Greetings, hello, and ay up, visitors to Sequel Country of all classes and social strata. There’s room for everyone in this land, as long as everyone keeps to the social station he was born with, for that is the framework without which society would fall apart – at least, if you listen to those at the top of the pyramid, it is. And some philosophers, such as Nietzche, who wrote:
Without social class distinctions, human society would run amok.
He says that as if he thinks it would be a bad thing…
It seems to me that class was written about a lot in the 20th century (the century of communism, if you like) but is increasingly missing from the literature of the 21st. Yet society, at least in the UK and the USA, is getting rapidly more inequal again after a socialist high-point when inequality was at its lowest and social mobility was at its highest: after the dismantling of inheritance as the main way power was transferred, and before the non-hereditarily rich got better at secretly accruing power for themselves. Class is a still huge factor in modern society, but it has become harder to see it now that nearly everyone has access to information tools and civil rights, and the media can award sudden riches and fame to almost anyone (for fifteen minutes, anyway). Modern American novelists do seem to me to tend to dwell on class, whilst US media as a whole desperately tries to pretend that the USA is an egalitarian society; in contrast, British novelists no longer seem to talk about it much, while much of the UK media raves about the imaginary “élite” who are supposedly running the country instead of the Conservative establishment, and somehow “cancelling” anyone who dares to disagree with them.
I could write a whole column justifying the opinions presented above, but instead, let’s take a step back. Why is it important to write about class? Class shapes our opportunities and our aspirations, limits our income, sets our moral compass and it measurably affects our education, relationship and health outcomes.
Bertrand Russell also observed that:
The class system nurtures hatred between rich and poor, fostering illusion, misunderstanding, malice and contempt on both sides.
while John Le Carré, in Absolute Friends, goes further:
The class system is so rife that people live lives of repressed bitterness from cradle to grave.
In previous columns I’ve covered how storytellers love a good conflict, so why isn’t this obvious conflict more prominent in literature? I can only suppose that it’s because it’s too big a dragon to slay, too big a problem to solve. It’s not plausible to imagine this conflict can be won by anyone other than the rich and privileged; all novelists can hope to do, perhaps, is shine a light on it and make sure some people notice.
The posh, of course, don’t want the problem solved, and neither do some novelists. Alan Hollinghurst is a writer whose work I admire (both stylistically, and as an out gay writer), but I don’t read all his books because of his obsession with the posh, the rich and their wannabes and hangers-on – and given that all his novels share it, I have to conclude that he’s one of them. I once read a review of his brilliant debut novel The Swimming Pool Library which was only three words long: “arty gay porn”. If that was all it was, I would have read more of it (especially as he writes gorgeous prose) but I find his fascination with wealth, or rather the wealthy, too tiresome.
If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.
so said Toni Morrisson, and that’s why I wrote about Yorkshire in the 1980s in my debut novel Parallel Lines. I wanted to write about the 1984 miners’ strike from the point of view of the miners, voices which aren’t often heard in novels. (I was still at school in 84, but I happened to know some miners due to the fact that my sister was married to one; also we were surrounded by pit villages, and lived only a couple of miles from Ferrybridge where a picketing miner was killed by a strike-busting truck driver.)
Class is one of the themes of my novel, with two strands. Firstly, the three main characters have slight class differences: Roy and Mandy are both the children of miners, but while Roy follows his tribe’s socialist values, Mandy is a working-class Tory of the kind that put Mrs. Thatcher in power and kept her there; meanwhile Ashley is almost middle-class, with a mother who’s a teacher and a father working at the council offices. These differences lead each of them to radically different outcomes by the time they are pushing 30. But also, the differences in outlook between Roy and Ashley (even though they have grown up in the same place and gone to the same school) that come from class are what cause friction between them which becomes irreparable damage by a third of the way through the book, so they have to break up.
The sequel I’m writing is set in the early 1990s, and although I’m still wrestling with how big or small a part to give Ashley and Roy in it, what I’m sure about is that class and society will be important. It’s going to be about raves, and their attraction to the marginalised in society, drawing parallels between the communities finding expression in the new music and LGBT communities. Hmm, parallel lines - maybe I should have kept that title in my pocket. Anyway, the law was intent on suppressing both ravers and gays, even if it was laughably ineffective in both cases.
Two aspects of class which I’m planning to weave into this, because they interest me, are intersectionality and identity politics. Intersectionality is when you lack privilege in more than one way, such as being black and female, female and queer, or in the case of my characters, queer and working class; the disadvantages multiply. This is because privilege, after all, is mostly about the absence of impediments, which is why privileged people tend not to notice it. But those who face multiple barriers tend to do worse than those who face only one (like Hollinghurst’s rich white gay men).
Identity politics is interesting because there are those on the left, in the UK, who seek to downplay or invalidate it. I think they see it as divisive; since class affects everything, they believe we should first unite to solve the problems of class, not separate into special interest groups like black, Jewish and LGBT+. Yet being working class is an identity too. Any way of defining yourself which is useful for describing how you are different from other people, is also by definition a way of highlighting differences rather than similarities. The important lesson learned by LGBT+ communities – and I certainly learnt about this at the start of the 90s – was to highlight the positives, to define ourselves in terms of who we are, not who we’re not. So I’ll be trying to work that in too.
Anyway, I’m all about the big themes at the moment. That was class, next week it’s sex! Don’t miss it, and since it’s better with friends, please share Sequel Country with yours using this widget: