations.

The oft-cited moment of the Ness’s canonisation came in 1992, when W. G. Sebald, walking the Suffolk coastline, took the ferry over to the abandoned site. His brief passage about it in The Rings of Saturn (1995) is probably the closest thing the Ness has to a founding scripture: ‘The closer I came to these ruins, the more any notion of a mysterious isle of the dead receded, and the more I imagined myself amidst the remains of our own civilisation after its extinction in some future catastrophe… Where and in what time I truly was that day at Orford Ness I cannot say, even now as I write these words.’

With this moment of first contact, or so the story goes, the Ness was anointed. Sebald’s pilgrimage, together with the site’s general air of numinosity, has fated it ever since to be a sanctuary-cum-muse for Britain’s artists and writers. In 2012 one blogger described the Ness as ‘a kind of Tintern Abbey for the post-industrial Romantic.’ In a 2019 interview with Granta, Robert Macfarlane, the closest thing to a keeper of Sebald’s flame, went even further: ‘the Ness is atomic pastoral, a shattered sacrificial-ceremonial supermodern Stonehenge, a ritual space.’

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Anyone who has taken the ferry over to the Ness will recognise the distinct feeling that pulls us towards such sites. It is the grown-up version of Henry’s ever-present desire to ‘touch plane.’ Whether it comes from some buried prey impulse or from our unresolved awe at the fact that humans can possess this kind of power is almost irrelevant; the feeling is simply there, and it stays with us. Yet this truth, along with the happy accident of Sebald’s wanderings, often leads us to think it was always going to be this way: that Britain’s cultural left would always find their way to the Ness as if its ruinous charms were somehow inevitable. They weren’t.

Long before the Ministry of Defence acquired the land in the 1910s, Orford Ness had a touch of strangeness about it. In the twelfth century local fishermen supposedly caught a merman in their nets, whom the authorities briefly tortured before he slipped back to the sea. In the eighteenth century there were reports of a gigantic winged crocodile prowling the waters off the spit. When the MoD finally arrived, the rumours continued, though now with a slightly more earthly tinge.

In the 1930s it became one of Britain’s first radar development stations. After the war it passed quietly into the hands of the Atomic Weapons Establishment, the agency responsible for designing and maintaining the UK’s nuclear arsenal, which used it to trial key components of the British bomb: high-explosive lenses, electronic triggers and environmental stress systems. In the 1960s it also became home to Cobra Mist, an experimental over-the-horizon radar system that never quite worked for reasons no one has ever convincingly explained.

By 1993, when the National Trust acquired the site, those days were long past. Abandoned in the 1980s, the Ness had become a ruin in which the animals and birds that relied on its shingle, saltmarshes and stagnant lagoons butted heads with petty vandals, traffickers and drug smugglers bringing their product across from Antwerp and Rotterdam. Locally it was known as ‘Awful Mess,’ though the regulars of the pub opposite the Ness, the Jolly Sailor, presumably enjoyed the vast quantities of Dutch tobacco they were given as encouragement to keep quiet. A recorded interview with the first area manager recounts police Land Rovers racing across the dunes, the discovery of fifty kilograms of cannabis stashed on the beach, and threats from an organised crime group after he accidentally exposed a hare-coursing ring.

The site also came with a larger problem: what to do with the sixty or so testing vaults and ruined buildings that littered the shoreline, most notably the two strange concrete ‘pagodas’ - hardened concrete structures designed specifically to contain any accidental explosion that occurred whilst testing, looking more like a Neolithic take on a Han dynasty temple than any building in the contemporary imagination.

The obvious solution was to knock them down and turn the Ness into a nature reserve. It is the best-preserved shingle ridge in Europe, holding fifteen per cent of the world’s vegetated shingle and home to breeding avocets and lapwing, marsh harriers, and even a suite of nationally rare spiders, including the tiny jumping spider Neon pictus.

Yet others in the organisation thought otherwise. The National Trust already preserves the ruins of other centuries; why should the twentieth be treated any differently? Rather than smoothing out the site’s contradictions, they argued, the Trust should lean into them, even sharpen them. As Christoph Waltz said last week, paraphrasing Hegel while discussing ceviche, there can never be a whole without the contradiction. It is a line the architects, historians and managers tasked with the original site plan would have happily nodded along to as they set about designing their own North Sea dialectic.

The result was a plan to operate the Ness in a spirit of ‘controlled ruination,’ in which most of the island’s structures would be left to collapse naturally. Alongside this came two guiding principles. The first was that Orford Ness should be a ‘safe but not comfortable’ visit. The second was that you may not be the only person on the site, but you should always be able to feel as if you are.

Hence the Ness as it exists today for the roughly eight thousand visitors who arrive each year via Octavia, the Trust’s small ferry that carries twelve people at a time across the River Alde. Because of the lingering risk of unexploded ordnance, you cannot wander freely but must follow a marked trail. After several miles of trudging through the shingle you pass the Black Beacon — a slatted lighthouse with its top lopped off, once home to one of the earliest radio-navigation systems — and eventually reach the atomic weapons area, the Pagodas faintly pulsing in the distance.

Then you turn around and walk back to the ferry, pausing once or twice to take in whatever caught your attention on the way out. For me it is the atomic bomb that sits in one of the information huts. Acquired in 2004 after three years of negotiation, it is a WE177A, the UK’s workhorse tactical and strategic nuclear weapon until the shift to a sea-only deterrent. If, as hinted in the most recent Strategic Defence Review, Britain does eventually restore some form of air-delivered capability, it will be the lineal descendant of weapons like this that end up inside an F-35A. The Trust’s WE177A is, I think, the only intact example on public display in the country.

In a world of infinite distribution, retaining such a mystique requires something more imaginative than leaving leaflets in holiday cottages. In the years before the Ness opened to visitors, it became clear that the Trust, an institution more versed in the aesthetics of 1930s railway postcards than the post-apocalyptic sublime, would need some help. So they called on the artist Dennis Creffield, promptly dispatching him to the abandoned Ness, where he camped in a wooden hut and rose each morning to paint the landscape. It is lost to history how many surprised Dutch drug smugglers Creffield encountered at his easel, but the paintings remain, and still colour the Trust’s depictions of the Ness today.

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Where Creffield went, many more have followed. For decades artists, writers and musicians have been invited to the Ness with a level of freedom, access and institutional indulgence that is almost certainly unique within the Trust. In 2005 Louise Wilson was invited to collect and manipulate sound recordings from across the shingle, which were then played inside the Black Beacon. In 2012 Robert Macfarlane, along with jazz musician Arnie Somogyi, were given e-bikes, an ageing Land Rover and an off-limits access pass to plan a performance in the New Armoury Building. And this summer eleven artists were each given three weeks in a makeshift on-site studio.

All of this points to a simple truth: the Ness did not become beloved by accident. Its aura is not inevitability but an achievement, deliberately assembled through decades of choices. And this matters, because the real brake on nuclear power in this country has never been technological, but imaginative.

What makes nuclear technology, and nuclear energy in particular, such an outlier is that it remains one of the few general-purpose technologies with a distinctly national character. Computers, modern medicine and the internet have converged into broadly shared forms across the West: a laptop is a laptop, an MRI scanner an MRI scanner, and most people in Britain, France or the United States intuitively imagine them doing the same things for the same reasons. Nuclear power, by contrast, is still filtered through sharply divergent national stories.

France built an aesthetic of radiance and technological confidence, and from it constructed a grid that is 60 to 80 per cent nuclear at any given moment, powered by a fleet of fifty-seven reactors. Ireland, by contrast, treats nuclear as a dread taboo. Its closest analogue to Threads is Fallout (2008), a docudrama imagining an accident at Sellafield — a site that, by that point, produced no electricity at all — triggering mass looting within hours, the collapse of the Irish state within days, and the depopulation of western Ireland by the end of the month.

Britain sits uneasily somewhere in between, with a nuclear culture best described as neurotic: never anti-nuclear as such, just permanently anxious about it. In the 1980s this anxiety produced its most memorable expression: a televised demonstration of nuclear-waste flask safety in which a runaway train was sent hurtling at more than 100 miles an hour into a derailed wagon, before an invited audience of 1,500 guests seated in a grandstand and served fish and chips, politely applauding as the locomotive folded into twisted, burning metal on a test track in the Midlands. Today the same unease expresses itself in the laughably slow, finicky regulatory process that dogs any new nuclear project. Lord, give me nukes, but not yet.

Thus, I think the National Trust at Orford Ness may have stumbled upon an unintentional blueprint: a way of telling the nuclear story that fits more naturally with the British imagination. Embrace the contradictions rather than deny them, spare us the rictus grin at the despatch box, and let the strangeness speak for itself. The Trust’s focus has, for obvious reasons, been on Britain’s nuclear past. But why shouldn’t the same aesthetic apply to Britain’s nuclear future?

Such an approach has a longer pedigree than one might imagine. Many of the other sites in the Trust’s portfolio were themselves the spoils of uneasy victors in the European wars of the long eighteenth century. Too awkward, or too constrained, to build the monumental houses they felt were expected of them, many landowners reached for an alternative aesthetic: they built ruins instead. The follies of the Romantic and gothic imagination, from the ruined castle at Dinefwr to the mock temples of Stourhead, now stewarded by the Trust, are far closer to Orford Ness in spirit than we tend to realise.

Perhaps this is the aesthetic to which the next generation of nuclear power should aspire: not beautifully designed structures, but ruins from the outset, with the same acceptance the Ness teaches us — that Britain simply cannot build its monuments straight. Build the thing that looks slightly wrong, not just because it will be faster and cheaper, but because it will feel truer as well. Do that, and you tap directly into one of the deepest parts of the British operating system. From the seventeenth-century antiquarians who obsessed over Stonehenge and Avebury to the politicians of the 1990s who chose to build their monument to the millennium on a toxic disused limeworks in Greenwich, we go wild for a ruin.

And so, when the next history of British nuclear power is written, its most consequential moment may not be the development of the Magnox reactor in 1956, or the completion of the first PWR2 in 1985. It may instead turn out to be the decision by a handful of conservationists to turn one of Britain’s most foreboding nuclear sites into a place that can genuinely be loved. If institutions can choreograph tenderness for a decaying bomb lab, then it becomes easier to feel a little more optimistic about our ability to do the same for the future machines that will one day power this island.

In the end, politics will obey the feeling. And so, like the stewards of the Ness, that is where we should begin: with the small, childlike impulse to step closer and touch the plane.

This piece was first published by the Republic of Letters (June 2025).

In 2013, Roger Martin, a business professor at the University of Toronto, and A.G. Lafley, the freshly retired CEO of Procter & Gamble, published Playing to Win. The book, already a classic of business strategy, starts with a simple principle: most organisational strategies are not strategies, but simply a series of loosely bundled aspirations. True strategy is about choices: hard decisions, made each day, to chart one’s course. Make the right choices, and success will follow.

This is the book István, the protagonist of David Szalay’s Flesh, starts reading halfway through the novel. By then, he’s living in a country house just outside London; a mansion once owned by a man now dead. The journey to this point has been vertiginous. We first met István at fifteen, living with his mother in a flat in his native Hungary. A few years later, a chance encounter in a London alley landed him a job as a driver, the springboard to a life amongst the more monied tiers of London society.

Contrary to the mantra of Playing to Win, very little of this is István’s own doing. His life unfolds as the logical consequence of things that happen to him. That’s not to say the novel has no plot; it has plenty. Whilst for most of it István is present physically, he is not in spirit — wearing, I imagine, the same glazed-over stare I had this morning while unpeeling an orange and half-listening to a podcast. As Roger Ebert said of Barry Lyndon: ‘he is a man to whom things happen.’

It’s hard not to think of young Redmond Barry, the protagonist of William Thackeray’s The Luck of Barry Lyndon, perhaps literature’s greatest kept man. Flesh is, quite clearly, a near beat-for-beat mirror — both of the novel and of Kubrick’s film adaptation, to such a level I’d almost call it a retelling.

Barry is born abroad, half-kills a man, and finds brief purpose in a stint in the military before drifting into a life on the fringes of the London underworld. That, in turn, leads to a chance encounter with a lady of means, whom he marries after her husband dies. Together, they collectively leech off the estate belonging to her son, Lord Bullingdon (whom Barry hates), while raising a new son of their own (whom he adores). Eventually the stepson confronts Barry publicly. Barry gets swinging. And then comes the fall.

Replace the word Barry with István, and Lord Bullingdon with his modern incarnation, Thomas, and you have the plot in a paragraph.

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There is, however, one crucial difference: Barry Lyndon has plenty of agency. Like all great rakes, he knows what he wants, has a fair idea how to get it, and knows exactly who to ensnare along the way. István, by contrast, is rarely the ensnarer — almost always the ensnared. In any decent 18th-century novel, this would be fatal to his prospects, no matter how much wig and powder he wears.

But as Szalay cannily understands, the heroine of the marriage plot –the person both object and beneficiary of desire – is, today, just as likely to be a man.

The book’s opening is devoted to a teenage István’s grooming at the hands of the forty-something woman next door. A decade later, when he gets the job as a driver, it’s not he who seduces his boss’ wife, Helen, but the other way round: ‘you know I’ve got the hots for you.’ When taking a break from the wisdom of Lafley and Martin by the pool, it’s one of Helen’s friends who invites him to her bedroom, ostensibly to view a painting, before lying on the bed and deploying the time-honoured technique of female seduction: the very, very long pause.

In Ways of Seeing, John Berger’s classic formulation on the male gaze is set apart by its simplicity: ‘men act and women appear.’ Here, it's the other way around. Why that happens is an interesting diversion. My wife thinks István must be insanely good-looking, and either he never tells us, or, like Karl Ove Knausgaard in My Struggle, never even realises.

I’m reminded instead of a recurring Saturday Night Live sketch featuring Pete Davidson, in which he plays a character called Chad. In conversation, he replies to every question with a monosyllable, evincing zero interest, and the more passive he becomes, the more alluring he is to his female co-star. JLo. Jessica Chastain. Julia Louis-Dreyfus. No female celebrity was immune to Chad’s gormless charm.

You might think, at this point, ‘fair play to István!’ as he (quite literally) rides his way from Hungary to Holland Park. However, compared to the 18th-century women who came before him — by way of example, Richardson’s Pamela, Burney’s Cecilia, and Defoe’s Moll Flanders — he comes at things with a pretty hefty disadvantage.

Those heroines realised what the deal was, and so they schemed, charmed, and survived with their eyes wide open. István drifts upwards without ever noticing the price of admission. As a result, he never quite develops the rugged agency the protagonists of such novels usually rely on. Worse, he starts to believe the story others have built around him: proximity confused for authorship; comfort, for control.

Szalay’s kind enough to point us to the exact moment this happens. István is in his 40s: a property developer, rubbing shoulders with Tory grandees, and not yet having duffed up his very own version of Lord Bullingdon. His cruelly adorable young son Jacob tells him that he would like to be a fireman:

‘Okay,’ Istvân says, still smiling at him, and enjoying the fact that he knows very well that his son will not be a fireman, that he’ll be something more exalted than that. [...] he idly wonders what his son will be, what position he will actually occupy in the world. There seems to be no limit to what is possible there. And whose achievement is that, he thinks, turning off the light and slipping quietly out of the room, if not his own?’

And so, like Icarus with a Royal Oak on his wrist, comes the inevitable fall — rendered with a ruthlessness that would make even George Eliot, monster of the Floss, flinch. Cigars become vapes, which quickly become hand-rolled cigarettes, as István fast becomes yet another of the failed kept men of fiction: Gilbert Osmond, stuck in Rome, loathed by all around him’ Wickham, eternal scoundrel, reliant on Darcy’s dollar to make ends meet; or Joe Gillis, face down in the pool with three gunshot wounds in his back. ‘No one ever leaves a star.’

Where does István go wrong? The obvious candidate is hubris — but there’s more to it than that. He simply gets too comfortable: breathing a little easier than he should, forgetting to keep one eye on the emergency exit. Before he picked up Playing to Win, István would almost certainly have read another business classic, the memoirs of fellow Hungarian and ex-CEO of Intel Andy Grove about his time running the company. Grove’s lesson is also the book’s title: ‘only the paranoid survive.’ I am not mounting a defence of imposter syndrome, but as someone who has felt its grip: there is an optimum level, and that level is not zero.

Once you enter a mental world where there’s no longer any need to pack a metaphorical go-bag, a second thing happens: a life that was simple quickly becomes complicated. There’s a reason why one of Vanity Fair’s chapter titles is simply: ‘how to live well on nothing a year.’ The property schemes get bigger, and more and more money is skimmed off (with the help of an enjoyably Dickensian lawyer called Heath), until we’re circling £80 million in loans, several houses and dependents, and a growing list of people who each day call István to tell him he must to do something for them. By the inevitable crash, I almost felt a sigh of relief as, Lehman Trilogy-style, he trips from the tightrope.

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In other novels, relief might have come in one of two forms. The first would be that the protagonist, at the very least, enjoys it. But aside from a few nice watches (the aforementioned Royal Oak, plus a five-digit Rolex Submariner), a trip to the BMW Museum in Munich, and razzing around his country estate on a 300cc Polaris quad bike, there’s very little fun for István. They ski in Verbier; the snow is rubbish, and his son just wants to play Minecraft. His social life mostly consists of Conservative politicians, ranging from ‘lunch with Damian Green’ to a trip to the party’s largest annual fundraiser, the Black and White. I’ve actually been to this ball once, and Szalay clearly had a man on the inside. It is just as dire as he describes.

The other kind of relief would have been for things to get so bad that the protagonist is finally forced into a heroic act of agency. Unfortunately, István is so disembodied that whenever he tries to take action, it simply blows up in his face. This most enjoyably happens in Szalay’s version of the scene where Barry Lyndon gives his stepson a good duffing-up in front of English society: wigs slipping, feet sliding on the parquet floor, women screaming, as the assembled men try to stop Barry from choke-slamming Lord Bullingdon to the ground for a fourth time.

Here it’s not a country house but the Gagosian Gallery on Grosvenor Hill, and instead of powdered aristos, it’s the Foreign Secretary and his wife. Even when István’s agency is used for good, it backfires. Late in the novel, he saves another character’s life, as Barry Lyndon does in aiming wide in the post-parquet wrestling match duel with his stepson. István’s good deed, too, is inevitably and gloriously punished.

After reading Flesh, I found myself wondering whether there had ever been any successful kept men in the canon, and if so, what their secret was. I could only think of two, sitting at opposite ends of the spectrum.

The first is Bernard Samson, protagonist of Len Deighton’s nine-volume Game, Set and Match spy series. Samson’s method is to take ‘only the paranoid survive’ and turn it into an art form, though given his profession, and the people around him, this is hardly a surprise. His wife, and her family, are far wealthier than he is: a fact he treats with gross suspicion, regarding them and their riches in the way most in his line of work would regard a KGB spymaster, with a go-bag full of cash, fake passports, his dad’s old revolver, and a Swedish pilot on retainer in case his in-laws (who, again, he still married into) ever decide to make their move. A sentiment to applaud.

The other is Will Thacker, the benign bookseller in Richard Curtis’s Notting Hill, who adopts an approach I’d best describe as going full himbo, looking forward to nothing more than fading Hugh Grant-ishly into the background. It’s a life lived staring at the ground, with only a money-losing indie bookshop to add the tiniest bit of sand to the gears.

The story of Flesh might only, at first blush, provide useful tips to those firmly in the gold-digging business. But I’m not so sure. In an economy of outliers, where incomes can rise and fall like snakes and ladders, many of us will end up either keeping or being kept at some point. And in giving us a blueprint of what not to do, Szalay offers more of us than we might realise a survival guide of sorts.

Flesh also offers a useful counterweight — particularly for men — to the world of Andrew Huberman, stoicism podcasts, and the idea that books like Playing to Win can serve not just as business advice, but as blueprints for life.

István’s life is shaped not by strategy or optimisation, but by a seemingly random series of events. A neighbour’s fall. An IED that explodes. A stranger’s death, interrupted. An employer’s request, acquiesced to. A car crash he wasn’t involved in. The moments that mattered most were the ones he couldn’t really control. In truth, as Szalay rudely reminds us, very little of life is actually lived on purpose. Not playing to win, nor to lose — but never quite realising we’re playing at all.

By the end, he’s done enough living anyway, trading in his receipt- and can-strewn Bentley for an altogether simpler life. What’s left? Just a few old photos on a phone, to look at from time to time; Szalay’s version of the epilogue at the end of Barry Lyndon.

“Good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor — they are all equal now.”

If our eldest child, three, had a favourite word, it would be cosy. She likes it so much she uses it for everything. A collected pile of every duvet and blanket in the house is cosy; so is the tomato plant we bravely grew on a W9 balcony; even the pair of dress shoes I own, worn with such irregularity she simply calls them my ‘wedding shoes.’

My toddler, it seems, isn’t alone in her obsession. Cosiness is now everywhere. There’s cosy crime, best embodied by The Thursday Murder Club series. Cosy fantasy, the paragon of the genre being (I am not making this up) Legends & Lattes, a bestseller in which a band of marauding orcs jack it all in to open a coffee shop. Even the term that started it all, cosy catastrophe, is making a comeback: once used to describe the weak tea apocalypses beloved by the science-fiction writers of the 1950s, it equally applies to Ian McEwan’s latest, What Can We Know, in which horny librarians wait out the end of the world in the Snowdonia outpost of the Bodleian library.

With literary fiction now having fallen, only one genre has held out: the spy novel. Traditionally, it’s been a particularly inhospitable environment. Read any Le Carré (sample quote: ‘love is whatever you can still betray’) and you’ll soon conclude that happiness is the surest path to ruin. Deighton starts out better: we meet Bernard Samson, happily married, and with two adorable children. By the end of Berlin Game his domestic bliss is shattered, his wife having defected to the KGB. Even Bond isn’t spared. In No Time To Die, the producers might have whipped out the soft focus lens and given 007 a child, but he paid an exacting price for it: nobly eating a Royal Navy destroyer’s worth of missiles.

