Ross Poldark returns from war expecting to step back into the life he left behind. Instead, he finds it gone. His home is stripped, his inheritance carved up, and Elizabeth — the woman he once imagined as central to his future — now married to Francis. The BBC adaptation turns this shock into the engine of a story about identity: how a man rebuilds himself when the world he thought he belonged to has quietly replaced him.
A Homecoming That Shatters Everything
The opening episode of Poldark (2015–2019) doesn’t ease Ross back into Cornwall; it confronts him with the truth. He arrives with the posture of someone who believes he still has a place there. That confidence falters the moment he steps inside Nampara. The rooms are bare, the hearth cold, the silence heavy. It feels less like a home and more like a reminder that he has been erased.
Aidan Turner once said Ross “comes home to nothing,” and the series makes that literal. The emptiness becomes the emotional climate of the early episodes. Ross isn’t returning to a life frozen in time — he’s returning to a life that has already moved on. Elizabeth and Demelza stand on opposite sides of that rupture: one tied to the world Ross expected, the other to the world he must now learn to navigate.
The Betrayal Ross Never Saw Coming
Ross’s homecoming contains one of the most quietly brutal reversals in modern period drama. He walks into the church expecting to reclaim Elizabeth, only to see her hand in Francis’s. The moment is devastating. It’s a betrayal that removes the ground beneath him.
Winston Graham wrote that Ross returns to a world that has “moved on without him” and the adaptation leans into that cruelty. Francis and Charles haven’t just assumed Ross dead — they’ve benefited from it. Wheal Leisure is theirs. Nampara has been stripped. Even Jud and Prudie have abandoned the estate. Ross’s return isn’t met with welcome or relief; it’s met with the realisation that his place in Cornwall has already been filled.
Eleanor Tomlinson captured the moment bluntly: “Ross loses everything in one breath — his home, his future, and the woman he thought was his destiny.”
Francis: A Man Unravelling in Plain Sight
Francis Poldark is one of the show’s quiet tragedies. His insecurity is ever present. Kyle Soller, who plays him, once remarked that Francis is “terrified of Ross because Ross is everything he wishes he could be.” The series shows that terror in small, telling ways.
Watch Francis at the Wheal Leisure shareholders’ meeting: the brittle laugh, the defensive posture, the way he clings to status as if it might hold him together. His jealousy doesn’t erupt in a single moment — it accumulates. In one early scene, Francis watches Ross and Elizabeth speak across a crowded room, and something inside him tightens. Later, his attempts to undermine Ross’s mining efforts feel less like strategy and more like desperation — a man drowning who grabs at anything, even his cousin, to stay afloat.
Francis steals Ross’s life, but never feels safe living in it.
Elizabeth: The World Ross Lost
Elizabeth is often misread as cold, but the series paints her as someone shaped — and limited — by her upbringing. She chooses Francis because she believes Ross is dead, but also because she has been raised to value stability above everything else. Reputation is her armour, and she wears it even when it restricts her.
Heida Reed said Elizabeth “chooses safety,” and the early episodes support that reading. Watch her at Trenwith: the slight hesitation before she speaks, the way she stands just behind Francis at social gatherings, the way she looks at Ross with longing edged by caution. She embodies the world Ross once expected to inherit — refined, orderly, predictable.
But she cannot follow Ross into the chaos that defines his return. She is the past, not the future.
Demelza and the Courage to Stand Beside Him
Demelza’s arrival shifts the entire rhythm of the show. She enters Ross’s life not as a romantic counterpart but as a force of disruption. In the early episodes, she is sharp‑eyed, stubborn, and unafraid of Nampara’s emptiness. Her first act is practical: she cleans. Her second is emotional: she stays.
Eleanor Tomlinson described Demelza as someone who “sees Ross clearly — not the hero, not the gentleman, but the man.” The series proves that repeatedly. When Ross spirals after Wheal Leisure’s failures, she steadies him. When he lashes out, she pushes back. When he retreats into grief, she refuses to let him disappear.
One of the most striking moments comes when she sings at Trenwith. The room falls silent. Elizabeth watches. Francis watches. Ross watches. For a brief moment, Demelza stands at the centre of a world that once excluded her. She doesn’t belong to Ross’s past; she belongs to what he can become.
The Mine That Makes Him Who He Is
Wheal Leisure is more than a business venture. It’s the one thing Ross can rebuild with his own hands. The mine is loud, dangerous, unpredictable — nothing like the polite world of Trenwith. In Episode 3, when the mine floods and Ross throws himself into the chaos to save his men, the series shows exactly what drives him: not pride, but responsibility.
Jack Farthing, who plays George Warleggan, said Ross fights the Warleggans because “they represent everything that destroyed him.” The mine becomes the battleground for that conflict. George uses influence and money; Ross uses sweat and stubbornness. Demelza stands beside him through every collapse and reopening.
The mine isn’t a symbol. It’s a wound Ross keeps reopening because he cannot bear to let the world take anything else from him.
The Night with Elizabeth: A Step Backward
Ross’s night with Elizabeth is one of the most controversial moments in the series, and one of its most important. It isn’t framed as romance. It’s framed as regression. Ross seeks out Elizabeth because he wants to feel like the man he was before war, before betrayal, before responsibility.
Aidan Turner explained Ross’s mindset simply: “He goes to Elizabeth because he wants to feel like the man he used to be.” The scene reflects that. The lighting is soft, the room quiet, the moment heavy with nostalgia. But nostalgia can be a trap. When Demelza learns what Ross has done, her devastation is understated and deeply human.
Ross’s betrayal isn’t passion. It’s a retreat into a world that no longer exists and a denial of what should be.
Ross Finally Chooses Who He Wants to Be
Ross’s transformation doesn’t happen in a single moment. It happens slowly, in the aftermath — in the way he looks at Demelza when she withdraws, in the way he tries to repair what he broke, in the way he finally understands that love is not inherited but earned.
Demelza becomes the measure of Ross’s growth. She demands honesty. She demands accountability. And Ross, gradually and painfully, becomes a man capable of giving both. By the later seasons, his loyalty to her is no longer impulsive. It is steady. It is chosen.
Conclusion
Ross Poldark’s story is not only a romance. It is a reconstruction. Betrayal tears apart the life he expected; class conflict shapes the life he must build; love — real love — forces him to confront the man he is capable of becoming.
Elizabeth is the past Ross cannot reclaim. Demelza is the future he must grow into.
Winston Graham wrote that Ross “must learn that love is not a memory — it is a choice.” The BBC series shows that choice again and again, until Ross finally makes it.
Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is not just a polite romance but a critique of the social systems that shape desire, duty and identity. Elizabeth Bennet’s independence, Darcy’s transformation and Lydia’s downfall reveal a world where reputation is currency and moral clarity becomes an act of resistance.
Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is often packaged as a polite romance — a story of misunderstandings, dances, and eventual harmony. Yet beneath its surface lies a sharper, more politically attuned novel, one that interrogates the social machinery of Regency England with a precision that still resonates. Austen’s world is not merely decorative; it is a system of power, reputation, and economic dependency that shapes every choice her characters make. Elizabeth Bennet’s independence, Darcy’s transformation, Lydia’s downfall, and the Bennet family’s precarious honour are not isolated narrative beats but expressions of a society built on fragile hierarchies and unforgiving moral codes.
To read Pride and Prejudice seriously is to recognise that its emotional arc is inseparable from its social architecture. Pride and prejudice are not simply personal flaws; they are symptoms of a world that teaches people to judge, categorise, and protect status at all costs. Austen’s protagonists do not merely fall in love — they learn to see clearly in a world clouded by class, gender, and expectation. Their growth is not sentimental; it is ethical. And in Austen’s hands, ethical clarity becomes a form of resistance.
Pride and Prejudice: The Title as Social Diagnosis
Austen’s title is deceptively simple. It gestures toward two human failings, but in practice it functions as a critique of the forces that produce them. Darcy’s pride is not merely arrogance; it is the learned reflex of a man raised to believe that wealth confers virtue. His sense of superiority is not innate but cultivated — a product of upbringing, class boundaries, and the constant reinforcement of social hierarchy. Elizabeth’s prejudice, meanwhile, is not petty spite but a defensive posture. She is a woman who must protect her dignity in a world that routinely undermines it. Her misjudgement of Darcy is shaped by wounded pride, social vulnerability, and Wickham’s manipulative charm.
Austen uses this symmetry to expose how social structures distort perception. Darcy’s pride blinds him to Elizabeth’s worth; Elizabeth’s prejudice blinds her to Darcy’s integrity. Their eventual clarity is not a romantic epiphany but a dismantling of the assumptions society has taught them to trust. The title becomes a map of the novel’s moral terrain: pride and prejudice are obstacles, but they are also catalysts for transformation.
Elizabeth Bennet: Integrity in a System Built to Undermine Women
Elizabeth Bennet’s independence is often celebrated as a refreshing departure from Regency norms, but its significance is deeper. Her refusal of Mr. Collins is not simply a rejection of an absurd man; it is a refusal to participate in a system that demands women sacrifice autonomy for financial security. Elizabeth’s insistence on respect — on marrying for compatibility rather than convenience — is a political stance disguised as personal preference.
Yet Elizabeth’s independence is not absolute. When Lydia elopes with Wickham, Elizabeth confronts the brutal reality of reputation: one sister’s mistake threatens to destroy the futures of all five. The Bennet family’s honour becomes a fragile commodity, vulnerable to public scrutiny and social condemnation. Elizabeth’s role shifts from spirited observer to moral anchor. She assumes responsibility not because society demands it, but because she understands the stakes. Her integrity becomes a form of stewardship — a refusal to let her family collapse under the weight of scandal.
