'Bookish' Remainers seek consolation in (more) fictions

I really should get on with the day job, but I couldn't resist this in teh Graub

Sometimes, for us bookish types [no plebs need read any further because they just won't understand], a particular moment in time requires a particular author, as surely as a bout of winter flu requires paracetamol. So I was very glad to find myself, last Thursday – in that nervous/tragic/hopeful gap between voting and seeing the exit poll – at a talk by Anna Burns, the Man Booker prize-winning author of Milkman.  

This looks like a good read:

Milkman transcends its setting in war-torn 1970s Northern Ireland, and evokes universal truths [i.e. petite bourgeois ones?] about conflict, power and human relationships. More than anything, Burns’s novels show, in terrifying detail, what happens to a society when people close their minds [we need a novel about NI to show us this?] . Milkman explores a culture in which people have become obsessed with defending their own perspective, against anything they see as “other”.

See any parallels yet? In case you are not that bookish after all, A O'Keeffe spells it out:

we are undeniably [!] drifting towards a very Milkman-esque “othering” mentality

The methodological implications appear most clearly 

the real task, [Burns] told us, is to “wait and hold” – to create the mental space, to stay patient, and to keep the faith...Her message of persistence and patience has helped me get through a week of otherwise bitter disappointment....we can’t actually force the world to give us what we want [that must really hurt] . There are times when we need to push, but there are also times when we do just have to wait, and create the space, and keep the faith that if we hang in here, eventually something will shift....

An important weapon against this small-mindedness is the kind of contemplation that Burns uses in creating her work. Extended periods of contemplation play an important role...and writing and reading fiction – perhaps appreciating any kind of art – similarly requires us to open our minds [not if we only read the stuff we agree with, of course]

It looks a bit like what you do in yoga:

As we look for ways to resist the seemingly unstoppable tide of division, perhaps trying, like Burns, to “wait and hold” is the most important work [!] that any of us can do.

I am sorry I missed an earlier contribution from O'Keeffe:

publishing is far from the only industry that fears the economic impact of Brexit, it faces an additional, very particular challenge: its products are responsible for helping the British public make sense of the deeply divided country in which we find ourselves [only for bookish people, surely?]. How can an industry so fervently remainer in spirit engage with the arguments in favour of leave? How can it reach the people who voted for Brexit – and to what extent does it want to?

Hachette publishes authors from across the political spectrum...Other publishers, however, take a strong anti-leave line. Franklin, for example, told me in no uncertain terms that leavers are not the sector’s target market. “What would we be publishing? Fantasy histories of a Britain in which servants doff their caps?”.

[This] is fuel for the fire of those pro-Brexit writers [where?] whose claim to represent the marginalised is often based on their feeling that they are looked down on by lefty metropolitan types who are the arbiters of culture...the industry’s “definition of pluralism can often be narrow and metropolitan” – while publishers have largely recognised the need to increase racial diversity in the industry, attitudes towards political diversity [i.e.class politics] are more complicated.

Meanwhile, as these debates rage around them, writers have been setting about the hard work of reimagining what it might mean to be British. ...A strong canon of work has emerged that subtly illuminates our national identity crisis....Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, a mythical tale of a Britain in which warring tribes have been afflicted by amnesia, was greeted with some bafflement on publication pre-referendum in 2015. But it has emerged as a prescient exploration of what the Economist has called “the violence that underpins national identity”. Nature writers including Robert Macfarlane, and novelists such as Melissa Harrison and Benjamin Myers, have helped to reinvigorate our emotional connection to the land and our environment. In the turbulent times ahead, their work will only become more relevant.