The publication of Assembly in 2021 marked Natasha Brown out as a virtuosic writer. Her debut – a cleanly written 112 pages – told the story of a black British woman as she prepares for a party at her white boyfriend’s family estate. With remarkable precision, Brown dissected the disorienting experience of assimilating across lines of class and race. For it, she won numerous award shortlistings, including for the Goldsmiths and Orwell prizes.
Brown’s second novel treads familiar, hyper-contemporary ground. In Universality, she examines how identity politics is cynically co-opted, especially by the media classes. But while Assembly brought to mind the vivid interiority of Virginia Woolf, Universality is a satire recalling Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood eco-warriors, Bella Mackie’s ridicule of the rich and the derision of the media found in Megan Nolan’s Ordinary Human Failings.
The novel is only slightly longer than her debut. It is told in five parts from three different perspectives, culminating in an on-stage author interview at a literary festival. The first section is a long magazine article exposing the story behind a recent crime: during an illegal rave at a Yorkshire farm, a man named Pegasus is bludgeoned with a 12.5kg gold bar. Pegasus is a member of the Universalists, a group of anti-capitalist activists squatting on the farm in an attempt to build a self-sustaining community. The aggressor is Jake, a fellow Universalist, who has run off with the gold bar, allegedly worth over half a million pounds. The owner of the farm (and the gold), stockbroker Richard, is unsurprisingly miffed. Hannah, the journalist behind the article, interviews these key players to reveal the full story.
By the book’s second part, it becomes clear that Hannah was used. Another journalist, columnist Miriam Leonard – or Lenny – tipped her off about where Jake was hiding, and offered herself up to be interviewed about her connection to the events. It helped Hannah out: the piece went viral and is being adapted for TV, good going for a working-class journalist previously struggling to get commissions, having found “she didn’t have the right identity for identity politics”. But what is Lenny getting out of this?
The tale neatly sets Brown up to critique the gaudiness of wealth. It turns out the gold bar was “merely gold-plated tungsten”, we learn in a section from Richard’s perspective, in which Brown’s snarky narration marvellously mocks the super-rich’s defensiveness over gradations of wealth. “It wasn’t a sophisticated counterfeit, but an obvious fake! A tacky indulgence that, for whatever reason, had appealed to him. He was guilty of a lot of things, but this was evidence only of his crass new-money tastes, not extreme wealth.”
Thanks to her deadpan descriptions, no one comes off lightly. Brown is equally scathing about the do-good hippies. Of Black Lives Matter, one Universalist insists: “focusing on race puts people off the message”. Later, an uppity friend of Hannah’s looks into the journalist’s “dull, unthinking face; the inadvertent herald of Western society’s decline, stupidly chewing an olive”. Brown even skewers us book critics, bemoaning Hannah’s “500-word summaries of the latest multicultural dreck passing for contemporary women’s fiction”.
Brown makes Lenny, who admits her “reputation as a slight misandrist does me a whole lot of good”, the mastermind here. The foreword to Lenny’s book No Mo’ Woke proclaimed her “one of the few souls brave enough to say the unsayable”. It’s as believable as it is risible, allowing Brown’s scorn to extend ever further: “Publishers, it seemed, had noticed that what Lenny said was actually quite sayable.” Yet the book didn’t sell. So Lenny arranged her involvement in Hannah’s article to trigger “the online content machine” – resulting in a new audience for her columns and a fresh book deal.
Universality is very funny. Brown is an astute political observer, easily dismembering cancel culture and our media circus. But while Assembly allowed for a deep understanding of one woman’s experience, Universality is not nearly as affecting. Its wincing satire is knowing but has limited emotional range – mostly because these characters are all so awful it is impossible to feel for any of them, but also because the novel’s brevity and flipping between perspectives doesn’t offer a substantive opportunity to try. Still, there’s a lot in here that will upset various corners of the media elite, which is no bad thing. Brown is a daring writer, and with her witty, often savage prose, she sees through every one of us.
Universality
Natasha Brown
Faber & Faber, 176pp, £14.99
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[See also: Vashti Bunyan’s second life]
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This article appears in the 12 Mar 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Why Britain isn’t working