As C.S. Lewis argued in his essay A Note on Jane Austen (published in Essays Presented to Charles Williams, Oxford University Press, 1947), “Austen’s heroines are moral agents first and romantic figures second.” Elizabeth Bennet exemplifies this with unusual clarity: her choices are not whimsical gestures of feeling but deliberate acts of ethical independence in a world designed to limit it. Her refusal to marry without respect, her insistence on judging character rather than status, and her willingness to confront the consequences of Lydia’s scandal all mark her as a woman navigating a system that undervalues her intelligence yet depends on her moral labour. Elizabeth’s agency is not rebellion for its own sake — it is the quiet, persistent assertion of a selfhood that refuses to be shaped entirely by class expectation or patriarchal convenience.
Elizabeth’s moral clarity is not naïve idealism; it is a deliberate act of resistance against a world that offers women little protection and even less forgiveness.
Lydia’s Scandal: Reputation as Social Currency
Lydia Bennet’s elopement is often treated as comic chaos, but Austen uses it to expose the harshness of Regency morality. Lydia’s impulsiveness becomes a public crisis, and Wickham’s predatory behaviour is reframed as her moral failure. The consequences are immediate and severe: the Bennet sisters’ marriage prospects collapse, the family’s social standing is threatened, and their financial future becomes precarious.
As Marilyn Butler argues in Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford University Press, 1975), “Austen’s novels expose the pressures of a society that polices women’s behaviour.” Lydia Bennet’s elopement makes those pressures brutally visible. Her impulsiveness is treated not as the folly of one teenage girl but as a moral catastrophe capable of contaminating the entire Bennet family. In Austen’s world, female reputation is a collective asset, fragile and easily destroyed, and Lydia’s downfall reveals how swiftly society punishes young women for the misconduct of men. Wickham drifts through towns leaving damage behind; Lydia is the one who pays the price. Butler’s insight underscores the structural nature of the scandal: Lydia is not simply reckless — she is operating within a system that offers her no education in self‑preservation and no protection from predatory charm.
Reputation in Austen’s world is not merely personal; it is collective. A single misstep contaminates the entire family. Lydia’s downfall reveals how little agency young women possess and how quickly society punishes them for the misconduct of men. .
Austen does not absolve Lydia, but she does contextualise her. Lydia is reckless, yes — but she is also a product of a society that gives girls no education in self‑preservation. Her scandal is not simply a plot device; it is a critique of a world that treats female virtue as a fragile currency and male irresponsibility as an inconvenience.
Darcy’s Intervention: Love as Ethical Action
Darcy’s response to Lydia’s scandal marks the novel’s moral climax. He does not declare his feelings; he acts on them. He tracks down Wickham, pays his debts, and forces him into marriage — quietly, without seeking credit. This intervention is not romantic heroism but ethical responsibility. Darcy recognises that his earlier pride contributed to the Bennet family’s vulnerability. His actions are a form of restitution, a deliberate correction of his own misjudgements.
Darcy’s transformation is meaningful because it is active. He does not simply become kinder; he becomes accountable. His intervention critiques the social system itself: only a wealthy man can repair the damage caused by another man’s misconduct. Elizabeth sees him clearly for the first time — not as an aloof aristocrat but as someone capable of moral courage.
In Austen’s world, love is not expressed through sentiment but through action. Darcy’s loyalty is not decorative; it is decisive.
Darcy’s Friendships: A Window Into His Moral Code
Darcy’s relationships with Bingley and Colonel Fitzwilliam reveal aspects of his character that Elizabeth initially cannot see. His protectiveness toward Bingley is not snobbery but genuine concern for a friend too trusting for his own good. His candid conversations with Fitzwilliam show humour, honesty, and shared responsibility. These friendships matter because they expose Darcy’s values: loyalty, duty, and care.
They also parallel Elizabeth’s devotion to her sisters. Long before they recognise their compatibility, Darcy and Elizabeth share a moral vocabulary. Their eventual union is not a triumph of romance but of ethical alignment.
Social Context: The Machinery Behind the Morality
Austen’s world is shaped by forces that operate quietly but relentlessly:
entailment laws that disinherit daughters
economic dependence that forces women into strategic marriages
militia culture that enables men like Wickham to drift between towns
class boundaries that dictate who is “worthy” of respect
These structures are not background decoration; they are the engine of the plot. Elizabeth’s intelligence operates within these constraints. Darcy’s transformation is meaningful because he learns to see beyond them. Lydia’s downfall is tragic because she never understood them.
Austen’s critique is subtle but pointed: the moral failures of individuals are inseparable from the systems that shape them.
Resolution: Moral Clarity as Liberation
By the novel’s end, pride and prejudice have not simply been overcome — they have been interrogated. Elizabeth learns discernment; Darcy learns humility. Their union is not a reward for good behaviour but the result of ethical growth. They choose each other not because society approves, but because they have learned to see clearly.
Austen’s message is sharp: emotional maturity is a form of liberation. Reputation, class, and gender may shape the world, but they do not have to define the self.
Conclusion
In the end, Pride and Prejudice reveals itself not as a genteel love story but as a study of how people learn to see clearly within a world determined to obscure their vision. Austen’s characters move through a landscape shaped by class hierarchy, gendered expectation, economic precarity and the fragile politics of reputation. Elizabeth Bennet’s independence, Darcy’s ethical transformation and Lydia’s vulnerability are not isolated narrative turns but expressions of a society where moral clarity is hard‑won and social missteps carry collective consequences. As A.S. Byatt observes in Passions of the Mind (Chatto & Windus, 1992), “Austen’s characters learn to see truly, and that is their freedom.” That insight captures the novel’s deepest argument: liberation comes not from romance but from the courage to interrogate pride, dismantle prejudice and recognise the structures that shape desire, duty and identity. Austen’s brilliance lies in showing that emotional maturity is not merely personal growth — it is a quiet act of resistance against the machinery of her age.
In Oliver Twist Charles Dickens didn’t set out merely to tell the story of a hungry boy asking for more. Oliver Twist is a novel built on the backs of women — their endurance, their compromises, their impossible choices — and the way Victorian society punished them for daring to protect a child. Read closely, the book becomes less about just Oliver himself and more about the women who keep him alive while the world tries to grind him down.
The women who hold the line
Oliver’s mother is barely present in the narrative, yet she shapes the entire novel. Dickens gives her almost no voice, no history, no chance to explain herself — and still she becomes the moral centre. She arrives at the workhouse in labour, alone, exhausted, and unnamed. That anonymity is deliberate: Victorian society erased women who fell outside its narrow expectations. But even in her final moments, she clings to her child with a ferocity that cuts through the bleakness.
Her death is not a plot device; it is Dickens showing how quickly a woman could be discarded once she no longer served a purpose. She dies in poverty, but she dies protecting Oliver. That act of resistance — refusing to let him be swallowed by the same system that destroyed her — reverberates through the novel.
Nancy, meanwhile, is the book’s beating heart. Dickens writes her with a complexity he rarely afforded his male characters. She is trapped in crime, tethered to Sikes through fear and trauma, yet she carries a moral clarity that the “respectable” characters often lack. Nancy knows exactly what the world is, and still chooses to save Oliver. Her courage is not romantic; it is desperate, dangerous, and rooted in the knowledge that she may pay for it with her life.
When Nancy dies, Dickens isn’t simply killing off a tragic heroine. He is showing how society punishes women who step out of line — even when they do so to protect a child. Her murder is brutal because Victorian reality was brutal. Women like Nancy were disposable, and Dickens refuses to soften that truth.
Men as instruments of the system
The men in Oliver Twist are not villains because they are individually monstrous; they are monstrous because the system allows them to be. Oliver’s stepfather is a perfect example. He marries Oliver’s mother for her inheritance, then treats her with calculated cruelty once the money is his. Dickens understood the legal trap of Victorian marriage: a woman’s assets became her husband’s property, and her autonomy vanished the moment she said “I do.”
That dynamic is echoed in Sikes’s control over Nancy. He doesn’t need chains or locks; the law, poverty, and social stigma do the work for him. Dickens shows how male violence is reinforced by structures that give women no escape route. Nancy’s attempts to protect Oliver are acts of defiance against both Sikes and the society that keeps her tethered to him.
Even Fagin, with all his theatrical villainy, is part of the same machinery. He exploits children because the system makes them easy to exploit. He manipulates Nancy because she has nowhere else to go. Dickens’s men are not simply bad people — they are products of a world built to reward domination.
Childhood as collateral
Oliver’s suffering is not unique; it is representative. Dickens wrote Oliver Twist at a time when children were beaten, starved, and worked to death. The workhouse scenes are not exaggerated. They are reportage. Oliver is punished for asking for food because poor children were expected to be grateful for anything they got despite remaining hungry.
Dickens uses Oliver’s innocence as a mirror. Every adult who harms him reveals something about Victorian society: its obsession with respectability, its fear of poverty, its willingness to sacrifice children to maintain order. Oliver survives not because the world is kind, but because two women refuse to let him be destroyed.
Class, identity, and the restoration that comes too late
The revelation of Oliver’s aristocratic lineage is Dickens at his most pointed. It is not a fairy-tale twist; it is a critique. Oliver is treated as vermin until the truth of his birth is uncovered. Only then do the “good” characters rush to protect him. Dickens is asking a simple question: why did Oliver deserve kindness only once he was revealed to be ‘respectable’?
His mother’s sacrifice becomes retroactively validated, but the validation comes too late for her. Too late for Nancy. Too late for every child who didn’t have a hidden inheritance waiting to rescue them.
Final thoughts
Oliver Twist is often remembered as a story just about a boy. It isn’t. It is also a story about the women who shield him from a society that sees children as labour, women as property, and poverty as moral failure. Oliver’s mother dies protecting him. Nancy dies protecting him. Their courage is the novel’s true engine.
Dickens understood something that still resonates: when a society is built on cruelty, the smallest act of care becomes an act of rebellion.
A chilling, near‑future dystopia where civic duty becomes coercion, technology blurs the meaning of being human, and the state decides when your life should end. Tim Bragg’s The Experience pushes familiar anxieties to their logical — and deeply unsettling — conclusion. Anthony C Green reviews the novel.
Introduction
I enjoyed Tim’s last novel, The Mirror, a lot, and like Tim, based on our online interactions. He’s an all-round talented guy, an accomplished multi-instrumentalist and recording artist as well as a seasoned writer of both fiction and non-fiction. So, I was looking forward to reading this and, thankfully, I wasn’t disappointed.
Overview
Like all good Speculative/Science/Dystopian fiction, the novel takes our world as it is now, or at least the most technologically ‘advanced’ parts of it, adds a prescient selection of the political/social issues that currently concern us, and projects that forward into a plausible future world.
The decision to make that future the relatively near future, the novel being set at some point during the 2060s, is a good one, given the pace of and scale we have seen in recent decades. It also serves to make the ‘new normal’ depicted in the story seem perhaps less unlikely and less terrifying than it ought to be.
For those who have never known a world very different to the one we now find ourselves in, or have perhaps have been gently cajoled and coerced into, anyone say under the age of thirty or so, some of it might even seem quite an inviting prospect.
For me, that’s perhaps the most worrying takeaway from the novel of all.
2066 is thirty years away at the time of writing. Think back to 1996. The first brick-like, not-yet-Smart mobile phones were starting to make an appearance, mostly among younger people, including fellow staff members at my then place of work.
In my mid-thirties at the time, I well remember a conversation that took place out back as we seized the opportunity for a quick smoke, involving myself and two or three fellow support workers of around my age. We were all in agreement that we wouldn’t be rushing to join this new-fangled Mobile Telephone fad: ‘I don’t see the point. Who wants to have people ringing you up when you’re out? Especially work. It’d be like being permanently tracked…’ said one female colleague.
She was bright, attractive and, it turns out, a prophet.
I regularly attended a Creative Writing evening class back then, and the Star-Writer word processor I used to produce my assignments, all saved to floppy discs that, confusingly, weren’t floppy at all, was the height of technological progress for me.
It would be three years before I attained my first bulky Windows ’98 home PC at almost the same time that the needs of my job forced me to relictally join club-mobile.
It’s been a foot-to-the-floor dash down the Information Superhighway (a once ultra-modern term now barely remembered) ever since.
A dash to where?
To a world where it’s become all-but impossible to live offline, and where the threat of being ostracised and banished into thae wilderness has become a powerful weapon in the hands of governments and giant, unaccountable transnational corporations, the threat of being socially cast out, de-banked, denied work or even deprived of liberty for a careless, online heat of the moment response to a real-world outrage, or through the unearthing of a comment, word or turn of expression you once presented in the digital Public Square which might have been quite acceptable at the time but, for reasons we are often not even fully aware of, certainly isn’t now.
Of course, not everything about this technological revolution is bad, but if we’d have known then where we were headed, would we have taken those first baby steps?
And, of course, our Long Trip into the unknown may barely have begun.
If anything, given that, especially with the advent of AI, which plays a big part in the novel, technological change escalates exponentially, perhaps reaching a quasi-religious End/New Beginning point in the Singularity, the 2060s may be a conservative estimate of how long it will take to reach the reality envisioned in The Experience.
Themes
So, that’s one idea that is explored in the novel, how quickly and readily human beings can come to accept what would once have been seen as, well, as the stuff of dystopian science-fiction.
There are many others.
This is very much philosophical SF in the tradition the great Philip K Dick, a comparison that has rightly been made on the back-blurb of the novel. The book raises questions about the nature of being, about what it means to be human and to be alive, and about the inevitable truth that we all, at some point, must face the question of what it might mean to be not alive.
Is it to be everlasting nothingness, or might we find ourselves transported into a new reality where we realise that all those small things and Big Questions we spent so much of this life worrying about were really just a fuss about nothing, that what we thought was it, was an infinitesimally small part of a perhaps infinite adventure, like taking a single grain of sand for the desert, a molecule of water for the ocean, or a single planet for the Galaxy.
The Story
This is, of course, a review of a novel, so I suppose I’d better say a little bit about the plot as well as the themes and subtext, though I’ll try to do so briefly, without giving away too many spoilers.
The main plotline concerns Jim and his wife Hannah. Jim is fifty-nine, and in this possible reality the National Government, which is merely a sub-branch, exists mainly to enforce the will of an all-powerful World Government, has mandated that all citizens must, for the good of the whole, sacrifice their lives at the age of sixty.
This has become known as one’s Civic Duty, the sort of innocuous term, suggestive of Sunday morning litter-picks or volunteering for the National Trust, which it is all too easy to imagine such a once unthinkable measure being branded.
That the necessity for this Civic Duty has become broadly accepted, especially but not exclusively by those for whom the age of sixty still seems like a distant horizon not yet worth worrying about, is partly due to the development of something called Future Fields, or Double-F.
Double-F is essentially the spoonful of sugar that helps the bitter medicine of humane but premature extinction go down. Developed through a combination of AI/VR technology and psychedelic drugs, Double F enables the racks of corpses preserved in drawers in vast storage spaces to experience a form of synthetic half-life after the quiet demise of their physical bodies.
The preparation for and execution of Civic Duty and Double-F has been sub-contracted by the World/National government to a gigantic private corporation called Portway which, while distant and shadowy as a whole, as a whole, as large corporations tend to be, and merely a component of something still more large and shadowy, at least offers the personal touch through a skilled team of doctors, nurses, therapists, and what might be described as psychic designers. The specific team assigned to the individual to work with him/her in both preparation for their obligatory end once they pass their fifty-ninth year, and in developing the form of Double-F into which they are soon to be initiated.
That’s the extra sweetener that helps to normalise the process, that the individual is as involved as they wish to be, or at least can be at current levels of development, in the design of the artificial pseudo-life they are about to enter: Who else do they want to be present? How would they like to spend their time? What sort of physical environment do they wish to spend it in?
In the novel, we get to see this process unfold through the eyes of Jim, and to explore its effect on Hannah, who by virtue of being nine years younger than her husband, still has a reasonable amount of time to go before she has to start thinking about her own post-life Experience.
At the time in which the novel is set, Double-F is still in its relative infancy, and Jim can only expect his personal experience to last for approximately five years. So, it doesn’t end the question of what, if anything, comes after physical death. It merely kicks the can down the road as, I think, Jim himself says at some point.
If anything, it raises new questions: Can one die in Double-F, and if so, would this be death-proper, or would it be more akin to dreaming of dying in this life?
To return to a point I made in the introduction, to many, particularly to those who lack any form of religious Faith in a traditional form of afterlife, the idea of one that is synthetic but guaranteed could seem quite a decent trade-off for an early exit.
However, as is also true of most religious ideas of a life beyond this life, there is no certainty that an individual’s Double F will be entirely benign.
There are also various sub-plots at work, including some detective work by Jim and Hannah as regards potentially shady goings on within Portway, as well clear topical references within the book as regards the conduct of our own shadowy elite-class, with more than a hint of Epstein’s Island about some of the later sections of the novel.
I’ll leave the reader to explore these for themselves. It’ll be well worth your time. The characters are believable, and the plot exists as more than a convenience on which to explore ontological questions.
Modern Moral/Political Parallels
The most prescient of these is the Assisted Dying Bill here in the UK. At the time of writing, this Bill has just been returned to the House of Commons for amendment after being rejected by the Lords.
There are of course, the usual assurances that such a course of action would be entirely voluntary, and there are plenty of seemingly humane reasons why people might support such an option being made available, for instance to those who are terminally ill and have nothing more to look forward to than months, or years of misery and pain before natural death occurs. It’s on such cases that Bill is being sold to MPs and the public.
Everybody is free to have their own opinion on this issue. But the example of abortion is I think instructive. Whether one supports the principle of ‘a woman’s right to choose’ or not, it’s undeniable that we’ve travelled a long way from the ‘exceptional circumstances’ terms of the 1967 Abortion Act that first made the practice legal in Britain.
And, in countries where some form of ‘assisted dying’ has been introduced in recent years, like Canada and the Netherlands, we have seen the same sot of slippery slope at work, though in a much-accelerated fashion, to the point where it is now being offered to those with entirely treatable conditions like depression and/or drug/alcohol addiction.
In the back story, the world-building aspects of The Experience, we discover that the introduction of Civic Duty, initially at the age of eighty, followed a series of wars and economic crises.
Given similar scenarios in our world, which are not only plausible but may already have begun, how soon could ‘offered’ become ‘suggested’, and how soon would ‘suggested’ become ‘mandated’?
As these things take on a life (pun intended) of their own, as with the journey from the Nokia-brick to the permanent tracking device/multi-media entertainment device/access to the sum of all (approved by ‘verifiable sources’) of human knowledge we willingly carry in our pockets, we may not even need such a period of crisis to get there.
That’s my tuppence-worth, anyway.
Conclusion
Politics aside, The Experience is an excellent, well-constructed, well-written, and thought-provoking novel. If you enjoyed The Mirror, you’ll enjoy this even more. If you’ve given prior thought to some of these Big Questions, and have perhaps explored states of consciousness beyond what the American Zen Philosopher Alan Watts termed ‘Wet Monday morning consciousness, by whatever means, you’ll enjoy it all the more.
