On the morning of 24 June 2016, as Britain was waking up to the mind-bending news that the country had voted to leave the European Union, my literary agent began sending copies of my novel to prospective publishers. “Do you feel like you’ve woken up in a Britain you just don’t recognise?” read the email header. Within a day, we had requests to publish it, including one from an editor at Penguin with the comment. “Fucking timely book, isn’t it?”
The book, Liberation Square, is a thriller set in Soviet-occupied London in 1952. Britain is split between a democratic north and a communist south, with a wall running through London like a scar. It’s a world turned upside down from the one that we know, positing historical events that turned out diametrically opposite to how we know them to be – an “alternative history”, as they are known. And it’s one of a surge of such books hitting the shelves right now.
On the day it was published last week, Penguin also put out Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan, which he started writing just after the EU referendum. McEwan’s book is set in a world where the UK has lost the Falklands war, and a far-left Labour leader – not Jeremy Corbyn but his role model Tony Benn – enters Downing Street and takes Britain out of the European Union.
September will see the publication of The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, set in a world where America has been subsumed by a far-right government. Out in January is Agency by William Gibson, probably the world’s foremost writer of highbrow science fiction, which imagines an America where Donald Trump lost to Hillary Clinton.
All were inspired to a greater or lesser degree by three great socio-political upheavals of the past few years: the thudding and wholly unexpected arrival of Brexit, Corbyn and Trump, each one tearing up the comfortable social order.
In my case, it was specifically the elevation of Corbyn – a leftwing outsider – to the Labour leadership, that set ideas in motion. I began to ponder what life would have been like if certain historical figures in positions of influence had got their way. How could we have ended up with a British version of the Stasi? How would that mix with cricket matches and tea? And then Brexit and Donald Trump plastered themselves across our televisions. If you want to inspire an author, the simplest way is to terrify them.
McEwan still feels that visceral emotion, telling the Observer last week: “Sometimes, I wake in the morning wondering what is bearing in on me, and then I remember. Brexit does seem to me a national tragedy. The great lie of the Brexiters, their magic dust, was to persuade 37% of the electorate that the EU, not the UK, was in charge of immigration, and they succeeded.”
The precise genre of McEwan’s book is a departure for him – if not the socio-political milieu. He examined British polity, for example, through the lens of opposition to the Iraq war in Saturday, and the monitoring of British communist intellectuals during the conflict-ridden 1970s in Sweet Tooth. So what attracted him to addressing it, this time, as an alternative history? “The great thing about having an altered reality,” he says, “is that you can’t get anything wrong.”
Well, yes, a blank canvas means greater freedom of expression. There are any number of quotes from dead authors – Google them at will – on how it is the duty of writers to represent the world as accurately as possible. (Basic level quote: Hamlet “to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature”. It’s short; it works; it’s literally Shakespeare.) And yet there are times, such as now, when authors leap as one over the line into something quite strange in order to come to terms with what they see around them. The push factor is usually fear.
“I didn’t viscerally fear Trump’s election until I woke up to the results of the Brexit referendum,” explains Gibson, who grew up in the US and now lives in Canada. “If the UK could do that, then the US could elect this guy. I think the feeling that we’re living in an alternative history now is quite widespread. “I find Brexit even more compelling [than American politics]. What’s happened in the US has actually shocked me less. Having grown up under state apartheid in Virginia, I knew where the bodies were buried, so to speak.”
Neither is the surge restricted to books. Television is jumping on the bandwagon too. Later this year, the BBC will broadcast an adaptation of Noughts and Crosses, the young adult novel by former children’s laureate Malorie Blackman, in which Britain is a racially segregated society. In an era where literal walls are being built, nations boycotted or traduced and people increasingly abused or excluded on basis of ethnicity, the BBC is portraying that movement’s natural conclusion. According to the producer, Preethi Mavahalli, recent political tumult absolutely influenced the drama.
“Brexit was very much present in everyone’s existence at the time and so there are references to a sort of Brexit scenario in our series,” she explains. “It’s not a complete copy, but you can tell there is some kind of similarity.”
Division and separation are the central themes of the drama, she says, and the alternative portrayal of Britain brings that to the fore.
“The novel was a take on Romeo and Juliet and there’s a strong social aspect because it’s about social pressure and the social rule that people live by and is keeping people apart. Once people get beyond the entertainment and the drama, if it makes people think, then that’s great. It might make them question things or look at things in a slightly different way.”
Liberation Square and Machines Like Me are available from the Guardian Bookshop
