Joshua Knapp’s savage satire takes aim at Britain’s new tyrants.
Political satires are best when they capture the national zeitgeist to such a degree the author appears to know the very soul of the subjects in conflict and the flawed society surrounding them. Joshua Knapp’s debut novel, The Haxton Review from Camp of the Saints-publisher, Vauban Books, does just that.
The book, in essence, is about ‘two-tier Britain’, the prefix of which began with recently-deposed prime minister “Two-Tier” Keir Starmer, following his government’s selectively light touch on Islamic street terror. But while narrowly set in the fictional, small “forgotten English mill town” of Coxthorpe in the northern coal country of Yorkshire (where the racial powder kegs of Bradford and Rotherham are situated), everything Knapp skewers, mocks, and satirizes can apply to most of the West today (the English-speaking world, at least).
Thanks to nearly two decades of demographic engineering from Tony Blair’s (then Gordon Browne’s) Labour Party (1997-2010), the small town, like so many parts of the country, has been utterly transformed, completely against the wishes of its native inhabitants. The tensions in Coxthorpe (especially in the neighborhood of Haxton) is set out well by the protagonist at the outset: “Like the Irish Troubles”, he writes, in which Catholics in Northern Ireland felt encircled by a Protestant majority, who in turn felt encircled by the whole of Ireland, both of Coxthorpe’s minority communities, English natives and Muslims, also “feel encircled” and “both display the anxieties and defensiveness that come with minority status.” That “Muslim anxiety is acceptable in polite society, while white-English anxiety is not, doesn’t alter the fact.”
As Coxthorpe can almost be an “any town” in today’s England (numerous towns and cities across the country are white-minority or close to it), so too is Knapp’s protagonist close to an “everyman” figure. Adam Monkton is a modern decadent ripped (let’s be honest) from the novels of Michel Houllebecq: a well-educated, childless, single straight male and porn-addict who drinks and smokes too much, but has a faded, though not vanished, pious Catholic past. Like many in the town (and around the country today), Adam is a Labour-to-Reform voter: a northerner long-aggrieved with the Tories’ crushing of the (bloated) coal unions, but who has also left the “party of the working-class” because it left him.
Walking into a local pub one day, Adam chances on a group of pamphleteers promoting their effort to revitalize an annual Middle Age-era, Christian procession. The historical “Rush Bearing” festival, which Adam knew nothing about, involved parishioners walking around the town in costume (including one dressed as a Crusader-knight) before delivering flowers to the local church (which still stands in the town). The genuineness of its promoters (local, working people, for the most part) and the cause itself almost instantly revives an innate sense of English pride in Adam as well as his Catholic faith. He immediately starts an online video channel covering the effort (“The Haxton Review”), which, as the procession nears, works to amplify the project’s controversy to a fever pitch by the novel’s end.
Like all good satirical novelists, Knapp captures the Western zeitgeist expertly. When a young Muslim in the street hands him an unsigned leaflet decrying the planned walk, Adam astutely observes “three different voices” in the literature: There’s a “liberal voice” regaling the reader with tired, shop-worn slogans (“diversity is our strength!”, etc.) and a general tedium where one can sense “liberal good intentions” coupled with “barely concealed anxiety.” There’s also “Muslim voice” discerned from the leaflet’s mention of how the community can work together, for instance, as it had done in tackling certain ‘immoralities’ in a nearby park (a reference, Adam assures, to local mosques which had organized congregants to take pictures of prostitutes working in the park then post them online) as well as a general mention of ‘illegal occupations in Muslim lands.’ Finally, there is the violent, extremist left (e.g. the procession “must not be allowed to pass!”, the leaflet says; an echo, says Adam, of the Anarcho-communist “¡No Pasarán!” of the Spanish Civil War).
Such a triumvirate of urban elite, Muslims and pink-haired shock troops is a familiar one for us here in the US, and certainly for the rest of Western Europe—France has the highest percentage of Muslims in Western Europe (10%). Among the numerous quips appear in the book’s adeptly-delivered dialogue, when the leafleteering Muslim tells him they will mount a physical protest during the procession should it commence given how “provocative” it is, Adam replies, ‘a protest sounds a bit provocative too.’