Malorie Blackman’s Thief! is a gripping and imaginative young‑adult novel that blends realism, science fiction, and moral questioning into a fast‑paced story about justice, responsibility, and the frightening consequences of being misunderstood. First published in 1995, the book remains one of Blackman’s most underrated works, overshadowed by the later success of Noughts & Crosses, yet it contains many of the same qualities that define her writing: a strong sense of empathy, a willingness to explore difficult themes, and a deep understanding of how young people experience fear, hope, and moral pressure. Thief! follows the story of Lydia, a twelve‑year‑old girl who is wrongly accused of theft and then swept into a terrifying future where her town has become a dystopian nightmare. Through Lydia’s journey, Blackman explores how a single moment of injustice can spiral into something far bigger, and how courage often emerges in the most unexpected circumstances.
The novel begins in the present day, with Lydia on a school trip. She is an ordinary girl, shy and thoughtful, who often feels invisible among her peers. Her life is not dramatic or rebellious; she is simply trying to get through school, navigate friendships, and make her mother proud. This ordinariness is important because it makes the sudden accusation of theft feel all the more shocking. Lydia is accused of stealing a classmate’s electronic organiser, and the accusation hits her with the force of a physical blow. She knows she is innocent, but the adults around her are quick to assume the worst. Blackman captures the emotional intensity of this moment with sensitivity: Lydia feels humiliated, frightened, and betrayed. She is overwhelmed by the realisation that people she trusted are willing to believe she is a thief without giving her a chance to defend herself. This injustice becomes the emotional foundation of the novel, shaping Lydia’s decisions and her understanding of the world.
The accusation also sets up one of the novel’s central themes: how quickly a person’s reputation can be destroyed. Lydia is not a troublemaker, but she lacks the confidence and social power to defend herself effectively. She is a child in a world where adults hold authority, and Blackman uses this dynamic to show how vulnerable young people can be when they are misunderstood. Lydia’s sense of fairness is deeply shaken, and she begins to question whether the world is as just as she once believed. This emotional turmoil is still fresh when the novel takes a dramatic turn. On the journey home from the school trip, a violent storm erupts. Lydia is caught in the chaos, and the storm becomes a symbolic and literal force that tears her out of her familiar world. In a moment that blends realism with science fiction, the storm transports her into the future — a future where everything she knows has changed.
When Lydia wakes up, she finds herself in a version of her hometown that is unrecognisable. The streets are deserted, the atmosphere is tense, and the sense of danger is immediate. She soon discovers that the town is under the control of a tyrannical leader, a boy named Dominic, who rules through fear, surveillance, and strict curfews. Lydia is shot at for being outside after curfew, and this moment marks the beginning of her terrifying journey through a dystopian world. Blackman’s portrayal of the future is chilling not because it is filled with monsters or supernatural threats, but because it is a distorted version of reality — a world where ordinary people have been pushed into submission by a system that punishes disobedience and rewards cruelty. The future Lydia encounters is bleak, oppressive, and deeply unfair, mirroring the injustice she experienced in her own time but magnified to an extreme degree.
As Lydia navigates this dangerous world, she learns that the future she has entered is not random. It is connected to her own life in ways she could never have imagined. The tyrant who rules the town is a boy from her own time, someone she knows — and someone whose future has been shaped by events that Lydia herself may influence. This revelation introduces one of the novel’s most important themes: the idea that small actions can have enormous consequences. Lydia realises that the future has become a nightmare because of choices made in the present, and she begins to understand that she has a role to play in changing what is to come. This theme is particularly powerful for young readers, who often feel that their actions do not matter. Blackman challenges this belief by showing how Lydia’s courage, honesty, and determination can alter the course of history.
Throughout the novel, Lydia is forced to confront difficult moral dilemmas. She must decide whom to trust, how to survive, and whether she is willing to take risks to help others. These dilemmas deepen the story and make Lydia’s journey more than just a physical adventure; it becomes a psychological and ethical struggle. Lydia’s character grows as she faces danger, betrayal, and fear. She becomes more assertive, more strategic, and more aware of her own strength. Yet she never loses her moral compass. Even when she is frightened or uncertain, she refuses to become cruel or selfish. This integrity is one of her defining traits, and it is what ultimately allows her to change the future.
Blackman’s portrayal of the dystopian future is both imaginative and grounded in social commentary. The future town is a place where inequality has deepened, where power is concentrated in the hands of a few, and where ordinary people live in fear. The curfews, surveillance, and punishments reflect real‑world concerns about authoritarianism and the erosion of civil liberties. By placing a young girl at the centre of this world, Blackman highlights how political systems affect individuals, especially those who are vulnerable. Lydia’s struggle becomes a metaphor for the fight against injustice in all its forms, whether it appears in the classroom, the home, or society at large.
The novel’s pacing is fast and tense, keeping readers engaged as Lydia moves from one danger to another. Yet Blackman also takes time to explore Lydia’s emotions, giving the story depth and resonance. Lydia’s fear, confusion, anger, and determination are portrayed with nuance, making her a relatable and sympathetic protagonist. Her emotional journey is as important as the physical one, and it is this combination of action and introspection that makes the novel so compelling for young readers.
As Lydia uncovers the truth about the future and her role in it, the novel builds toward a dramatic climax. She must confront Dominic, the tyrant, and expose the truth about how the future came to be. This confrontation is intense and emotionally charged, forcing Lydia to draw on all the courage she has developed throughout her journey. The climax is not just a battle between characters; it is a battle between values — between fear and hope, cruelty and compassion, despair and possibility. Lydia’s victory is not easy, and it comes with the realisation that changing the future requires both bravery and responsibility.
When Lydia finally returns to her own time, she is forever changed. She carries with her the knowledge of what the future could become, and she understands that her actions matter. The resolution of the novel is hopeful but realistic. Lydia has grown, but she is still a young girl who must navigate the challenges of her everyday life. Blackman does not offer a neat, sentimental ending; instead, she acknowledges that trauma leaves scars and that growth is a gradual process. Yet Lydia emerges stronger, more confident, and more aware of her own capabilities.
The themes of Thief! are rich and relevant for GCSE students. The novel explores justice and injustice, showing how easily a person can be misunderstood and how devastating the consequences can be. It examines identity and self‑discovery, as Lydia learns who she is when everything familiar is stripped away. It addresses power and manipulation, revealing how authority can be abused and how fear can be used as a tool of control. It also critiques social inequality, showing how systems can fail young people and how those failures can shape the future. These themes make the novel not only exciting to read but also meaningful to study, offering opportunities for discussion, analysis, and reflection.
Blackman’s writing style is clear, direct, and accessible, making the novel suitable for young readers while still offering depth and complexity. She balances fast‑paced action with emotional insight, creating a story that is both thrilling and thought‑provoking. Her ability to capture the inner life of a young protagonist is one of her greatest strengths, and it is what makes Thief! such a powerful and memorable novel.
In conclusion, Thief! is a compelling exploration of injustice, courage, and the power of individual action. Through Lydia’s journey into a dystopian future, Malorie Blackman shows how ordinary people can rise to extraordinary challenges and how the choices we make today can shape the world of tomorrow. The novel’s blend of thriller, science fiction, and social commentary makes it an ideal text for GCSE students, offering both an engaging story and rich thematic material. Nearly three decades after its publication, Thief! remains a relevant and resonant novel, reminding readers that even in the face of fear and misunderstanding, it is possible to fight for the truth and change the future.
A thoughtful, deeply informed review of How the Web Was Woven: Essays on Elvis by Peter Critchley, in which Anthony C. Green explores the author’s scholarship, shared fandom, and the book’s challenge to long‑held myths about Elvis Presley.
Peter Critchley has been a Facebook acquaintance of mine for a number of years, and often comments on my posts, especially if they’re Elvis-related, such as my reviews of the two Baz Luhman films, the 2022 biopic, and this years Epic: Elvis Presley in Concert.
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Similarly, I’ve commented when something Peter has posted has come to my attention. This may not always be on matters Elvis, but I have long been aware via the wonders of social media that Peter is not only a very learned man in a whole number of fields, with a PHD in Philosophy, but also a fellow Elvis super-fan.
The book is a collection of essays written at various points over several years.
Its format is such that you could open it at any point and read any chapter that takes your fancy at any time. I’ve yet to read it all, but I chose to read the first twelve chapters in chronological order, and I will likely continue chapter by chapter until the end.
But that’s just me. If your interest is in a particular era or topic or album, then head straight for the relevant chapter, whatever takes your fancy. It’s a ‘dip into book’, and a very good one.
But I’m glad I personally decided to start at the beginning. Already, in the very first two chapters, I discovered much in common between myself and the author as regards our relationship to Elvis.
The first Elvis album both of us remember is the little-regarded budget album (of which RCA have released far too many) Separate Ways. In Peter’s case, this album was bought for him by his mum. In mine, the album entered our household via my (now ex) brother-in-law, a big Elvis fan, when he married the youngest of my two older sisters, and the two of them shared our council house until they found a place of their own. He probably bought other Elvis albums with him too, but that’s the one I remember. Going through the track listing in the book, I found that I still remembered something about every track on that album, even though it must be over fifty years since I last heard it, until reading about it inevitably inspired me to check it out on YouTube.
So, both Peter and I discovered 1970s Elvis before we discovered the younger 1950s Elvis, and that freed us from the ‘Elvis died when he joined the army’ snobbery articulated by John Lennon, and which continues to be accepted and hegemonic amongst ‘serious’ rock critics.
I also discovered that the very favourite Elvis track for both of us is If I Can Dream, the raw, power-house ballad/address to the world with which he chose to conclude the 1968 ‘Comeback’ T..V Special, and interestingly, and rightly, chose to never perform again, despite the 1100 plus concerts he performed in Las Vegas and on the road throughout the United States between 1969 and his death in 1977.
