The England of David Peace is not just collapsing, it’s rotting from the inside, suffocating under the weight of its own unburied past. His characters don’t simply suffer; they ferment. In GB84, the miners’ strike unfolds not like trench warfare but like a civil siege, communities starved out, unions infiltrated, the language of solidarity twisted into threat. In The Damned Utd, ambition doesn’t drive the protagonist forward; it tunnels him downward, like a cursed miner digging toward something rotten at the core of English football. Peace’s England is sealed, a crypt, where history doesn’t pass but congeals, and the only escape is madness or complicity.
Nicolas Padamsee’s England Is Mine, now out in paperback, gives us a very different England: equally in crisis, equally lost, but drained of any heroic register. His protagonist, David, is a sixth-former with vegan leanings, a cancelled pop idol, and a complicated relationship to protest culture. He shuttles between divorced parents and ideological scripts, queasy about his stepsister’s activist friends, uncertain whether to side with the old liberal left or the ambient, ironic nihilism of the online right. In place of Peace’s anguished men, caught in the machinery of history, Padamsee gives us a teenage boy scrolling Reddit and wondering if he’ll be cancelled for wearing the wrong band T-shirt. There’s shame, but it’s curdled into cringe.
Both authors are preoccupied with English decline, but Padamsee gives us not the trauma of history but the fog of its absence. David isn’t haunted by what his country has done; he’s paralysed by the impossibility of making any claim at all. He tweets, deletes, scrolls, hesitates. The prose mirrors this. Where Peace is incantatory, even hysterical—short bursts, repetition, rage rendered formally. Padamsee writes in a clean, flattened style. The novel is structured in short scenes, with the momentum of a scroll feed: a night at a gig, an argument over brunch, a campus protest, an Instagram unfollow. The effect is quietly devastating. What if the real state-of-the-nation novel isn’t the one that gives us government cover-ups and national traumas, but one that documents liberalism’s final slouch into consumer melancholy?
Though it isn’t formally labelled as such, England Is Mine draws heavily on the techniques of autofiction, the contemporary genre that merges fictional narrative with the tonal markers of memoir: minimal plot, flattened affect, a relentless focus on interior life and the self as it drifts through late-capitalist culture. In most cases, autofiction is a literature of bourgeois self-consciousness: a writer with a residency, a breakup, and a book deal wonders what art means in a time of crisis. Padamsee strips the genre of its literary pretensions and rewires it for a more class-ambiguous, politically confused generation. David is not a writer. He’s barely articulate. His crisis isn’t whether the novel can redeem the self but whether it’s safe to post about a cancelled gig. The prose is taut, but the stakes are ambient, not war or ideology, but moods, microaggressions, the fear of misreading a room or a thread. Padamsee turns autofiction inside out, using its surface realism to depict something far more spectral: the way ideology lives now, not in institutions, but in vibes.
This is not to say Padamsee lacks political edge. On the contrary: England Is Mine stages, with meticulous care, the contradictions of post-2010 England. His characters talk about freedom of speech and trans rights, colonial memory and veganism, but it all feels weightless—like a dress rehearsal for a politics that never arrives. David’s mother is an exile from Iran, haunted by real repression and real hope. But her son is afraid to post a gig photo in case it’s interpreted as Islamophobic. “If speech had no consequences,” one of the characters observes, “what would be the point of protecting it in the first place?” It’s a strikingly contemporary formulation: a progressive defence of censorship, stated with a sincerity that no one around the table appears to find contradictory.
Padamsee’s real triumph is structural. The novel’s quiet build-up, lyrical, funny, mundane, is slowly subsumed by a horror story: of harassment, surveillance, silence and complicity. The violence, when it comes, is shocking not for its intensity but for its banality. David is humiliated and assaulted not for who he is, but for what his T-shirt is perceived to say. “You not clock what he’s wearing? Karl Williams. The one who was talking shit about us. Muslims this. Muslims that.” The beating is preceded by parody, theatrical posturing, boys stoned and bored. Then: a fist. Then: piss. Then: silence. The prose doesn’t break. It doesn’t need to. The state of the nation is already inscribed in its form.
Padamsee writes in the rhythms of a generation raised on Twitter and mid-tier journalism. It’s no accident that David finds himself scrolling Spiked by the end. The novel is not sympathetic to him, but it is not cruel either. His loneliness is political. His craving for approval is shaped by culture. He is mocked at school, undermined at home, and censured by the very activist world he tries, haplessly, to belong to. “You can’t separate the art from the artist,” Zoe tells him, after Karl Williams is denounced for a remark about Islam and LGBTQ+ education. “Saying that is ignorant as fuck,” she continues. “Muslims are stigmatised enough without people like Karl Williams weaponising homophobia to smear them further.” David doesn’t know what to say, because there is no script anymore. The good guys aren’t good, the left isn’t kind, and the only people willing to talk back are racists. This, too, is England.
Race, masculinity and class are refracted through this drift. David is mixed-race, self-conscious about his skin, mocked for wearing concealer, and desperate to be seen. His alienation isn’t located in racial identity per se but in how England metabolises identity into insecurity. His bullies call him Makeup Boy. His activist friends treat him as a project. His desire for belonging curdles into humiliation. What England Is Mine understands, and what most state-of-the-nation novels miss, is that masculinity today is less about repression than exposure. This isn’t the hard man of the industrial North, or the quietly fuming patriarch of The Line of Beauty. It’s the teenage boy with too many tabs open, caught between Karl Marx, Karl Williams and Karl Lagerfeld, asking whether he’s allowed to speak. If there’s rage, it comes from impotence. If there’s violence, it’s often inward. Padamsee’s real innovation is to render this new affective terrain—anxious, performative, post-liberal—not as psychological drama, but as national diagnosis.
Both writers ask what it means to come of age in a country that no longer believes in its own future. Peace conjures a nation shattered by betrayal, where the only available mode is repetition—of strikes, of murders, of losses half-remembered and badly buried. His novels are acts of possession, or dispossession: the characters speak, but something speaks through them. There is no exit. The past is not even past. It is still in power.
Padamsee offers no such historical weight. England Is Mine is not a political thriller or a social realist novel. It is, in form and feeling, a cultural diagnosis: the novel as newsfeed. And in its precision, it captures something Peace cannot. Not the violence of power, but the erosion of agency; not class war, but the loneliness that sets in once the class has dissolved. If there is a flicker of hope, it lies not in protest or redemption but in the bare act of narration—in Padamsee’s refusal to aestheticise despair. He gives us the England we live in: brunch menus and burnout, liberal pieties and racialised backlash, the slow dread of meaninglessness. And he does not flinch.
That may not sound like much. But in 2025, it’s more than most novels manage.
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