But what if the turn was hiding in plain sight? Open any Slough House novel, and take the usual tour - through the grimmer corners of the Barbican into the beige, flaking, job-centre décor of the eponymous office itself - and you’ll hardly feel cosy.

Yet the argument can be made. The books themselves are surprisingly picturesque: by now the Slow Horses have completed a grand tour of Britain’s best - chases through snowy Welsh villages, massacres in deep Derbyshire, and brawls with football hooligans on the grounds of a country estate. Plus, whatever the calamity, things usually settle back into some semblance of normality. Jackson Lamb, unwashed and happy, returns to his desk; whilst Diana Tavener, queen of MI5, and grubby politico Peter Judd are both back safely ensconced in one of the nicer parts of West London.

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In Herron’s new Slough House novel, Clown Town, it’s as cosy as it comes. The antagonists are a band of elderly spooks, veterans of the Troubles, condemned to a threadbare retirement, now out for revenge, blazers with elbow patches and all. In my notes while reading, I had oh-so-cleverly described them as The Thursday Murder Club, already imagining myself unveiling this epithet, maybe even using it as the title, to impress all of you. Unfortunately, Jackson Lamb says it first, two-thirds through the book. Looks like it’s not just Taverner and the Park who are two steps behind.

The rest of the gang, too, are in happier times. Shirley Dander is out of rehab. Roddy Ho is busy basking in his ‘hot girl summer,’ new tattoo ensuring that, upon sight, ‘the girls would crap themselves - in a good way.’ Even River’s enjoying life, and all the good things in it, as he cruises up the M40 to Oxford. ‘He may not have a song in his heart, but he has a radio that works. It’s playing Solsbury Hill.’

The sweetness and light soon fades, thanks to the ever competently incompetent Taverner and Judd. As usual they’ve set a disaster in train, leaving those beneath them, the incompetently competent Slow Horses, to clean up their mess. The distinction here, though somewhat Rumsfeldian, matters: it’s the thread that runs through the whole series, the paradox that powers every new Slough House story.

Let’s start with what it means to be competently incompetent. These people are the masters of process: optics managed, the right papers lost, all sides squared away, paragons of what Whitehall cliché calls ‘grip’. They rarely achieve the right outcome but always know how to look as if they have. Theirs is the competence of appearances: the middle manager whose reports are immaculate and every deadline met, though nothing ever improves; or or the track athlete with the Nike contract who does and says everything right in front of the cameras but never quite delivers.

Lamb and his crew are the opposite. They are incompetently competent. This is a breed Brits like to romanticise, though we usually hold our breath when they’re around. We even have another word for them. The maverick. This is Lamb, the Tyson Fury of spycraft, chaos in theory and control in practice, the brilliant coder who refuses to log his changes or turn up on time, yet when the website goes down, he’s the first one you call. The kind of person the phrase to wing it was made for.

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Hence the usual criticism of Herron: why, after saving Britain’s collective bacon nine times over, are they still relegated to their Aldersgate hovel? In the world they live in, a world of pure process, there’s no other way it could be. It’s less misconduct or bad behaviour (heaven knows we’ve seen enough of it from Lamb) but this injustice Herron aims at. What he fears most is a world where such deeds can no longer, from time to time, be justified, the means glossed over, if the ends are right.

A counterintuitive example here comes from Herron’s most misunderstood creation, Peter Judd, the figure around whom Clown Town revolves. Judd is usually compared with Boris Johnson: I suppose for his general outrageousness and libertine streak. He certainly began that way, but is now a fundamentally different creature. A much better comparator is Peter Mandelson or George Osborne: those rare political operators who love the game so much that everything else melts away - those who see themselves less as as political actors than, as Judd puts it, ‘indispensable national assets’: critical, load-bearing figures that the country silently depends on.

Judd may look like a rule-breaking renegade, but in fact he is as incompetently competent as they come. This is what makes him so repugnant: the sense that all his schemes are perfectly planned yet devoid of substance bar his rapacious desire to be a legend in his own lunchtime - the Widmerpool of the Wolseley. Judd is not Lamb’s mirror, but his negative, oh so happy to be a member of the class which, as he puts it,‘enjoys rewards commensurate not to [its] achievements, but to [its] expectations.’

The reason for Judd’s life as an incompetent competent is obvious. Like many ministers, he is a spy who never made it, a man whose pulse quickens when handed a pink piece of paper with ‘STRAP’ at the top, a twinge in his stomach each time he gets close to the ‘high side,’ knowing he never quite landed the done thing post-Oxford.

Taverner, on the other hand, is the spy who did. She is an instinctively more likeable incompetent competent: at least she believes in higher things than yet another three-letter acronym after your name. Yet nine novels in, her closet is so full of the dead that the hinges are beginning to give way. Perhaps it is a sign of the times, or simply the laws of wardrobe gravity, but the deep-state shtick no longer has the juice it once did, so many errors to her name you can no longer argue the toss. The kid with the Kalashnikov at last must be disarmed.

Who yanks the gun from her? Take a wild guess. It’s the king of the incompetents himself, the man from '‘the engine room’ as Judd tells him at one point in the story. After such needling, and the carnage contained in a story that ranks among Herron’s best, Lamb does something he has never done before: calling time on the soft focus shenanigans. ‘I’m going to burn the fucking house down.’

So he transforms into an Eumenidic spirit, not a sword of Albion but its scalpel, turned inward to excise the malignancy from our body politic. When Gary Oldman gets to this one, he’ll feel like he’s playing the villain in Léon again. The catastrophe isn’t so cosy any more.

This has always been Herron’s way: subverting a fundamental tenet of Britishness – our addiction to cosiness – and doing it so well. Time and time again he lures us in with country lanes, snowy fields, and ancient libraries, only to then collapse it all around us. It’s easy to forget, especially reading Clown Town, with its geriatric A-Team and an even funnier array of one-liners: ‘Footage of Goldilocks going down on Daddy Bear,’ ‘Show her the Dreaming Spires then take her up the Woodstock Road,’ or, more simply, ‘Are you there God, it’s me, Jackson.’ But then, inevitably, he reminds us.

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Take Joe Country, perhaps the most cosy catastrophe-esque Slough House novel. When writing each book, Herron says he begins with a single image, and builds the entire plot around it. In the case of Joe Country, we actually know what that image is. It is of a snowy field in Wales. A man sits down in the snow, staring out across the hills of Pembrokeshire. He holds the image in his eye, sighs, and dies.

It’s an image I return to every time I drive the aforementioned toddler, her brother, and my wife down the A40 past Carmarthen on the way to our annual family holiday in Pembrokeshire, as the car eats up the final half hour of the journey westward. Was it that field? Or the next one? Few things could be more cosy than the snow blanketing the hills surrounding Tenby or Saundersfoot, orange light flickering from farmhouses built of old red sandstone, nostalgic dreams of a Child’s Christmas in Wales.

Nor more horrifying. The man, who I won’t name, is disembowelled, literally holding his guts in with his hands as he sighs his last. Here’s what happens when he’s found: ‘“I’m sorry,” he told his dead colleague, then went through his pockets, removing [his] ID and phone. Unlike River’s, this still had some charge in it.’ Stripped like a battlefield corpse, all that survives of him is his phone battery.

At this point it’s worth remembering that the original cosy catastrophes were, above all, love letters to the competent incompetent - the quiet, attentive figures that dominate the works of Wyndham, Christopher and Shute. Think of Keith Stewart, writer for The Miniature Mechanic and the quiet man of Ealing, who saves his step-daughter’s fortunes by flying halfway around the world in Trustee from the Toolroom. Or Gordon Zellaby, the mild-mannered intellectual of The Midwich Cuckoos, befuddling Midwich when the alien children arrive by deciding to teach them instead.

What first looks like folly, in hindsight, becomes something else entirely. In the book’s final pages he says goodbye to his wife and calmly drives to their school. The children greet him warmly as he walks into the classroom, and promptly blows himself up, destroying the aliens and saving the world in the process.

Herron’s defence of competent incompetence matters. Spy fiction is one of the few soft-power assets still capable of converting itself into hard currency. The world’s appetite for it shows no sign of slowing. 2025 was not only the year of Black Bag and The Day of the Jackal, but the moment Netflix entered full spook mania, churning out tale after tale of British espionage: Black Doves, Hostage, and a third season of The Diplomat in the last few months alone. Are we paying them for this? We should be.

Where does Slough House fit? I suppose it brings us back to our original distinction: between the incompetent competents, and the competent incompetents. For a modern state to aspire to competent competence is a bridge too far, accepting incompetent incompetence a dangerous fatalism. The only choice left, as Clown Town makes stark, is to choose between the Park and the Horses.

Maybe that is Britain’s secret service after all: the quiet triumph of engine room lot currently being beamed to fifty million users worldwide via the excellent Apple TV adaptation. Not Bond’s impossible gloss, but a crocked, shabby, flaking, believable form of excellence - our national art of getting away with it.

Shortly after the Kansas City Chiefs won the Super Bowl, Tight End Travis Kelce was invited to host Saturday Night Live. One of the sketches that night was called ‘NFL gives back.’ Kelce and his teammates have gathered for a day of charity work: to lift women whose boyfriends physically cannot. As 6’5”, 300-pound offensive lineman Creed Humphrey faces cast member Ego Nwodim, she commands him: ‘Lift me.’ He obliges. ‘Good news babe, Crypto’s back!’ Nwodim’s boyfriend announces, scrolling aimlessly on his phone. ‘That’s great, babe.’ She turns back to Creed and whispers softly as he lifts her, ‘Again. Again. And again.’

I do not lift. The closest I get is carrying two children, one in each arm, as I stride my way through Paddington Recreational Ground on a Saturday morning. I do, however, appreciate those who lift. The /r/strength_training subreddit, which I am browsing as I write this, has more than five million followers; its top posts this year include a woman calmly lifting three times her bodyweight, a sexagenarian pressing a pair of 45-kilogram dumbbells, and a man bravely squatting 410 kilograms in a first-floor flat. The top comment: ‘I was waiting for his feet to break through the floor.’ Me too.

In the early days of the iPod, I remember a poster in a shopping centre for Apple’s new Nike partnership: a pedometer small enough to hide in a trainer. Its great advance was that you could store your steps on an iPod Nano.

From that small, Swoosh-branded acorn, mighty oaks have grown. From endurance runs across Africa to motorcyclists leaping between moving trucks, minor miracles of flesh are now everywhere. This summer in Tenby, the quiet seaside town I visited often as a child, the locals could talk of only one thing: the upcoming Ironman, with its two-and-a-half-mile swim, 112-mile bike ride, and a light marathon to finish.

Nor is it just the ironmen of Wales. The last thing I watched was Chad Powers, a quarterback escaping his flaws by literally building himself a new body. The book in front of me is David Szalay’s Booker favourite, following a security guard who sleeps his way to the top of London society. The title is, simply, Flesh. Sally Rooney’s single essay this year, on snooker great Ronnie O’Sullivan, turns on the same theme: ‘The calculation happens in the brain, of course, but also, somehow, in the arm. The throw is itself the calculation… The brain is, after all, part of the body—and could it be that the body is also part of the brain?’

Harold, the protagonist of Jordan Castro’s new novel Muscle Man, has similar obsessions. His outlet is lifting. Unlike the football players of Kansas City, he isn’t paid to do it. He’s a professor of English literature at a liberal-arts college.

Harold is a man out of time, condemned to wince his way through the institution’s descent into a ‘life of pure language.’ Concepts such as ‘objectivity’ and ‘sense of urgency’ are verboten. When a crime is committed, an alert goes out, enjoyably, from ALERT_TO_INSPIRE@shepherd.edu, urging everyone to ‘think about how we might better relate.’

Harold wants out. Leaving, however, would be too much work, so he settles for a distraction suggested by a fellow professor. Whenever he can, Harold drives to Hill’s Health World. It is in this shining gym on the hill, its windows seeming ‘to radiate a kind of life,’ that Harold is happiest. In the car park he downs a pre-workout snack of L-citrulline, beetroot powder, and a protein bar, then heads inside to the real work: chasing ‘the pump’.

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It’s here his fight against the disembodied life of the academy begins. In the relative safety of Hills, Harold becomes the Captain Ahab of embodiment, Merleau-Ponty with traps, Lispector’s GH on HGH. The goal, he tells us, is to achieve a true ‘mind–muscle connection’: the conscious feeling, understanding, and control of each muscle Harold has been blessed with. In the best moments everything changes: his body opens up, colours grow more vivid, and the life he’s trying to leave behind drifts a little further away. ‘The body ached and screamed, but it also spoke and sang. The body had its own way of thinking. Harold was beginning to learn its language.’

What exactly is he chasing? Or, perhaps more truthfully, what is he trying to escape?

The architecture of Shepherd College gives us a first clue: ‘The hodgepodge of materials and styles gave Harold a claustrophobic feeling, like he was scrolling on his phone; the buildings, like the furniture, looked like pictures, or images on a screen, flatly representing something that only might have once been real.’ His mild phone addiction is another: six times in Muscle Man we get the refrain, or some variation of it, ‘Harold scrolled.’ Near the end of the book, Harold gives it to us straight: ‘He wanted an experience of reality, not a mere representation of it.’

Harold’s chosen route to the real is lifting, but it could have been anything. By the standards of his literary forebears, in fact, lifting heavy things is almost banal. Take, for example, perhaps the first recognisably modern portrait of embodied male obsession: Uncle Toby’s fortification mania in Tristram Shandy.

Unlike Harold, Toby’s wound is physical, not mental. It is a groin injury, the ‘dismal crush’ of his bones beneath a stone from a parapet during the siege of Namur. After four years laid up in bed, unable to explain to others what his bodily change had done to him, trapped in a ‘world of sad explanations,’ as Sterne put it, he resorts to desperate measures. With his manservant Trim, he engineers a full complement of defences — ‘saps, mines, blinds, gabions, pallisadoes, ravelins, half-moons’ — on the bowling green at Shandy Hall.

Tristram is a fan. Toby’s physical pursuits are not only delightful to witness, they have changed him entirely, becoming the source of his ‘extreme and unparalleled modesty in his nature.’ How does he achieve such ‘benignity of heart’? By learning to interpret ‘every motion of [his] body in the kindest sense the motion would admit of.’ Mind–muscle connection, eighteenth-century style.

In 2005, Tom McCarthy came to rewrite Uncle Toby’s story. The protagonist of Remainder is struck not by a stone from Namur but by some vaguely clandestine object from the heavens. His recovery is similar: months in hospital, followed by an obsessive project to repair the break between body and mind. Using his compensation payout, he hires an army of actors, builders, and designers to recreate his imagined memories, a compulsive attempt to close the gap between thought and action, representation and the real, played out in the now painfully moneyed, prime-era Blair London of 2005.

At first, things seem almost charming. Sport is what returns to the narrator when he wakes from his coma, quickly forgetting his formative years, to be replaced by the layout of every basketball court and football pitch he had ever played on.

When he searches for the apartment block for his first reenactment, it is a running track that leads him there. When he instructs his hired actors, he turns not only to the language of American football but directly to Kelce’s forebears: ‘Do it like a tight end, just before the play begins he peels out and runs behind the other crouchers. I want you to leave the line like that. Not running, obviously, but peeling. We tried it. It looked beautiful.’

By the end, such representations no longer give him the same charge. After all, why have the actors simulate a robbery when they can perform one instead? The final reenactment, a bank heist, goes wrong. An actor is shot dead, a victim of the tiniest sliver between performance and reality. In that instant, the divide collapses completely, and the narrator experiences his own version of the pump:

‘He turned to me and, voice still quivering, whispered: ‘It’s real!’ The tingling really burst its banks now; it flowed outwards from my spine’s base and flowed all around my body. Once more I was weightless; once again the moment spread its edges out, became a still, clear pool swallowing everything else up in its contentedness.’

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Such weightlessness comes with a problem: it feels so good everything else disappears. The gang flee the police, moaning, weeping, yelping, and shrieking, while our man observes with eerie serenity, his gaze turned entirely inward. As he boards the escape jet, he offers a final note of reassurance to the panicking passengers, whom he, or more precisely his body, will soon hijack: ‘There’s nothing to be worried about. It’s a very happy day. A beautiful day. And now we shall all go into the air.’

In Remainder, embodiment becomes a mirror, each reenactment an experiment in feedback and control. It makes me think of the mirrors used in the most advanced semiconductor machines, still polished by hand, a task so precise that only a handful of people alive can do it. The acceptable flaw in such a mirror is fifty picometres. As one blogger put it, if the mirror were blown up to the size of the United States, those fifty picometres would be half a millimetre tall. That is the level of perfection McCarthy’s protagonist aspires to: Narcissus with a microfibre cloth, just one more polish and the surface might finally gleam. We are a long way from Uncle Toby now.

Can we return? Instinctively it feels difficult. McCarthy’s fantastical novel now feels like our reality: the pursuit of the body near-synonymous with manic quests for perfection, or vanity. Now, when we think of such optimisers, we don’t picture a genial successor to Uncle Toby, perhaps a dad casually checking his Parkrun time or glancing at the bathroom scales. We picture strange-looking bodies from the US West Coast, grossly distended chests, and night-time erections tracked — men built, as one Twitter user put it, ‘like a deep breath.’ Somehow Patrick Bateman, posing in the mirror, pumping away, female leg draped lazily over his shoulder, seems almost quaint.

An incurious reader might see much of this in Harold, and simply discard him as yet another creature of ‘the manosphere’ or some other trite formulation. Yet another way is possible. Listen to what his body actually tells us when ‘the pump’ hits:

‘He received new eyes…. the sensation starts in your blood and stretches out over the whole world, through your eyes. It’s as if each color contains a deeper, richer layer of itself, invisible during the rote machinery of life— grading papers, opening a laptop—which gets revealed only when blood makes muscle thick and full. Before, Harold saw colors, but now he could actually see; before, Harold was breathing, but now he could actually breathe. Everything opened into a new and wondrous layer of itself, such that it remained the same, but different.’

This is physical experience as a world opener, not closer. A bridge to be crossed, not a mirror to be looked at — through the body, into the mind, and out into the world. It is an embodiment closer to Travis Kelce and his teammates tossing improv actors across a New York studio than to the neurotics of mid-noughties London. It is also what Jordan Castro captures in his 2024 essay Getting the Pump, describing his own lifting journey: ‘a dynamic, vital interaction,’ transfiguring his relation to others. ‘The power of the spirit can reconfigure even flesh, such that it will be raised again, the same, but different.’

In the 1980s, British sci-fi lit crossover author M.John Harrison found himself with the same problem as Harold. ‘I wanted an extremely physical relationship with the world.’ So he took up climbing. The result was his 1989 book, Climbers: ostensibly a novel, but probably more autofiction avant la lettre than Harrison will likely ever give on. After a failed relationship and the death of a child, spleen lacerated by a shard of coffee table glass, he joins a group of stringy Manchester misfits, howling their way up slabs in the driving Northern rain.

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Here’s Harrison’s version of the pump, halfway up a Stanage wall:

‘Suddenly it was no effort. I could smell the damp bracken; and the curious spicy odour of the gritstone in front of my face. I could feel the new boots, edging on a tiny quartz pebble, clinging magisterially to nothing; and my hands as they selected and rejected a fingerpocket, a little rib, a large rounded hole like a bucket which worked in the wrong direction to be of any use. It was exhilarating. I was the idea or intuition that sat cleverly at the centre of all this, directing it.’

Mind. Body. World.

This has a curious effect on Harrison’s narrator: the more he climbs the less he knows. Every repetition ‘builds up the neural pathways a bit stronger,’ yet ‘every outcome still somehow undependable.’ The world not clear and polished, but rich, and opaque instead. By the end of it, he’s hit levels of humility that even Uncle Toby would struggle to match: ‘I sat in the niche for a long time. I realised I didn’t know any more than the last time I sat there. I didn’t know anything about anything.’ By the end, all certainty has fallen away. All he can do is look at a few photographs of old friends.

What often surprises a new reader of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, another male embodiment classic, is how much the protagonist: a starving, homeless writer, can love so many things in a world so desperate to have him out of it: the look from a woman, ‘she turns round, I feel a wrench in me, a delicate shock through my senses’; the salute from a policeman, ‘his friendliness had overwhelmed me, and I cried weakly’; or the glimpse of the city he leaves behind, ‘Christiania, where the windows gleamed so brightly in all the homes.’

Even at his lowest, his body strains outward, breached and porous, its edges dissolving into the world:

‘The Lord stuck His finger in the net of my nerves gently… then withdrew, and there were fibres and delicate root-like filaments adhering to the finger, and they were the nerve-threads of the filaments. And there was a gaping hole after the finger, which was God’s finger, and a wound in my brain in the track of His finger. But when God had touched me with His finger, He… let me depart in peace, and let me depart with the gaping hole.’

As Muscle Man ends, we don’t really know which path Harold will take. We’re left with scraps: a betrayal, an invitation, a fleeting sense of strength. Perhaps the story is cyclical, as all stories of obsession are. Even in resolution, the pattern reforms: a conversation in a car park, another recruit, another ritual. A new obsession-shaped key finds an obsession-shaped hole. The lock turns. The story continues.

But Harold’s unspent obsession has at least got him somewhere. Could it take him further? I think it can. What the climbers, starvers, and fortification builders of the world show us is that embodiment is only the first step: what matters is what you do with it. An outward turn is as possible as an inward one. As Leonard Cohen once put it, ‘I locked you in this body, I meant it as a kind of trial // You can use it for a weapon or to make some woman smile.’

Which brings us back to the Chiefs, manhandling improv actors in a New York studio. They lift not for themselves but for others. Repetition can doom, but it can also redeem. After all, if the NFL can give back, so can Harold. Again. Again. Again.

The worst thing about any drive to Cornwall is the false hope. You escape London more quickly than expected, chew through mile after mile on the M4, and before long you’re in Bristol. Here the first wave hits. We’re halfway there! Google Maps, however, says otherwise. Fine. Time to crawl on to Exeter. You get there, stop for a break, and a second wave washes over you: this pain must have been worth something? Check the phone again: you still have a whole drive-to-Wales worth of miles left to go. Last time I didn’t even make it to Exeter. The sulk began, in earnest, at the Taunton Deane Costa.