I know my Elvis. I’ve read the books, even Albert Goldman’s hatchet job, listened to most, though not all of his tangled/mangled discography. I’ve seen all of the Elvis films at least once, all of the compiled concert footage films, starting with the first version of That’s The Way It Is, which I first saw on television in the mid-70s, up to Epic, the various biopics, from Elvis the Movie, which I watched at the Odeon cinema, Grimsby in 1979, soon after leaving school, to Luhman’s 2022 Elvis. I’ll check out any new documentaries that come to my attention, most recently, The Searcher and The Return of the King on whatever streaming service I can find them (both are excellent. I later bought a physical media version of the former). I even sometimes listen to the excellent TCB Elvis Podcast.
I probably don’t know as much about Elvis as I do the Beatles, though I might if I lived in Memphis or Tupelo, Mississippi rather than Liverpool, but I consider my knowledge to be well above that of the average or casual fan.
But Peter is in a different league, and I’ve learned a lot of stuff I either didn’t know or had forgotten I knew.
There are songs I’d heard once or twice and forgotten about, and have now been re-acquainted with, and many outtakes and alternative versions which I didn’t know existed. To give one example, the unadorned version of his much-maligned cover of Roger Whittaker’s The Last Farewell (a song my dad always liked – I skipped forward towards the end of the book to read this chapter), recorded by Elvis at almost the very end of his life, in comparison to the syrupy string-adorned officially released RCA version. This is one of many examples given of how unnecessary levels of post-production became a sad feature of much of Elvis’ recorded output from the 1960s onwards.
As these are essays written at various times, without necessarily having the end-point of a cohesive book in my mind at the time they were written, there is a certain amount of repetition, but this was no big problem for me.
Based on what I’ve read so far, certain recurring themes emerge.
The standard decline and fall narrative is a myth. According to this narrative, the 1954 – 1958 Elvis was great (ultra-purists might draw the line at the point he left Sun records for RCA at the end of 1955), one of the most important artists of all time, without whom there would be no Beatles, Rolling Stones or The Clash. After he left the army in 1960, he abdicated his throne as the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll to churn out increasingly dire Hollywood movies at the rate of three a year, accompanied by a series of equally dire soundtrack albums. The magnificence of the ’68 Special is generally noted, especially the sit-down sessions (much of which weren’t in the original broadcast and only became available later), before he returned to live performance as an increasingly bloated and drug-addled nightclub MOR performer in ever more garish jumpsuits, until his inevitable early death.
Like all good myths, this narrative contains much truth; and the mismanagement of Elvis career by both ‘evil genius’ manager ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker and RCA is undeniable, and is a running sub-theme through How the Web Was Woven.
But as Peter shows, even in what are considered to be his weakest years, approximately between 1962 and 1967, good music was recorded by Elvis. The problem was that instead of waiting until there were enough great tracks in the can to make a great album, they tended to be buried in twos and threes as bonus material on the movie soundtrack albums.
And not all of the film soundtrack songs were bad (I’ve always had a guilty fondness for his version of Frankie and Johnny), and I’ve even been inspired to revisit two or three of the films themselves. Ironically, leaving aside the four pre-army 1950s films, Wild in the Country from 1961 and, possibly, Viva Las Vegas three years later, my favourite has long been his very last acting role, 1969’s barking-mad but brilliant Change of Habit.
I’m glad that Peter writes quite extensively about the movie years, as this whole period tends to be glossed over. This is understandable, but Elvis made twenty-five films between leaving the army and returning to live performance. Between 1962 and 1969, there were no Elvis albums that weren’t movie soundtracks, so that’s a considerable chunk of the man’s career. Peter Guralnik’s two-volume Elvis biography, Mystery Train and Careless Love is probably rightly considered the best. But I always thought it should have been three. He raced through the Hollywood period like a man in a very great hurry, and Peter does an excellent job of filling in many of the blanks.
Another re-occurring theme is that Elvis was very much a Heart Singer, that he was a technically brilliant singer, with a huge two-and-a-half octave range, but that this was secondary to the fact that he put his heart, and his soul, into his performances, whether live or in the studio. Obviously, there were times when this wasn’t the case. After all, there’s only so much heart one can muster for a version of Old MacDonald Had a Farm, and we have several instances of Elvis off-handedly expressing his displeasure with some of the material he was given to work with.
But in general, Peter is of course right. Whatever the style of music, rock, country, blues, gospel, pop, as long as the song was worthy of him, Elvis would give it all he had, in some cases lifting material above the mediocre through the sheer power of his performance.
As wide as his natural range was, emotional depth was always more important to Elvis than technical accuracy. It had never occurred to me before that he is singing flat at times on my beloved If I Can Dream until Peter mentioned it. But once you are aware, if you listen hard, you can hear it. But it didn’t matter. Elvis knew he’d nailed it, singing alone in a darkened studio, and he wasn’t going to worry about being a semitone out here and there. I just hope that the song hasn’t had auto pitch correction applied to it, as seems to be a depressing trend nowadays (see the excellent Wings of Pegasus podcast).
Peter is also right to stress that it was with the 70s ballad material, recorded long after Elvis ceased to be considered cool, that his power as a heart singer is best revealed. Put simply, long after his days as the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, were over, and as Peter says, cursory, truncated versions of his 1950s hits were always the low points of his 1970s performances, he revealed himself to be one of the greatest, if not the greatest ballad singers of all time.
I won’t say anymore on this. Peter explains the concept much better than I can.
The final point I’ll cover, although there is, of course, much else contained within the book, is the democratic nature of Elvis and Elvis fandom. His appeal spans the spectrum, across sex or sexuality, nationhood, race (the accusation that Elvis somehow stole the black man’s music is another myth the author demolished with ease) and class. Elvis really did provide something for everybody.
I remember becoming friendly with a middle-aged ex-striking Yorkshire miner and his wife on holiday in Egypt, 1998. They loved ‘big ballad Elvis.’ Others may like his early stuff, or his gospel material, or his more country or blues orientated songs. Some of us like some of all of it.
There may be a perception of Elvis being somehow low-brow. But plenty of artists who are considered to be much more critically credible are or were big fans. For Bob Dylan, Elvis’ version of his Tomorrow is a Long Time is the one cover out of the very many cover versions of his songs that he is most proud of. I did know this, but I wasn’t aware that Leaonard Coen was also a big fan. Unfortunately, Elvis didn’t cover any of his songs, though the book had me checking out the quite impressive fake 1970s cover of Hallelujah, a song he would surely have gotten around to recording had he lived longer. Springsteen is a fan, and numerous other artists are cited, including some from the worlds of opera and classical music.
This essential democratic nature of Elvis is reflected in the variety of writing styles Peter has employed in the writing of this book. He’s a very learned man, and that comes across where appropriate. But this is no book of dry academic essays. He’s also quite capable of writing like a fan-boy, as in the ‘Lost album’ chapters covering the years 1964 and 1967/8. Isn’t that something we’ve all done, compiled albums that never were but should have been? I don’t know how many ‘What songs would have made the next Beatles album if they hadn’t split up when they did’ videos I’ve watched on YouTube over the years, but it’s a fair few. Such things can only be done well if you have the knowledge to know what songs were recorded when, which Peter clearly does.
How the Web Was Woven will probably be enjoyed most by those with some prior knowledge of and liking for Elvis, but it’s an accessible collection even for those who have merely a passing interest in the subject.
So, a hugely entertaining and thought-provoking read so far, and I’m looking forward to completing the rest of the collection.
And there’s still more to look forward to. In the blurb at the end, Peter teases a major three-volume musical biography, covering the fifties, sixties and seventies that he’s been writing and researching on and off since the 90s. Like the completed set of Mark Lewisohn’s promised three-volume Beatles biography (thirteen years and counting since volume one), that’s something I hope to live long enough to read.
(with a postscript on Unite the Kingdom and the Slaying of Charlie Kirk)
It’s probably not difficult to write a damning indictment of Mr. Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, known to the world as Tommy Robinson. No doubt, it’s already been done in the book ‘Tommy’ by Nick Lowles of Hope Not Hate. I haven’t read it, and have no intention of doing so. Because it’s by Nick Lowles of Hope Not Hate, and a book from that source on anyone to the Right of Keir Starmer is never going to be anything but a ‘damning indictment.’
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From the off, Lucy Brown makes it clear that her book is not a narrative of redemption by someone who was radicalised by the Far-Right, but was young and naïve and now realises the error of her ways and sees how much our society has been enriched by multiculturalism, and that Diversity truly is our Greatest strength.
It’s not that kind of book at all, and all the better for it.
Lucy’s failure to prostrate herself before the liberal establishment probably explains why Hate Club hasn’t received much media attention.
Although the Tommy who emerges through the pages of her book is one whose failings as a human being are many, she appears to feel no hatred towards him. Her sympathies, as far as I can tell, remain firmly with the Right.
Her failure to repent makes her testimony all the more powerful, despite the resultant lack of publicity and its likely negative impact on sales.
That it is also a well-written, humorous and entertaining read is a bonus.
She worked for Robinson in a variety of roles for a two-year period beginning in 2017: Her duties included the production of increasingly professionalised publicity videos, the management of his online content, the general management of his public appearances and public affairs, and often as a reluctant apologist and provider of excuses.
The book’s timeline begins and ends several years after Robinson first became a public figure of both hate and adoration through his leadership of the EDL, the English Defence League, a period of his life for which he often seems to feel a sense of nostalgia and a keenness to recreate.
But we first meet Lucy shortly before that, as a privately educated, young and attractive but troubled and searching young woman who was still embroiled in a middle-class leftist milieu embittered by the traumatic experience of the 2016 Brexit vote, delivered, in their eyes, by uneducated, unwashed ‘gammon.’
