Rosa Rankin-Gee follows her 2021 near-future climate-crisis dystopia, Dreamland, with a similar but more politically focused work. As I read My Only Boy, I kept having to remind myself that the nation it describes is not (yet) real, because, for a reader living abroad, the novel’s England seems unnervingly close to what might come next. Any political dystopia risks being overtaken by reality, but in this case the gap between truth and fiction feels claustrophobic.
At the beginning of the novel, Elle is at a party held to mourn that day’s election of a far-right populist government. She’s the communications director for the almost too brilliantly named Gigr, a company connecting people seeking immediate shift work with businesses offering it. Elle is freshly upset by witnessing and immediately containing the reputational damage of a worker’s jump from a balcony. She knows how to do this, because “we’d had a death every four weeks, then every three weeks, then every two”: exhausted, starving people taking underpaid shifts from Gigr after finishing public sector jobs that no longer pay enough for survival. Almost everyone, in this slightly more desperate, divided and unfair nation, ends up doing some work for Gigr sooner or later, to buy faster access to emergency healthcare or food for crisis-stricken family, and Gigr has algorithms to ensure that each person is paid the least their particular circumstances oblige them to accept.
Meanwhile, summers are hotter and more dangerous, air and water dirtier, rain harder and stranger. The rich are richer while everyone else’s lives are nastier, more brutish and shorter, and the resulting desperation shows up in parties and violent crime. And Elle, who has been sure of her lesbianism since her teens, meets Ed, who has just published a gay love story to overnight success, and is now the poster boy for threatened LGBTQ+ human rights. They have a sad, sharp, flirty conversation about the politics of despair, and Ed invites Elle back to his borrowed flat to “put some Wagner on and stare into the incoming meteor”. Instead, there is a first experience of heterosexuality for both of them, and the beginning of a confusing romance.
The twin engines of the plot are romance and corporate/government corruption, entangled when Elle begins an affair with a much younger colleague while living with Ed. The entanglement generates some necessary jeopardy in a story where it’s plain from the outset that things will only get worse. Since Elle is Luisa’s boss as well as her senior, the affair makes Elle’s choices even harder to defend. Part of her pleasure in sex with Luisa is the use, bordering on abuse, of power, Luisa habitually so sarcastic that verbal consent is hard to judge. Though she pays bills for her naive, elderly parents, Elle struggles to tolerate spending time with them. We see her justify steadily more outrageous violations of labour law and human rights, her bleak frankness not wholly redeeming. Rankin-Gee walks a fine line between asking readers to spend 450 pages with an unlikable but understandable narrator, and with a loathsome one.
The great majority of the writing is first-person narrative from Elle’s point of view, a perhaps necessary choice since it is her voice that needs to win and hold the reader’s forbearance. Mine flagged in the final third, where it began to feel as if the darkness and humour risked cancelling each other out and I couldn’t care quite as much as the book asks about the intricacies of white-collar crime. There are a few brief sections told in the third person from Ed’s point of view, not revelatory and tending to feel like a convenient way to reconcile the advantages of a first-person perspective with the usefulness of another narrative technique.
Everyone in this story is clever and brittle and flippant, and the writing offers exactly those pleasures. Ed’s visiting American friend Brad remarks that “I was expecting 1930s Germany but really it’s like 1890s Russia” and Elle’s friend Flo, deep in a literature PhD and (of course) an affair with her married supervisor, responds “That must be so nice … to have a sense of history”: writing so wry that it’s hard to see the fulcrum of the joke. Elle’s circle of friends and (ex-)lovers are all surviving on wisecracks, alcohol and threadbare repression. It makes for cynically funny if unvarying writing, and an unexpected last-minute turn towards greater warmth isn’t wholly convincing.
• My Only Boy by Rosa Rankin-Gee is published by Scribner (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