If only I’d known then about Mary Callinack of Newlyn, a nineteenth-century fisherman’s wife whose own journey to London would have put mine firmly into perspective. In the summer of 1851 she resolved to visit the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park. Callinack had no money for a carriage to Plymouth, let alone a ticket on the newly opened Great Western Railway. So she walked. The three-hundred-mile trek took five weeks. By the end she was a minor celebrity, meeting Queen Victoria herself, a fellow exhibitionophile, who remarked fondly in her diary of this ‘most hale old woman...almost crying from emotion when I looked at her‘.

Such technophilia was hardly unusual. The technological anxieties of the early nineteenth century had begun to fade, replaced by something close to euphoria. The Great Exhibition marked what Hardy would later call ‘a precipice in time.’ A third of Britain’s population came to see it during its six-month run. For many, it was their first journey not only by train or omnibus, but the first time they had ever left their own parish. Landowners and clergymen who organised these excursions were hailed as public benefactors. The Illustrated London News rhapsodised over the movements of an envelope-making machine, finding in them nothing less than “the human form divine.”

Britain’s cultural elite led the chorus. Thackeray, in his May Day Ode to the Crystal Palace, seemed almost overcome: ‘With this she sails, she weaves, she tills, / Pierces the everlasting hills, / And spans the seas.’ Charlotte Brontë couldn’t get over the crowd, ‘ruled and subdued by some invisible influence,’ a ‘living tide’ generating ‘a deep hum like the sea heard from the distance.’ Tennyson also found himself airborne: ‘rich in model and design, / Harvest-tool and husbandry, / Loom and wheel and engin’ry.’ A few months later, when the first submarine telegraph was laid across the Channel, The Times proclaimed it ‘the greatest of human achievements since record has existed of the mighty feats accomplished by man.’ A decade later the mood had hardly dimmed: in 1861 one of the year’s bestsellers was Samuel Smiles’s Lives of the Engineers, celebrating the Stephensons, Telford, Boulton, and Watt.

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Where did it come from, this Romantic enthusiasm for technology? You could say it’d been there all along. The only thing that stirred a Romantic poet more than an Alpine glacier was some new scientific endeavour. Byron, in Don Juan, imagined steamships carrying us to the moon. Novalis, writing Hymns to the Night while employed as a mining engineer in Saxony, praised ‘the lovely harmonies of thy skilled handicraft.’ Keats went further, making the telescope his favoured metaphor for poetic discovery: ‘then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken.’ Even Wordsworth — admittedly one of the harder cases — gave the epithet ‘Earth has not anything to show more fair’ not to a Jungfrau peak but to the urban sprawl of early nineteenth-century London.

Yet as much as we might wish otherwise, science and technology are not quite the same thing. One is far easier to love than the other. Telescopes, microscopes and transits of Venus fed the poetic imagination, as did the strange proto-scientists who pursued them: Coleridge and Davy, Goethe and Humboldt. It was harder to worship the disruptive, dangerous, belching mills, factories and trains that carved their way through nineteenth-century Britain, and the industrialists who drove them.

The Romantics found a way. How they did so is a story mostly untold: the journey from poets misty-eyed over Herschel’s discoveries to fisherwomen on machine pilgrimages to Hyde Park. Richard Holmes, biographer of Shelley and Coleridge and author of The Age of Wonder (2008), the canonical text on Romantic science, has now turned to tell it. His new book, The Boundless Deep, does so by an unlikely route: the early life of Alfred Tennyson.

I’ve always, frankly, struggled with Tennyson, despite him being someone I really should like. He’s the poet, excluding Byron, whose echoes most of us still bump into in modern life: present everywhere from M in Skyfall, pre-installed with Ulysses and ready to deliver it at the film’s climactic moment, to the only good scene in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, where a Kraken smashes through an East Indiaman and swallows the crew whole.

Yet somehow, I’ve never quite taken to him. Part of it, I think, is to do with photography. Picture the figures of the early nineteenth century and you see them as they intended, lovingly painted by the greats such as Romney, Lawrence and Raeburn, even in later life (Holmes has helpfully written about this too, in his 2005 deep cut for the NPG, The Romantic Poets and Their Circle). Think of Haydon’s Wordsworth on Helvellyn: arms crossed, all nose and bone, narrow eyes fixed on something the rest of us will never quite perceive. Contrast this with the mid-to-late Victorian figures, whose likeness we normally imagine via a stained brown photograph: someone draped in about twenty shades of black, usually old, running to fat, with an ungodly quantity of facial hair, never smiling.

Consider Lord Salisbury, a political figure I should love but never quite have: the romance of his elopement, risking it all and condemning himself to years of poverty to marry Georgina Alderson against his family’s wishes; his strange obsession with new technologies; his later attempts to lose weight by riding a tricycle around the grounds of Hatfield House, clad in a purple velvet poncho, a footman trailing behind. All of it wonderful, yet swallowed, like Jerry Bruckheimer’s Kraken, by a wet-eyed photograph, his frowning face lost in a thicket.

This is Tennyson’s prison too: black Spanish hat, dead hands, living beard, photographs you can almost smell. The Boundless Deep is Holmes’s attempt to break the poet out, to take us, as he puts it, from the ‘old Tennyson of the Isle of Wight’ to the ‘young Tennyson of Suffolk’: a man of broken family, slighted circumstances and rousing ambition, writing to escape a cursed home where family cooks self-combust like Spinal Tap drummers, trying to manage his place among seven brothers and four sisters, a strange, unruly ‘black-blooded race’ of siblings.

You can probably guess by now that I think Holmes succeeds on two levels. The first is that he sheds the weight of those villainous photographs. This Tennyson is a deeply enjoyable figure, a man of dirty clothes, incessant smoking and a habit of disappearing to the beach — in other words, a proper poet. His appalling sense of social cues and his knack for being resolutely cack-handed in love, at least until quite late in the day, are softened by the fact that he almost always has a great friend or frenemy close by: whether debating the metaphysics of ghosts at Cambridge, tinkering with microscopes and touring the new scientific exhibitions, strolling through the freshly opened zoo in Regent’s Park, or crashing the launch of the Liverpool–Manchester railway.

Most importantly for our purposes, this Tennyson is, above all else, a nerd. His teens were spent sneaking looks at the top-shelf science mag of the day, Jane Marcet’s Conversations on Natural Philosophy. At Trinity College he fell into the orbit of polymath William Whewell, the man who coined not only GCSE chemistry stalwarts such as ion, electrode and cathode, but in 1833 a new word for those devoted to the study of the physical world: scientist. Later in life his rooms were filled with ‘charts of isothermals and isobars.’ Taking delivery of one of his regular new books on the sciences, he could hardly contain himself: ‘I trembled as I cut the leaves.’

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This influence shows in Tennyson’s early work. Timbuktu (1829), which won him the Chancellor’s Gold Medal at Cambridge, owes as much to Herschel’s lunar observations as it does to Keats: ‘The Moon’s white cities, and the opal width / Of her small glowing lakes, her silver heights / Unvisited with dew of vagrant cloud, / And the unsounded, undescended depth.’ A year later came The Kraken, blending the language of the Romantics with Linnaean taxonomy, sailors’ reports from the Napoleonic seas, and an 1818 article by the young zoologist James Wilson in Blackwood’s Magazine. Just as Mary Shelley had given us the first science-fiction novel, Tennyson, a decade later, gave us the first science-fiction poem.

A few years later, things take a more technological turn. In Locksley Hall (1835) we begin, as expected, with the science: ‘Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest, / Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the West.’ Soon, though, things get a little steampunk: ‘Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, / Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales.’ By the end we’re in full industrial spasm: ‘Not in vain the distance beacons; forward, forward let us range; / Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.’ We start with the stars, and end with a railway engine.

We can tell this is baby-deer-on-frozen-lake stuff, a first foray into a new field, because riding on top of the grooves is not how a train works — a detail that led to good-natured ribbing from engineers in the years that followed. But he gets the feeling right: the motive, inevitable force of it. And from there, he only gets better.

The Princess (1847), charts not only the founding of a university for women but the spectacle of a nation falling in love with its own machines:

‘A man with knobs and wires and vials fired

A cannon: Echo answered in her sleep

From hollow fields: and here were telescopes

For azure views; and there a group of girls

In circle waited, whom the electric shock

Dislinked with shrieks and laughter: round the lake

A little clock-work steamer paddling plied

And shook the lilies.’

In Memoriam (1850), becomes not only a great science epic, but an industrial one as well:

‘That life is not as idle ore,

But iron dug from central gloom,

And heated hot with burning fears;

And dipp’d in baths of hissing tears,

And batter’d with the shocks of doom

To shape and use.’

Tennyson wasn’t alone in such a turn. The last surviving Romantics had felt the same stirrings. Wordsworth, in Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways, urged nature to ‘embrace her lawful offspring in man’s art,’ and called on time not only to accept from technology’s ‘bold hands the proffered crown of hope,’ but to look upon the trains of England ‘with cheer sublime.’ De Quincey, in his 1849 essay The English Mail-Coach, wrote of the ‘grandeur and power’ he felt riding an old mail coach, that ‘vital experience of the glad animal sensibilities’ as it carried letters across the land. In 1844, while Tennyson was in the throes of his deepest emotional despair, Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed was being exhibited at the Royal Academy.

These weren’t just fine words either. The Boundless Deep is not only a study of poetical science but of how success actually happens: slowly, slowly, slowly, then all at once. As Holmes notes, In Memoriam had sold over 60,000 copies by the end of its first year — numbers from another age, that of Byron and Scott. Disraeli, Lyell, Darwin and many within Prince Albert’s circle all responded; a copy even found its way to the royal bedside table. Reading The Princess, it’s impossible not to imagine it somewhere in the minds of Albert and Henry Cole when they launched the nine-month sprint that brought Mrs Callinack to Hyde Park in the summer of 1851. Or take Robert Peel, speaking a decade after the ‘forward, forward’ of Locksley Hall: ‘This night you will select the motto which is to indicate the commercial policy of England. Shall it be ‘advance’ or ‘recede’?’

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More importantly, others were listening. If Tennyson was the last of the Romantics, what then was he the first of? Late in The Boundless Deep, Holmes recounts an encounter with an as-yet-unpublished author, Elizabeth Gaskell of Manchester, who wrote to Tennyson asking if a signed copy could be provided to an aged labourer she knew, ‘the most hearty admirer of Tennyson I know.’ Tennyson obliged. Ten years later, Gaskell finished North and South, the greatest of the industrial novels, in which the romantic hero is not a Byronic brooder but a mill owner. The act that brings the pair together is not a glance at a country ball but a clog to the head thrown by an errant Chartist. And when satisfaction comes, it ends not in a country estate, but in the heroine’s ownership of a mill of her own.

From this angle, Romanticism looks a little different: not just a story of stony-faced poets trudging up glaciers or mystics half-entranced, half-appalled by the factories rising around them, but a story of economic technology, one that made industrial growth feel not only possible but meaningful. It was from this wellspring that the crowds of 1851 came, drawn not to dark satanic mills but to what Ada Lovelace, in 1843, called ‘poetical science,’ the marriage of machine and imagination. Tennyson took his Romantic inheritance and used it to give steam and iron the aura once reserved for stars and mountains. This, I think, is what we owe him.

By the 1870s, the turn was complete. As Tennyson wrote in The Passing of Arthur (1869), ‘The old order changeth, yielding place to new, / And God fulfils Himself in many ways, / Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.’

I suppose that’s where we have to leave it. Or do we? Consider the device I’m typing this on. One Silicon Valley curiosity, occasionally brought out for show, is Apple’s first logo. Instead of the sleek, modern outline my two-year-old loves pointing at, it was a home-made etching worthy of the frontispiece of some old tome in the stacks of the London Library. A man, Isaac Newton, sits beneath a tree, reading intently. Above him, emitting a biblical light, is an apple. ‘I am here. I am about to fall,’ it tells us.

This is where most people leave it, failing to notice the motto, faintly handwritten and slightly obscured, yet clearly the inspiration for the entire logo: Wordsworth’s lines about Newton, from The Prelude: ‘Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.’

Even today, technology can’t quite resist the allure of the Romantics. It’s Tennyson we have to thank for that — and Holmes, for reminding us once again.

‘Let knowledge grow from more to more,

But more of reverence in us dwell;

That mind and soul, according well,

May make one music as before,

But vaster.’

The name ’Hanbury’ keeps following me around. It’s the name of the village my wife’s family moved to ten years ago. The church where we got married. The street, on Brick Lane, that we used for our first co-working space. The pub I used to frequent, in that weird no-man’s land around Angel. The company whose East London office I’d often find myself grabbing coffee at. Now it’s back again: the Minnesota Vikings, the American football team I’ve found myself strangely involved with, are in London for their annual game. Their base, a hotel in the Hertfordshire countryside. Hanbury Manor.

The players treat the English countryside - and their adopted manor - with a mix of awe and bemusement. Strange things happen out there. Earlier this week their coach, the six-foot-five ex-quarterback Kevin O’Connell, woke to find a bird flapping around his room. The practice field, reached by a wooded path, looks out across the old Roman road to Cambridge and the north. When back-up quarterback Carson Wentz needed a haircut, he ended up driven to the nearby town of Ware, once one of England’s great malting centres.

Coming into this season, expectations were high. The Vikings had won 14 of their 17 regular-season games the year before, Kevin O’Connell named coach of the year. The faith he inspires, even from a sofa thousands of miles away, borders on awe — bolstered by the presence of Justin Jefferson, already one of the greatest wide receivers of all time. When rookie quarterback JJ McCarthy met O’Connell before the 2024 draft, he captured the vibe admirably, grabbing his hand and putting it plainly: “I’d run through a brick wall for you.” More than once over the past year, any Vikings fan watching one of O’Connell’s post-game speeches has probably found themselves glancing uneasily at their own plasterwork.

The 2025 season is the brick wall. Riven by injuries, the Vikings sit at 2–2. To an English eye that might seem middling, somewhere between Chelsea and Everton. But with only seventeen games in an NFL season, and in what is often called the league’s toughest division, the market gives them just an eight per cent chance of winning it. So, like King Alfred, they have retreated to a small corner of England, an all-American Athelney, to take stock and plan their next raid.

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I suppose there’s a question I should answer: why do I care? I’m an unlikely candidate to follow such a strange, foreign sport. I grew up in Wales, in a town built around the local rugby club, so perhaps there has always been a need for contact in my life. When we first got Sky, I would catch it irregularly, usually presented by the extraordinarily likeable Kevin Cadle — a basketball coach turned Sky’s all-purpose pundit on US sports. It was on so late on Sunday nights that it felt faintly illicit, a sense that has stayed with me.

Between then and about four years ago, living life as a professional clever person, my only encounters with football were twofold. First, being vaguely annoyed when the college common room was taken over for the Super Bowl: 95% of the audience casually scrolling toward the halftime show, 5% in scratchy, oversized jerseys, fist-pumping every forty-five seconds. And second, reading Don DeLillo’s End Zone. I’ll come back to that.

A few years ago we had our first child, a profoundly atrocious sleeper. Which meant late nights pacing the living room, baby in a wrap, watching whatever was on TV. The only live sport available was American football. A few weeks later I’d chosen a team: the Vikings.

There were reasons. First, they are, like Moses, forever close to the promised land of a Super Bowl but never quite able to enter. Perfect for a Brit, raised with the Pavlovian addiction to hope that kills you. I also liked the quarterback then, Kirk Cousins — clean-cut, devout, X bio reading: “Micah 6:8: What does the Lord require of you? To act justly, love mercy & walk humbly with your God.” It was so American it was almost comical. And Minnesota, after all, feels a little like America’s Wales.

To a Brit, the game has two particular quirks. The first is how serious it is. Mao II, another DeLillo novel not about football at all, opens with the question: “When the old god leaves the world, what happens to all the expended faith?” Here it is not faith but unexpended seriousness that finds its refuge. Unlike most of life, which makes us feel we live in an unserious age where politicians, business leaders, and cultural figures no longer measure up to their predecessors, football has gone the other way. It has only become more serious.

This intellectual arms race now defines the sport. Each year the complexity and rigour increase: better-disguised coverages, shrinking time-to-throws, linemen moving faster than ever. Analysts like Mina Kimes break down games with a detail now impenetrable to casual viewers. Even Madden, the most popular American football video game, now demands that even its most casual players understand coverages as well as professionals in the 1970s. Valorisation now comes mostly from intellect. Kevin O’Connell is described as having a ‘PhD in quarterbacking,’ his defensive coordinator Brian Flores as a ‘mad scientist,’ the Kansas City Chiefs’ practice field as ‘the lab.’ KOC’s mentor, Sean McVay, is famed for remembering every play he has ever called.

This makes it, improbably, the perfect sport for a Brit to care about. Say what you like about the UK, but if there is one thing we do well, it is producing clever people. Perhaps it is even one of the best things about living here: we pathologically despise stupidity. Our national myth is built as much on boffinry as battlefield heroics: bouncing-bomb tinkerers, Enigma decoders, spooks deceiving the Nazis, as much as men stepping off Higgins boats on Sword Beach. In London, to be a taxi driver you must pass a test so difficult it literally rewires the brain.

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The second quirk is its strangeness. Music, TV, and film almost always cross the Atlantic; the worlds of College GameDay, State Farm adverts, and Nick Saban do not. To travel, most culture attempts to sand down its edges, smoothing national differences into the neutral tones of an international airport. Football has done the opposite. It has stayed resolutely strange: B-2 flyovers; weeping during the national anthem; and retaining an indecipherable language, a land of cover zeros, tampa twos, and run stuffers plugging the a-gap. DeLillo again: ‘a nation is never more ridiculous than in its patriotic manifestations.’ Nothing is more ridiculous than this.

There’s a lesson here too. Culture spreads not by being universal, but by being strange. America’s most magnetic exports have always been its weirdest. The same is true of any country. Britain is only just rediscovering this: our most successful film of the year is a fever dream of native savagery and island claustrophobia, trading allusions to Saints Cuthbert and Peter with the Teletubbies and Jimmy Saville. ‘You’re all so fucking weird,’ screams the lone outsider, a Swedish soldier finally driven insane by the lumpen Brits. Moments later his head is ripped from his body.

Hence, I suppose, the sport’s total cultural domination - a monoculture that one and all can enjoy. Earlier this week, the /r/nflnoobs subreddit faced an enjoyable question: ‘ ‘just how big is the nfl “culturally” in the US?’ The top rated answer puts it plainly: ‘The NFL snatched a day of the week away from the biggest religion in the country,’ joined shortly after by another: ‘All the TVs in the ER had football on yesterday if that’s a clue.’ Even Patricia Lockwood, in her most recent LRB diary, cannot escape it, being lured down to watch the recent Super Bowl, with the promise of the half-time show: ‘IT’S HIGH ART, my husband, Jason, called up the stairs. IT’S THE STORY OF HIS LIFE. I ran down to catch the tail end of it.’

The serious and strange alone surely cannot do this? Is there something more? I think there is. Back to End Zone. Quite a common, and somewhat irksome reading of the book, is that it’s a story of how football is war. This was clearly on DeLillo’s mind whilst writing it as he explicitly gets a character to say that it isn’t: ‘I reject the notion of football as warfare. Warfare is warfare. We don’t need substitutes because we’ve got the real thing,’ after, in what most other books would be a footnote, deriding ‘the numerous commentators’ who ‘have been willing to risk death by analogy in their public discussions of the resemblance between football and war.’

So if our attraction to football, and I suppose all sports of contact, is not some Girardian martial desire, where does it come from instead? DeLillo’s answer is that it gets us the things that in the modern world, we can’t quite get elsewhere.

There’s speed: ‘the last excitement left, the one thing we haven’t used up, still naked in its potential, the mysterious black gift that thrills the millions’. Or contact: ‘the special teams collided, swarm and thud of interchangeable bodies… the breathless impact of two destructive masses, quite pretty to watch;’ Even its weight: ‘Bloomberg weighed three hundred pounds. This itself was historical. I revered his weight. It was an affirmation of humanity’s reckless potential; it went beyond legend and returned through mist to the lovely folly of history. To weigh three hundred pounds. What devout vulgarity.’

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These, I suppose, are things we can only get through the body, or our bodies. And this is where he takes us: not just to the protagonist, running back hero Gary Harkness’s thoughts, but to the bodily sensations as well. When Harkness says, early on, to football Ahab Coach Creed, ‘my life meant nothing without football,’ we think it’s simply the kind of bullshit sports player espouses, dead eyed in a post-match interview. It’s only after we feel the clothes tear, the ‘glue spreading over his ribs’ after a particularly brutal encounter that we finally begin to get it.

Take such feats of embodiment for granted, and things fall apart. This most memorably happens when the 300 pound lineman, Anatole Bloomberg, decides to slim down, to disastrous results: ‘as I lost weight, as I continued to struggle against food and its temptations, I began to lose the idea of myself. I was losing the idea of my body, who it belonged to, what exactly it was, where all the different parts of it were located, what it looked like from different angles and during the various times of the day and evening. I was losing the most important part of my being.’

This, I think, today, is what draws us to sports like these: in an ever more disembodied world, those who are embodied fascinate us more and more. If the Philadelphia Eagles hadn’t won the last season, the only thing that would be remembered would be a single play, by running back Saquon Barkley, in which, seeking to escape a defender, he instead jumped, six feet up in the air, and hurdled over the head of the unsuspecting safety. Backwards. It’s the same reason why the last few films in the Mission: Impossible we no longer watch for the plot or characterisation, but simply to spend two hours with Cruise’s spectacles of skill. Is that really him? How did he do it?

The same instinct guides two releases of the last month, albeit on radically different ends of the spectrum. The first is the surprisingly cohesive Hulu series, Chad Powers, in which Glen Powell plays a Princess Diana-obsessed football pariah who decides to try to escape his psychological flaws by literally making himself a new body, and wearing it to practice each day. I’m not sure the writers knew they were channelling DeLillo when, at the end of the first episode, Powell’s character is asked why he wants to join the enjoyably named South Georgia Catfish, and replies ‘without football, I don’t know who I am,’ but there we are.

