'This year has taught us that if we don't protect our freedoms we can lose them forever'

Back in the spring of 2022, I was told a story about a spaniel whose greatest delight was to play with a toy rat. The rat uttered little protesting squeaks when the dog’s jaws clamped around it, and these squeaks made the dog’s tail wag with happiness. Then the squeak mechanism broke.  The spaniel kept nibbling and biting the rat, but it was silent. It was no longer alive. So the dog lay down with it, held between his paws, with his head resting on the dead toy and refused to move. He was in mourning for the rat. Moved by the sadness of their pet, the spaniel’s owners found a replacement, took the broken thing from the dog’s grip and returned a ‘living’ playmate to him. At once, order was restored, grief banished. Life could go on as it had before.

The jolt of this story rests in the dog’s human sorrow for a lost ‘friend’, for which there was, in fact, a commercial cure: an online search could produce a new rat. But what the passing year has reminded us, in many bleak ways, is that certain people and things – even those we somehow thought would always be with us – can disappear forever. 

The loss of Queen Elizabeth II feels profound. I met her at two investitures and she only ever addressed me in unimaginative royal-speak: “Do you actually write?” “Are you still writing away?”  Yet, for all the stilted exchanges which I and many of her subjects endured in her presence, we mourn the loss of a woman who had planted herself in our minds as the embodiment of British stoicism and decency. These qualities can sometimes be actually or imaginatively contagious, but don’t appear to have taken deep root in Elizabeth’s heirs, a troubled coterie of people, who seem confused about what roles to play on the world stage and so perfectly express the existential muddle in which Great Britain now finds itself.  

Brexit was supposed to reinforce our sense of our best Brit selves, plucky islanders, obstinate rosbifs, the people who gave the world Charlie Dickens and Charlie Watts, but let me say this with an ominous drum roll: the year 2022 has confirmed to me that Brexit was a grave mistake, a loss of huge significance. With a disgraceful war now being waged on Europe’s eastern borders by Russia, our divorce from the continent appears not just mistaken, but morally infantile, a petulant self-inflicted wound, which may never be totally healed. Sure, we’re trying to stay in step with France and Germany in our efforts to help Ukraine, but how ridiculous and sad it is that when the peace we’ve enjoyed in Europe since 1945 is broken by Putin, we find ourselves adrift in the North Atlantic, tangled in a net of unresolved Brexit protocols, trying to sail into some protective American harbour of the mind which no longer exists. For the ‘special relationship’ with America, too, is fractured. The president is Irish and he wants us to know what that means for the old Black-and-Tans. We have never, in my lifetime, felt so completely foolish and alone. 

In days like these, we look to leaders. But what kind of leaders has our ‘mother of all parliaments’ given us? A yellow bouncy castle, deflated by his own squelchy enormity, followed by a pallid little skittle, knocked over in the 44 days it took her to try to demolish the British economy. Now, as 2023 begins, we have an investment banker married into a pharmaceutical dynasty for PM. He seems to be a cautious and honest man and so this feels better. But the investment banker is having to deal with massive loss. He confronts the kind of inflation unknown since the 1970s, an NHS brought to near-ruin by Covid and by the departure of disillusioned and exhausted doctors and nurses, precarious energy supply, disrupted travel, families falling into poverty and water companies allowing sewage to be discharged into once-beautiful rivers. 

The feeling of helplessness felt by ordinary Brits is acute. How can we be part of this unfolding crisis and not succumb to despair?  

I would once have said that writers are fortunate in their ability to take refuge in cognitive displacement, to escape the anxieties of a blighted present by imagining the lives of others in all their absorbing difference. Across my long writing life, I’ve inhabited the minds of a 17th Century rake, an immigrant widower from Eastern Europe, a Chinese gardener, a Cevenol peasant woman raped by her father, a gay Swiss hotelier, the troubled spirit of Wallis Simpson and many other characters distant from me in gender, ethnicity, place and time. I believe that I’ve learned a huge amount about the human psyche and about the power of empathy by striving to ‘become’ these people. But now, the prevailing view in our culture is that there is something morally dubious about work which dares to ‘appropriate’ subjects outside the author’s own experience.

It’s been suggested to me this year, for instance, that my 1993 novel, Sacred Country, which traces the arduous journey of a female character transitioning to being male (30 years before this subject became part of our national discourse) is ‘innately flawed’ by being fiction rather than autobiographical réportage. The fact that this book was published in 27 countries and won the Prix Femina Etranger in France seems to count for little; it follows that my entire rationale for being a novelist is now put in question. I could summarise this rationale as a yearning to learn as much as I could about human experience worldwide through trying to make vivid and captivating the stories of others, but I am now told that this way of writing, which has kept my life afloat since 1976, is inadmissible. I feel this dispossession very acutely.

The most extreme form of censorship is of course physical attack. The horrendous stabbing of Salman Rushdie by a Shia Islamic extremist in August of 2022 in upstate New York is a terrible iteration of this. Writers are seldom visible enough to become targets of hate, but Rushdie, as the author of The Satanic Verses, has endured life in the cross-hairs of the Iranian fatwa since 1989. With his smart understanding of human frailty and with his habitual dancing humour, Rushdie had managed to return his life to a near-normality. Now, he’s lost an eye and the use of his left hand. If this maiming means that he writes nothing more, then the loss also becomes ours; another slipping away, in this violent year, of something of value, something we failed to protect enough. 

As 2023 comes in, we pause to look around us and ask questions about where we are in our lives. Perhaps, we make resolutions. We certainly try to list consolations and move forward with hope. One of my recurring consolations since 1985 has been my home in Norfolk, the middle section of a big regency house standing on a wooded hill. The garden slopes away towards a spinney, where a 300 year-old Corsican pine has grown to incredible height. For long years, Richard and I have cast affectionate eyes on this tree from our terrace, a place of tranquillity and rest. But in 2022, our neighbours decided to build a swimming pool five metres from our garden’s edge. Warm summer afternoons are now filled with the sound of splashing and shrieking.  Birds we used to watch in our shrubbery – thrushes, woodpeckers, coal-tits, jays, sparrows, robins, goldfinches and wrens – are no longer seen. Only the fearless magpies, stout pigeons and a few gulls, used to the sound of turbulent water on the North Norfolk beaches, deign to visit. Nothing here will ever again be as it once was. 

So where can I look for something to be glad about? Towards work, perhaps, despite the prevailing cultural constraints. In recent months, I’ve completed a short novel, titled Absolutely and Forever, about first love and heartbreak, loosely based on my own experiences. Writing about dear old Berkshire, where I spent my teenage years, has been strangely consoling. It’s also amused me a lot. It seems you can impoverish the Brits in all kinds of ways, and yet our self-mocking laughter will obstinately remain. Or perhaps it’s just the idea of a toy rat making us smile?