Culture

In 2015, Daniel Markovits, a professor at Yale Law School, delivered a commencement address to that year’s graduating class in which he attacked the idea of meritocracy. It was, he said, a gilded cage that imprisons the elite and leaves the rest feeling excluded and undervalued. For Markovits to make these remarks at one of the cathedrals of the meritocratic church — students at Yale typically score above the 99th percentile in the nationwide Law School Admissions Test — was a kind of heresy and it attracted enough attention for him to secure a book deal. Four years later, The Meritocracy Trap is the result.

Rod Liddle has taken a huge gamble with this book. It could be out of date very soon. The book’s premise is a conversation he had with his wife on the day after the Brexit vote in 2016. She, like Liddle, is a Brexiteer and said to him that morning, ‘They won’t let it happen.’ Liddle agreed. ‘Betcha we don’t leave,’ he said. And that is the book’s principal argument: we’ll never leave the EU. The Great Betrayal was published in July and, so far, Liddle is right. But what about on 1 November: will this book be massively outdated and will Britain be out of the European Union? It’s anyone’s guess. Even now, quite a few of the references in the book are dated. It was published before Boris Johnson became Prime Minister.

Why, I asked some months back in these pages, do the protagonists in American fiction these days seem so lost? What is it they’re all so het up about? Well... everything. At least according to the narrator of Ducks, Newburyport. Lucy Ellmann’s monster novel is a more or less non-stop narration of the thoughts of one Ohio housewife, a former college teacher who now bakes pies for money, attempts to keep her household shipshape, feels the pinch of post-bail-out America, is frustrated in the usual ways, and frets persistently about the physical, moral and emotional safety of her offspring (other people’s too) in those ostensibly United States.

Probably this happens to every generation: the moment when you can’t believe what’s going on; when events seem too preposterous to be true. I never thought I’d witness government and parliament in this country tearing themselves to tatters and becoming so irrelevant that Westminster might as well be located on the dark side of Jupiter. Perhaps the most incendiary topic lumbering about in the disintegration of our governance is immigration. No other subject manages to beget such nonsense and fury. The claims of anti-migrant, anti-immigrant sentiment are rife, despite the fact that even on the far right it is almost impossible to find anyone who is completely against the notion of immigration; it’s all about how it should be conducted.

He would want to be remembered as the debonair war hero who delivered Indian independence and became the royal family’s elder statesman. But something went wrong for Lord Louis Mountbatten. Andrew Roberts anticipated many modern historians when he called him ‘a mendacious, intellectually limited hustler’. Field Marshal Gerald Templer told him to his face he was so crooked that if he swallowed a nail, he’d shit a corkscrew. As reputations go, the turnaround has been extraordinary.

Doxology covers five decades and a spacious 400 pages, with all the subplots and digressions you would expect of a baggy monster realist novel. It moves from the subculture of straight edge punk to the backrooms of political powerbroking, and surveys ground from East Harlem to rural Ethiopia. There are at least half a dozen characters who take command of the narration for a substantial chunk of the story, and many more whose consciousnesses we breeze through as cameos. Yet the overall feeling isn’t of plenty, but of precarity. From the opening sentence, it seems that time is always about to run out.