The second is the single best study of embodiment I’ve read for a while, Jordan Castro’s recently released novel, Muscle Man. Castro’s protagonist, Harold, is a professor of English literature at a liberal arts college. Harold wants out, and so he takes up lifting. In Hill’s Health World, his shining gym on the hill, he engages in his battle against the disembodied mind of the academy. Like Coach Creed, he too is an Ahab of embodiment, Merleau-Ponty with trapezoids, chasing a true ‘mind-muscle connection.’

In his best moments at the gym, everything changes: his body opens up, colours seem more vivid, the life he’s trying to leave behind just a shade more distant. ‘The body ached and screamed, but it also spoke and sang. The body had its own way of thinking. Harold was beginning to learn its language.’ This too is phenomenology applied. Embodiment for men, right alongside Saquon’s highlight reels. At moments, lifting even transcends the intellectual and becomes spiritual: ‘Sitting up from underneath the bar, he felt reborn.’ I’m reminded even of Corinthians: ‘the body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.’

Contrast such spiritual bodies, as Castro does, with Harold’s co-workers, brains in vats, with arms that ‘more closely resemble a spaghetti noodle than an actual human arm.’ Understandably, their greatest ire is turned towards the campus football players, hoovering up their budgets, whilst being all being so damn happy all the time: ‘the football players fought back against the deadening more than any other student group on campus, essentially because they loved football. This love structured their lives so that they regularly failed to do their homework, and this was in the end what saved them.’

It’s easy to see why such figures obsess us, for good or bad. While most work becomes easier, more abstracted, less embodied, the work of the athlete does the opposite. When things seem dumber, some sports, at least, appear to get harder. Such seriousness is contagious. When Timothée Chalamet reached for the language of greatness in a recent awards speech, he reached for the only language left: that of sport. ‘The truth is I’m really in pursuit of greatness. I know people don’t usually talk like that. But I want to be one of the greats.’

Agree, or not, it’s difficult to look away. The players of Hanbury might not realise this is what they’re doing, but maybe they do. When JJ McCarthy stood up and told Kevin O’Connell he was going to run through a brick wall through him he probably didn’t know he was quoting DeLillo directly, or more accurately, Bobby Luke, one of Harkness’s colleagues, ‘famous for saying he would go through a brick wall for Coach Creed.’

Indeed, after a quick search, bar a few mentions in regional newspapers, it does seem that the first time anyone actually wrote down the phrase, presumably at that time already circling around the college and professional football communities - ‘to run through a brick wall,’ - was DeLillo in End Zone. To run at a brick wall, or to bang one’s head against it, had been around for a long time, since the 17th century at least. But to run through such a wall, and to use one’s own body to do so, it turns out is a relatively newer invention. We needed sports to get us there.

Which is why, when Justin Jefferson runs so far, or JJ McCarthy vows to run through that wall for his coach, we can’t help but follow. Not for seriousness, or strangeness, or even entertainment. But for embodiment, borrowed for a moment as our own.

Why am I writing this at half past two in the morning? A neutral observer of my life so far might suggest a few causes. My lifelong love affair with staying up late, discovered at six, reading past bedtime by the crack of light beneath my bedroom door. Or the fact that last week our youngest drank from a sheep trough, spreading, with the efficiency of a Constantinople flea, a plague through our home. Easier, perhaps, to go with the obvious answer. I’m watching the Minnesota Vikings play the Chicago Bears.

Even then, why such sporting deviancy? Here things escalate. Was it my parents’ decision to get Sky in 2004, introducing me to a strange new sport, broadcast just late enough at night to feel illicit? What about 1988, when the Astra A1 satellite launched from French Guiana, giving Sky an unbeatable edge over staid competitor BSB, and cementing its place in the British cultural diet? Maybe it’s not a satellite that’s the culprit, but a person: John Riggins, running back for the Washington Redskins, whose 1984 season converted my father to the sport.

All of this is to say, I’m not entirely sure of the chain of accidents that led me to this point, typing merrily as JJ McCarthy, Vikings quarterback, throws a 28-yard crosser to receiver Jalen Nailor, as the first half reaches its close. Neither, to be fair, is McCarthy — the 10th pick in the 2024 NFL draft, tonight playing his first ever NFL game.

When teams choose who to draft, they usually divide players’ qualities into two categories. First there are the tangibles: how fast can a player run 40 yards, how high they can jump, how big are their hands. Those gifts secured the places of the four quarterbacks taken before him. To get picked McCarthy had to rely on the other side of the ledger – the intangibles: the relationships, ideas, and instincts no stopwatch or tape measure can capture.

The intangibles might have brought both me and McCarthy to our respective places — the field and the sofa — but they’re not doing either of us much good now. The Vikings are losing, and McCarthy has just thrown the worst kind of interception, a Pick Six, returned for a touchdown.

Intangibles have no exact equivalent in politics. The closest I can think of is atmospherics, an enjoyable bit of Spook-speak, used when dissecting a meeting between two principals. Agreements and actions can be taken as read; what matters is everything else: who was nervous, who was calm, who deferred, who dominated. These are the details that linger.

Scan most political histories, however, and you’ll find little trace of these. Much easier to talk about spreadsheets and speeches; the solid, and the seen. Between the Waves, Tom McTague’s history of Britain’s post-war struggle over Europe, does things a little differently.

The first clue something is up comes from where the story begins. Not at Yalta or Potsdam, nor even Robert Schuman’s office. Instead we are in 1942 Algiers, fresh off its capture by the Allies: staging post for a desperate war, a living Ben Macintyre book. Generals ensconce themselves in villas and hotels, cafés turn into playgrounds for spies, and the city becomes a crucible of diplomacy. This brings together three men, each of whom would, in their time, decide the course of a continent: Britain’s Harold Macmillan, America’s Robert Murphy, and France’s Jean Monnet.

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As in any good Macintyre tale, the real action is elsewhere. Vichy admiral François Darlan is in town, awaiting his blessing as France’s leader in waiting. Twenty-year-old Fernand Bonnier has other ideas, ably assisted by a pistol and two bullets. Darlan never makes it to his blessing ceremony, forcing our three wise men, and the countries they represent, to shift to plan B: recognition of Free France, and its standard-bearer, a general named Charles de Gaulle. In this Casablanca for bureaucrats, a city where the only friends are enemies not yet made, the course of post-war Europe is set.

Like the bullet that killed Darlan, very little here is ever destined. History is a process neither ‘ordained nor ordered, but chaotic and contingent.’ IRA car bombs explode prematurely in Holland Park. A young Ted Heath goes on a debating tour through middle America. The wife of the 1922 committee chairman decides she likes their quiet life in Somerset too much. This is how history happens. The players involved are less world spirits on horseback, more outlaws hauled behind a horse in a mid-70s Western. 'No arc of history, no permanent settlement, only endless struggle.'

Two intellectual figures dominate this book. The first is Michael Oakeshott, earning not only an array of citations but also one of the two epigraphs: ‘In political activity then, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed destination.’ The second is Roger Scruton. We first meet him in 1968 Paris, reading de Gaulle’s memoirs as his friends smash up the city. His funeral, with a reading of T.S. Eliot’s Little Gidding, ends the book.

Both treat politics as the Vikings treated their make-or-break draft: a game of intangibles, where aesthetic judgment beats scientific calculation. Here, as McTague puts it, Westminster is not just a place of dull managerialists but a home for ‘incurable romantics,’ united in their wish to see the work of government as ‘something more than a humdrum profession’. Culture matters, imagination counts, and politics is an affair of taste before it is ever one of numbers.

See the world this way, and a familiar story looks different. Ted Heath, usually profoundly unlikeable, becomes a man elevated in thought and spirit by the music of Europe, the only prime minister willing to actually make a choice between Europe and America. Jim Callaghan ceases to be ‘Sunny Jim,’ and is instead the sole leader of the 1970s willing to face reality, chiding country and party for being all too ‘ready to settle for borrowing money abroad to maintain our standards of life instead of grappling with the fundamental problem of British industry.’ Thatcher’s Euroscepticism, far from being predestined or a post-facto invention, emerges slowly, forged by a combination of American adoration and European insults.

Even better, we meet a cast of new characters: a roving band of political misfits most of us have never heard of, but whose influence we still feel. Chicken farmers, after discovering Hayek in the Reader’s Digest, plough their proceeds into think-tanks. Blind journalists, robbed of sight at the age of nine, write their way to the top. Students whose early work is so captivating they need permission from their college to install a landline and secretary in their digs. Between the Waves is a tonic for anyone who believes the 2020 call for misfits and weirdos was some great rupture. It’s always been misfits and weirdos.

This is the juice. The stuff for the true sickos. Who wants cabinet minutes when we can have deep dives into the best right-leaning literary salons of the 1980s, the petty feuds of Peterhouse dons, or tales of aristos serving as cut-outs between MI6 and the Czech resistance? I wish more political histories treated things this way: a history of Lord Liverpool’s cabinet that pays just as much attention to the goings-on at Almack’s, or biographies of Ursula von der Leyen detailing her strange year in London under police protection, living under a fake name with some real-life Peter Guillam watching over her. What does that do to a person? How often does she think about it? Will we ever get an answer?

All this makes for very depressing reading for a conspiracy theorist. The names might change — Business for Sterling becomes the New Frontier Foundation, which becomes the No to AV campaign, which becomes Vote Leave — but the personalities stay the same. The same people resurface again and again, not because they’ve been chosen by some secret cabal, but because they’re willing to look very stupid for a very long time, normally starting out in some terrible office space, jumping from room, to room, to room, until they find themselves in one that actually matters.

It does not feel like it, but a history that treats politics as a battle of ideas is so unfashionable we almost forget it ever existed. A lot of reviews of Between the Waves focus on the gap in quality between the politicians at the start and those at the end, usually in terms of erudition, intelligence, or work ethic. The sharper loss is of those who believe ideas matter, and the rise of those who do not. When Roger Scruton, a professor of aesthetics, takes a Times column and declares his goal: “a conservative dominance in intellectual life,” it’s less the doctrine but the sheer ambition that is shocking. In a world of deliverism and “adults in the room,” it is a relief to be reminded what political vision can look like.

Does any of this even matter? I think it does. Take Britain’s relationship with America, its most consequential. Seen through the tangibles — GDP, trade flows, military capacity — it looks inevitable, the gravitational pull of the supergiant across the Atlantic. Seen through the intangibles it looks different: aesthetic choices first, with the occasional handshake or shove from Washington to keep the vibes onside. A meeting refused, an invitation extended, a joint military or intelligence success. It was Heath's lesson: we have a choice here, but one that must be made. Lean towards America, or lean towards Europe. Try both, you fail.

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Look at the intangibles today and it is clear we have made our choice. It’s no surprise that the modern right, particularly of the Reform variety, borrows so much from America: sequins; singing; and concert-like rallies. More surprising is how the other parties follow suit. The most successful leader of the Lib Dems moved to California after office. Keir Starmer’s most prized gift, delivered at real political risk, was the US ambassadorship. In Boris Johnson’s final PMQs, his first piece of advice for his successor was not ‘govern well’ or ‘trust your team’ but ‘stay close to the Americans.’

Is a world that takes political intangibles seriously a happier or sadder one? On one hand, they’re harder to pin down, isolate, and correct. Quite often the leaders in Between the Waves resemble flies to wanton boys, coming in with a genuine belief that they, and they alone can do the thing their predecessors never could: to become ‘the prime minister who taught Britain to live with its contradictions.’ The universe has other ideas, with no shortage of wars, bombs, and referendums to quickly disabuse them of that notion. As McTague reminds us early on, there is no ‘arc of history, no permanent settlement, only endless struggle.’

On another reading, this is all quite fun. There are Line of Beauty-esque helicopter trips to millionaires in Burgundy, bawdy student politicos hanging out with the Contras, and the oddest of oddballs - lone subscribers in their chosen city to arcane political journals - somehow making their way to the top. Like any true Romantic form, there are plenty of fallen heroes, people who never quite reach the major leagues yet still pass the parcel on, leaving their ‘imaginative glow for others to follow.’ The figures are scratchier, their politics more coarse, than the groups we often like to lionise, but if you want evidence of what small groups of the committed can do, you will not find much better than this. Clubbish? Yes, but show me a better alternative.

Despite all this - or perhaps because of it - it's here, to optimism, that intangibles ultimately lead. The Vikings collapsed through the third quarter, their chance of victory falling to just 8 per cent. In the fourth quarter, McCarthy did something unexpected. He found the end zone three times, the first quarterback ever to do so in the closing quarter of his debut. The Vikings won.

Later in Between the Waves, McTague turns again to Oakeshott: ‘events do not resolve in such rational patterns… people matter, decisions matter, events matter.’ He was speaking of politics, but he might just as well have been describing the NFL. Some will read Oakeshott’s words, and the story of Between the Waves, as one of pessimism: ambitions doomed to failure, a future that, in the national imagination, never quite took.

McCarthy, and most of the characters in McTague’s tale of political anti-science, would see such contingency differently. In politics, as in football, the intangibles matter. They leave us with the simplest truth. You can just do things.

This was originally published in Issue 6 of the Toe Rag (June 2025)

On 27 February 1957, my wife’s grandfather was engaged in some particularly bad behaviour. Then a student at Manchester Technical College, he borrowed a car and, with four friends, drove to the newly opened Calder Hall power plant, the first commercial nuclear power station in the world. They cut through the wire fence, scaled one of the two 300-foot reactor chimneys and unfurled a banner from the top. It was red, stitched with a hammer and sickle, along with a few cryptic words in Russian. The next day, The Manchester Guardian called it ‘the most audacious stunt in university history’.

It was a stunt, rather than a protest: the work of five bored students in search of maximum publicity. The cryptic Russian words were ‘support Raising and Giving Week.’ Calder Hall, having been opened a year prior by the new-ish Queen, was the biggest stage they could find, a place that lit up, for a brief moment at least, England’s nuclear imagination.

Reading the Guardian’s account of the hijinks, sourced mainly from a ‘mystery phone call to the Manchester Evening News,’ it’s hard not to be swept up in the youthful naïveté of it all. After a week of reconnaissance, the operation began at 1am, outwitting the lone policeman guarding the site. Two students climbed the towers. The others kept lookout. When done, the trespassers ‘sang a student song and escaped over two snowbound Lakeland peaks’, stopping en route to call on Mrs Jefferson, a local landlady, for breakfast and a wash.

Today, the site, renamed Sellafield in 1981, holds no such romanticism. A quick Google offers enough epithets to last a lifetime: ‘a bottomless pit of hell, money and despair’, or, more kindly, I suppose, ‘Europe’s nuclear dustbin’. Yet images from its earlier days tell a different story. In 1952, the site looked strikingly clean and modern, even by today’s standards, a sharply drawn monument to atomic ambition. Back then, in a formulation endorsed by Anthony Eden in Parliament at the time, it was the home of ‘the mid-twentieth-century revolution in the production of power’, a showpiece of the new Elizabethan age. Today, it is simply a place we would rather forget existed.

Sellafield’s original sin occurred just months after Ian Maclean’s 1957 climb. That night, as he sat atop Calder Hall, he would have seen not only the peaks of the south-eastern Lakes and the moon glinting off the Irish Sea, but two other chimneys nearby. These were not the fat, curved cooling towers we now associate with nuclear power, but tall, narrow stacks, closer in spirit to the satanic mills of Blake’s industrial England.

They were the Windscale piles: reactors not designed to power homes, but to breed plutonium for Britain’s nascent bomb programme, one of several grand, anxious projects that sat at the heart of 1950s Britain.

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This was a particularly neurotic phase of British industrial life: a moment when the dreams of technological supremacy were freighted with a kind of national desperation - not just to justify intense state spending on science and infrastructure (the year Ian climbed the tower, defence spending alone sat at just over 7% of GDP), but to reassure the public (and our allies) that Britain still had a future in a Cold War world. These things simply had to work.

Often they didn’t. Three of the de Havilland Comets, the world’s first commercial jet airliner launched in 1952 with a promise to revolutionise travel, crashed catastrophically within the first year, leading to the plane's withdrawal from service. The same optimism fuelled Blue Streak, Britain’s first ballistic missile programme, which began development in 1955. Four years later, after spending some £300 million and facing the brutal realisation that the project was both technically and conceptually flawed, it was quietly cancelled.

The resultant mood, a combination of lofty national expectations, Potemkin projects, and a very British kind of regret when they failed, soon hit Sellafield. On 10 October 1957, a fire broke out in Windscale’s Unit 1, the worst nuclear accident in UK history. It burned for three days, releasing into the atmosphere a cocktail of elements with numbers at the end, the most frightening of all elements: iodine-131, caesium-137, xenon-133, polonium-210.

Things were covered up in the relatively half-arsed way they often were in those days. A small isolation zone was set up. Officials were dispatched to the farms of North West England to tell the farmers to throw away their milk (in the end, about two million litres). A report was issued, read, then unissued. Something had happened, yes, but it was honestly nothing to worry about, or so went the official line, delivered with all the conviction of a teenager who has just totalled the family car and is trying to break the news gently.

In the taxonomy of great nuclear disasters, Windscale wasn’t especially severe. Best estimates put its radiation release at just 0.063% of the caesium-137, 0.071% of the xenon-133, and 0.57% of the iodine-131 released during the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011. Both piles were shut down soon after. Unit 1 remains sealed to this day, its chimney still being dismantled brick by brick.

The rest of the site pivoted to civil nuclear, that is, the production of electricity. New reactors were added: some of the same breed Ian had climbed (Magnox reactors, named after the magnesium-aluminium alloy that encased their fuel rods), and others more advanced, including an experimental newer model of gas-cooled reactor, imaginatively called Advanced Gas Reactors (AGRs), housed in a vast, patinaed dome that still looms over the surrounding farmland.

And yet, like a druid’s curse (there is a stone circle nearby), the mood lingered. On paper, Sellafield was the flagship of Britain’s new atomic age. In practice, it made everyone uneasy – especially the Ministers of post-war Britain, who from the 1970s onwards relied on high-profile public inquiries to insulate themselves from any nuclear decision. Even when sent out to bat for nuclear, as Nigel Lawson was in 1982, they did so with a lump in the throat and a generous supply of qualifiers: ‘In view of the formidable range of uncertainty which inevitably attaches to long-term projections, it clearly makes no sense to adopt any rigid plan or programme…’

Sellafield, and with it Britain’s civil nuclear effort, became a kind of quiet failure. Not because the technology didn’t work: it did. Calder Hall powered the grid until 2003, lasting more than twice its original twenty-year design life. The AGR designs developed at Sellafield were exported to Japan and Italy and became the backbone of Britain’s nuclear fleet.

The real failure lay elsewhere. Sellafield didn’t just export reactor designs; it exported unease, that vague feeling that something wasn’t quite right. In the plain words of one Sellafield local: ‘No, I am not anti-nuclear, but my goodness, I think they could have made a better fist of it if they'd tried harder.’

As a result, neither Sellafield nor the wider nuclear programme ever found a place in the national imagination. In the country that gave us the films and television shows Threads (1984), When the Wind Blows (1986), and the five-second jingle from hell that bookends every Protect and Survive (1975) episode, such failure might seem inevitable. Yet across the Channel, the story is very different, particularly in public attitudes toward nuclear power.

Today, nearly 70% of France’s electricity comes from fifty-seven nuclear reactors, spread across eighteen sites tucked into the riversides and coastlines of la France profonde. Retired locals swim each morning in the warm waters around the plants. Reactor chimneys are sometimes transformed into public art, most famously at Le Verseau, where artist Jean-Marie Pierret painted a fifty-foot-tall naked child, drizzling water from a shell onto a pyramid of tessellating triangles. Where the water lands, the pyramid glows with a biblical light, the kind that fires from doves in fifteenth-century paintings. It is Europe’s largest mural.

Such optimism has been a feature of France’s nuclear journey from the very beginning, in which nuclear energy was presented not as a Faustian bargain but as a patriotic inheritance, the logical heir to the discoveries of Marie and Pierre Curie. As Gabrielle Hecht notes in her 1998 study of France’s nuclear imagination, the mood was unmistakable when Zoé, France’s first experimental reactor, burst into life in December 1948:

This success, proclaimed one newspaper, was ‘a great achievement, French and peaceful, which strengthens our role in the defense of civilization.’ The following year, scientists isolated France's first milligram of plutonium. President Vincent Auriol paid Zoe a visit and solemnly declared: ‘This achievement will add to the radiance of France.’

While France adorned its reactors with images of children casting light into the world, Britain’s uniquely approach post-Windscale, a blend of denial, improvisation and embarrassment, seeped not only into the national debate but also into the day-to-day running of its nuclear programme. Nowhere more so than at Sellafield, where our anxieties even took physical form.

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Waste disposal at Sellafield, on paper, was relatively simple. Vast ponds were dug, often open to the air and filled with water. Spent nuclear fuel was removed from the reactor and placed into the ponds to cool. The fuel was meant to sit briefly before being transferred for processing. But in the early 1970s, as a wave of miners' strikes plunged Britain back into candles, bath rationing, and yet more Ted Heath, the workers at Sellafield had to pick up the slack. More fuel went in. Less came out.

At the same time, one of the plants meant to receive processed waste, B205, broke down. The spent fuel was left in the ponds. Over time, it formed a thick radioactive sludge. Attempts to make the ponds less radioactive using zeolites, aluminosilicate blocks designed to absorb radiation, only created new problems when the zeolites themselves, reclaimed by the ponds, became radioactive too.

Today, the most dangerous of these ponds is B30: the length of three Olympic swimming pools, known in the industry as ‘Dirty Thirty’. Less the kind of thing that Tom Daley would dive into, more like the Old English mere in which Beowulf hunted down Grendel’s mother.

