Down and Out in Lagos and London
The future of political fiction
Kemi Badenoch provoked a backlash recently when she said she had become working class on returning to the UK from Nigeria aged sixteen. The Tory leadership candidate worked at McDonald’s on her return to the country of her birth, and she used this as an example of a step down in social class. In Nigeria she’d had a middle-class upbringing, being ‘driven to school every day’. Now she was having to support herself, was not always able to afford her own bus fare, and was sometimes going hungry.
The novelist Ross Raisin used his own experience of “working either in kitchens or around kitchens, in hotels and bars and restaurants” (The Guardian) to wonderful effect in Ghost Kitchen, which won the BBC national short story award earlier this month. I had the great pleasure of being a judge with Ross on this year’s Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, so I thought I would explore one or two aspects of his story using the values that guided our deliberations for that prize to see what this might tell us about the future of political fiction (with the following being my own views rather than those of the Orwell Foundation).
A key principle of the prize is to put aside one’s own political or ideological beliefs and to assess the submitted novels and short story collections on their own merit. This, for me, gets to the heart of an aspect of what the greatest political fiction writers do: convincingly inhabit political positions antithetical to their own, something that is, of course, extremely difficult to do. It brings to mind a (half-remembered) story that John Yorke (author of the seminal Into The Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them) once told in a writing workshop I attended on story shape or outline. Yorke talked about working with mining communities around the time of the 1980s UK miners’ strike. In workshops in these communities, he tried to get participants to write a story from the viewpoint of a miner crossing a picket line to continue work during the strike. They refused to do it.
It is not difficult to understand why. Our political predilections run deep; we can think of them as ‘tribal’. Yet the greatest political fiction manages to transcend these affiliations – or perhaps it manages to plumb their depths. As perhaps the greatest political novelist – Tolstoy – writes (at the end of his short story Sevastopol in May 1855)
Where in this tale is the evil that should be avoided, and where the good that should be imitated? Who is the villain and who the hero of the story? All are good and all are bad…
The suggestion here, then, is that, rather than going ‘beyond good and evil’ (in the phrase of Nietzsche’s from his Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future), there is a recognition of both aspects within characters whose opinions may range across the political spectrum. Yet this is not a representation of some insipid political relativism; at its best such writing requires rigorous critical thought and ruthless political acumen. The ability to inhabit the political views of one’s enemies (while undoubtedly continuing to disagree with them) requires, in other words, an intellectual courage and clarity that can seem to be in ever shorter supply.
The purpose of political fiction, on this basis, is to extend beyond ideology or rhetoric to arrive at a truth that will effect change. This – truth – Tolstoy concludes, is
The hero of my tale – whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I have tried to portray in all his beauty, who has been, is, and will be beautiful…
Truth, then, is that to which political fiction aspires, a truth that transcends narrow affiliations; this is – truly – a tall order, and one towards which few successfully ascend.
Clarity of expression is another of Orwell’s injunctions: good prose, for him, ‘is like a windowpane.’ (Why I Write) It is an apt image for Ross’s story. Sean, the protagonist, ends up operating a deep fat fryer in a ‘ghost kitchen’ or ‘dark kitchen’. These are kitchens with no windows and so “no way for anybody on the outside to see in”. Often located on the urban fringe, they are, “concealed islands that sometimes create the conditions for darkness to flourish”. (The Guardian) One of the great gifts of the story is the shedding of light on these spaces. Ross also had a series of “fascinating conversations” with couriers (Sean’s other trade), which led him to a deeper level of critical and creative engagement with the precarity of the gig economy.
Orwell also said he wanted ‘to make political writing into an art’, and that he couldn’t write a political book or essay ‘if it were not also an aesthetic experience’ (again in Why I Write). One of the ways in which ‘Ghost Kitchen’ is a masterful expression of the art of political fiction in this sense is in its plotting and pacing and – specifically – in the symmetry of its structure.
Sean becomes a cycle courier after a tragic family incident involving his brother Frank. Much hinges on the nature and outcome of that tragedy, and Ross skilfully withholds and discloses key elements of that tragedy at precisely the right moments in the story. The name Frank is mentioned fifteen times in total, and the concentrations of these references disclose something of the story’s symmetrical structure.
Frank is referred to once in each of the first three parts of the story: in the first paragraph, where Sean, on his courier route, has finally mastered his bike, ‘which had been Frank’s’; in the fifth, where he lingers over the smell of fish and chips at the ghost kitchen’s collection point before zipping his courier bag shut, a smell that reminds him ‘of childhood, of Frank’; and in paragraph nine, when the laughing face of a student receiving a stack of pizzas on a sodden doorstep reminds Sean of his brother, even though the student is ‘at least five years younger than Frank would be now’.
A concentration of seven further instances occurs around the story’s midpoint, when Sean is attacked by three boys, who are ‘keyed up, wild’ and who make off with his courier bag full of takeaway. It is this incident that resurfaces the trauma of what happened to Frank, and it is in this moment that Sean’s character starts to change. After it, he begins responding to the victimisation of one of his colleagues at the ghost kitchen, a colleague who becomes a kind of surrogate brother to him (another element in the story’s symmetry). The remaining five references to Frank in the story occur in the concluding paragraphs, where what really happened to him is revealed, and Sean experiences the painful consequences of acting to protect his colleague.
The author and critic David Lodge said (in The Art of Fiction) that ‘Symmetry matters more to writers of fiction than readers consciously perceive’. This symmetry is an example, for me, of what makes Ross’s ‘political writing into an art’ in this story.
I don’t know if Kemi, in the future, will ever mine her own fast food experience to such wonderful fictional (rather than purely political) effect. If she does, then these are some of the characteristics that could guide that endeavour.