Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer's Reviews > Assembly

Winner of my inaugural Golden Reviewer Book of The Year Award for 2021

The author was recently selected for the decennial Granta Best of Young British Novelists list (2023 edition).

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I re-read this book just ahead of its publication and find myself in broad agreement with Ali Smith who said in the Guardian

Books, and all the arts, naturally and endlessly inspire change because they free up the possibilities between reality and the imagination, and the possibilities for change in us. They never stop doing this. It’s one of the reasons the current powers that be are hellbent on controlling the arts, devaluing them, removing easy access to them and controlling history’s narratives. Last week I read a debut novel called Assembly by Natasha Brown. It’s a quiet, measured call to revolution. It’s about everything that has changed and still needs to change, socially, historically, politically, personally. It’s slim in the hand, but its impact is massive; it strikes me as the kind of book that sits on the faultline between a before and an after. I could use words like elegant and brilliantly judged and literary antecedents such as Katherine Mansfield/Toni Morrison/Claudia Rankine. But it’s simpler than that. I’m full of the hope, on reading it, that this is the kind of book that doesn’t just mark the moment things change, but also makes that change possible

My review

Generations of sacrifice; hard work and harder living. So much suffered, so much forfeited, so much–for this opportunity. For my life. And I’ve tried, tried living up to it. But after years of struggling, fighting against the current, I’m ready to slow my arms. Stop kicking. Breathe the water in. I’m exhausted. Perhaps it’s time to end this story.

During 2020, during the early stages of the UK’s own attempt to come to terms with its colonial and slave trader past, and its on-going implications into the present as highlighted by the Black Lives Matter protests – there was a period where Bernardine Evaristo and Reni Eddo-Lodge became the first British Black authors to top the fiction and non-fiction charts respectively for “Girl Woman Other” and “Why I am No Longer Talking to White People about Race” respectively.

This short but extremely powerful and superbly crafted book, to be released later in 2021, was for me in conversation with both those books and with the recently Orwell Prize longlisted non-fiction book “The Interest” by Michael Taylor (with its tale of the struggles of a well-connected group of establishment interest to first resist the abolition of slavery and then ensure copious compensation for agreeing to end its atrocities).

Its unnamed narrator – a young Black British woman (who reminded me in many ways of Carole in “Girl, Woman, Other”) has successfully worked her way from her working class beginnings to a senior position in an investment bank, and is on the cusp of further promotion. Her white boyfriend (from an old-monied English establishment family, who secured their fortune from the slave-owner compensation) has invited her to attend a weekend gathering on his family estate – signaling, at least in his view, a further acceptance of her into his family.

But all of this apparent progress has taken place against a constant background of prejudice, condescension, micro-aggressions in all aspects of her life – which she dissects and examines with scalpel like precision.

And the narrator’s health issues give a further sense that this is a crisis/turning point in her life as she pauses to considers whether to continue on her life path – as set out in my opening quote and neatly captured in the book’s Ecclesiastes “chasing after the wind” epigraph.

The book is very short and written in a fragmentary form with prose which has been powerfully distilled to a high level of proof - this was one of those books where I seemed to highlight paragraphs on every page.

Issues that the narrator examines include:

The myths of meritocracy and social mobility

The astonishing arrogance of anti-affirmative action comments – and the almost incomprehensible persistent of the belief that minorities are somehow privileged, protected and over-promoted

The insidiousness of ill-intentioned inclusivity campaigns when designed more to whitewash (pun intended) than to actually address deep-seated issues

Political actions over the years. Her castigation of the path from slave-owner repatriations through Churchill via Enoch Powell to Theresa May’s “Go Home” Vans, Amber Rudd’s Windrush scandal to the inherent racism and hostility to others that underlay Brexit – will get lots of approving nods from the left-leaning literary community. But she also castigates positive Conservatives who see her as an example and frowning liberals who think she is not sufficiently focused on poverty and anti-capitalism (incidentally a poor review in the Guardian of the book is an almost perfect example of this). And her brilliant, unnamed demolition of the absurdity and hypocrisy of the under-achieving and over-privileged supposed leader of the woke pointing the finger at The City, and all who work in it, as being the root of all evil (even setting aside the implicit anti-Semitism of that criticism) will make for very uncomfortable reading for many.

Let’s say: A boy grows up in a country manor. Attends a private preparatory school. Spends his weekends out in the barn with his father. Together they build a great, stone sundial. The boy, now a young man, achieves two E-grades at A-level, then travels to Jamaica to teach. His sun shadows cycle round and round and he himself winds up, up. Up until the boy, an old man now, is right up at the tippity-top of the political system. Buoyed by a wealth he’s never had to earn, never worked for. He’s never dealt in grubby compromise. And from this vantage, he points a finger –an old finger, the skin translucent, arm outstretched and wavering. He points it at you: The problem.

Always, the problem.

Returning to my “conversation” opening, the author has said “I see it as almost one half of a conversation; people are going to read it and bring the other half” – and so for full disclosure my “other half” is sharing the author (and narrators and Evaristo’s Carole’s) working class via Oxbridge degree to City job background, but very much not the inherent institutional disadvantages that come in the City with being Black (and specifically Black not BAME) as compared to the privilege of being white.

Overall an outstanding book – I was very disappointed to see this not make at least the Booker longlist and it is to the discredit of this year's judges.

My thanks to from Penguin General UK, Vintage for an ARC via NetGalley

I’ve watched with dispassionate curiosity as this continent hacks away at itself: confused, lost, sick with nostalgia for those imperialist glory days – when the them had been so clearly defined! It’s evident now, obvious in retrospect as the proof of root-two’s irrationality, that these world superpowers are neither infallible, nor superior. They’re nothing, not without a brutally enforced relativity. An organized, systematic brutality that their soft and sagging children can scarcely stomach – won’t even acknowledge. Yet cling to as truth. There was never any absolute, no decree from God. Just viscous, random chance. And then, compounding