In 2011, a novelist called Martin Ashby published a book called The Reckoning, with a small independent press in Edinburgh. It sold, by the publisher's estimate, around 1,800 copies. It received two reviews in national publications, both brief and mildly positive. It went out of print in 2014. Martin Ashby, who had been a schoolteacher in Coventry for thirty years, died in 2019 without, as far as I can establish, ever knowing that his novel had described, with a precision that still seems remarkable, the political dynamics that would produce the Brexit referendum two years after his book went out of print.
The Reckoning is set in a fictional English market town in the early 2010s. Its central character is a local newspaper editor — a figure Ashby knew well, having written for regional papers throughout his adult life — who watches, with a mixture of sympathy and alarm, as the town's political culture shifts. The novel's antagonist is not a politician but a feeling: a sense, widespread among the town's older working-class residents, that the world has moved on without them and that the people who are supposed to represent their interests no longer speak their language.
What Ashby understood, and what most political analysts failed to understand until after the fact, was that this feeling was not primarily about the European Union. It was about something older and more diffuse: a sense of cultural dispossession, of institutions that had ceased to be legible, of a political class that had become a separate caste. The EU was the available vehicle for this feeling in 2016. It might have been something else in a different year.
I came across The Reckoning by accident, in a second-hand bookshop in Bristol. I read it in two sittings and spent the following week trying to find out why it had been so thoroughly ignored. The answer, I think, is that it was published at the wrong time, by the wrong press, in the wrong format. It was a quiet, realist novel about provincial English life, published in a moment when the literary culture was interested in other things. Its prescience was invisible until the thing it described had already happened.