John Hunt Publishing (Alresford 2020). 154 pages. Pbk. £10.99.
How to respond to the sorry saga of Brexit? The cover of this book presents the perfect metaphor in the poem by the 15th century German humanist Sebastian Brant, whose English version happens to carry the cover message ‘The Ship of Fools Bids Farewell to Europe’. A mutinous and dysfunctional group all want to steer the ship of state towards a legendary utopia but do not have the skills to go anywhere. Or, as we might say in exasperation, in a fortuitous English rhyme, the crew ‘haven’t a clue’.
Nicholas Hagger is a cultural historian steeped in the European tradition, a prolific author and educationalist and self-styled ‘universalist’, a term which conveys both his cross-disciplinary mindset and his humanist and political philosophy. In what he calls a ‘mendacious age’ Hagger adopts the poet’s role of ‘truth-bearer’ and employs the apparatus of epic to expose the promise of Brexit and its delusion.
He claims to be neither Leaver nor Remainer and his opening invocation of the European Union vision, half way to a new world order, is not without irony. However, its attackers are worse, said to espouse the ‘hell’ of national controls, inspired by the ‘seafaring empire of old’, that once ‘ruled the waves’ and now ‘still dreams of new greatness among old graves’. From an Olympian perspective it is all a sorry history of ‘antics and dithering’, ripe targets for a poet’s rapier.
Mock heroic is a powerful genre in the English tradition, from Dryden to Swift and Pope, though Hagger looks to soften the potential monotony of heroic couplets by varying the metre of the lines. In a poem of this length it is difficult to avoid sounding occasionally trite, bathetic or repetitive, deliberate or not. The heroic apparatus is well represented: the division into long cantos, the ritual evocation of the Muse and invocation of other deities, together with the intrusions of the poet. Then there are the extended similes – Boris Johnson aptly a fox causing havoc in a hen coop, and the linking motifs – Theresa May’s beads being particularly notable. May is the person in the eye of the storm. She is introduced as a calm and ‘reconciling maid’ who increasingly cuts an almost tragic figure, the butt of cruel and misogynistic jokes on all sides, from Tusk’s cherry cake to the P45 presented at the Tory conference.
The book includes a time-line from the referendum to the revised date for exit on January 31st 2020 but was written at different periods between June 2016 and May 2019. This gives it a feel of synchronicity, the density and vividness of being in the midst of an on-going and seemingly never-ending drama. We are confronted again with all the catchphrases with which we were once so familiar, like ‘rule-takers, not rule-shapers’, the ‘vassal state’, ‘taking control’ and the ‘Meaningful Vote’. It reminds us how nearly events might have turned out differently. Indeed, even at the end of the poem the outcome is still open.
With its host of unsavoury or unfortunate characters, perhaps Dante’s Divine Comedy is the most appropriate literary analogue. One of the most powerful moments of the Brexit negotiations was Donald Tusk’s wondering ‘what that special place in Hell looks like for those who promised Brexit without even a sketch of a plan of how to carry it out safely’. Hagger helpfully suggests Dante’s eighth circle, alongside the fraudsters, might be the one. In Britain at the time, Tusk’s observation was met with some outrage and the literary allusion largely missed, which says much for Britain’s awareness of its European heritage.
Finally the epic comes to an end: ‘But Article 50’s run its course, the hour chimes. / Your poet’s run out of perspective and rhymes’. Despite the hint of Dr Faustus, the conclusion is down-beat. The poet is also suffering from the public’s sense of terminal fatigue. Enjoy this book, even though you might have enjoyed it more a few months ago or in a few years to come. From the perspective of 2021, the catastrophe of Covid and the glimmers of light provided by the vaccine and President Biden, this clever Brexit satire already seems to record a curiously distant event.
Kathryn Southworth is the former vice-principal of Newman University College in Birmingham. Her most recent publications are her poetry collection Someone was Here (Indigo Dreams, Beaworthy, 2018) and her pamphlet No Man’s Land (Dempsey and Windle, London, 2019).