The best way to summarise Byers’ entertaining state-of-the-nation novel is to suggest that it’s probably the novel Jonathan Coe would have liked to have written when he sat down to write his highly successful tome Middle England. We’re in similar territory. The provinces as the epicentre of Englishness, the place where the culture wars are really played out. The self-serving narcissists of the post-Brexit intellectual/ political world. The faultlines of race and class. Byers manages to add a convincing dose of Ballard to this mix, as he conjures up a housing estate which will be a social media experiment, with residents graded and rewarded for their participative actions. However, before that can happen, the old residents have to be cleared out, and one of these elderly residents becomes a cause celebre. Byers shows no fear of complexity. There are all sorts of elements thrown in: Semiotic performance happenings; hackers; pernicious social media enterprises. Twitter, Facebook et al, which will probably guarantee that the book feels dated sooner rather than later. The dialogue is whipsmart, effortlessly conjuring the desaturated conversational rhythms of a society which is always in a hurry to get somewhere, and rarely knows where that somewhere is. That the narrative eventually hinges on an action so stupid that the fact it is perpetrated by a sub-Farageian politician doesn’t quite justify it, is slightly disappointing in a novel that’s so on the button. Nevertheless, if you want a rapid snapshot of pre-pandemic, post-Brexit Britain, you can’t do much better than Byers’ acerbic tale.
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