We follow the author as she attends radical feminist groups and Black Lives Matter meetings before BLM became all too well known following the death and subsequent elevation to sainthood of lifelong criminal and drug addict George Floyd.
It was at these meetings that she began to question some of the ‘truths’ that were self-evident to most of her friends and work colleagues: were all men really potential rapists? Should she really feel guilty simply because of her skin colour and the colonial sins of her ancestors? Wasn’t this hatred of all things white itself racist? Was there nothing to be proud of about being British? Was the Brexit vote necessarily a bad thing, and even if it was, shouldn’t the democratic wishes of the British people be respected? Was the Pakistani grooming/rape gang issue really exaggerated or non-existent and little more than a ‘racist dog-whistle’?
The next stage of her journey was the online rabbit hole of Right-Wing influencers, a journey that soon led her to first the periphery, and then the centre of Planet Tommy.
The contempt for the Left (or the version of the Left that existed in Lucy’s world. Other varieties are available) seems well-justified, with much of her ire aimed at Hope Not Hate, an organisation that comes across as much more Hate than Hope.
Lucy makes it clear that she had many good times during her period of working for Tommy. Humorous anecdotes are legion, but I’ll leave the reader to discover and enjoy these for themselves.
Her relationship with Robinson was complex: part employee, sometimes paid, often not, part friend, near one-night-stand drunken lover, another tale that needs to be heard in Lucy’s own words, and part caretaker.
Despite Lucy’s lack of malice, the ‘damning indictment’ thing is certainly there, up front and writ large.
True, there’s nothing we didn’t already know, or at least suspect. What Lucy does is provide detail, and it rings true in a way that a book by the likes of Nick Lowles never could, because she was there and she isn’t writing from a perspective of polarised ideological disdain.
The Tommy of Hate Club is allegedly:
A heavy-drinking cocaine addict who craves the limelight and will champion any cause that’s palatable to his fan base, if it helps him to maintain his position in the public eye.
A man who will claim responsibility for, or at least exaggerate his role in, exposing issues like the Pakistani rape gangs, which many others, both publicly and privately, played an important role in exposing.
Who has sought to involve himself in causes where it’s been made clear he is not welcome, for instance, in the fall-out to the brutal Lee Rigby murder.
He has indeed faced some of the state censorship and persecution that takes centre stage in his self-told Hero’s Journey. But at least some of his jail time and online cancellation have happened because of his own stupidity, because of his tendency to act without thinking, a trait common among users of cocaine and other stimulants.
Tommy lived/lives an extravagant, luxurious lifestyle, dripping in bling, replete with flash cars, numerous foreign holidays and a succession of houses far out of the reach of his overwhelmingly working-class followers.
Lucy does not outright state that this lifestyle was/is funded by the regular appeals for donations he seeks and receives from his supporters, and this may or may not be true. But what is clear from the pages of the book is that, at least during the period covered, no real accounting and auditing system existed for how these donations were used, and I suspect that this remains the case today.
Not only was his lifestyle at odds with his public ‘Man of the People’ persona, but so was his claim to be a dedicated family man. In reality, he was an inveterate womaniser who once used the excuse of a ‘sick daughter’ as a means of bailing on an important public engagement, when the truth was that he was driving to Newcastle for a sexual encounter with a woman he barely knew, and didn’t even find particularly attractive.
As with Coke and the opportunity of another moment in the glare of the public spotlight, the offer of sex was something Robinson had great difficulty in refusing.
Unsurprisingly, he is now separated from his wife.
He was also incapable of taking responsibility when decisions he had made went wrong, and was quite prepared to throw employees and friends under a bus rather than to do so.
In fact, that’s how Lucy’s involvement with Tommy came to an end, but that’s another story best heard in her own words.
I was going to draw my review to a conclusion here, but because of recent, fast-moving events, I’ve decided to bring matters up to date with an extended postscript.
…
Tommy is now more high-profile and more popular than ever before. He’s been accepted as a member of former Reform UK Deputy Leader Ben Habib’s new Advance UK party, having previously been given a wide berth by Farage’s, Reform, and I’m writing this a week on from his latest big London gathering, the Unite the Kingdom event in London, which included Habib and, by video link, Elon Musk among the speakers.
Musk’s appearance confirmed what’s obvious from anyone who follows such things on his social media platform ‘X’, that Tommy has reached almost the level of a free speech folk-hero among the American Right, most of whom, I think it’s safe to say, have little knowledge of his history.
The police estimated the numbers attending the London march and rally at 110,000. I’ve attended many big demonstrations in my time, and a good rule of thumb is that if you split the difference between the organiser’s claimed attendance and the police’s estimate, you get something approaching reality. From the various online sources I accessed, Unite the Kingdom appeared to be much bigger than the figure claimed by the police, even if Tommy’s figure of three million seemed a tad grandiose.
I doubt that one million would be a wild over-estimation.
But where does Tommy go from here?
He’s already talking about the next major and similar event. But this type of demonstration/’Festival’ is of a similar character to those described in Lucy’s time as one of his chief organisers, the last of which included the incident that finally led her to walk.
He’d also mobilised decent, if considerably smaller and more yobbish numbers, in his time as leader of the EDL.
But people soon tire of marching around London with their flags, listening to a dozen or so speakers, and then going home. It’s the law of diminishing returns, and in the end, these events, in and of themselves, achieve little.
Arguably, the migrant hotel protests have had more real and likely lasting impact, precisely because they have been localised affairs. Those attending may chant Tommy’s name, but he has played no part in their organisation.
As mentioned earlier, Robinson lacks any ideology beyond his hatred of Islam. But, as valid as many of his concerns are, this isn’t enough to sustain or build a movement. I’ve watched a few interviews with him recently, and he’s struggled noticeably if the tone has gone beyond allowing him to retell anecdotes of his own heroism and persecution, and his reiteration of the evils of Islam.
In one, he seemed to have adopted the position advocated by open Ethno-Nationalists such as Mark Collett of Patriotic Alternative, of re-establishing a 90- 95% White majority in Britain. But he was soon back to claiming the mantle of ‘diversity’ for himself, embracing all cultures (especially Sikhs, Tommy loves Sikhs), apart from Muslims.
He had no real answer when one interviewer pointed out that illegal immigration from non-Muslims, often from nominally Christian African countries, has now almost caught up with that from Islamic sources.
When it comes to legal immigration, the biggest growth area, via Starmer’s Indian trade deal, is going to be from Hindu Indians, with whom Tommy has professed to have no quarrel. They do, after all, have their own problems with Islam.
We’ve already had a big legal influx, including here in Liverpool, of Hong Kong Chinese, another group Tommy has been conciliatory about.
The point being that if you wished to achieve a white ‘super-majority’, your reach for deportations would need to extend far beyond the Muslim community (and not forgetting that Islam is a religion, not a race. Many of them are also white, as Malcolm X long ago realised. Some are even white British converts.)
We’ll see how matters unfold. I doubt many of the issues with Tommy Lucy highlights are in the past, even if he is now claiming to be a Christian. Despite a definite swing to the Right nationally, I can’t see Robinson being much of an electoral asset to Habib.
Also, at the time of writing, we are in the aftermath of the public assassination of the thirty-one-year-old American conservative ‘influencer’ Charlie Kirk, about which much was made at the big London event, even though it’s doubtful many of those attending were even aware of Kirk, and those that were, only barely, before his public slaying. That includes Robinson.
The official narrative is linking the alleged assassin, Tyler Robinson, to ‘Far Left’, Antifa extremism, with the added and helpful element of a ‘trans’ lover.
The murder is being used by the Trump administration as an opportunity for a clampdown on the Left, with the promise of the designation of Antifa as a terrorist organisation, though, as no centralised ‘Antifa’ organisation exists, this might prove more difficult to do than to promise.
We’re also likely to see attempts to criminalise opposition to Israel’s actions in Gaza and elsewhere. This is something we’ve already seen the beginnings of here, with Starmer’s outright proscription of one organisation, though, here too, intent is one thing, and implementation quite another.
I’ve been following developments in the Kirk investigation closely (some might say, obsessively. The only gun I’ve ever held is a 2.2 air rifle bought for me by my dad when I was fifteen. But I now know how long it takes to disassemble a ‘Mauser 98’) and believe there are a lot of issues with the mainstream narrative, as does his close friend and fellow American Christian conservative Candace Owens. But I’ll leave that aside and conclude with a personal anecdote that, in a very minor way, adds credence to the official narrative.
About a month ago, I attended a protest outside a migrant hotel here in Liverpool, partly because I believe the concerns of the protesters to be legitimate, and partly to see for myself how both the demonstrators and counter-demonstrators conducted themselves.
A protest the following week, in the city centre, erupted in violence, if fairly low-level violence, which, as far as I could tell from the coverage on YouTube, seemed to arise largely from the failure of the police to keep the two groups apart.
But the hotel protest I attended in person was well policed, with a solid line of mostly good-humoured officers separating demonstrators and counter-demonstrators, while still allowing passers-by and individuals like me who didn’t look like they were out to cause trouble to pass between the two groups, and to take photographs and video footage, both of which I did.
My observation, and I’m aware that appearances can be deceptive, was that those on what I will call the patriots side were largely good-natured, humorous, normal-seeming types. They were mostly middle-aged, but with a smattering of young people and children, and probably majority female.
On the other side, chanting ‘Nazi Scum Off Our Streets’ at the very un-Nazi looking people facing them, were 90% young ‘studenty’ types, with the usual array of ‘Refugees Welcome’ and, rather irrelevantly, ‘Trans Rights Now’ banners and placards.
I had two overriding thoughts about this. One was that I knew some of the counter-demonstrators, at least by sight, from the regular Sunday marches in support of the Palestinian cause. I found it depressing that the Palestinian flag, many of which were also plentiful amongst the ‘antifa’, is now seen, through a process of guilt by association, as synonymous with the people calling them Nazis.
