An email arrived the other day from Travis Elborough, whose great new book about public parks I reviewed in these pages at the end of May. “I’ve found myself thinking a lot about this book lately,” it read, next to a link to a novel called A State of Denmark. “It’s kinda depressing, but…”
A State of Denmark, hitherto unknown to me, is by Derek Raymond, a writer best known for his Factory series of crime novels (an old Etonian who lived a somewhat rackety life, Raymond, who was born Robert Cook in 1931, died in 1994). This book, however, predates those: it was first published in 1970, shortly before Raymond gave up fiction for around a decade (the first book in the Factory series, He Died With His Eyes Open, came out in 1984; from what I can gather, Raymond spent the time in between working in French vineyards and as a minicab driver in London). Back in print thanks to Serpent’s Tail, I can’t in all honesty recommend it if you are desperately seeking to escape current events. But if you want to read something that seems, now, to have been chillingly prescient, well, as my correspondent hinted, this is just the thing.
It’s in two parts. In the first, we meet Richard Watt, a former journalist who is living with his girlfriend, Magda, in a remote village in Italy: a kind of utopia, for those who like their coffee very strong. In the second, Watt is back in England, its atmosphere changed entirely by Jobling, a politician he previously tried desperately to expose.
Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland having gone their own way, England has sleepwalked into dictatorship. Non-white immigrants have been deported, the Times is the only newspaper and internment camps, one of which will soon be Watt’s new home, are everywhere. (Even more sinisterly, for those who believe nothing bad could ever happen to John Lewis, Peter Jones is now a military HQ.) Raymond’s occasionally implausible plot sometimes struggles under the weight of its own ambition and his narrative is, be warned, unrelievedly bleak. But, still: I agree with Travis. Once read, it’s hard to stop thinking about this one.
