I’M ALWAYS on the lookout for what get called  “State of the Nation” novels, so was pleased to have come across two of them in the wild recently.

A full-on State of the Nation novel is the kind of social panorama that takes in many levels of society and shows up social issues, a fiction that exposes social exploitation, like Dickens, or describes “The Way We Live Now,” like Trollope’s satire on corruption in Victorian Britain.

A lot of fiction has a very narrow focus on the personal lives of the comfortably off, so fiction doesn’t really have to be a “panorama” to get called “State of the Nation” — it can just present some view of people who worry about how to pay the bills as well as how to live their emotional lives.

The two recent novels I am recommending both do that: they are both great reads that also have a good — or bad — story to tell about the way we live now. 

The first, Kirstin Innes’s Scabby Queen, was published in 2020 and has been well reviewed, both in Innes’s native Scotland and Britain more widely. 

Scabby queen is a card game, like old maid, where the play turns around the appearance of the hidden queen of spades — the “scabby queen.” 

The novel searches for the life of Clio Campbell, the novel’s “Scabby Queen,” a Scottish singer and political activist. She appears through the eyes of a multitude of characters who met her, and found her inspirational, or irritating, helpful or demanding, selfless or selfish. Or a mixture of both.

Campbell has some success as a singer, and some hard times. She is a spokesperson around the poll tax, struggles through anarchist squats, is involved in the big “anti-capitalist” and “anti-globalisation” protests like the 2008 confrontation with the Italian police at the G8 summit in Genoa and the radical side of Scottish independence. 

She has hits and misses in grassroots music. Her story is a story of the radical movement, which is a story that doesn’t get told enough, even though it’s a story hundreds of thousands of people have helped write (including both this writer and Morning Star readers), and has changed our political landscape.

For that reason alone, it’s a book worth reading. The characters are all trying to get by, so earning a crust and paying the rent are all part of their characters and lives, like they are in the real world. 

The character of Clio Campbell isn’t simple — she can be a good and a bad friend — and showing who she is through other people’s memories emphasises how we have different effects on people depending on how and why and when we meet them. The book also shows that those who don’t quite “make it” to the top also can have a big effect on the world.

It’s a gripping read for anyone who has been in the “movement(s)” but I think has a bit of a flaw. Innes is good at describing the burnouts and the sellouts, the moments of naivety and also of nastiness that can happen in the radical movements. These are all real. But she is less good at describing the full-on good times, the comradeship, and the actual joys people get from a radical milieu — which made it feel sometimes like an outsider’s description of the “movement.”

Because people do get joy out of “protest” — if they didn’t, they wouldn’t do it. To only focus on the slog and pains of the movement sometimes feels like an outsider who only sees the hard things, who views the grassroots radicals as driven by self-sacrifice.

It also doesn’t really show how it feels when you win, which as the story includes the unalloyed victory of the anti-poll tax movement seems an omission. But getting a well-told story of the movements at all makes it a book worth reading.

The second “State of the Nation” novel I suggest for your summer reading is Glen James Brown’s 2018 book, Ironopolis. Morning Star fiction reviewer Paul Simon has already recommended this for you, finding the book “the most accomplished working-class novel of the last few years,” so I’m late to this party, but, like Paul, I think you should read it.

Ironopolis is a multi-character novel based on a Middlesbrough housing estate over recent decades. It really carries well how people make a life — or scratch a living — on the estates, especially when they face first de-funding, then the kind of “regeneration” that kicks many of the tenants out. I particularly liked how the novel describes the different generations of tenants who try and resist regeneration -from the “traditional” community to the new generation of more “alternative” tenants  and the ones who sneer at both – like our earlier Morning Star review said , “Brown exposes the loyalties and antagonisms that lie within the infrastructure of any working-class community –— the veins that keep it alive.”

Underneath the tenants’ story is a kind of gothic folk-horror, centred on Peg Powler, who is a real folk devil — well one that real people outside novels talk about, anyway. 

Peg is a kind of malevolent water-sprite. Her spectral presence gives the novel a big unexpected energy and a page-turning structure. 

But I thought also bends it towards being a bit of a tragedy, putting an air of inevitable doom over the characters. Thomas Hardy sometimes used “pagan” and folk omens to underline the tragedy of his “low-born” characters, which can add excitement to the story. 

But at the risk of being purist, I think introducing a note of folk magic and tragedy can also give the feeling that the character’s struggle is inevitably doomed. 

Tragedy encourages sadness about life rather than anger. That said, and stepping back off my soapbox, I’d agree with our earlier reviewer that Ironopolis is an extraordinary, and recommended, read.