I’m a literary critic. I can’t like a book if it’s not well-written. There’s no consideration of political usefulness or ideological affinity that can vanquish my desire to read beautiful texts. This is why I am happy to report that in Edward McLaren’s novel Bothelford’s Gone I finally found a right-wing text with artistic value.
Bothelford’s Gone is not a political manifesto or a propaganda screed. It’s a work of art that is as complicated as the world it describes. It’s a Bildungsroman whose teenage protagonist tries to grow up in a world that ditched the idea of growth in favor of mindless, aggressively pursued change for its own sake.
McLaren’s diagnosis of Britain’s (and, by extension, the West’s) ills is neither shallow nor simplistic. The writer correctly intuits that what the Right urgently needs is a philosophy of the times. We need to explain the degradation of our reality, from the devastation of the natural world to the fraying of social bonds, in ways that eschew both convoluted conspiratorialism and superficial sloganeering. The novel is promoted as the first literary portrayal of Muslim rape gangs in Britain, and it is absolutely that. It is also much more.
Bothelford’s Gone portrays Britain as being profoundly spiritually unwell. Families fall apart, culture disintegrates, and meaningless licentiousness overpowers people who are glued to their screens in search of pornified titillation. Before Jack and Agatha, the novel’s teenage protagonists, were brutalized by foreigners, they were betrayed by their own self-indulgent and careless parents.
The novel leaves you wanting to think deeply and obsessively about the reality it portrays. This is how real art works. It becomes part of you. You go into the world, carrying it inside you and touching others with the traces of the art that transformed you. The concept of shared culture has disintegrated into volitional content with everybody consuming—and what a word this is!—their own, highly idiosyncratic list of cultural products. We don’t vibrate in sync because we don’t hear the same music of words, images, and rhythms. Whoever manages to overcome the isolating tendency of our times will win the future. Culture is only that if it is shared. We need to come together over real art.
Bothelford’s Gone is a good place to start.
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