Review by Annabel
It’s been a four-year wait for this, Natasha Brown’s second novel. Her first, Assembly, was stunning, winning many plaudits. It’s a moving and beautifully written novella told in vignettes by a young black woman who works in finance in the city getting ready for a party with her white fiancé’s family and wrestling with some important life decisions.
Universality is equally striking and very different, although still novella length, told in several sections, each with different voices or style.
The first section is written as a magazine feature article, published after the end of the Covid lockdowns. Its investigative journalism tells of a rich banker, Richard Spencer, who buys himself a bar of gold worth half a million quid, just because he can – and then leaves it ostentatiously on the mantelpiece of his Yorkshire farmhouse that he rarely visits.
Thirty-year-old Jake had been living on the farm since 2020, and that night a group of youngsters defying government restrictions had descended on the farm for a rave. Jake uses the ingot to bludgeon someone, we’re not told who at first, then runs. The gold bar goes missing too. As the article’s introduction concludes:
The story was soon forgotten, however, as national focus remained on the Covid-19 pandemic and the government’s strategy heading into the challenging winter months. Yet unravelling the events leading to this strange and unsettling night is well worth the trouble; a modern parable lies beneath, exposing the fraying fabric of British society, worn thin by late capitalism’s relentless abrasion. The missing gold bar is a connecting node – between an amoral banker, an iconoclastic columnist and a radical anarchist movement.
The article’s author goes on to interview Spencer among others and start unpicking those events. It seems that Spencer had let Jake quarantine on the farm as a favour to another resident in his building in London. She is Miriam ‘Lenny’ Leonard – the iconoclastic columnist mentioned above – and Jake is her son. She writes to provoke, rather like some UK media personalities you could probably name. ‘Woke capitalism is trampling all over the working class.’ […] ‘If you’re a black disabled lesbian, or whatever, then you’re hired. Regardless of qualifications.’
The farm had also been occupied by a group of half a dozen or so squatters, calling themselves the Universalists. They were led by Pegasus – the bludgeoned – who survived miraculously, but their little commune cum cult ended.
The article carries on talking to and profiling the Universalists before returning to Lenny and Spencer. Notably, Lenny now realises her earlier ‘rhetoric in the past wasn’t helpful, I can admit that. But my heart has always been in the right place.’
End of part one. Part two is simply titled Edmonton, a gentrifying part of North London, and we’re at a dinner party held by Hannah, author of the article. Her guests, John, Guin and Martin are all in publishing or the media – and the main topic of discussion is the forthcoming adaptation of Hannah’s article into a TV drama. You can imagine the conversation, can’t you? All politico-cultural pretentiousness, lubricated by lots of wine, although not on Hannah’s part, as she remains rather humbled by her success. I won’t dwell on where the evening takes us. The third part takes us to Weybridge in Surrey, Spencer’s home and what happened after the events and the article, and interesting facts are revealed before handing over to Lenny to close the novella in a telling interview.
It was fascinating to see how each section builds on the previous one like a Russian doll. The satire on wokeism, capitalism, race, class and culture is spot on and the author has had great fun with it, managing simultaneously to be witty whilst scoring some serious points on freedom of speech and its language. It’s no surprise that emblazoned on the covers is a slogan which encapsulates Brown’s whole point in this book:
‘Remember – Words are your weapons, they’re your tools, your currency’
Annabel is a co-founder and editor of Shiny.
Natasha Brown, Universality (Faber 2025). 978-0571389018, 141pp., hardback.
BUY at Blackwell’s via our affiliate link (free UK P&P)
