Should your social media occasionally present you with publishing-related content, you may have spotted proofs for Natasha Brown’s Universality on your feed last autumn. The excitement with which various “bookfluencers” clutched them was twofold. Brown appeared on the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list in 2023, and Universality is the follow-up to her 2021 debut, Assembly, which saw her shortlisted for a Goldsmiths, Orwell, and Folio prize: its critical and commercial popularity has undoubtedly created a sense of anticipation for this next book. But alongside that fact was the feeling that the proof itself provoked as an aesthetic object: striking and slender, with its reflective gold jacket and spectrally engraved lettering. “Oh, it’s a book,” a family member of mine exclaimed on holding it, having been intrigued by what I was carrying around. It wasn’t an absurd response. Those early copies were fashioned to look like bars of gold, in reference to the fact that the first 49 pages are delivered in the style of a magazine feature about a young man who uses one to bludgeon the leader of a group called The Universalists, a faction of political activists (or squatters, depending on who you ask) attempting to form a self-sustaining “microsociety” on a Yorkshire farm during the Covid-19 pandemic.
It’s the sort of story that would set social media alight for days, or rather, as Brown wryly notes in the book’s second chapter, two weeks: “a modern parable [that exposes] the fraying fabric of British society”. Each detail is more eye-popping than the last. Both the farm and the gold belong to a banker named Richard Spencer, a man with “multiple homes, farming land, investments and cars […] a household staff; a pretty wife, plus a much younger girlfriend”. A perfect symbol, in short, of “the excessive fruits of late capitalism”. Jake, the young man doing the bludgeoning, is the son of a reactionary British journalist, Miriam “Lenny” Leonard, whose columns are designed less to provoke thought and more to go viral online. The Universalists themselves share DNA with Extinction Rebellion, and do just as good a job at polarising the great British public. At the centre of it all is that gold ingot, with which, post-bludgeoning, Jake absconds after police raid the farm. Hence the flashy proofs. Except – not really. Engraved on the back of each copy is a quote from the penultimate chapter: “Words are your weapons, they’re your tools, your currency.” After the first section the conceit of a magazine feature drops, with succeeding chapters told from different characters’ perspectives. We learn to read carefully.
It’s worth, in this case, not spoiling the remainder of the plot. Brown worked in financial services for a decade, and her novels so far inherit as themes the mediums through which she has earned her living: the circulation of money, and language – both their own salient forms of capital. Nevertheless, Brown knows that her readers’ biases are the most satisfying currency she can trade on and so creates, in a mere 156 pages, an impressive matryoshka doll of a story, where each established fact is progressively re-rendered with increasing detail and nuance.
Assembly was a similarly slim novel about a Black female banker recently diagnosed with cancer who prepares to attend a party at her boyfriend’s parents’ country estate. It drew comparisons to Mrs Dalloway, but should rightfully have been read against French philosopher and linguist Roland Barthes: Brown’s self-professed aim when she began writing was to assess whether “language can be neutral” in the context of 21st-century identity politics. Despite a lucrative job and a dynamic mind, as an ill Black woman the narrator of Assembly functioned as a discrete semiotic system on to which other characters (and, regrettably, various readers) projected, to quote Barthes, “the weight of a gaze conveying an intention that [ceased to be] linguistic”. Various well-meaning remarks uttered by other characters betrayed a series of flawed insights regarding the narrator’s status, potential, health, emotional wellbeing and desires. “I grew up dirt poor, you know […] So I get it. I get the grind. All this – it’s as foreign to me as it is to you,” a work colleague tells the narrator, despite having no discernible knowledge of her upbringing or previous work history. That such utterances were rejected by the narrator herself went somewhat ironically unnoticed by most of the people who interviewed Brown during her publicity run for the book. “Why subject myself further to their reductive gaze?” read one passage. “To this crushing objecthood. Why endure my own dehumanisation?” Why not, in other words, try to be free?
This time Brown is having more fun within the constraints of our current sociopolitical discourse. Universality is less measured than its predecessor, and trades on the inverse of its core question: nothing about the language in it is neutral. Pronouncements on “wokeism”, on meritocracy, on race and culture wars fall from characters’ mouths like bombs. Thanks to the novel’s ingenious structure, the more you hear them, the more you realise how inhibiting they are, and how soul-crushingly tiring it is to spend your one precious life negotiating their deployment in a rigged and utterly useless system: a realisation only one character profits from, though dangerously so.
It’ll be interesting to watch Brown navigate her publicity run in an era of tech bros heralding a very particular mode of free speech. If Assembly was a meditation on the linguistic construction of cultural myths that dominate our present-day understanding of identity, then the final two chapters of Universality successfully consolidate this new novel as an observational satire about the language games that enable that process. To this end, Brown is one of our most intelligent voices writing today, able to block out the short-term chatter around both identity and language in order to excavate much more uncomfortable truths. And despite how genuinely satisfying it is to watch her deconstruct the world as we know it now, Universality arouses in me an excitement over what could happen should she ever choose to stray from social realism. What should we be doing with language? How might things look otherwise?
• Universality by Natasha Brown is published by Faber (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