The finer details of the pond are kept secret, but in 2014 a few photos were anonymously leaked to The Ecologist and subsequently posted on Reddit. They show a square, concrete-lined pool, with crate-like containers decaying beneath the surface, the water a sulphur-blue colour that sets a 300,000-year-old evolutionary alarm bell ringing somewhere deep inside you. The iron lip of the pond has rusted, sending streaks of brown mascara downwards, discolouring each cracked concrete block. On top: moss, grass, and twisted iron. When the image appeared on the ‘submechanophobia’ subreddit, the top comment, courtesy of user /r/doppelfrog, read: ‘That’s something straight out of the Zone’.

Cleaning up the ponds is now the main job of the 10,000 or so people who work at Sellafield. Some, like B29, are safe enough that specialist divers can descend via makeshift scaffolding and guide underwater vacuums through the sludge. B30 is not one of them. To dive into it would mean life-altering doses of radiation within minutes. Nausea hits almost instantly. Vision blurs. Your mouth fills with the taste of metal. Even preparing the building for eventual decommissioning meant limiting workers to half-day shifts by the pool. The first generation of remotely operated vehicles sent into the pond quickly failed. I agree with doppelfrog: ‘The Zone wants to be respected. Otherwise it will punish.’ Dirty Thirty is where the punishment begins.

So why did one country end up with murals, the other with the lagoon of death?

There’s an obvious answer, and a less obvious one. The obvious reason takes us back to Ian Maclean’s view from the top of that chimney: on one side, the second Calder Hall tower; on the other, the Windscale piles. Atoms for peace and atoms for war, side by side and bound together from the start.

In Britain, the civil and military strands of nuclear ambition were never cleanly separated. In France, by contrast, the bomb programme remained tightly secret for years after the first reactor, Zoé, came to life. (The building that housed it is now a public museum: the Museum of the Atom.) The British imagination, by contrast, was steeped early on in nuclear duality — another consequence of our 1950s national neurosis. The day after Britain first tested its atomic weapon in 1952, the Daily Mirror began its write-up with the line: ‘Today Britain is Great Britain again.’

The French, of course, understood the bomb’s destructive potential, and in elite circles were desperate to acquire one. But they proved far better at mentally separating bomb from reactor. Civil nuclear power became something distinct: a technology associated with sovereignty, progress, and modernity. To think ‘nuclear’ in Britain, however, is almost instinctively to think ‘bomb.’ And when it came to imagining nuclear nightmares, on page, screen or cassette tape, no country did it better.

As someone born in 1992, I came too late to fully indulge in this national pastime. At ten, I was handed Robert Swindells’s young adult novel from hell, Brother in the Land, a book so dark the afterword includes the line: ‘There is no hope in my story.’ After the Cold War ended, and the need to scare another generation of children shitless had subsided, Swindells rewrote the ending. In the original, after the protagonist Danny’s family is wiped out, cannibals and bureaucrats survived, and a girlfriend handily procured, his reward is to bury his radiation-addled little brother in a shallow Northallerton grave. The brother goes in the land.

Grown-up fare was hardly lighter. M. John Harrison’s The Committed Man, set in a post-nuclear Britain, makes Brother in the Land look like The Wind in the Willows. Harrison’s hero, Clement Wendover, we are told, is one of the lucky ones: living in a junk-strewn nissen hut, with only his ‘raw and toothless gums’ and ‘bony, ulcerated face’ for company. At night he dreams of his dead wife Vanessa, yet every time he reaches out, ‘her face would bleed, the beautiful skin breaking out in ulcers or peeling back like the rind of an orange to reveal the perfectly white skeleton, the inner grin.’ Great.

Even Martin Amis’s irony buckled, slightly at least, under the weight of nuclear dread. In the introduction to Einstein’s Monsters, he imagines surviving the bomb while alone at his desk:

I shall be obliged (and it’s the last thing I shall feel like doing) to retrace that long ride home, through the firestorm, the remains of the thousand-mile-an-hour winds, the warped atoms, the grovelling dead. Then – God willing, if I still have my strength, and, of course, if they are still alive – I must find my wife and children and I must kill them.

All of which is to say: in a country like Britain, Sellafield’s link to the bomb doomed it from the start.

To figure out the less obvious reason, it’s wiser to head away from Cumbria, and instead towards the Suffolk coast, namely the shingle spit of Orford Ness, a place far more deeply, darkly and obviously bound to the story of the British bomb than Sellafield ever was.

Unlike Sellafield, Orford Ness was never a civilian site. It began life in the 1910s as a testing ground for experimental military aircraft, and in the 1930s became one of Britain’s first radar development stations. After the war, it passed quietly into the hands of the Atomic Weapons Establishment, the government agency responsible for designing and maintaining the UK’s nuclear arsenal, which used it to trial key components of the British bomb: high-explosive lenses, electronic triggers and environmental stress systems, all tested in squat concrete ‘pagodas’ poured straight from the Brutalist imagination. The weapons whose parts were refined here were not just proof of concept; they were the workhorse tactical and strategic bombs carried aboard British aircraft from the 1950s until the shift to submarine-based deterrence in 1998.

The site was sold to the National Trust in 1993, landing its new custodians with the question of what to do with a place of such apocalyptic history — and in such poor condition (an early nickname for the site was, internally, Awful Mess). The initial plan was to demolish what they could and return the site to wilderness. But as Sophia Davis details in War, Ruins and Wilderness at Orford Ness, a group of National Trust employees fought to preserve its weirdness and simply let it go to ruin on its own terms. Even before opening to the public, the Trust began inviting artists. The first was painter Denis Creffield, who spent several weeks living in a small wooden hut on the island, rising with the dawn to paint its strange concrete landscapes.

The strategy, one that feels more French than British, succeeded.

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Shortly after it opened, W.G. Sebald, in The Rings of Saturn, wrote lyrically of his illicit journeys to Orford Ness, meditating on the secret projects pursued there since the 1930s. Sebald, in 1995, still takes a relatively apocalyptic tone: ‘with each step I took, the emptiness within and the emptiness without grew ever greater’, but as each generation of artist has entered the Ness, the tone has noticeably changed. Of Robert Macfarlane’s many contemporary descriptions of the site, my favourite is this: ‘an atomic pastoral, a shattered sacrificial-ceremonial supermodern Stonehenge, a ritual space.’

Why do we venerate the Ness but despise our lonely outpost on the Cumbrian coast? Because one has aged the right way and the other the wrong way. What draws us to the Ness is its obsolescence, a ruin melting back into the shingle it rose from, so clearly of another age. Sellafield, by contrast, has never been allowed to die. It staggers on, unmistakably a relic, but one we refuse to bury. Few things are more unsettling than the technologies of the recent past: the medical tools of a previous generation, the aesthetic obduracy of a 1970s BT phone box. Technology, like everything else, has a sell-by date.

This might seem like a strange way to talk about technology. We’re usually told to fear the new and the hubristic: think of Jeff Goldblum, in Jurassic Park (1992), staring at a genetically modified egg and muttering: ‘Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.’ But more often, it’s not the new technology that gets us. It’s the old: the rusting bolt that fails, the transformer thirty years past its sell-by date, the load-bearing software built on a programming language nobody remembers.

This is Sellafield’s true sin: not some act of deception or disaster, but the quiet consequence of a peculiarly neurotic optimism. We tried to do too much, running a bomb programme, a power station, and a global reprocessing hub all on one site, stretching technologies and institutional trust beyond their limits. When that failed, we did not reckon with the consequences. We buried them. What we were left with was a functional ruin: minimal function paired with maximal danger. An anti-artifact, a site that refused to fade into gentle obsolescence.

The French, again, provide a bracing contrast. France’s equivalent to Sellafield, Marcoule, began operation in 1956 with three major reactors on site. Their average lifespan was just under twenty years, far from the near fifty years Calder Hall endured before being left to rest. When they began to age, newer ones were quickly built: in France between 1977 and 1999, fifty-six reactors were connected to the grid; in the UK, that number was just one.

The dreams of Britain’s post-war industrial age never survived. The de Havilland Comet and Blue Streak missile now belong in museums. The Calder Hall reactor design, briefly exported to Italy and Japan, was soon overtaken by safer, more advanced models (the last working Magnox reactor today is in North Korea). One by one, the icons of 1950s and 60s technological ambition were allowed to fade. But Sellafield did not vanish like the rest. It lingered, a reminder of that ambition but also a burden on it, weighing down the plants that still operate today and darkening the prospects of those, like the next generation of Small Modular Reactors, still to come.

This is why Dirty Thirty is more than a prurient detail in Britain’s nuclear story. Not just a pond, but a reminder of why we remain repelled by nuclear power, and of the uneasy legacy we have never fully reckoned with. Its presence stops Sellafield, unlike the Ness, from growing old gracefully, from becoming the atomic pastoral we might one day need. Until then, it remains: the id of Britain’s failed nuclear imagination. Not just a radioactive mess, but a living metaphor for our inability to complete our own modernity. A bad miracle, humming quietly with the dreams we gave up on.

Earlier this year, a new, achingly English video game, Atomfall, was released. It is set in the ruins of a fictionalised version of Windscale, fittingly in 1957, the year Ian climbed that tower. What I liked most about it is that the Windscale of Atomfall is not tethered to today’s Sellafield in any meaningful way. It exists entirely in the imagination, as perhaps it would more helpfully have done if the site had simply been shut down in October 1957, leaving the burden of national symbolism to the new reactors of the 60s and 70s, better suited to carry it.

This is why we should wish them well, the men and women who will wake up today to man the remote underwater vehicles and pack the zeolites into the self-shielded boxes they’ll call home for the next century. They’re not just removing a biological hazard, but an aesthetic one: the last link to a sunken land we want and need to leave behind.

That’s for a day in the future, though. Until then, Dirty Thirty will remain: Grendel’s mother’s lake, ringed with scaffolding and men in PPE.

‘Roots that reach as far as the water / And help keep it dark. At night that lake / Burns like a torch. No one knows its bottom / No wisdom reaches such depths.’

Whilst at university, whenever I needed to stay in London, I relied on a rather cushy deal I had with a club in Whitehall. It was called the Farmer’s Club. I paid around £80 a year for a vague sort of junior membership. In exchange, they let me stay, from time to time, in their tiniest room at the top of the building, permanently shrouded in cellophane sheets. Once, after leaving the room and finding the main lift was out, I found the service elevator, and took it instead.

The door opened, not to the lobby I was expecting, but to an entirely different space. The feel was similar: beige paint, overly polished wooden doors, and a carpet from the eighties that somehow evoked both Princess Diana and Little Chef. In this world, however, words and numbers had ceased to exist. The sign in front of me had only what I could best describe as painted golden hieroglyphs etched into it, accompanied by a few arrows.

I chose a direction and walked until I reached an open doorway, with a large pyramid sitting on top of the frame. It bore a hieroglyph too, the largest of them all: the head of a fork, its central tine elongated like a middle finger, bisected by a cross, with a sharp triangle jutting from the lower right leg. The room beyond was perfunctory, if dated. A few screens. A few monitors. The same Princess Diana x Olympic Breakfast carpet. It was empty. I bolted. A few turns down corridors, and somehow I was outside, gulping Whitehall’s dirty air.

In the years that followed, I often thought back to this incident, unsure whether it had really happened. A few times I tried to find my way back, but I never could. My best guess was that there was an office next door owned by some kind of magicians’ guild, but a search on Google turned up nothing. Over time, the uncertainty became oddly comforting. A memory, or not-memory, to noodle on while driving down some long stretch of motorway.

In time, I learned the truth. I won’t say how. Only that, in a 19th-century building less than 200 metres from the Ministry of Defence, there is a room that speaks only in symbols. The occult still lives, happily, in the heart of Westminster.

Once, a flirtation with the strange was a rite of passage for high office. Arthur Balfour kept, until his death, automatic writings he believed came from May Lyttelton, his first love, who had died at 25. In an 1894 speech, Lord Salisbury proclaimed: ‘we live in a small, bright oasis… surrounded… by a vast, unexplored region of impenetrable mystery.’ Even in the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher and her colleagues paid their dues. Michael Heseltine built a druidic circle in his garden. Alan Clark hosted the cast of The Tripods at Saltwood. Thatcher herself welcomed a barefoot Indian mystic into her Commons office to have her future foretold.

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Now, ‘weird’ has shifted from an essential attribute to the most grievous of political insults. The most notorious poster of the 1997 election showed Tony Blair with his eyes replaced by those of a demon — like the children of Midwich, his true nature supposedly revealed in his gaze. Two years later, Blair himself opened his 1999 conference speech with the dig: ‘Under John Major, it was weak, weak, weak. Under William Hague, it’s weird, weird, weird.’ Fifteen years later Ed Miliband, of limestone monoliths and mis-eaten sandwiches, found himself with the same target on his back. Today’s leaders reach for reason above all else. The adults, we are repeatedly told, are back in the room.

Britain’s strangeness is a nettle. You can tramp it down, cut it, punish it. But it just won’t go away. Now, perhaps, it’s resurgent. Weird walks and visits to megaliths are hot in a way that would make Stukeley blush. The most anticipated new British game this year is set in a village named after John Wyndham. The most successful film of the year mashes together visions of St Cuthbert with a hauntological band of Ken Loach cosplayers. When our women’s football team wins an international tournament, players speak of their English blood.

Writers have historically done most to keep the weird flame alive. They train us from an early age: the books young British readers grow up on are almost all fantastical. The impulse runs so deep that to describe, say, the Harry Potter series, seven volumes of wizards and magic, as ‘fantasy’ would, in Britain, mark you out as a bit odd. The instinct persists into adulthood: in the last major national reading survey, seven of the top ten books were science fiction or fantasy. That’s not counting Jane Eyre, a novel whose plot hinges on a moment of horny 19th-century telepathy, which perhaps says it all.

A tradition needs more than reach; it needs depth: writers who embody the sensibility instinctively — the hardcore beneath the literary tarmac. If I had to name one, it would be M. John Harrison.

It’s hard to call Harrison a cult writer any more. Since his debut, apocalyptic shit-scarer The Committed Men (1971), he has spent half a century as our cartographer of the English strange. His most recent novel, The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, won the Goldsmiths Prize in 2020. The Course of the Heart (1992), perhaps his strangest novel, has now been reissued.

Three students head into the fields of Cambridge with a haphazard occultist, somewhere between Aleister Crowley and Super Hans. Something occurs, though we are never told exactly what. We only know it takes them near, perhaps even into, the pleroma: a zone outside our world and beyond understanding. From then on their lives are changed. Two are broken, haunted not only by metaphorical spectres, but actual ones. One is trailed everywhere by a pair of entwined ghosts, the other forced into periodic skirmishes with a coke-can-lobbing gnome.

The narrator seems to have fared a little better. His life holds together: a wife and child, a job in publishing, a house overlooking Regent’s Canal. His visions, too, are gentler, more Chelsea Flower Show than Wicker Man: dog and guelder-rose, streaming willows in winter sun, and the smell of attar. When another character tells him, ‘you fell in the shit and came up smelling of flowers,’ he is right in more ways than he realises.

Harrison’s horror is brutally realistic. One character dies choking on half a Mars bar; another by driving a milk float into a ditch. The most chilling passages are the blow-by-blow details of a cancer death. It reminded me of a Saturday Night Live sketch where the Rock plays a mad scientist competing to design the world’s most evil invention. Going third, he promptly kills the contest by unveiling a robot built to molest children. ‘We know what evil means!’ ‘Well, doesn’t seem like you do ‘cause you built a freeze ray.’

His zones are not those of Tarkovsky, nor the family-friendly ‘multiverses’ we know from Marvel films, but those of an England we recognise all too well: a grotty flat in Peckham, a public toilet in Cambridge, the gap in a wedding marquee where the flooring meets the grass.

These settings are familiar from two of Harrison’s other novels, that, along with The Course of the Heart, feel like an unspoken trilogy. The first, Climbers (1989), follows a drifter who, after personal tragedy, devotes himself to the crags and slabs of the Peak District. In the second, The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, two characters stumble through a Britain being quietly overrun by fish people.

All three share the same backdrop: an England a click or two removed from our own. In Climbers, Hadrian’s Wall ‘dreaming in the wind and sunshine’ coexists alongside car-parks to nowhere, their bins overflowing with wine bottles and disposable nappies. In Sunken Land, it’s towns on the ‘brown edge of Wales,’ where faded closure notices rub shoulders with dark deeds in the alleys between Costa and My Little Wedding. The Course of the Heart becomes a kind of grand tour: from the grimy Morecambe seafront, through the Pizza Express on Dean Street, all the way to Cornwall’s most notorious dogging spots.

It’s through this world that Harrison’s characters drift, shrug and avoid. When one discovers his family has been destroyed, the response is laconic: ‘the goddess gives. The goddess takes away.’ Another arranges a reunion with his ex-wife in a railway-station restaurant, sits out of sight, watches her for an hour, then boards the train home. The last words of one of the protagonists in Sunken Land, who by my count has seen at least four aquatic humanoids first-hand, are as understated as they come: ‘It’s a nice little town, but something is happening here.’

And when it ends, as it always does, there are no answers. This is the rule Harrison obsesses over most, and the one his readers take to heart: resist closure. We never learn where the water people came from, what the students did with Yaxley, or why white rose petals drift from the sky outside a grotty pub in Settle. Why should we? Who wants Children of Men with a thirty-minute lecture on infertility, or a Twin Peaks in which we watch the interior designers come in to stage the Red Room first? Harrison’s animus towards explicability is clearest in his 2023 ‘anti-memoir,’ Wish I Was Here: ‘Rationale is always the sound of the stuffing falling out, the jaw jaw jaw of a nauseating lack of imaginative intensity.’

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All this helps explain the paradox of Harrison. He has his signatures: the grubby beauty of the English countryside, the anticipatory tension of a communal stairway, the uncanny glare of fishbones left on the side of a plate. His themes — uncertainty, obsession, the perils of an imagined past — are hardly unique among contemporary British writers. Yet why does he feel so much more relevant, more attuned to the present, than writers born decades later?

The first reason is obvious. Most literary novelists have to think their way into the strange: they start with a conceit, wrestle their way out of the rationalist trap, and only then invite us in — having overcome what Ishiguro, speaking of himself, once called the ‘instinctive suspicion’ that colours such attempts. Harrison’s approach is different. Others put on the fantastical. He embodied it from the start.

The second reason is that the world has bent back towards his way of thinking. The nettle has regrown. The Course of the Heart ends with the fall of the Berlin Wall, ‘then came the fireworks at the Brandenburg Gate,’ while Sunken Land brings us to an England unknowingly on the verge of the pandemic. The thirty-year gap between the two mirrors our own interregnum: the calmer, cleverer, teleological world that followed Demon Eyes, a world that now looks like an aberration. ‘The shiny offered produce of a vanished age,’ as one character in Sunken Land puts it, gazing at glossy printing paper in a run-down regional shop. If this world and that of The Course of the Heart feel similar, it is because they are. Push the land down deep, but its buoyancy remains.

When I studied law at university, the dominant doctrine was the ‘one right answer’ thesis — the belief that every legal question had a single solution if only you understood it well enough. But life doesn’t work that way. Less Ronald Dworkin’s Judge Hercules, more Harrison’s narrator at the end of Climbers: ‘I sat in the niche for a long time. I realised I didn’t know any more than I had the last time I sat there. I didn’t know anything about anything.’

Most of us have moments that shape our lives but resist explanation. Balfour, Salisbury, and Thatcher certainly did. The big ones we keep to ourselves; the small, inexplicable ones get wheeled out at parties. Mine involved a wastepaper bin in the Drakensberg mountains that slid, without cause, across the floor. Political analysis usually dwells on the gap between voters and candidates over issues like the economy, immigration, or the environment. But what about how people process uncertainty — the things that can’t be known? How many members of the Cabinet believe in ghosts?

This is a serious question. It isn’t about someone’s attitude to the Green Man or a passing apparition, but to uncertainty itself. This is the closest Harrison gets to stating a mission: ‘Let’s have some representation in fiction for everyone who, without knowing it, puzzles through their lives in what used to be called ‘a dream’… I’m not sure life is a dream. But if your attempts to map it don’t feel like one, you may be making a serious error about what being awake actually is, or where and in what conditions it is carried out.’

Rationalists can rule rationalists. But most of us in this country are not the exam-passers who spent three years training to be Judge Hercules, eliminating our way to the right answer every time. In Britain, a hint of superstition usually beats a totalising explanation.

I think of my Dad. While I was at university learning Hercules, he was wrapping up three decades on the police front line — beginning, in the years of Climbers and The Course of the Heart, by policing unexplained hurricanes, Millwall hooligans, and the fringiest protests of the 1980s, then heading back to Wales to carry on a life of encounters with all the world had to offer. What always bemused me was that the more he saw, the more tolerant he became: never knowingly unwilling to accommodate what he could not explain. That, I suspect, is where tolerance as a low-level British virtue first found its foothold. To not understand all may, in fact, be the surest route to forgiving all.

This perhaps explains why our politics so often resembles the ur-story of science fiction — from Frankenstein, to Solaris, to Harrison’s work: clever people driven mad by a thing they cannot understand, deafened by the grinding silence of rationality meeting its limits. The weird is not escapism but a way of testing epistemological standards, which is why a novel like The Course of the Heart contains more political wisdom than any number of think-tank reports. From time to time someone asks why politicians should read novels. Much better to ask why a politician should read a novel. Here’s my first suggestion.

'Life's aware of itself even as you piss it down the drain,' muses one of the characters in The Course of the Heart. 'You're forever catching its last signal.' If the sunken land really is back, it is better to throw out our rational map. 'Comprehend the heart and you will never experience it.' We need a guide for rooms that speak only in symbols. Here he is.

Hi folks,

In full August mode I’m writing this from the Cantref Adventure Park cafe. This has two benefits: a very pleasing view of the Brecon Beacons in the distance, and a fitting place to finish something about parenthood, via two of my favourite debut novels this year, Saba Sams’ Gunk and Leo Robson’s The Boys.

