In turbulent times, we often look to literature for guidance, for inspiration, for wisdom. So what can the world of words tell us about Brexit? Very few writers have examined the idea of a state seceding from a larger geopolitical entity and the consequences thereof. But a glance over the novels that do discuss such questions creates an exceptionally esoteric reading list.
The Fixed Period by Anthony Trollope (1882)
Trollope is often relegated to the second string of 19th-century novelists, which is a disservice. It’s not all vicars and wistfulness, as this bizarre late novel shows. An antipodean crown colony, Brittanula, has seceded from the empire, and one of its new laws is that citizens at the age of 67 are taken to “the College” in Necropolis and then euthanised, to spare them the indignities of old age. That the author of Barchester Towers was also the precursor of Logan’s Run is an irony lost on many an undergraduate. Written as the memoirs of the forcibly retired president, John Neverbend, Trollope insisted it was not a satire, but a minatory warning. Trollope died at the age of 67.
The Napoleon of Notting Hill by GK Chesterton (1904)
Adam Wayne, the humourless and heroic protagonist of Chesterton’s first novel, does not strive for the independence of Notting Hill – although the tenor of the book influenced the film Passport to Pimlico – but he does stand up against a government that is both ludicrous and demanding; insisting on silly pageantry while riding roughshod over rights. Chesterton is that oddest of combinations, a Conservative radical, and I am sure he would have been delighted to know that Michael Collins, the Irish Republican activist, was “fanatically attached” to The Napoleon of Notting Hill.
If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg by Winston Churchill (1930)
Churchill won the Nobel prize for literature in 1953, and this essay amply proves he deserved to do so. It is a counterfactual within a counterfactual: set in a universe where the south won the civil war, the fictitious author is imagining what would have happened if the north had won it instead. The failure of the south’s secession in this alternate universe leads to an Anglo-American hegemony, the earlier emancipation of slaves, Gladstone and Disraeli swapping sides and most European dictators marginalised and never getting their clammy palms on power. It also has Kaiser Wilhelm founding the European Union.
A Song of Ice and Fire by George RR Martin (1991, and ongoing)
The North might remember – as a Scot I can sympathise – but it was the Iron Islands demanding their independence that took me by surprise. While the Tyrells, Targaryens and the Lannisters cling on to their power, the breakaway realms have been far more insistent on their own destiny. Is it a coincidence that the areas of Westeros that want to secede have their own religious traditions? Martin may have more than one trick up his sleeve in terms of geopolitics. Arya asks: “What’s west of Westeros?” Answer: America.
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon (2007)
Again, not a secession per se, but a fictional state in constitutional crisis nevertheless. Chabon takes the proposition that Alaska might have been the Jewish homeland – an idea seriously considered by Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior in 1939 – and more than runs with it. His “frozen chosen” are about to be returned to the US; a putative Messiah has been definitely murdered; and a deep conspiracy might strike at the heart of a sacred site far from the Alaskan shores. There is an eerie weariness about our detective, tramping the dirty streets, haunted by the uncertainty of where home is and where it might be.