After Adam’s first video—a series of interviews with the Rush Bearers—, his channel quickly explodes, making the procession a mini-national news story—his brother, a textbook liberal columnist at a center-left London newspaper, takes advantage of the “scoop” after Adam tells him about it, but then uses the opportunity to criticize it, deploying the basic, stock arguments so typical of his class: ‘it’s too divisive’, ‘organizers should build bridges, not tear them down’, etc.
It being a political novel, The Haxton Review does come off polemical in places, with essay-length discourses delivered under the guise of Adam’s online video commentary. Knapp’s takes are strong and engaging, however, and considering the paucity of right-wing fiction, these mini-orations will seem refreshing, not clunky. For instance, in one such commentary, he captures the left’s idea of citizenship well, stating:
[W]e must the avoid magic dirt theory, that people become English simply by arriving on our soil with the intention to stay. To say that anyone becomes English by virtue of getting here is to undermine the bonds of mutual commitment and reciprocal belonging that come from shared history and membership of the same descent group.
In another clip, he expressly reiterates the idea of the “Four Ds” from British professors Robert Eatwell and (Reform Party-candidate) Matt Goodwinson in their 2018 book National Populism in which they describe the conditions for the emergence of populist movements i.e. “Distrust of politicians and institutions; Destruction of a national group’s historic identity; Deprivation as a result of rising inequalities in income and wealth; and De-alignment, the weakening of the bonds between people and traditional political parties.” Movingly, he comments:
[S]uppose [the ‘four painful Ds’] are a route to discovering something worthwhile and precious that has almost been lost. Suppose they are a route to rediscovering nation, belonging and home as real and vital parts of human experience. Suppose that Eatwell’s and Goodwin’s four Ds are a rough road back to somewhere called England.
Indeed, there is much food for thought for the reader here and numerous commentaries appear as the day of the Rush Bearing festival approaches.
Like a proper satire, Knapp sets up and skewers an assortment of modern Western archetypes that explain so much of the West’s decline generally. The most in-depth is a female Anglican minister of the same church where the procession originally took place. She reaches out to Adam to urge him to stop vlogging about the Rush Bearing festival and push members to stand down. While interviewing her for his channel, she relays to him a story about a French Trappist monk in Algeria who penned a letter while his monastery was under Muslim-attack about a special affinity he felt for them as God’s “children of Islam… all shining in the glory of Christ… [a Christ] who delights in the differences among humans.”
“What happened to him and his brothers”, Adam asks? “They were all killed”, she answers. But, in the monk’s defense, she responds, “[t]hey weren’t imposing any truth on the people… [t]hey understood that true love requires respect for the other precisely in their otherness… Christianity can cost you your life… [t]hat’s almost the point of it.” Under the new dispensation of the Church of England, at least, it’s apparently better to die than be accused of ‘othering.’
Later in his video commentary, Adam asks: with the UK’s “twilight of Christianity, have we lost any public sense of religiousness in this country?” “We have not”, he answers. The new British religion “infuses the power of the sacred” into ‘equality, diversity, and individualism’, with “minorities being its sacred symbols.”
As the procession gains wider attention in the national media and the date of the walk/protest nears, Adam’s place of work (a warehouse where he does office work) receives a phone call from the local police branch’s so-called “Communities Cohesion Team.” Most Americans by now will have heard that the ‘Land of Orwell’ is not quite what it once was in terms of its institutional respect for freedom and liberty (at least for the nation’s indigenous). As Adam’s boss relays after the call, the police’s enquiry related to a so-called “non-crime incident”: until recently, an actual designation in the UK wherein so-called “hate crimes”, but unindictable ones (e.g. tweets), are marked on a person’s record (with no appeal allowed and sometimes without a person even knowing).
The exchange kicks off an exchange straight out of a modern British comedy in which both Adam and his sensible, working-class boss are trying to work out what exactly instigated the conversation and just what such a thing actually means. When the police call again, for instance, Adam’s boss rings him saying, “Cop said I should ring him if you gave me cause for concern.” To which Adam replies, “By doing what, invading fucking Poland?”
The Haxton Review is truly one of the finest debuts I’ve read in years and, but for its honest portrayal of contemporary Britain, with all its deep and varied contradictions fearlessly explored, Joshua Knapp would have been picked up by a publisher with the size and reach his talent deserves. A perfect read for ‘lower-tier’ Britons and Catholics alike, the novel is something Americans can learn a lot from as well, particularly what its own increasingly Islamic future might look like.