In other news, last week I wrote for UnHerd about the return of Victorian moral capitalism, and shared my most recommended summer read with Alys Key at UK 2.0. Next up is something on M. John Harrison and his recently re-released The Course of the Heart. Weird.

Have a great bank holiday weekend, and see you next week,

Aled

‘We got a family here!’ shouts Nicolas Cage’s H.I. McDunnough halfway through Raising Arizona. He and his wife, Ed, have just welcomed a baby into their home. The baby isn’t theirs. They’ve stolen him. But provenance matters little as they flee through the desert with nothing but a child, a station wagon, and Dr Spock for guidance. Of course, in the end, even for these two most amateur of parents, it all works out.

That parenthood is less an active decision than the accidental result of daily acts of care is a truth literary fiction has long grasped. It takes only a squeeze of the infant Tom Jones’s hand for Squire Allworthy to adopt the baby found snoozing in his bedsheets. Silas Marner, counting his hoarded gold, finds it returned to him in the form of a child. Anne Shirley rides a clerical error all the way to Green Gables.

My favourite of all foundling stories comes from Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey–Maturin series. We first meet Stephen Maturin's eventual god-daughters on a Pacific island, their village wiped out by smallpox. The crew take them aboard, name them Sarah and Emily, and appoint Jemmy Ducks, the ship’s poulterer, as parent-in-chief, mainly because he already has ‘seven or eight of the little buggers’. They carry the girls halfway around the world. ‘Well,’ Jemmy shrugs, ‘they say no man can escape his fate.’

It’s no wonder, then, that found-family tales have become the plot-du-jour of the modern blockbuster. In HBO’s The Last of Us, Joel finds in Ellie not just an extra hand during the zombie apocalypse, but a surrogate daughter. The Mandalorian has Grogu (more widely known as Baby Yoda), an animatronic creature from a galaxy far, far away who somehow behaves exactly like a human toddler. The Fast & the Furious franchise found new life when Dom Toretto discovered a secret son, whose main function is to be kidnapped and rescued with increasing frequency (three attempts, two successful, in Fast X, the most recent in the series).

If the world of blockbusters is intent on turning family into spectacle — the recent Fantastic Four film contains a ten-minute birthing scene, the most recent DC film ends with the titular Superman gazing lovingly at videos of his parents — this, for my money at least, is no bad thing. But someone does need to pull it all back to earth. That’s exactly what Saba Sams’s Gunk and Leo Robson’s The Boys attempt: to bring the found-family story back onto quieter, stranger, and more ordinary terrain.

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Gunk is Sams’s first novel after Send Nudes, a short-story collection featuring street brawls, dick pics, and a dog with a terrible sense of coital timing. Like Giovanni’s Room (Baldwin gets another nod in the epigraphs), it begins with the aftermath: ‘the baby is twenty-four hours and seventeen minutes old.’ The rest of the novel explains how Jules, our narrator, got there, there being a sofa in a Brighton apartment, successfully doling out colostrum from a tiny syringe: a cathartic image for anyone who spent the last weeks of pregnancy stocking their fridge, only to throw it all away a month later.

Jules is not the baby’s mother. That’s Nim, who’s missing, having fled the hospital shortly after the birth. The father is Leon, a five-foot-five club promoter with ‘front teeth angled with one just over the other,’ and a hole in his heart. For a time, Leon and Jules were married, having met on her first visit to Leon’s nightclub. We learn early on that Jules has wanted to be a mother for as long as she can remember. As a child, she didn’t play with her peers, but marshalled younger ones like a nine-year-old Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. Nim knows this, and so, with a ‘you know you’ve always wanted a baby,’ the in loco parentis hijinks ensue.

The Boys leaves the strollers until the very end. It’s 2012, and Johnny Voghel is a thirty-year-old for whom life has never quite taken off. The story unfolds over the two strange weeks of the London Olympics, when even long-time residents briefly became tourists in their own city. The Games mostly pass Johnny by. He’s preoccupied with more personal disruptions: Lawrence, his half-brother and natural foil, arrives unannounced, needing to ‘sort something out.’ That something involves Lawrence’s teenage son, Jasper.

Lawrence is the sort of man you really only find in Britain: someone who copes with life by simply learning a vast number of facts. He and Johnny are literary lads through and through. At one point an ‘I Heart Reading’ mug appears, and it’s left ambiguous whether it refers to the festival, the football team, or the act. Lawrence is a highbrow version of Jay from The Inbetweeners. FHM is replaced by the LRB, Thorpe Park by the British Library, and tales of the Swanage MILF by anecdotes about Susan Sontag.

He’s not the only figure to make his way into Voghel’s flat, which hosts so many people over the course of the novel that one begins to wonder about its square footage. There’s the aforementioned Jasper and his partner Loulou, who hail from Stratford-cum-Eastcheap, as well as an enjoyably ridiculous cast of students whose major triumph is commandeering a boat and floating it down the Thames. ‘“Look, she’s read shitloads of Conrad. She understands how tides work.”’ There’s also a dazzling array of New Labour cameos, with Lawrence cast as the Forrest Gump of the Third Way: at Granita alongside Blair and Brown as they talk football while carving up the next decade and a half. A glimpse of Peter Mandelson in the street is ‘like bumping into God.’

Gunk also offers an array of excellent supporting characters. It would have been easy to make Leon entirely unlikeable, but, much to my wife’s chagrin, I found him oddly sympathetic: a tin man in every sense, powered by a heady blend of ‘cocaine, valium, alcohol, and Fanta.’ When he cuts his finger chopping a lime, he weeps. When a near-death emergency arrives, he can’t even summon the necessary vomit.

Both novels show how orbits harden into attachments. Jules longs for a child; Johnny is incapable of longing for anything at all. Yet each clings to the place they know best. For Jules, that means Gunk, the nightclub where she met Leon and still runs the show. For Johnny, it’s an entire city, seen through the misty-eyed sensibility of your median centrist dad. His proudest achievement, at least at the outset, is his proximity to central London (‘“five stops” — “no! six”’): just enough to set him slightly apart from the broader pool of thirty-something drifters.

London in The Boys gets the kind of lovingly granular treatment usually reserved for spy fiction: alongside Samson’s Berlin, we now have Voghel’s London. The tone is that of a US celebrity discovering Hampstead Heath for the first time. St Mary’s Hospital Paddington is not an overheated Gormenghast, but something far more poetic:

‘“Loulou, St Mary’s Hospital is next to Paddington Station,” I said, then reflected on the tremendous luck enjoyed by this child, being born not, as its parents supposed, on the periphery but right in Zone 1, at the heart of the London Underground network, a stone’s throw from Baker Street in one direction and Hyde Park on the other, and the effect that this would have on his or her ability to view existence as a succession of opportunities, a fantastic high-stakes game.’

It’s easy to sneer at this rose-tinted view, but frankly, when it comes to London, Voghel is generally more right than he is wrong. Nonetheless, ‘London as an identity’ has its limits, as does ‘downmarket Brighton nightclub’. A better alternative comes along by both novels’ end. Jules’ destination we already know: torn nappy tags and accidentally over-heated milk. Johnny’s route, like his beloved tube lines, is a little more circuitous, but ends at much the same place. Out go sexually charged trips to the National Gallery, Olympic-themed parties, and houseboat-related adventures. In come singing classes, rhythm time sessions, and excursions to city farms.

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What’s striking about these tales is how little drama attends them. Parenthood in these novels doesn’t arrive with a lightning bolt; a foundling in a bed, or a toddler waddling in from the snow. Instead it settles in like a low-pressure system. Gunk might sound as radical as they come: queer parenting, Brighton nightlife, a missing mother, but it resolves, movingly, into a portrait of everyday parenthood, complete with night feeds and handovers. The Boys is even more restrained: its domestic turn arrives almost by stealth, slipped in at the end of the book: a turn you never really see coming.

In Gunk, things are so collectively relaxed that Sams is forced to create a little turbulence — Nim’s disappearance just hours after labour — to raise the narrative stakes. When Jules’s parents arrive to help her with a baby that isn’t technically hers, her partner missing, there’s no sly tutting or talk of ruined lives, just a seat on the sofa and a gentle offer: ‘Why don’t you have a nap, dear?’ Not to worry. You’re in the club now.

Johnny is a little more circumspect as to how he got here, leaving us to draw our own conclusions about how a week quietly expanded into months, then years. ‘We couldn’t be certain why I had done this.’ The closest thing to an answer comes in a dream: a vision of ‘a heavily bearded version of myself pushing my father as a baby on a swing, and my mother as an old woman, stroking her hands.’ Maybe it wasn’t Utah. Maybe it was Swiss Cottage instead.

Early in The Boys, Johnny pokes around the bedroom where Lawrence has holed himself up and finds a copy of Knausgaard’s My Struggle — the only book any high-brow Inbetweener worth their salt would have been reading in the summer of 2012. When reading Gunk and The Boys, the instinct is to reach for the classics of English domesticity, but what about the original literary lad himself? Fraught relationships, disappointing parties, and a search for meaning resolved not by transcendence or reinvention, but by committing to the mundane and relentless mechanics of care. The last line of the Boys is not a rumination on the wonder of the world, but on what a toddler should be fed: ‘I was thinking carrots and steamed broccoli.’ Chop wood, carry water, and imagine Knausgaard happy.

Stories of found parenthood reverse the direction of choice. In most of life, we agonise over commitment: whether to have children, to stay in a city, to be with someone. The foundling story flips it. The decision arrives first, the meaning comes later. Change enough nappies, and who cares how you get there.

You can argue — and some of the marketing around Gunk certainly does — that these are unusual, or very new, forms of parenting. Are they really? Writing a straightforward nuclear family feels suspect, so we come at it sideways.

Here, as in novels of old and the Hollywood of new, sideways works. Perhaps that’s the lesson too, and one pro-natalist advocates would do well to remember: instead of inflating parenthood into ideology or fantasy, these novels remind us that it is strange but ordinary.

The best literary parents usually have it thrust upon them. But no matter how carefully we plan, or think we’ve got it locked down, don’t we all?

Of all the subplots of British politics during the American Revolutionary War, the most enjoyable is Lord North’s obsession with resigning. After a series of desperate attempts were rebuffed, in March 1778 North finally snapped, dropping all courtly decorum and instead giving it to George III straight: if the ‘load of important duties is entrusted to me, national disgrace and ruin will be the consequence.’ The King disagreed. Lord North would remain yoked to office for another four years before finally tasting sweet release.

Today, if you had to describe the average British politician in one word, you’d struggle to do better than ‘reluctant’. Almost every long-form interview the Prime Minister has given this year has included some kind of apology. One line captures the general tone: ‘there are many bits of politics that are just alien to the way I do my work… I find it hard, you know.’

In most jobs, a key part of doing them well is looking like you enjoy it. Last year comedian Conan O’Brien appeared on Hot Ones, a web series in which guests are asked questions whilst eating ever more sadistically-dosed hot wings. Asked what the worst thing a guest could do on a late-night show was, he answered instantly: tell the audience they’re not enjoying themselves. ‘I’d look out at the audience,’ he said, ‘maybe 200 people sitting there, and I’d see 200 souls leave 200 bodies and float up through the ceiling.’ The first rule of entertainment, at least, is never to say you’re bombing.

Enjoyment has many virtues, but the most underrated is the power it bestows. Doing something well is one thing; doing it in a way that makes clear you enjoy it is another. Whether it’s a motor journalist drifting a car whilst speaking to camera, a tennis player finishing out a match, or a maître d’ in a great restaurant feeling confident enough to sit beside you and recount the miracle of staying open after an all-night celebration, the effect is the same. Enjoyment is a form of authority.

The older, legal definition of enjoyment is ‘possession’. This sense of quiet command is captured in Boswell’s line that Johnson’s ‘supreme enjoyment was the exercise of his reason’. O’Brien thinks the same way. Break the illusion, and watch your grip disappear. The souls leave the bodies.

That modern policymakers choose to ignore this near iron law of public life might seem bizarre. Fiction, however, suggests the instinct is sound. From Gerald Fedden to Kenneth Widmerpool to Nino Sarratore, there’s no quicker route to litero-political ruin than enjoying it too much. Only a rare few survive the spotlight: the protagonists of Coningsby and Endymion, or, I suppose, Hugh Grant in Love Actually. Even he still pays the necessary tribute whilst roaming Wandsworth in pursuit of his secretary. ‘Are you the Prime Minister? Yes, I'm afraid I am. And I'm sorry for all the cock-ups, my Cabinet are absolute crap.’

The sharpest cautionary tales, though, come from one pen in particular: Anthony Trollope’s. There’s Augustus Melmotte, the crooked financier whose appetite for fraud (and flair for dinner parties) carries him perilously close to the top. Or Ferdinand Lopez, the wily lounge lizard whose rise destabilises an entire administration. Or the loathsome George Vavasor, torching his cousin’s fortune on a doomed campaign for the Chelsea riversides. In Trollope’s world, ambition is forgiven. Enjoyment, or so it seems, is fatal.

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Contrast these rogues with Trollope’s beloved Prime Minister, Plantagenet Palliser: diligent, obsessive, and quietly endearing. He’s a lover of early morning bed-chats about the British constitution, a proud owner of horses named Dandy and Flirt, and the kind of man who, while on a grand tour of Europe with his wife and her companion, fantasises about delivering a six-hour financial statement from the despatch box. For Palliser, as for many of today’s leaders, the role is one of subjugation: strapping into harness as a ‘serviceable slave’ of England, and attacking the job with the ‘grinding energy of a young penniless barrister labouring for a penniless wife.’

By the time he reaches the top in The Prime Minister, the fifth novel in the series, any question of enjoyment falls away. Palliser spends the book trying, and failing, to hold his rickety coalition together, sacrificing both public favour and private happiness for little in return. When the end comes, it’s not just the reader who feels relief, but Palliser himself: ‘But for m’self I shall never desire to stand at the head of a government again… I don’t think that a Prime Minister of a free country should suffer from that infirmity.’

Trollope clearly liked Palliser. A lot. In his autobiography, he calls him my Prime Minister, and lists him first among the three characters he’s proudest of. That affection has shaped the standard reading: Trollope as the quiet champion of dutiful self-abnegation in the service of technocratic politics, the patron saint, as Adam Gopnik put it in his superb 2015 essay, of those who ‘surrender freedom of action to the dull daily work of good government.’ Fittingly, the vice president of the Trollope Society is the most boring British Prime Minister of the past fifty years: the achingly interregnal John Major.

As I boarded the flight from San Francisco to London last week, all of these thoughts, from Plantagenet Palliser to John Major, were far from my mind. I was after simpler fare: Heads of State, the latest Amazon Prime action thriller, in which Idris Elba plays the British Prime Minister, Sam Clarke.

Things are going well in Sam Clarke’s Britain: the Britain, essentially, of an Iranian or Russian propagandist. We really do run the world. Joint MI6 and CIA teams police it, all under the all-seeing eye of Echelon, a shared GCHQ and NSA surveillance tool. In his first press conference, Clarke announces the development of a bleeding-edge nuclear technology made in Britain and soon to be exported around the world.

This was all excellent stuff. As I watched it at 35,000 feet, en route to America, I began to sit up a little straighter. It was as if Suez had never happened. I, like the other Brits draped in blankets on this BA flight to San Francisco, felt like a Greek en route to visit the Romans.

Clarke did not share my enthusiasm. We first meet him asleep on the sofa in the Downing Street flat, whiskey and papers at his side. With six years as Prime Minister under his belt (the most unrealistic thing about the entire film), he is Palliser reborn, most happy when debating changes to the ‘tax code’ in committees, the six hour financial statement to the Commons redux. Each morning he goes for a run through London, Range Rover trailing behind him, little audio summary of his day playing, Arsenal beanie sweat sodden. Cold. Wet. Dutiful.

It has made him a relatively unhappy warrior, a disillusioned technocrat to whom hope is nothing more than ‘delayed disappointment,’ The summary he gives of his job, though pithier than both North’s and Palliser’s, hardly differs in sentiment: ‘this job, my job, is about suffering.’

US President Will Derringer, played by John Cena, sees things differently. A former action hero turned politician, Derringer not only enjoys the job, he treats that enjoyment as essential. For him, governing isn’t just about results, but also about, as Thatcher once said of Reagan, embracing the ‘great cause of cheering us all up.’

Derringer wants Clarke’s approval, and is wounded when Clarke shares fish and chips with his rival during the presidential campaign, a gesture he sees as a coded endorsement. Clarke, in turn, sees Derringer’s ‘popcorn presidency’ as a farce. After a joint press conference goes wrong, both are forced by their aides to share a flight to a NATO summit in Trieste. Air Force One is shot down. Hijinks ensue.

Having been Trollope-pilled over the course of a lifetime, I settled in expecting Clarke to teach this grinning mountebank something about the gravity of office, and what it takes to become a world leader. Yet it's Clarke who runs into a problem. The body count. A team of spies are massacred. Then the entire crew of Air Force One.

By the time a CIA agent, played with cheerful lunacy by Jack Quaid (‘that boy’s a nutter.’ ‘Maybe, but he’s America’s nutter’), nobly gives his life to save them both, the Prime Minister’s tortured miserabilism begins to grate, not just on us, but Derringer as well. ‘If life is such a Möbius strip of failure and futility,’ he asks, ‘why do you want to lead an entire nation?’ Clarke has no answer. No wonder, as Derringer keeps reminding him, his polling numbers are firmly in the red.

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Here we find the film’s sly message: Clarke might have just as much to learn from Derringer as Derringer does from Clarke. Conan O’Brien’s law of showbusiness holds true beyond the studio, as the slight clenching in my jaw made clear while watching the Prime Minister pout lyrical after surviving yet another fight scene. There is nothing especially mystical about political authority. It too depends on looking like you enjoy it.

This presents a challenge: not just to our current political crop, but to Trollope as well. Did Hollywood really have one up on him? If he’d boarded BA 285 that rainy day in London, and had the misfortune to sit next to me and the eighteen month old I was stewarding, would he have been appalled?

I doubt it. The most common mistake about Trollope is to assume that loving Palliser means endorsing his way of governing. Affection is not the same as reward. Every author has their favourites, and it is often those very favourites (think of Jane Austen’s Emma) on whom the most flaws are heaped.

Trollope is no different, which is why his affection does little to help Palliser succeed. Like Trollope himself, whose own brief and disastrous run at Beverley in 1868 scarred him for life, Palliser’s time at the top is short. His administration is creaky from the outset, and the personal cost, especially to his marriage, is steep.

You can jump on plenty of reasons for the failure. A lack of clear policy, as Sir Orlando Drought charges early on in The Prime Minister. The ever more ham-fisted attempts by Palliser’s wife, Lady Glencora, to sex up the administration. Or simply, that the vicissitudes of parliamentary arithmetic fated it to die.

Watch Heads of State, then turn back to Trollope’s own verdict, and the problem sounds all too familiar. Palliser is too thin-skinned, too diffident, too rigid; a man who can handle facts and systems, but to whom people have never opened themselves. The young idealist who once dreamed of becoming Chancellor is gone. In his place stands someone always scanning for the exit, knowing full well he’ll never be able to take it.

Without a Derringer, a plane crash, or an army of the most Russian Russians to fight his way through (the final scene involves a Viktor Bout-inspired character opening fire on the entire NATO leadership), there’s no reckoning, nor epiphany. What undoes Palliser is simpler, and more brutal: he hates the job, and it shows.

It’s thus no surprise that it’s the slightly-less-than-dutiful politician, the one who can take a step back and look at the surroundings every now and then, who, in Trollope, usually meets with most success. Mr Gresham, the house's ‘favourite orator’, for whom members will miss almost anything to hear him speak. Phineas Finn, the politician of whom John Major perceptively once wrote (he genuinely could have been a critic in another life), ‘was Trollope as he wished to be.’ Or even Mr Daubeny, a man who (like his inspiration, Disraeli), it’s both easy to roll one’s eyes at, but also find yourself quietly impressed by: ‘He manipulated his words with such grace, was so profound, so broad, and so exalted, so brilliant in mingling a deep philosophy with the ordinary politics of the day, that the bucolic mind could only admire.’

This makes particular sense when you remember how much Trollope himself enjoyed politics: the ‘noblest and manliest’ (he really would have liked Heads of State) of all England’s assorted callings. Here he is, taking us to Parliament for the first time:

'It is the only gate before which I have ever stood filled with envy... my lips have watered after no other fruit but that which grows so high, within the sweep of that great policeman's truncheon.'

It’s this too that I think leads to the confusion: the visceral hatred he has for the truly content-free showmen of politics. ‘The intriguers, the clever conjurers, to whom politics is such a game as is billiards or rackets, only played with greater results’ — the Melmottes, Vavasours and Lopezes of the world. Only someone who thought politics so worthwhile could be so obsessed with gunning down those who don’t.

That’s the irony. Trollope didn’t hate political enjoyment. He hated those who faked it. The problem today is the same: the lumping together of figures like Gresham and Daubeny with the Melmottes and Vavasours. In a world where enjoying politics is seen by leaders as, at best, moronic boosterism, and at worst, a portent of malice, it’s safer to wince your way through high office and call it virtue.

They misread the room. A lot of the mystical power of so-called populist leaders around the globe is much simpler than you think: they're the last few who actually look like they're enjoying the job. Enjoyment in politics isn't a luxury; it is part of the governing infrastructure. And there's enough nihilism in the air already. As Trollope puts it, one last time, on the curse of unhappy Prime Ministers: 'they affect to disdain and put aside the thing they can no longer enjoy.' The nation has enough to carry. We shouldn't have to carry our leaders too.

Perhaps it’s time to recall Trollope’s most counterintuitive lesson. A little less dutifulness in our politicians might not be such a bad thing. Every Clarke needs a little Derringer. Every Palliser, a little Daubeny.

Otherwise, the Melmottes, Vavasours, and Lopezes will be only too happy to do both.

In March of the year he set out in search of the mythical northern polar sea, young Captain Robert Walton — whose letters open Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein — seemed to have it all. He wrote of the vessel he’d procured, a crew of ‘dauntless courage,’ and enough supplies to carry them northwards beyond the Archangel ice. There was, however, something missing. A friend. ‘I have no one near me, gentle yet courageous, possessed of a cultivated as well as of a capacious mind, whose tastes are like my own, to approve or amend my plans.’