This has led to a reaction that even goes to the extreme of flying a foreign flag, the flag of Israel, on supposedly patriotic demonstrations, presumably on the basis that my enemy’s enemy is my friend. There were none on this particular demonstration in Liverpool (perhaps due to Scouse exceptionalism?), though I spotted a few in the coverage of Saturday’s London event. I gather a Palestinian flag was even ripped up on stage, though at least one speaker, to his credit, condemned this.
Robinson’s own committed Zionism and his focus on Islam is partly to blame for this. In reality, not all Palestinians are Muslims, anyway, and Israel has ‘accidentally’ bombed churches in Gaza, and Israeli ‘Settlers’ have deliberately torched churches on the West Bank. For me, there is no contradiction in supporting the Palestinian people and supporting the anti-migrant protests. Unfortunately, I doubt many on either side would see it this way if I were to carry an English flag in one hand and the Palestinian flag in the other.
My other primary reflection was how far from the type of serious Marxist analysis I was once schooled in the Left, or at least the type of ‘Left’ that attends this type of counter-demonstration has descended.
In my youthful days in Militant, and not quite so youthful, and much shorter period in the Communist Party of Britain, we could distinguish between different strands of Right-Wing thought, between outright Nazis and Fascists, and for instance, Margaret Thatcher and Enoch Powell, the precursors of the likes of Nigel Farage, Rupert Lowe and Ben Habib today.
Or, for that matter, Tommy Robinson. Lucy Brown doesn’t directly address the question in Hate Club, but in all of her many criticisms of Robinson, nowhere does she give reason to believe that his primary motivation is racial hatred. To call him, as supposedly right-wing ‘Talk’ presenter Julie Hartley-Brewer recently did, a ‘White Supremacist’, is based on precisely zero evidence.
The failure to make distinctions between ideologies is dangerous, and it’s entirely possible, setting aside any problems with the official narrative, that an ideological co-thinker of the Liverpool counter-demonstrators across the pond, where guns are much more prevalent, and where President Trump has been called a ‘literal Nazi’ by even mainstream Democrats, and has himself been the subject of two assassination attempts, could believe that Christian conservative Charlie Kirk was a hateful fascist’ who deserved to die.
The online celebrations that took place almost as soon as the news that he’d been shot hit the internet confirm this hate-filled mindset.
This is not to say that even those who really are Fascists or Nazis should be randomly assassinated or attacked. But the tale of how we’ve moved incrementally from ‘No Platform for Fascists’, which I never supported, anyway, to ‘Punch a Nazi’, to where we are now, which can be summarised as ‘Kill all Nazis and anyone who disagrees with us on anything, be it immigration or trans rights, is a Nazi’, is a long and complex one, and I’ve digressed way too-long already.
To conclude, Tommy Robinson is clearly a deeply flawed human being, and Hate Club does a superb job in capturing the essence of his failings at a particular moment in time, which, as I’ve said, I doubt has much changed. It’s an enjoyable read and, having watched Lucy on a recent podcast appearance, where she came across as likeable, genuine, and humble, I’d guess her personal memoir captures her own essence as much as and as well as she does that of Mr Yaxley-Lennon.
I read Higgs’ The KLF Chaos Magic and the BandWho Burned a Million Pounds some years ago. It was a fascinating read that led me to a brief, and unsuccessful, flirtation with Chaos Magic. The book featured a very interesting chapter on Doctor Who, my all-time favourite television show, so I was delighted to discover that the writer had now written a whole book on the subject.
It didn’t disappoint, expanding on the main themes of the chapter in his earlier work, arguing, to simplify, that the show has enjoyed such longevity that it has taken on the form of a living entity, changing and adapting to new conditions, and evolving in such a way that it creates the conditions for its own survival.
That might sound weird and artsy-fartsy, and I suppose it is. It does, however, make sense, though it would be impossible to do the author’s thesis justice in a short review. All I can do is urge people to read it, be they fans of the show or those with a more general interest in British popular culture.
You’ll gather from this that this is no ordinary Doctor Who book, and I suppose I should qualify my recommendation by saying that if you’re looking for a mainstream history of the show, with detailed production notes on the now close to nine hundred episodes in nearly sixty-two years, then look elsewhere. This is essentially a work of cultural criticism, written from an unusual and esoteric point of view.
It does present its analysis in a conventional structure. That is, it begins with the pre-history of the show and takes us chapter by chapter, Doctor by Doctor, from Hartnell the First in 1963, through McCoy the Seventh, the last Doctor of the classic era that ended in 1989, and onwards through the ‘Wilderness Years of the nineties, McGann’s movie Doctor and the modern incarnation from Eccleston the Ninth in 2005 right up to the present day with Gatwa the Fifteenth/the Disney Doctor. Higgs’ Left-field analysis flows beautifully from this familiar structure.
There are many sub-themes to enjoy here. But I’ll mention just one. That is, the idea that the relationship of the BBC to the franchise is analogous to that of the Time Lords to the Doctor within the show’s lore and canon. Again, this might sound a bit ‘out there’ for some, but it really does work.
I don’t agree with the author on everything. He’s more of a liberal than I am, and his progressive views sometimes collapse into a form of cultural relativism where, in this context, one Doctor is every bit as important as every other. That’s not really a criticism. Higgs has chosen his path, and it’s a valid one that I thank him for sharing with us in such a thought-provoking and entertaining manner. However, there should also be a place for value judgment when discussing art/pop culture. Readers may be interested in checking out my reviews of the current ‘season 2’ of Disney Who. There are plenty of value judgments to be found there.
That aside, I have no hesitation in recommending Exterminate! Regenerate! It’s a book that’s well worth reading, from an author who is rapidly establishing a place among my favourite non-fiction authors.
Anthony c Green, May 2025
Exterminate/Regenerate
By John Higgs
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I’m a big fan of David Peace, the author whose novel of the same name this play is based. The Damned United, his fictionalised account of Brian Clough’s il-fated 44-day tenure at Leeds United (a day less than Liz’ Truss period as Prime Minister, as many journalist and online wags pointed when her disastrous period as Prime Minister ended), is the book he’s best known for. I loved it, and the film adaptation starring Steve Coogan, though much lighter in tone, was still a worthy effort. I also read his GB 1984, a novelisation of the miners’ strike written from the viewpoints of Messrs Scargill, Heathcliffe and McGahey. That’s pretty good too. Time prevented me from reading all of his Red Riding trilogy, set in Yorkshire during Peter Sutcliffe’s murderous rampage against girls and women. But what I read was good, and the television adaptation on Channel Four was a powerful, gritty, violent drama that’s well worth revisiting.
I purchased Red Or Dead, Peace’s second legendary football manager based novelisation, this time with the great Bill Shankly as its subject, almost as soon as it came out, hoping it would match or even exceed the Damned United.
It was a huge hardback tome of over seven hundred pages in length. I found it to be almost unreadable, and gave up on it about one-tenth in.
I wasn’t alone in my opinion, as a skim through the Amazon reviews makes clear, and for a book originally retailing at £20 plus to be available for £2.99 in The Works within a few months of publication is not a sign of success.
I could see what Peace was trying to do. He was attempting to demonstrate how Shankly’s success was based on repetition, on doing the same things over and over, ingraining good habits in mind and body until a state of perfection is reached, in the manner that a classical musician will repeat scales or certain musical pieces over and over until they can be performed on demand almost unconsciously. This was the methodology Shankly sought to instil in his players and the teams he managed, in the fifteen years he spent in charge at Liverpool FC, THE team he managed.
Statue of Bill Shankly at Anfield stadium in Liverpool (England)
Peace’s attempt to mirror the Shankly method in a literary fashion was a bold, admirable idea. But page after page of ‘Bill Shankly goes into the kitchen and makes himself a cup of tea. The first cup of tea of the morning. Strong with a splash of milk. Two sugars. Stirred clockwise three times. Bill Shankly sits at the table and opens his notepad. Bill Shankly drinks his tea and looks at the notepad. The notepad with the team sheet for Liverpool’s game against Arsenal. On Saturday. At home. At Anfield. Bill Shankly thinks about Ian St John. Ian St John who was injured in the match against Leeds United. Last Saturday. Away. At Elland Road. Bill Shankly thinks about Liverpool’s game next Wednesday. Against Real Madrid. In the first leg of the European Cup quarter-final. Away. In Madrid. Bill Shankly picks up a pencil. Bill Shankly writes a question mark next to Ian St John’s name. On the team sheet. The team sheet Bill Shankly had written. In the notepad. The team sheet for the game against Arsenal. On Saturday. At home. At Anfield…’
And so on, and on, and on.
And on…
How can anyone make of such source material an entertaining play?
Such were my thoughts as I headed for the Royal Court theatre.
The Royal Court theatre in Liverpool.
The month-long run at the Royal marks the world premiere of the production, and the theatre was packed by the time the doors closed and the lights dimmed.
The audience tended towards the middle to upper age register, though with a smattering of younger men and women, with quite a few couples.
I’d guess that most of those in attendance were working class, likely to be long-term Liverpool FC supporters, and with many of them not being regular theatre goers, though maybe that’s too many assumptions.
As is my usual practice, I read no reviews beforehand and so genuinely had no idea of what to expect as the cast assembled on the minimalist, suitably vintage stage.
I’m happy to report that Philip Breen did a superb job in adapting such seemingly unpromising source material for the stage, demonstrating that not only could it be done, but that it could be done in such a manner that it has a genuinely populist appeal.
As narrated by the multi-talented Alison McKenzie, in the guise of Shankly’s beloved wife Ness, Peace’s words were revealed to possess a poetry that had failed to escape my notice as dry words on the page.
