In autumn 2016, literally just a few months after the Brexit Referendum with its devastating 52/48% result in favour of Britain leaving the EU, the acclaimed Scottish novelist Ali Smith published Autumn (2016), a novel that was to become the first example of what is now referred to as BrexLit. According to critic Kristian Shaw, BrexLit novels “either directly respond or imaginatively allude to Britain’s exit from the EU, or engage with the subsequent socio-cultural, economic, racial or cosmopolitical consequences of Britain’s withdrawal”.
For centuries, literature has contributed to shaping public opinion, and BrexLit has continued to do the same. Smith’s novel – the first in her seasonal quartet that continued with Winter (2017), Spring (2019) and Summer (2020) – opens with the evocative lines “It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times” (Smith, Autumn,2016, p. 3), an allusion to Dickens’ “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” in A Tale of Two Cities (1859). This opening sentence alone shows Smith’s disillusion with the outcome of the referendum – everything is worse than previously – which she emphasises further with extended paragraphs such as:
“All across the country, people felt it was the wrong thing. All across the country, people felt it was the right thing. All across the country, people felt they’d really lost. All across the country, people felt they’d really won. All across the country, people felt they’d done the right thing and other people had done the wrong thing. All across the country, people looked up Google: what is EU? All across the country, people looked up Google: move to Scotland. All across the country, people looked up Google: Irish passport applications […]” (p. 59).
BrexLit
Since this first important publication, BrexLit has developed into an important subgenre of contemporary British fiction. Publications fall into very diverse categories, and I here want to introduce just a few select examples. In 2017, Amanda Craig published her novel The Lie of the Land, an account of a left-liberal, metropolitan family fallen on financial hard times and relocating to rural Devon where they encounter Euro-scepticism and hostility towards Eastern European migrant workers. It is a novel that clearly shows the two sides of the Brexit debate and highlights the feelings of the rural ‘left behind’ who have, for years, felt neglected and overlooked by successive Westminster governments.
Douglas Board’s Time of Lies was also published in 2017 to coincide with the first anniversary of the Brexit Referendum. It focuses on the former football hooligan Bob Grant who has become PM on a wave of right-wing populist rhetoric. The novel offers a deeply dystopian vision of a near-future Britain on the brink of nuclear annihilation.
Jonathan Coe’s much-anticipated novel Middle England was published to much acclaim in 2018. It was hailed as the definitive Brexit novel to date and followed a wide cast of characters (some of whom had appeared in Coe’s earlier novels), some pro-, some very anti-Brexit. The novel clearly shows how Brexit and its aftermath has not only divided the nation but also families and couples with different opinions that have become irreconcilable.
In the same year, Tracey Mathias published her deeply dystopian Young Adult novel Night of the Party which follows teenager Zara trying to negotiate life in post-Brexit Britain as an ‘illegal’, a European-born migrant who has lost all rights to reside in the UK after an election victory by a right-wing nationalist party with a ‘British born only’ edict.
2019 was a real bumper year for BrexLit, with important publications by John Lanchester (The Wall), John Le Carré (Agent Running in the Field), Ian McEwan (The Cockroach) and Linda Grant’s superb Stranger City (among other publications). These later novels in particular stand out for being a lot more outspoken against Brexit – Le Carré, in particularly, is not holding back with statements such as “the British public is being marched over a cliff by a bunch of rich, elitist carpetbaggers posing as men of the people” (p. 60).
Since 2020, things have become a bit quieter on the BrexLit front; it still features in some novels, such as Coe’s Bourneville (2022) or McEwan’s Lessons (2022) – but it has become more of an event mentioned in passing, as affecting lives of characters at a particular moment in time, and is no longer given prominent central position. It can only be assumed that for contemporary British novelists there are now other topics that have become more important – the Climate Crisis, for instance, which is increasingly the focus of contemporary novels.
It could then be concluded that BrexLit has been the expression of a particular cultural and political moment with the majority of its publications appearing between 2016 and 2019. What is, however, remarkable is that these publications do not only fall into the category of contemporary realist novels but, instead, cross over into a wide variety of genres: crime novels, Young Adult novels, satires, crime novels, even historical novels. As Baroness Young of Hornby noted so succinctly in one of the first academic publications on Brexit in Literature by Robert Eagleston:
“There’s a role for literature, so adept at humanising big questions and creating emotional and cultural landscapes, in metaphorically poking us all in the ribs and urging us to start thinking critically and becoming politically active again” (2018).
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Dr Christine Berberich is Associate Professor in Literature at the University of Portsmouth, UK. Her publications include the collection Brexit and the Migrant Voice: EU Citizens in Post-Brexit Literature and Culture (2022).
