England is in a state
The state of the nation is that the nation’s in a state. But we know that. That’s the news. That’s the high street. That’s the wallet. Raising our present lot to state-of-the-nation art – explanatory and instructive in all the ways we like – requires a technique beyond mere reporting and a talent beyond mere noticing. Amanda Craig’s new novel High and Low is a fresh attempt to make meaning of our mess, and to enjoyable effect.
It is Craig’s ninth novel, and joins the others in what she calls a roman fleuve – a river novel. The stories are all interconnected, though they can also be read discretely. Often, a minor character from an earlier book will become the protagonist of a later one. In an afterword to High and Low, Craig helps “spotters” identify which characters from this novel are which characters from previous books. “Andy the baker”, for example, turns out to be Andrew Evenlode from her first novel – and the first in the sequence – Foreign Bodies, published 36 years ago, in 1990.
For all the history and plaudits of Craig’s past work, though, High and Low is intensely concerned with the here and now. In this case, that means post-Covid Britain. She began writing the novel in 2023 and the plot was prescient. It concerns the news (or rumour) of an immigrant attack on locals sparking flag-drenched riots in a mild part of Britain, as would happen in Southport and elsewhere throughout the summers of 2024 and 2025.
The composition of High and Low is interesting, because to relate all of these uncontainable events, Craig allows herself only a very contained stage. The action is limited to six continuous hours. We see it largely unfold on one high street, mostly within one shop, the Literary Café. The crisis arrives when a hunted, accused immigrant child enters the shop, and the raging mob follows him, and the writerly types in the café must figure out how to respond. Keeping the most vivid action off-camera is a striking approach for a writer who professes herself to be a defender of both plot and the thriller. But the gauntlet Craig throws down is that novels can be “both a tale of sensation and one of sensibility”. The risk, of course, is that in trying for both, you end up with neither.
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In certain moments, Craig’s confines chafe a little. Several characters share the limited time, so it occasionally feels that they are being detailed more than developed. Some of them are quite familiar literary archetypes, such as a sardonic and self-pitying Tory literary editor. And some moments deserve more space than the book could find for them, such as when a young mother sees her baby smile for the first time. Rather than just reading that it did, it would have been good to stick around and feel how “in that instant, everything changed”.
But the emotions of that moment fly high anyway. The storytelling is deft throughout High and Low, and there are several cases of fine creative sympathy. Take, for instance, when a daughter looks at her father’s body, after he has been shot, and thinks that “the bullet hole in the middle of his forehead was perfectly round and neat, almost too small to let a life out”.
In addition there is the constant pleasure of Craig’s observation, and the exact artefacts of a moment that gradually accumulates. There is the cheep of unpaid Lime bikes, the lockdown sourdough craze, law graduates tutoring to earn money, no young person being able to afford a house, writers worrying about being replaced by AI, migrants living by Deliveroo. As well as objects there are opinions; Craig aims to present a full chorus of contemporary political anguish.
Craig made her own explicit contribution to these views when she articulated the motivating impulse for the novel in a newspaper article titled: “Even the nicer parts of London now feel under siege by criminals”. She describes walking into a familiar shop to see the shopkeeper being mugged by a man with a knife and writes, “the feeling that our beloved capital and its citizens are under siege is not illusory”.
In the book’s afterword, Craig reveals that the story’s setting, Prospect Park, is in fact based on Kentish Town, a north London neighbourhood slightly upstream of Camden. One former resident, before a move to Downing Street, was Keir Starmer. High and Low feels like it might have been conceived as a guide to all the reasons he may end up back home sooner than expected.
High and LowAmanda CraigAbacus, 336pp, £20
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[Further reading: Land is Maggie O’Farrell’s best novel]
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