As well as narration, we get plenty of great dialogue too, sometimes in dramatic re-enactments of key moments in Shankly’s life and career, from before, during and after those momentous days at Liverpool FC, and sometimes in well-crafted interactions between Shankly and his players, coaching staff, groundsman, supporters, club chairman, fellow managers (including Clough), and Ness, all written and designed to illustrate the character and philosophy of life of the man.
There’s plenty of nostalgia to be had for those who lived and followed football in this period, with cameos from the likes of Kevin Keegan and Emlyn Hughes (with a sly did at the latter for being an irritating Tory), and there are also some genuinely heart tugging moments, such as when we are informed that the troubled club chairman Jimmy McInnes, who first brought Shankly to Liverpool from Huddersfield Town was found hanging under the Kop.
The play has a large cast of fifty-two, drawn, aside from the lead actors, from a local community theatre group, almost all of whom occupied the stage throughout the performance.
The size of the cast gives the play an appropriately democratic and collectivist style and form, with those who don’t have a speaking part still able to play an essential role as representatives of the Anfield crowd on match days, as well as being a rousing choir in the production’s several musical numbers.
The first rendition we get of the inevitable You’ll Never Walk Alone is at the point in the story when it was adopted as the club anthem by the Kop, one Saturday afternoon in 1963, as Merseybeat swept the nation and Gerry and the Pacemakers took this little remembered number from the musical Carousel to the top of the Hit Parade. The recreation of that moment began as a solo rendition by McKenzie, soon to be joined by the full cast. They in turn were augmented by the archived, echoic, full-throated surround-sound of the Kop itself, and not a small number of the audience, until it felt as though the whole theatre was shaking through sheer volume and raw emotion.
Musically, we also get She Loves You, again as a full-cast plus Kop number, and Cilla the Singer in full peak-Cilla dress and hair, standing alone in the spotlight on a raised platform at the back of the stage, giving us Anyone Who Had a Heart, as copied from Dionne Warwick.
This musical interlude, despite being beautifully performed by Jhanaica Van Mook, was one of the play’s few missteps. Every other musical component served to illustrate key moments in the story. This felt like pure cabaret, though audience reaction suggested that mine was a minority opinion.
Some more or less good natured audience hissing at the first mention of a defeat by Liverpool’s arch nemesis’ Manchester United early on, was beautifully undercut by Shankly movingly relaying the moment he learned of the tragic event of the Munich Air Crash of 1958, his words accompanied by symbolic snow falling onto the stage, of how he got down on his knees and prayed ‘harder than I’ve ever prayed for anything’ for the survival of his friend and fellow Scot, United’s manager Matt Busby.
As we know, Busby did survive, unlike twenty-three of his fellow passengers on that ill-starred and ill-advised return flight from Belgrade, including eight of his young team, the Busby Babes.
The close relationship between the two managers remains an important theme throughout the rest of the play.
After the interval, the performance resumes with archival newsreel footage of shocked, and often disbelieving, real-life Liverpudlians’ as they reacted to the news of Shankly’s retirement in 1974, one of several intelligent uses of ghostly period film projected onto the back of the stage.
This second half was a half-hour or so shorter than the first half. This made sense, given that life for Shankly after football would last a mere seven years, until his death at the relatively young age of sixty-seven.
But for Shankly, who was only half-joking when he famously said that ‘Football’s not a matter of life and death, it’s more important than that,’ there could never really be a meaningful ‘Life after football.’
The difficulty that many working men, and Shankly never ceased to consider himself a ‘working man,’ have in finding meaning in life once the daily routine of work is over, is in and of itself a great topic for drama. But here, the great man’s failure to adjust to retirement was played a little too much for laughs, and this made the second half of the play weaker than the first, though that’s not to say it was weak per se, or that it significantly lowered my estimation of the whole.
For some considerable time after his decision to step down, Shankly continued to turn up at Liverpool’s training ground, to impart the benefits of his wisdom to players and staff, to ‘keep himself in shape’, to ‘help out’, to be around in case he was needed, but really just to be there because there was nowhere else that he needed to be.
In the end, it was politely requested that he stay away, because his presence was at risk of undermining new manager Bob Paisley, previously his long-term assistant, at a time when he needed to ‘make his mark’.
Soon, of course, he did indeed make his mark, building upon the essential foundations Shankly had laid to lead Liverpool to even greater heights, to add the European Cup, the one triumph that had alluded his predecessor, to the already impressively stocked Anfield trophy cabinet.
We do see all this in the play, but the over-concentration on the comedic in this second half downplayed the key, tragic essence of Shankly’s final years, an essence well encapsulated by the Ian St John in his remark that, ‘Shanks died of boredom, of not being the manager of Liverpool Football Club.’
That’s not to say, to paraphrase the cliche beloved of football commentators, that this was ‘play of two-halves’. The level of performance was never below excellent, and the comedy provided the audience with plenty of laugh-out-loud moments.
Shankly believed footballing success was predicated on individuals working as one, as a collective towards a shared goal (or, more correctly, towards the opposing team’s goal). In one of his most iconic statements he described this as a form of socialism, ‘real socialism in action.’ He always recognised that the collective extended well beyond the eleven players on the pitch to incorporate everybody connected with the club, from the boardroom down to the supporters, with the players and the manager, those who most obviously receive the glory and the accolades of success, being but parts of a much greater whole.
Much the same, with appropriate linguistic amendments, can be said of a successful theatre production, and of much else in life.
Almost everything about this play serves to powerfully illustrate this truth.
This being said, it seems almost a contradiction to single out individuals for praise. Nevertheless, it would be remiss not to mention Peter Mullan’s superb performance in the lead role, though perhaps we should expect nothing less from such an experienced and accomplished actor. He had Shankly’s mannerisms and accent down pat. But his performance never descended into mere impersonation, and although he is the ‘star’ name, there are no star moments, no grandstanding attempts to dominate. Clearly, he understands his subject and the nature of the production well.
Alison McKenzie, I’ve mentioned, but Les Dennis was so convincing as Tom Williams, who took over as the Liverpool club chairman after the suicide of McInnes, that ‘Les Dennis’ disappeared entirely and I didn’t even realise it was Les Dennis until I checked the cast list on the bus home.
Breen’s direction should also be commended. Two-and-a-half hours is a fair old length for a play, but never for a moment did it drag.
Some prior knowledge of the life and times of Bill Shankly would certainly enhance enjoyment of the production. But those who lack such knowledge would almost certainly leave the theatre wanting to rectify this deficiency.
I wouldn’t recommend that they head straight for Peace’s novel, although I left tempted to dig it out from the darkest, most neglected corner of my book collection.
Red Or Dead continues at the Royal Court, Liverpool until April 19th, but will surely be coming to a theatre near you at some point.
Tim Bragg is an engaging writer, novelist, poet and multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter and musician with an impressive bibliography of both fiction and non-fiction works and recorded albums to his credit, the very latest being the cyber gothic slow burner and critically important ‘The Mirror’ (Sycamore Dystopia 2023).
The Mirror is a dystopian novel set in a not too distant future – 2073 – where humanity is held captive in a society completely run by a system of artificial intelligence and technocracy similar to that envisaged by both one-time Fabian socialists Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) and George Orwell (1984), both of whom portrayed ‘one world’ collectivist states run by an elite of central planners where life, language, media and ‘entertainment’ are completely regulated and controlled. Bragg here offers a very compelling and highly relevant take on this theme for the contemporary times but with perhaps a story more reminiscent of the film ‘Blade Runner’ (itself based on the novel ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’ by the gnostic Philip K Dick) and Mary Shelley’s classic ‘Frankenstein’, but with a much more uplifting and positive affirmation of the human capacity for self- transcendence through the essence of creativity and art; the nature of art being one of the central themes of the book but also how art can be captured and simulated by technology (witness now how AI can itself write poetry and paint images of incredible complexity etc.).
There is a cryptic relevance in the story to how the world changed in 2030. Some of the characters in the book who hold positions of power have names that appear rather ‘hipster’ or eco-themed although the world they inhabit is anything but ‘natural’ – cloning, eugenics, genetic engineering and mass surveillance. Even personal reproduction, itself reduced to life inside something resembling a panopticon, is closely screened in the name of ‘mother earth’.
Given that Tim Bragg is connected with the excellent ‘Off The Left Eye’ YouTube channel having composed music for some of its broadcasts and podcasts which serve to popularise the esoteric Christian spirituality of the 18th Century Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg, it was no surprise to see space given in the book to themes of human immortality in the face of individual extinction, particularly as one central character has a near-death experience, this theme being central to the novel’s central premise – do humans and nature have a Soul or Spirit? Are we Soul and Spirit, or merely biological machines with neither? Does consciousness actually exist independently of the mind? Do we think thoughts or are thoughts thinking us? What does it mean to be human? (Another work worthy to be mentioned in this context here would be C.S. Lewis’s ‘That Hideous Strength’, an anti-transhumanist classic.)
Tim Bragg has succeeded in writing a highly readable novel depicting what the world would look like should Klaus Schwab’s vision of the Great Reset and Agenda 2030 actually come to fruition and succeed in reducing all of humanity to automatons. Given the indefatigable spirit of humanity though, Bragg gives us much inspiration to suggest that a single blade of grass could cut through concrete given time and genuine human values like compassion, friendship and love and the redeeming capacity of art to transcend and ennoble life which will win through in the end somehow.
This is a multi-layered work with good characterisation and many textures and tones which slowly draws the reader in, with twists and turns in the tale amidst a mounting fear that builds to its shocking conclusion. A gripping polemic against transhumanism which succeeds without either preaching or condemning but clearly displaying the author’s obvious empathy and sensitivity to the human condition.
