Documentary fiction
Jean Baudrillard would have recognised the gold bar for what it is: not wealth, not exchange, but simulation. A dense, gleaming object of pure signification. Spencer, the banker who buys it for himself as a fortieth birthday present, keeps it on his mantelpiece not because he trusts it more than fiat currency, though he might say that, but because it proves he’s the sort of man who can buy gold and forget about it. Jake, the aimless dropout who steals it, doesn’t know what to do with it. Pegasus, the commune leader, is struck down by it. It’s the most literal possible metaphor: revolution, knocked out by capital. And then the bar is hidden in a cupboard in a West London bedsit, wrapped in laundry, attracting dust. “That fucking thing ruined my life,” Jake says. It could be a line from a Kaurismäki film.
Brown’s new novel opens with that bludgeoning and then sprawls outward. Jake runs. The gold disappears. What follows looks like long-form journalism: a narrative pieced together from interviews, scene reconstructions, text messages, police statements, pastiche magazine features. It’s fiction disguised as reportage. If Assembly was clinical, inward, relentlessly interior, Universality is outward-facing and fragmented. It mimics the rhythm of online reading: one perspective tumbling into another, everything connected by hyperlink logic. But this is no postmodern trick. Brown writes with control and precision. Her tone is cool, dry, almost legalistic. There are no lyric flights, no italicised introspection, just clean prose and implication. The form is fragmentary because the subject is: a Britain drifting, splintered, made up of unshared truths.
Simulation and performance
Everyone in Universality is performing. Spencer, a banker with survivalist fantasies, buys a Yorkshire farm to wait out the collapse he helped cause. Lenny Leonard, Jake’s estranged mother, writes for right-wing papers about “woke culture” and “common sense,” but is herself a former single mum from a working-class background. Jake hides in a squat-turned-commune, where a loose band of idealists calling themselves the Universalists try to build a new society out of compost and solar panels. Even Pegasus, their wounded prophet, speaks in slogans. “We’re open to everyone,” they all say. But no one is.
I once saw a gold bar vending machine at the top of the Burj Khalifa. Not behind glass or in a luxury vault, just there on the viewing deck. You tapped your card, chose your weight, and out slid a sealed ingot. 5g of gleaming, shrink-wrapped reassurance. Like a Mars bar. People queued. Tourists posed. It wasn’t that you could buy gold; it was that you were meant to. That you were part of a system where even your contingency could be aestheticised. In that moment, the gold bar wasn’t a hedge or an investment. It was a performance. A selfie in commodity form.
That machine has stayed with me more than any trading floor or gilded lobby. It was the purest expression of Baudrillard’s third-order simulation: a sign of value with no referent, circulating in a closed loop of self-replication. Brown’s gold bar functions the same way. Spencer doesn’t sell it. Jake hoards it but can’t use it. Pegasus is struck down by it. It isn’t exchanged, it’s displayed, hidden, returned. It has no economic function. Its value is mythic. It holds the power to ruin lives, not through use, but through meaning.
Brown doesn’t make a spectacle of this. She writes it plainly. The bar ruins Jake, wounds Pegasus, sits inert in a cupboard. It’s just there, absorbing consequence. That’s the most quietly brutal thing about Universality: its objects matter more than its people.
Lenny and the lie
Lenny is the novel’s sharpest creation. She doesn’t just perform ideology, she manufactures it. A veteran columnist with a carefully cultivated contrarian persona, Lenny has made a career out of balancing on the tightrope between tabloid populism and broadsheet respectability. In public she rails against “anti-white sentiment” and “overprivileged minorities.” In private she shields her own dropout son and rewrites her past. “My readership is mostly males in the forty-plus age group,” she says. “They don’t want to hear from someone’s mum.” It’s not a joke. It’s a business model.
Brown doesn’t flatten her into caricature. Lenny is plausible, frighteningly so. She’s articulate, emotionally contained, even momentarily sympathetic. She is what happens when class mobility meets content production. Her former working-class identity becomes a credential; her motherhood, a liability. Her politics isn’t insincere. It’s curated. She says what will sell, and what will protect her from the precarity she’s clawed her way out of. That she ends up writing for The Observer is not a twist, but a truth.
The novel touches race without turning it into moral arithmetic. Jake is white, but he’s poor, disaffected, useless. Lenny uses race rhetorically but lives in a world where class is the thing she can’t escape or explain. The commune is diverse in theory, but mostly white in practice. Indiya, the most vocal and visible non-white character, ends up playing the role of caretaker and conscience. Present, committed, respected, yet also marginal. Brown lets this contradiction sit. There’s no resolution. The problem with the Universalists is that they mistake openness for universality. They’ve internalised the language of solidarity, but not the substance. Their idea of freedom is the ability to opt out. No one is building anything together. They’re just living in parallel collapse.
The last platform
I thought about Universality again walking past King’s Cross last week. The old railway sheds are gone, the ones that once hosted dance nights and squat raves, back when King’s Cross was a place for passing through, not arriving into. The Engine Shed pub is gone too. It had a meat counter like a deli, not for steak or charcuterie but for proper sandwiches: egg mayo, ham, corned beef, sliced to order, wrapped in greaseproof paper. You’d see railway workers in there just off shift, drivers with their jackets undone, drinking lager with their sandwiches. It was old school, not nostalgic, not retro, just there.
I remember being at King’s Cross when Reclaim the Streets turned the undergound concourse into a party. I hadn’t planned to be there. I think I was meeting someone. But I stayed. People danced on the ticket barriers. Someone scrawled “this is public space” across a billboard. There was music, leaflets, maybe even a samba band, I don’t remember the details so much as the feeling: that the routines of the city had broken, briefly, and that the station was something other than a gateway to work. Henri Lefebvre would have called it lived space, temporarily wrested from the logic of transit and capital. For a moment, it felt universal, not because everyone was included, but because no one was being processed.
Now the concourse empties into a plaza of glass and intentional brick. Wine bars. The occasional pop-up store. Trees that light up at night in coordinated LED sequence. Or was that on Slow Horses? The new buildings all have names that sound like venture capital firms or art galleries: Granary Square, Coal Drops Yard. Everyone smiles at the same branded coffee. The grime’s been sanded off. You can still hear music, but it’s piped. And anyone deemed undesirable is captured on CCTV and disappeared before their imprint can be felt, completely missing the point of what King’s Cross is—I mean was.
Brown doesn’t write about King’s Cross. But she understands its logic. The commune becomes a cautionary tale. The squat becomes a cultural footnote. The gold bar goes back in the vault. The future doesn’t arrive. It just repackages the past, adds a logo, and waits for the next man with a portfolio to turn up.
What Universality captures, with precision and restraint, is the feeling of being alive in a time when everything claims to be political, but nothing is shared. Where every act of rebellion becomes a lifestyle. Where even failure belongs to someone else.
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