Remember those halcyon days when Brexit was the subject of every headline? When we watched in disbelief as British MPs scurried around the voting chambers of Westminster and lounged despicably on the benches of parliament? Death and dying, there was none.
To read Amanda Craig’s new novel, The Golden Rule, is to cast your mind way back to a time when Brexit rocked the world. Set in the summer of 2018, this is Craig’s second Brexit novel, after 2017’s The Lie of the Land.
Our heroine, Hannah, is not yet 30 and has been ground down by her London life. Once a promising advertising executive, she quits due to Weinstein-levels of sexual harassment and becomes a domestic cleaner. Her marriage to her aristocracy-adjacent college sweetheart has fallen apart. He has a new relationship and is cruel and physically abusive to Hannah, regularly forgetting to pay the rent on the flat where she lives with their daughter Maisie.
Hannah is a struggling member of “generation rent”; visiting food banks, living on her nerves. Having grown up on a council estate in “the ugliest town in Cornwall”, she is horrified to find herself still living in a cycle of poverty.
Then she takes a train to Cornwall to say goodbye to her dying mother and meets an enigmatic woman, Jinni, who offers her a seat in first class. After sharing their woes, the women somewhat unexpectedly make a Strangers on a Train style pact. Each woman will murder the other’s abusive husband – the perfect crime.
When Hannah meets with Jinni’s husband, Stan, who lives on a rundown sprawling estate in Cornwall, she ends up working for the man she’s supposed to kill. He offers an alternative story of his ex-wife. Who will Hannah believe?
All this might feel like the fantastic set-up for a psychological thriller: a good beach read, should there be a need for such a thing this summer. But Craig is interested in writing about the role of money and class in British society and extended sections of the novel owe more to Jane Austen or Joanna Trollope.
As in life, it can be difficult to stay with a character so mired in resentment
Cliched references to avocado toast and Instagram aside, millennial Hannah makes for a naive and wistful modern heroine. An avid childhood reader, Austen’s “stories of poor clever young women” had given her hope: “I thought all I had to do was follow the rules laid out by literature. If I was honest, hard-working, kind, I would get my heart’s desire.” Now, her confidence had been stripped and “she could read and read and work and work and would never be one of them”. One might ask, why the hell would she want to be?
In the first half of the novel, Hannah’s own sense of the injustice of her life is almost stifling. “It is easy to be pleasant when life treats you kindly,” she thinks, watching tanned tourists innocently stroll through the streets of a fishing village. “She might as well have been living in one of Jane Austen’s villages, except as a working-class Cornishwoman, she wouldn’t even have been a governess.”
Thriller
As in life, it can be difficult to stay with a character so mired in resentment, but after the midpoint of the novel, when the thriller aspects of the story come to the fore, the plot unfurls cleverly and Hannah moves towards a vision of a new life.
Cornwall is a fitting setting for a novel of opposing narratives. Its humble fishing villages have succumbed to the showmanship of tourism and locals moan that their taxes leave the area and go to London, leaving behind “an olde world place of cream teas and f***ed-over fishermen”. It is a town that voted overwhelmingly Leave in the Brexit referendum despite relying heavily on EU grant money.
The Golden Rule ultimately has the feel of a fairytale; comeuppances abound
Craig, as a self-described “state of the nation” novelist, writes empathetically on the ever-widening gulf between the city and the countryside, a chasm revealed at its truest by the Brexit vote.
Interviewing people about their divorces, time and again Craig heard the phrase, “it would be so much easier to be a widow”. The idea of a murder pact on a train seems more plausible if you consider The Golden Rule as an examination of the way people behave in the death throes of a marriage.
Inspired by Beauty and the Beast, The Golden Rule ultimately has the feel of a fairytale; comeuppances abound. Despite all Hannah’s good socialist intentions, her mini treatise on the generation of cleaners and childcare workers with no job security, and her erstwhile eat the rich sensibility, ultimately money and its attendant freedoms win out.
Sales of crime fiction and thrillers are on the rise; at a time of unrest, we reach for old-fashioned narratives of good triumphing over evil. Escapist and compelling, The Golden Rule will sate this desire, while offering much more than is promised by its Hitchcockian premise.