Walton, of course, finds one in the end: a benighted scientist on the edge of death, all too eager to tell his sorry tale. After hearing him out, the young captain wisely turns the ship around and heads back to England as fast as possible. The Walton–Frankenstein partnership thus, I think, has to join Melmotte–Fisker and Scrooge–Marley as yet another of literature’s doomed business partnerships.

Writers, and their creations, have often held a soft spot for technology: from Caleb Garth’s longing to witness ‘the thunder and plash of the engine’, to the charming note in Len Deighton’s Bomber, which thanks Mr Jacques Maisonrouge of IBM for setting him up with a computer and magnetic tape. By most accounts, it was the first novel ever written on a computer.

Even the most resolute of the Romantic poets found themselves charmed. In Don Juan, Byron imagines steam engines carrying men to the moon. Novalis, writing Hymns to the Night while working as a mining engineer in Saxony, praised 'the lovely harmonies of thy skilled handicraft.' When Wordsworth, in 1802, wrote that mankind had nothing to show more fair, he wasn’t gazing at the Lake District, but out over industrial London.

Turning such technologies into viable businesses, however — the things that, as cotton magnate John Thornton puts it in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, sit at the front line of the 'war which compels, and shall compel, all material power to yield to science' — is a task that literature has generally found less interesting.

North and South is the exception that proves the rule: a stout defence of the ‘shoppy people’ of the 1850s who dare stray from the ‘three learned professions’ (then law, medicine, and the clergy; now, I suppose, finance, law, and consulting) to ‘make their fortunes in trade again.’ ‘I’m sure you don’t want me to admire butchers and bakers, and candlestick-makers, do you, Mamma?’ says Margaret Hale at the beginning of the novel. By the end, it turns out, she does, a rare thing in literature indeed.

The horrors of Coketown, or the sadness Silas Marner feels at seeing his Lantern Yard subsumed into a factory, hardly slowed the rate of Victorian industry. Nor did the moralising of Shaw or Priestley put 20th-century Britain off the mass-produced comforts their villains so cheerfully sent rolling off the factory floor. From Robert Peel’s 1846 call to ‘advance, not recede,’ to Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat,’ or even Thatcher’s ‘there is no alternative,’ the roles were clear: politicians made the case for economic progress; writers, the case against it.

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That’s no longer true. Western policymakers now focus most of their energies on culture, and how best to shape it. Gnash your teeth about the economy, by all means. But try to tell a new story? No thanks. Hence the paradox we face in Britain and elsewhere: an abundance of policy that sets out a course toward growth, coupled with a sheer lack of political will to enact any of it.

The consequences of that are clear. Split my life in two and you get two sixteen-year periods. In the first, from 1992 to 2008, I lived in a country with just over 2.3% average GDP growth per head. In the second, it was below 0.5%. At some point you feel the difference, no matter how insulated you are.

Drayton and Mackenzie, Alexander Starritt’s new novel, is a rare and excellent attempt to reignite that lost imagination, a story of two McKinsey consultants who quit their jobs to start an experimental energy company, swapping a life ‘safe and comfortable on the steady flow of fees’ for one of ‘risk, heartbreak, and [the] occasional glory of trade or industry.’ Shoppy people, indeed.

We first meet the protagonists not as co-founders, but as undergraduates. James Drayton is at the Oxford University careers fair, staring down the barrel of corporate law, hunted by a pair of predatory lawyers from Allen & Overy. Roland Mackenzie is having a very different Oxford experience, the highlight of which is a late-night romp with the editor of a student newspaper amid its proof-strewn offices. I particularly enjoyed showing these pages to my wife, a former editor of one such paper, whom I met in my second year. Sadly, I never made it into the OxStu offices.

The genius and the drifter promptly take us on a Gulliver-esque journey through Britain’s recent economic history. We begin with a perfectly drawn stint at McKinsey, featuring trips to the Grand Kitzbühel Hotel and reverent lectures about a man named Marvin Bower, confirmed to me by a friend as ‘McKinsey Jesus.’ A brief turn through Whitehall and a fever-dream sequence in the City of London later, the pair land in Aberdeen, where they’ve been sent to slowly and kindly gut the oil and gas companies of the Scottish east coast.

As you can probably guess, this is not the usual contemporary literary novel. Out are the listless creatives, louche loafers, and literary lads. Drayton, at one point, casually notes he hasn’t read a novel since leaving university. This is the world of the HENRYs: Fitbits, Infernos, and JP Morgan Challenge runs.

All the better for it. No one loves a stroller-clutching Norwegian existentially stomping around one of Stockholm’s shabbier playgrounds more than me, but this is a novel that deals in the working lives of actual Britain: consultants, lawyers, and young professionals. It’s the class that underpins the British economy, yet rarely appears in literary fiction. Or if it does, it appears only as a marker of narrative shame, as corporate lawyers such as poor, harmless Darren, the stray-catching half-brother in Intermezzo, can attest.

Finally, some normal people at last. Or so it seems until Aberdeen breaks them. Driven mad by their roles as McKinsey’s answer to the Duke of Cumberland, they impulsively step off the conveyor and, with the help of Alan, a garden-shed inventor in the best British tradition, start a business designing and building floating tidal energy generators.

At first, their generator is not so different from the others that sit off the brutal Orkney shoreline, bashed and dashed by waves, rocks, and seabed alike. Soon, however, things begin to look a little different. Peter Thiel and Elon Musk pop up in cameos reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher in The Line of Beauty (or, I suppose Napoleon in War and Peace). The rest, as the undoubted fictional biographers appearing just off-screen by the end of the book would say, is history.

This is a much bigger, looser novel than we’re used to in the post-Outline era: books tightly drawn, adjective-averse, and often wrapped up in under 200 pages. Here, the incident that truly sets the plot in motion — their exit from McKinsey — doesn’t arrive until page 193. Many contemporary writers would have dispatched everything before that in a single line. Starritt doesn’t. We get it all.

This sweepiness brings us another gift we’re no longer used to: an array of deeply enjoyable supporting characters. I’ll pick just one. Drayton’s father is a true man of Canonbury: an academic and Italianophile who brings out the pasta machine as they plan the business at the dinner table. Home-made polpettone (alas, a little dry), chestnut-flour gnocchi (‘it’s the wrong time of year really, but nevertheless’), and zucchini-flower ravioli all flow forth from a man who, when watching football, chooses which team to support based on whose home city he prefers. Fantastico.

So far, so Victorian, a mood only heightened by the fact that, as I’ve mentioned, this book comes with something close to a mission: to help us take economic growth seriously again.

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Does it succeed? Reader, I think it does.

The first reason is that both Drayton and Mackenzie are far from the characters we might imagine them to be — corporate terminators without a soul, knowing not why the rest of us cry. Part of this comes from each character’s enjoyable idiosyncrasies: Drayton’s way of coping with life by simply learning a lot of facts; or Mackenzie’s constant uncertainty as to whether he is living the right life after all. Some comes from the richness of the book’s corporate detail: the no-no-no-no-yes nature of company building; the crushing defeats behind even the smallest public win; the sting of investor rejection. Often, it’s simply the level of detail we’re treated to from the world both characters are a part of: the arcane names of the girls' schools of London; the litmus test for who in a friendship group would get married first (‘those who’d been together since Oxford, and the Christians’); or the modern-day etiquette of DINK holidays (‘Going to Paris meant they could work online from the train’).

Through these details you feel not only the lives of the characters, but the life of a country. Much of the novel is devoted to the 2008 financial crisis and its centrality to the economy we live with today. Starritt includes a few Don DeLillo-esque vignettes: glimpses into the heads of Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson, and Mario Draghi as they try to comprehend the crisis and contain its fallout. If you’ve ever wondered how Bernanke felt, mid-Nespresso, before a 5am conference call in the depths of the collapse, or what passed through Draghi’s mind in the moments before the 'Whatever it takes' speech (‘Fuck Mervyn, that old maid’), then this novel has you covered.

Britain loses its mojo, and with it, its knowledge-worker vanguard (Starritt, I think, would argue we’ve never really got it back). Characters are laid off. The survivors are moved onto restructurings. The mood darkens. The country of New Labour turns back to Le Carré grey: ‘Poor loves. Trained to Empire, trained to rule the waves. All gone. All taken away. Bye-bye, world.’

The crisis makes them. Their first real bond forms during a furtive trip to the Lehman Brothers offices on the day it closes. And it’s a journey in a gloriously ridiculous purple Lamborghini — presumably affordable because some poor dealer had just gone under — that seals it.

From it comes a new national mission of their own: to build a great British company. I emphasise the word British for a reason. This is a startup, yes, and even one financed by Americans, but it’s a very British one at that (perhaps even more accurately, a Scottish one). The economic action here takes place not in Palo Alto, or even King’s Cross, but in the bays of Orkney and the warehouses of the Scottish east coast. The final scene takes Anglofuturism to northern Scotland, where an ambitious new breakthrough unfolds — with all 927 metres of Ben Hope presumably looking on.

This, for me, is what makes the story most enjoyable — and what marks it, I think, as the first true Anglofuturist novel. The characters never become Americans in the pursuit of growth, nor ever feel they have to. When faced with Peter Thiel’s pronouncements about the death of tertiary education their response is understated - ‘Do you think unis are stagnant backwaters of received ideas?’ ‘Maybe it’s different in postgrad’. So is the response from an air stewardess as they fly back from a fundraising mission: ‘Rockets? Very cool.’ She seemed genuinely impressed and gave them an extra bag of crisps each.’

In terms of plot, at least, the closest contemporary book I could think of wasn’t a novel, but It Started in the Shed, the self-published memoirs last year of Dave Walls, one of the founders of Accuracy International, the company that invented the modern sniper rifle out of a garage in Portsmouth, and is today one of Britain’s most strategically important defence companies. Here’s Walls on meeting his version of Roland Mackenzie: ‘It was a strange feeling to meet up again eight years later under completely different circumstances, and to enter a friendship that unbeknownst to us at the time, would last for the rest of our lives.’

It was Mallarmé who once defined writing as ‘gestures of the idea.’ More recently, those gestures have mostly turned toward culture — but it’s the economic ideas we’re missing. As Starritt demonstrates, we are neither a sordid little country built on OnlyFans, online gambling, and illegal Deliveroo accounts, nor a natural nation of Silicon Valley risk-takers just waiting for a political exhortation to enter our final form.

We’re something different, yet in a way we are yet to fully express. Much of the energies so far in filling that gap have come from the usual suspects: columnists; non-fiction writers; and a new generation of tech-adjacent campaigners. Most would think the novel unsuited to that task.

Yet as Mrs Gaskell, and now Mr Starritt, show us: why not?

Of all the obsessions of Dutch pamphleteers in the early 1650s, few ranked higher than England. Soon after the Anglo-Dutch wars began, they fast settled on a favoured analogy: Britain, once a land of angelic delight, had become possessed by the devil himself. A 1652 tract, The English Devil, spoke of the ‘hellish tongues’ and ‘satanic tricks’ that enabled Lucifer to ably ‘squat upon the altar’ of England. Another fused people and place entirely, rechristening the country simply as ‘Devil Land,’ a phrase historian Clare Jackson lifts for the title of her recent study of seventeenth-century England.

Four centuries later, in 28 Years Later, England’s deep spiritual weirdness remains in full fetter. In Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s film, England is festering, quarantined by NATO, the lights of patrol ships visible to the few remaining survivors on shore. Land on Devil Land and dare to meet the undead; or worse, the primitive, recidivist people who still live there.

The idea of Britain as an unusually weird place is hardly new. For generations, we’ve succeeded in bemusing the world. In 1922, George Santayana described Britain as a ‘paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies, and humors’. De Gaulle, who understood England better than perhaps any other 20th-century foreign statesman, was under no illusions: ‘She has in all her doings very marked and very original habits and traditions.’ But it’s Susan Sontag, writing in Volcano Lover, who gives us my favourite line of all: ‘If they did not exist, nobody would ever have invented them.’

28 Years Later continues this tradition. Its sheer weirdness is difficult to convey without spoilers, but the film includes: a Teletubbies-themed massacre; a cosmic foot-chase set to the prelude to Das Rheingold; a free-birth in the family seats of an LNER train; Colonel Kurtz reimagined as an English eccentric; and and the power rangers as a cult dedicated to Britain’s most notorious paedophile.

The film revels in its strangeness. About thirty seconds pass between the only non-Brit arriving on Devil Land and turning to ask no one in particular, ‘Can this get any weirder?’ I’m sorry, Erik, but it can. And it does. With a parting ‘What the fuck, you’re all insane’, addressed to an audience that’s only 25% zombie, he is carried off by a mythical giant to meet his fate.

The film is irrepressibly British, a nation’s conversation with itself. There isn’t a single American actor in the cast, and a cursory glance at the production crew suggests no Americans there either. If you’ve never intimately known the small islands on the edge of the Atlantic, the best you can do is sit in the corner and try and keep up.

Most of the dialogue is delivered in thick Northumbrian accents. Nurofen gets a shoutout. There’s a soliloquy about the Angel of the North. When Ralph Fiennes’ character, Dr Kelson, is first mentioned, he’s not called a doctor but a GP. His surgery, we’re told, was in Whitley Bay, the same place I received my second Covid jab. That fact, combined with his accent, a particularly reassuring consultant’s RP, is a whole story in itself, legible only to British viewers.

There’s method to it. Zombies are no longer the novelty they were when 28 Days Later came out in 2002, thanks to shows like The Walking Dead and The Last of Us. As Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s character, Jamie, tells his son Spike, played by Alfie Williams, as they leave the safety of their island to get Spike his first kills: the more you do something, the more relaxed you are when you do it. A life relieved of your mind is no longer the horror it once was. A film like this needs to go further to unsettle us now,.

So Garland and Boyle invent an entirely new villain: the past. Jodie Comer’s character, Isla — mother to Spike and wife to Jamie — can’t always distinguish between past, present, and future. It’s a moving affliction, but also one that makes her very ill. Most on-the-nose is the film’s opening scene. Unlike Brendan Gleeson’s character in 28 Days Later, who sacrifices himself to save his daughter, the adults we meet here aren’t quite so on it. The shuddering, terrified children of the Teletubbies massacre are, quite literally, eaten by their parents.

Moving beyond pure horror vignettes and towards an actual film was a harder task. Boyle and Garland have both spoken about this difficulty at length. Garland’s first version of the script, built around the virus being weaponised by an international company, was rejected for being too generic. So they subtracted the rest of the world from the equation, and focused on the place where it all began. To make the past a convincing villain, you have to deal in specifics — which means you have to deal with England.

Just as British riots, with their lack of guns and water cannon, often resemble mediaeval sieges, the film is relentless in drawing on the more obscure corners of British history. Cuts from Olivier’s Henry V draw the parallel between the bowmen on the island and the bowmen of Agincourt. Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s outfit — a repurposed London Fire Brigade tunic — reads as Saxon warrior garb. The iodine-stained skin of Dr Kelson evokes the woad of an ancient Briton, staring out as the Romans arrive. There’s even a tiny Viking invasion.

The English countryside isn’t immune from this Fisherian hauntology tour. We’re escorted through a festival of the eerie: the Angel of the North doesn’t feel the same, stripped of its A1 roar. Nor does the roadside grate the characters use to hide in, without its accompanying road. At least the Sycamore Gap gets to keep its tree. It’s telling that the only jump scare in the entire film comes not from a zombie, but a garden-variety fox.

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Much of this isn’t about ploughing new earth, but about unearthing the stranger corners of English culture. The bet is sharing them with a new audience. It’s not just the greats like John Wyndham, J. G. Ballard, and Angela Carter who have sought to remind us of Britain’s deep strangeness, but a contemporary vanguard including Daisy Johnson and Alan Garner. It’s impossible to spot the Happy Eater cameo and not think of Rooster Byron, the wild-eyed prophet of Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, recounting how he met the giant who built Stonehenge ‘just off the A14 outside Upavon. About half a mile from the Little Chef.’

The film also joins Alex Garland’s recent work — Annihilation, his adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s sci-fi novel, as well as Warfare and Civil War — in drawing heavily from the New Weird. 28 Years Later is clearly influenced by the writer who coined the term and did most to popularise it: M. John Harrison. Like Garland, Harrison is obsessed with England, its strangeness, and its inhabitants — the ‘denizens of futures that failed to take’, as he puts it in his 2020 novel The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, in which the country’s ancient, unresolved past begins to rise from its rivers and lakes, quite literally, to reclaim the land. To describe the plot of Harrison’s earlier novel The Committed Men would be to reveal themes and moments so similar I think I’d accidentally risk spoiling the series. Without Harrison, I’m not sure a film like this would exist.

If we’re handing out author accolades, credit should also go to Robert Swindells, because, as any school-age reader of his antinuclear shit-scarer Brother in the Land will know, in the event of an apocalypse, it’s Holy Island — the island Jamie, Isla, and Spike each call home — that any survivor with their head screwed on should try to reach. The route’s already saved on my Google Maps.

Holy Island is profoundly weird even today. There’s the walk across the causeway, flanked by the wooden treehouse-like refuge shelters built to protect those caught out by the tides. There’s the town itself, which feels like the UK of thirty years ago, the only giveaway being the improbably good coffee. And there are the castle and monastery ruins, with weathered boards telling the strange tales of St Cuthbert — the saint who outwitted ravens, was warmed by otters, and whose corpse, like the undead, never decays.

In 28 Years Later, the island is home to a firmly gated community, a pick-and-mix call-back to the UK’s favourite decade of the imagined past: the 1950s. You can see in Boyle’s Holy Island whatever you want to. Centrist dad? Close your eyes and it’s a caricature of Brexit Britain: an all-white island of village halls, bland food, and a strong gender divide. True blue conservative? It’s a commune of barter and trade, populated entirely by people with Kes haircuts, who muck in during the day, and by night get slaughtered in front of a red banner, sing a few songs, and cheat on their wives — the fevered fantasies of Tony Benn made reality.

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Wherever you look, the past is a dead end. If our inability to escape it damns us, where might salvation come from? You might expect the answer to be the future. I’d put it differently: it lies in the things that are timeless. The clearest clue is how central religion is to the film. Of the four main places of effective sanctuary, three are churches or monasteries, and the fourth — Dr Kelson’s ossuary, which we’ll come to in a moment — may be the most spiritual of them all. An antagonist wears an upside-down cross. A zombie’s skull is literally smashed with an altar. The final line before civilisation falls? Father, why have you forsaken me.

The film is haunted by the holy spectre of Cuthbert, seventh-century saint of Lindisfarne over a millennium before it became Ken Loach Island. In one scene, Isla wades into the North Sea up to her neck, as Cuthbert once did to spend the night praying. In another, it’s a strange fog — like the one that Cuthbert, according to legend, sent to save Durham from Nazi bombs — that spares her and Spike from death.

The timelessness that dominates here, however, is a secular kind. This is a film ultimately about the big things: life and death, and whether either, or perhaps both, can free us from our imagined pasts. On the question of life, there’s a fantastic Children of Men style twist, a few meditations on childbirth as the closest thing we have to a secular miracle, and an unanswered question as to whether a child can wipe the world’s slate clean. Something I suspect Danny Boyle and I would agree on. The citizens of /r/childfree, however (one of this week’s top posts is a warning not to go near this film at all costs) might not.

The spectre of death leads us to Fiennes’ Dr Kelson, our man from Whitley Bay, with a penchant for neolithic burial rituals and a personal mission to build a timeless monument of his own. He treats death less like a funeral and more like a marriage: make your commitments, and off down the aisle you go to a very different kind of reception. These scenes are, quite obviously, the best Boyle has ever directed.

Here, weirdness isn’t something to repress or reject. It’s a diagnostic tool, opening the world up just a crack and letting us ask: is this something to keep, or to let go?

Some things, like the frisbee Jamie and Spike find early on, are worth holding onto. Others, the Tinky-Winky, Dipsy, Laa-Laa, and Po’s of this world, we’re happy to discard. The skulls in Kelson’s bone tower, boiled of their white bloodless flesh, turn out to be the things to hold onto the most.

The film treats the infected anthropologically, luxuriating in their evolved differences. Some graze slowly along the ground to conserve energy, munching on worms and bootlaces alike. Some have grown seven feet tall and become intelligent. One even becomes, for a few seconds at least, fully human again, as her hands slowly press into Isla’s. No horror here. Only fascination. Maybe even wonder?

Fisher again: ‘the Thing overwhelms… but it fascinates.’

This vision of weirdness, defined not by fear but fascination, is undoubtedly not what much of the audience signed up for. They wanted a horror film. Not a fascination film. But this is what we get. And when it’s gone, we miss it. In the film’s final two minutes, the world of the weird collapses. In its place comes a different kind of British strangeness: grotesque, carnivalesque.

The weird is what makes us the island that so disgusted the Dutch pamphleteers of the seventeenth century, and still unsettles many today. Our head of state is a real life Green Man, with a foster-village in Transylvania, who can trace his lineage back to Odin. Our greatest artists and writers obsess over Cold War weapons testing sites and a very peculiar German writer called Max with a penchant for the Suffolk coastline.

In This is Spinal Tap, when the fictional British rock band talk of the hex that’s taken out three of their drummers: the first, in a bizarre gardening accident (‘the authorities said best leave it unsolved’), the second, choking on ‘someone else’s vomit,’ and the last, self-combusting at a ‘jazz blues festival’ at the Isle of Lucy, the humour doesn’t just come from the absurdity, but from how plausible it all sounds.

A film like this simply wouldn’t have been made five years ago. Coming out of it, blinking, onto the Finchley Road, culture most definitely didn’t feel that stuck. It’s a better world that demands more strangeness. And one that a country like ours, a weird unloved island of stone circles, strange lights over East Anglia, and the spirit of John ‘Stumpy’ Pepys, is well placed to play a part in. Particularly if work like this keeps getting made.

