Universality by Natasha Brown Review

Two Extinction Rebellion oiks squatting in a banker’s country house have a barney during a COVID rave with one lamping the other with a gold bar and then going on the run. But all is not as it seems at first and this self-righteous and neatly-packaged story of class disparity during late-stage capitalism turns out to be something more complex and disturbing…

Natasha Brown’s second novel Universality is currently, and deservedly, on the long list for the Booker Prize, and it’s really good - which means it won’t get any further, let alone win, because (mostly) only stinkers take home that questionable prize.

The novel’s opening faux article is cleverly written in a convincingly breezy contemporary style you see in most articles nowadays while also telling an immediately-compelling and twisty story involving wealthy bankers, jilted wives, populist columnists, activists galore, and the easily-understood symbolism of a gold bar worth half a million dollars at the centre of it all.

From there, Brown takes us behind the polished article into the lives of its players - the young freelance journalist Hannah, the banker with the unfortunate name of Richard Spencer, and the famous columnist Lenny - which adds multiple layers on the original piece with each succeeding chapter until we’re left with a very different perspective of what really happened than the one we started with.

It’s very clever storytelling by Brown and immensely compulsive - it’s a relatively short book at 156 pages but I still wolfed through it in no time at all. There are some clever ideas here - like Calhoun’s Universe 25 experiments with rats; the idea being that overpopulation leads to societal breakdown, a spiritual death in its citizens and then finally drastic depopulation, implying that this is what’s happening to humanity today - and some less so - that the media oversimplifies stories to play to its audiences’ biases, which, duh.

Universality is a really fun book though and I definitely enjoyed it - so I’m having a hard time figuring out why I’m resisting giving this full marks. Maybe it’s the lack of a truly memorable story or scene or character in the book to make it stand out as truly powerful. There’s nothing that distinctive anywhere in the book that makes me think I’ll remember it for very long. That and maybe the slightly empty feeling we’re left with at the end - wondering what the point of it all was and/or that the novel as a whole, while intellectually stimulating, lacked emotional resonance?

Still, good books are hard to come by and are all the more surprising when they get published recently and aren’t hidden gems easily missed because they’re from decades past. Universality is one of the fiction highlights of the year and Natasha Brown is an exceptional writer - here’s hoping the Booker spotlight at the very least brings this book more of the attention it deserves.