Better to embrace the weird than deny it. As the protagonist of another tale of mythical quarantine puts it: ‘The Zone wants to be respected. Otherwise it will punish.’

Devil land, still. But ours.

For the last year my wife has been away a few days a week. During those two or three nights she stays at Broadview, a University of East Anglia-run facility with a name more like an asylum than a hotel. For those nights, I have been placed in sole charge of looking after our two children. The oldest is three. The youngest had just turned one when she started.

On the days my wife was away it was, in a sense, striking at how little changed. Our children had always been apocalyptic sleepers, and for reasons that escape both of us it was only me who could really calm them successfully. So nights were broadly the same. Mornings too were similar, though the gap between how clean I wished the house to be and how clean it actually was widened with each day she was away. On Wednesday the children would usually wake up in a house not quite fit for habitation: a duplo-studded living room carpet; a dishwasher eternally one cycle behind where it needed to be; and a grey lino kitchen floor with stains a living history of the past three years.

The evenings were a different story. At five I’d stop work and loudly announce TV time for their ever-elastic thirty minutes a day, which gave me just enough space to make dinner. After dinner came bathtime involving games as diffuse as ‘nail salon’ (easy, involves lots of bubbles) to ‘recreate the dives of the Paris Olympics women’s 10m synchro final’ (hard, relic of the summer of 2024, involves Youtube, toddler’s favourite). Then bedtime. On good days this routine would end at eight o’clock, on bad days, even later.

On the more difficult nights, when I felt particularly useless and books were beyond me, I’d watch a film instead. Often, in a perverse ritual, like a dog returning to its own sick, this film would be about parenting. The film I found myself returning to more than the others wasn’t something actually good: Bicycle Thieves; Tokyo Story, or the Royal Tenenbaums. It was the 2003 film Cheaper by the Dozen, which I must have watched first when I was eleven or twelve.

Steve Martin plays Tom Baker, a small-town college football coach who gets headhunted for a job coaching a D1 college team at the fictional Illinois Polytechnic University (it was meant to be Northwestern, who took a look at the script and said no thanks), moving to Chicago and upending his family. Bonnie Hunt plays Kate, a writer who has just finished her debut: a memoir that has been sent to a mysterious but, as we come to find, incredibly efficient ‘friend in publishing’ called Diane.

They arrive at their new home, a turreted mansion whack-bang in the centre of Ferris Bueller-land, an impression cemented when the neighbour turns up and is literally played by Alan Ruck. Just as they're about to settle in, the phone rings. It's Diane, calling to let Kate know that not only is the book to be published, but with the fastest timeline of any book in modern publishing history. She is to get on a plane and fly to New York immediately, duly putting Tom in charge of the family. The kicker, of course, is that they have twelve children, and so hijinks ensue as Martin attempts, and fails, to balance his coaching career with the demands of parenting.

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Watching it two decades later — thankfully no longer on the 20-inch CRT Panasonic we had in our bungalow in rural mid-Wales — two things have changed.

I now know a lot more about American Football, something I now realise sorely hampered my understanding of the plot. My twelve-year-old British mind simply could not comprehend the phenomenon of US college sport. In my head, Tom Baker was basically a glorified gym teacher, with the move simply involving more money, and the opportunity to teach a better class of student. So why the fuss?

Only now do I realise that he was each week playing to a crowd larger than in any stadium in the UK at the time I was watching it (they filmed the football scenes at the Rose Bowl, Pasadena, which has the same capacity as the new Wembley Stadium). Tom Baker was just a good streak away from an appearance from College Gameday, and a good season or two from becoming the next Nick Saban.

Watching it now, I also identify more with Tom Baker than the children. Look at us. Two men. Left at home by writer-wives to tend the hearth and herd the offspring. Two men, gamely improvising their way through the day, each with a penchant for playing the most stupid games imaginable with our children, and prone to using enthusiasm as a replacement for competence.

Yes, he may have twelve children and I only have two, but three of his are fully grown, leaving him with nine. And none of them are younger than five. Mine are toddlers, one basically still a baby. They're each worth five of his school-age kids, surely. And what's a D1 coaching job anyway? That's basically playing Madden for a few hours a week. He doesn't even call the plays. I could end up doing that, if my initial protestations were pushed aside like Disraeli's insistence to Derby that he was numerically illiterate upon first being made Chancellor: 'Nonsense, my dear fellow — at the Treasury they'll do all the sums for you.’

The similarities between us became clearer as time went on. Our dinner goes wrong. So does Steve's: 'That's the way daddy likes it, hot and nice and spicy,' he says as the pasta sauce burns on the cooktop. Someone points at my child who has escaped pre-bath and is doing the ‘naked dance’ in our first-floor window. Steve, too, finds himself chastised, most notably by the chandelier repair guy (did I mention Ferris-Bueller land?): 'You are in over your head mister.' I tell lies down the phone. Steve’s are better. ‘They’ve formed a study group, and they’re helping each other. A mini think tank thing.’

Steve’s problems felt like they were from another era, an America with a breezy 2.06 birth rate, where the problem was instead having too many children too young. A world away from today’s anxieties about demographic collapse, but also from today’s anxiety-ridden portrayals of parenting.

These tend to come in two types. The first is ascetic and dutiful: Knausgaard, with the anguish cranked higher than the amp his teenage heavy metal band uses to ruin a shopping centre opening in book one of My Struggle.

The second, which is now dominant in popular culture, is the idea of parenting as a modern form of heroism. In writing this normally means blogs in which parenting, and parents, are treated in the tones David Foster Wallace reserved only for David Lynch and Roger Federer.

In film, the latter has become dominant in the Hollywood blockbuster, in which the protagonist’s main mission is now almost invariably the protection of a child: Joel and Ellie in The Last of Us; Baby Yoda in The Mandalorian; Dom Toretto and ‘Little B’ (a child existing solely to be kidnapped and rescued repeatedly in each new film in the Fast and Furious franchise). Even James Bond, at the end of Daniel Craig’s last outing, needed to find himself a suitable secret child in order to justify eating a frigate’s worth of cruise missiles.

Cheaper by the Dozen does not concern itself with such anxieties. The Baker’s parenting isn’t treated so much as an act of noble sacrifice, but as something actually quite selfish. Kate takes her children’s stories and bundles them up into a memoir that lands on the best-seller lists. Tom evidently enjoys being with children (and the members of his young football team) more than he does adults, silly games and locker room antics holding significantly more appeal than his encounters with the world of grown-ups.

It’s this, I think, that made Cheaper by the Dozen such an addictive film during my year of no rest and relaxation: its portrayal of how mind-numbingly fun parenting can be. Even when children misbehave, they find it very hard to do so in a way that isn’t hilarious. As Tom puts it whilst chastising the children for pranking Hank, the boyfriend of the eldest child, Nora, out of the family home: ‘you soaked his underwear in meat. That is so wrong. Funny, but wrong.’

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Tom’s only friendship beyond his children is with old college friend and noted ‘hot dog’ Shake McGuire, a relationship based solely, on my reading at least, on needling based on the fact that Tom’s wife is hotter than Shake’s, who remains either unmentioned or nonexistent. It was the 00s after all. When Shake meets Tom at the start of the film in his puny Indiana locker-room, the conversation ends with him looking around and saying the line: ‘so she chose the third string receiver and got all this.’

We see this same ambivalence about adult company from that paragon of contemporary fatherhood: Bandit, the talking blue dog from Bluey. Unlike Chili, his wife, Bandit has no friendships outside his family bar a frenemy style acquaintance with his neighbour Pat. Like Tom, whenever we see Bandit with adults, he’s never quite present, just killing time before getting back to the important business of mucking about. I’m with Bandit.

This is a very different mode of fatherhood than what we generally see in the novel, in which good fathers are either unrelated (Silas Marner, Squire Allworthy, Matthew Cuthbert), dead (all of Dickens), or a special third category: tortured beyond recognition in the Bastille (Alexandre Manette). The Tom Bakers of this world are few and far between: Robert March, perhaps? Patricia Lockwood’s dad in Priestdaddy? You know that the literary pickings are slim when you’re looking to the terminally-irresponsible, lawsuit-loving, ultimate-hater Mr Tulliver for an example: simply because he’s nice to Maggie after she attempts to become a gypsy. Hence my reliance on a 2003 Disney remake to show how parenting can be fun again.

It’s not just fun that makes parenting a two way street. One of the central ideas of child psychologist D.W. Winnicott is the transitional object: a thing, usually a blanket or a soft toy, that helps a child move from total fusion with their parents to a more independent sense of self. These objects, Winnicott argued, allow children to build the capacity to be alone without feeling abandoned. What Winnicott knew, but never quite said, is that the urge for a transitional object never really goes away, especially when you become a parent. Only this time, the object isn’t a toy. It’s your children: forcing, projecting, needing you through the identity crisis of early parenthood, and, in doing so, making a mockery of that old aphorism, ‘One day, you’ll need them more than they need you.’ Yeah! Day one!

Tom Baker’s transitional phase ends with the realisation that his relatively juvenile dream — coaching his alma mater — probably wasn’t worth trading every other card in for. It’s because he gives up that dream job in the end that the film is often read as belonging to the dutiful, ascetic tradition. Tom Baker, the inessential man, learns his lesson and shall never put his career over his family ever again.

I don’t think he gets such a raw deal. They don’t move back to their old house in rural Indiana, but stay put in Ferris-Bueller land. The family frog gets a proper burial in the back garden, and in a closing scene reminiscent of HI’s final dream in Raising Arizona, the whole family gathers there for Christmas.

When Tom makes his decision to step down, his team has won four games and lost only one, putting them on track to finish the season with nine-ish wins out of twelve. This year that would put them well ahead of Michigan, and not far behind Ohio State, the eventual college playoff winners. No wonder, as the final voiceover informs us, he ends up with twelve job offers.

And finally, his wife is now a bestselling author; the dream, perhaps, of every self-respecting upper-middle-class man. As Tom says at the start of the film: ‘Did I tell you we’re gonna have it all?’

So don’t buy the propaganda. Baker’s got it locked down, just so stealthily that no one notices. He ends up with a massive house in the Chicago suburbs and a D1 coaching job on his resume, all thanks to the fact that the athletic director was the best man at his wedding.

That’s not to say he gets it all right. He continually forgets the name of one of his children: ‘Sorry Charlie, Nigel, Kyle... It’s Mark,’ an area I can finally one-up him on. The move from Indiana to Chicago is less warm bath, more cold-water immersion, leaving some of the younger Bakers to be bullied by mini-Ferris Buellers with venti lattes in their hands and upside-down golf visors on their heads.

But our coach from Chicago – the last of the good-enough parents – gets it right by not taking the whole thing too seriously. That’s his sauce, bludgeoned into him each day by his dozen children. Here’s Winnicott one last time, sounding his most Baker-esque:

‘Some people seem to think of a child as clay in the hands of a potter. They start moulding the infant, and feeling responsible for the result. This is quite wrong. If this is what you feel, then you will be weighed down with responsibility which you need not take at all.’

Tomorrow, my wife has her final dissertation meeting, and my year as Tom Baker comes to an end. Channelling my inner Knausgaard, cursing my wife’s name as I stroller around the parks of West London, is over. That’s not to say Knausgaard hasn’t lingered. The one black mark on my oh-so-progressive parenting record remains a firm refusal to attend a Rhythm Time class with either of my children.

Whacking apples with a tennis racquet, on the other hand.

This piece was first published by the Republic of Letters (April 2025).

“You see, the thing about Geoff, is that he doesn’t really do plot.” Or so says Geoff Dyer’s literary agent — a fleetingly minor character in Out of Sheer Rage, Dyer’s account of his failed attempt to write a study of D.H. Lawrence. Or at least I think she says it. I used to have two copies in the house, but I’ve given them both away. And I gave up on a last-minute attempt to listen to the audiobook at 2.2x speed at about the 30 minute (or, more precisely, 66 minute) mark. So I may have imagined it.

Fittingly, it’s that slipperiness — and the honesty beneath it — that defines Dyer’s work. Born in Cheltenham in 1958, he won a scholarship to a grammar school, then spent three years at Oxford. Next came life on the dole in 1980s London, the kind that makes the characters in Withnail and I look like management consultants. In 1989, he published The Colour of Memory, his first novel — a book about three Brixton dossers attempting to live creative lives. “It was as though getting a job was a temporary illness from which I had now recovered.” Write what you know, and all that.

One of my favourite clichés about writers is that they only ever have one novel in them and that their life’s work is just an attempt to write ever-better versions of it. Dyer is the best argument against this. In a career spanning 21 books, he’s written more widely than perhaps any living writer. From a quasi-biographical series of vignettes about jazz musicians, to a reworking of Death in Venice where Gustav von Aschenbach is replaced by art journalist and “high-quality freeload[er]” Junket Jeff, to his most recent work: a meditation on endings, ageing, and (ostensibly) Roger Federer’s tennis career.

The result is a library of cover quotes most writers would kill for. Zadie Smith’s (“a national treasure”) gets rolled out regularly, as does Steve Martin’s (“the funniest book I’ve ever read”). His is a career of stealth importance. Dyer is rarely cited as an influence, but it’s hard to read Ben Lerner, Sheila Heti, or even Elif Batuman without noticing echoes of Dyer somewhere.

Part of what makes Dyer such a rare figure — what marks him as a true literary man — is the way he combines seeming opposites. There’s always been a touch of the bloke about him — look at the cover and blurbs of some of his books, and like Junket Jeff himself, you might be forgiven for thinking Dyer a writer “more FHM than TLS.” But pick up any of his books, and you’re quickly disabused of the idea that his lightness of spirit comes from a lightness of intellect.

The biggest clue comes early: the epigraphs. Roberto Calasso. G.C. Waldrep. Anita Brookner. The Goncourt Brothers. Every time you open a Dyer book, it’s a gateway to a Wikipedia rabbit hole, followed by a swift trip to the lesser explored corners of Amazon. Even Dyer’s mask of self-deprecation slips when it comes to them: “Whatever people say about my books — and it always amazes me when people don’t like them, but sometimes they don’t — the epigraphs have always been top-drawer.”

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So here we have one of the rare, and possibly vanishing, figures in artistic life: a true literary man. What might we learn from him?

Let's start with where Dyer’s success comes from. With such a diverse output, many reviewers simply give up on finding a through-line, throw up their hands, and revert to something like “genre-bending.” For me it’s his sense of fidelity.

There’s never a feeling that a book Dyer has written is anything other than the book he wanted to write, nor that in some way he’s been forced to stop, slow, and do what so many of us do: fear that sentence we’ve just written is a little too much, and hastily deploy the index finger of our right hand. Delete the sentence. Sigh with relief.

The result is a set of genuine, unique, and excellent books, buoyed by a weightlessness that comes only when one finds oneself not bothering to try too hard, and one that elicits a certain kind of response from reviewers. Here, for example, is William Deresiewicz, brilliantly, in a 2012 article for The New Republic:

What I really admire about Geoff Dyer’s work is Geoff Dyer. Here is a man who decided a long time ago that he was going to follow the muse of his own curiosity, let the rest of the world be damned, and by God, he’s made it stick. No institutions, no apologies. A freelance, a vagabond, an aesthete, a latter-day bohemian and man of letters: I call that courage. I also call it culture.

Here, I think, lies the first lesson. As someone who’s attempted a grand total of zero novels in my life, I don’t really feel qualified to opine on this topic in any way, but the one thing I would feel comfortable saying is that what is true is generally good. And what is inauthentic, is generally bad. I would hope Dyer agrees. Here’s him in an interview he gave to The Dublin Review in 2013: “I like to write stuff that is only an inch from life — but all the art is in that inch.”

It’s this inauthenticity that, above all else, I think, has led to the situation detailed by Jacob Savage in his article in Compact Magazine that kicked off the present wave of soul searching, one in which: “Not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker.”

Many of Savage’s missing men, I think, are lured off-piste by the temptation of writing what they think an imagined editor, with a very specific worldview, wants to read — rather than what is actually true. This worldview normally gets caricatured by its opponents as ‘woke politics,’ but I think that misses the point entirely. Whether it’s Cusk, Knausgaard, or even, as some have (convincingly) argued Rooney, it’s not like the book industry at large is averse to publishing, and putting serious money behind, writing with a small c-conservative bent — so long as it’s good.

Instead, it’s the inauthenticity that strangles these nascent works in the cradle. Importantly, this generally seeps in not via the big picture, but in the small details. Like a bent copper, it’s the small things that almost start the inexorable decline. The result is that male characters in novels by men cease to feel like real men — less an inch from life, and more a mile. And it’s not just the male reader that notices it, I think, but any reader regardless of gender.

It’s easier, I think, to point to a novel that gets it right than to publicly flag those that don’t. Because when male literary fiction does succeed today, it often succeeds in exactly the register Dyer made his own: small, precise, close to life.

David Szalay’s new book Flesh is a case in point, rightly feted for its portrayal of modern masculinity. Lots of the reviews of the book centre around the usual suspects: the relatively large number of sex scenes in it. Don’t get me wrong, they were excellently realised. But for me, they weren’t the scenes that really landed the novel.

Instead it was the smaller details: the masculinity written in the margins. The button-sized pain in the front of your neck that comes from wearing a shirt and tie fully done up all day. The strange allure of cars: a three-page diversion about the delights of the BMW museum in Munich. The precision in placing the watches that the main character is gifted (an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak and a 1953 Rolex Submariner).

This is the route to great novel writing, and a virtue Dyer shares. It’s not just the sex scenes (“My God, she was radiantly beautiful, high on coke, and fifteen minutes previously, she’d had his hand between her legs while she pissed”), but the small things that punctuate all of Dyer’s novels. The search for a perfect Italian cornetti, a can of coke in a foreign land, or the pain of a trip up the stairs after a game of amateur tennis. It’s real. And good.

The second lesson from Dyer is less about his fidelity to the world, but to writing itself.

This, I think, presents us with the most direct answer to the question: where have all the literary men gone? In fact, they’re all still here, they’ve just exited the arena of literary fiction, scattering themselves to the winds — as a cursory glance of any non-fiction bestseller list, festival lineup, or podcast back-catalogue can tell us.

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Some remain on non-fiction island, the traditional jumping off point for the notable male novelists of the past century. Think Anthony Powell at Punch. Martin Amis at The New Statesman. John Lanchester at the LRB. Some have gone to TV and film: think of the rigour of the writing in shows like Succession. Some, as I suspect Szalay might have excelled at in another life, have poured their obsessive tendencies not into books at all, but to some other pursuit: history; food; cars; even watches.

All of them, in their own way, have stepped off the conveyor that once carried Powell, Amis, and company towards fiction. Back then, you started with essays, and if you stuck at it long enough, the belt would nudge you, gently but firmly, into fiction — whether you meant to or not.

When we bemoan the lack of literary men, what we’re really bemoaning is that this conveyor has stopped. Much easier now to stay on the safe ground of non-fiction (or even genre fiction, where men still clean up) than ever make the leap towards literary fiction.

Everyone knows the stats: the most widely used being that women make 80% of worldwide fiction sales. The corollary of this (which frankly I think is a perfectly defensible example of the market in action, rather than any sort of conspiracy) is that, in the back of the mind of any man looking to make the jump, is that they’re going to have to, in some way, beat the market.

Hence, expectations skyrocket, as one’s gaze becomes fixed on, to paraphrase Dyer: “the commanding — and thereby discouraging — heights of the truly great.” DeLillo. Pynchon. Or bust. With this mindset, the bar is set too high. Rather than taking a swing at writing the Great Anything Novel, much better to not take the swing at all.

This perhaps, is the other great throughline of Dyer’s books — the writerly equivalent of analysis paralysis. In reading his books we meet character after character, desirous of writing something — whether it’s a study of D. H. Lawrence or a book about tennis — so perfect that the only solution is procrastination.

It’s because Dyer’s thought about it so much, he also provides the literary man with our solution: don’t take things so seriously. The work is the work, call it what you want.

Indeed, one of my favourite moments in his many interviews is an answer he gives in a joint one with Elif Batuman, when asked if he’s ever written a short story. His reply is to mention a story he wrote off the back of a holiday with a girlfriend. First it was sold to The Observer as a travel story, then to an anthology as a short story, then as a memoir to a journal, then as an essay in a magazine, and finally, it was a chapter in a novel. One story. Five guises — a fact Dyer wears as a badge of honour. Why?

It’s so much this thing of generic expectations that I’m very happy to be at loggerheads with, or at least not to conform to those expectations.

We don’t quite need to go so far as Dyer (“I have written novels even though I have absolutely no ability to think of — and no interest in — stories and plots”) to accept the point that adopting his sentiment, at least to some degree, takes the edge off the fear that many men face when thinking about dipping their toe into literary fiction.

Adopt the blagger mindset, and when it comes to questions of commerciality or politics, just, to borrow from The Book of Mormon, “turn it off.” Dyer, again: “I’m most interested in the book which is completely unsellable on the basis of a proposal or a contract.”

This, evidently, is a more difficult thing to do than it sounds. Even I find myself rolling my eyes at descriptions of how easy it was, in the past, for men to get published. “In 1960, Deighton went on vacation in France and there tried his hand at writing,” is a not unusual opening to a Wikipedia entry for a 20th century male writer. Jenny Turner’s review of Jeff In Venice in the LRB is simply titled “How dare he?”

But I do think, in putting the blagger well and truly to the sword, we might be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And whilst Geoff might be resolutely unserious about himself, he never is about his craft. It’s from this instinct that most of his own personal advice for writing fiction comes from: loosen up, accept your limits, and have a go:

The great thing about this cat — the writing one — is that there are a thousand different ways to skin it. In fact, you don't have to skin it at all — and it doesn't even need to be a cat.

Here the cure lies: time for men to stop putting literary fiction on a pedestal. Look not just to the greats, but as Dyer puts it: “Take a look also at what’s happening on the lower slopes, even in the crowded troughs.” And instead of sitting on the sidelines, do as Geoff does: just go and write the thing and see where it ends up. Fiction is not a form that requires permission. It really only requires nerve.