Brexit in fiction: How literature latches on to the theme of political divisions

How does culture sort out the bloody mess of social, political and geographical divisions? Politicians and bureaucrats don’t have the answer. The man down the pub doesn’t have the answer. So maybe it’s time we look to literature, writes Erica Wickerson

Love Means Love: Cordelia visits her ailing father King Lear, who feels ashamed of falling for the £350m-a-week promises made by his elder daughters (Getty)

The chaos of politics, the searing divisions through society, the promised demise of faith in democracy: it might look like the country is in an unprecedented state of strife and upheaval over Brexit. But writers have been talking about this stuff for centuries.

King Lear’s shuffle into dementia as he tears apart his kingdom on a vain whim. Dickens’s revolutionary bloodshed in A Tale of Two Cities conjuring tensions within and across borders. Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman challenging the imperialist march of the Nazis in Casablanca. How does culture sort out the bloody mess of social, political and geographical divisions? Politicians and bureaucrats don’t have the answer. The man down the pub doesn’t have the answer. So maybe it’s time we look to literature.

Ali Smith’s Autumn – the first in her seasonal quartet (the third in the cycle, Spring, has just come out) – is perhaps the first “Brexit novel” (what a terrifying label!), written in the immediate wake of the 2016 referendum. Its opening lines wave to Dickens: “It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times.” Too right, Ali. “That’s the thing about things. They fall apart, always have, always will.” Here a nod to Yeats’s A Second Coming. Yeats, Smith, Dickens, Shakespeare: they’re all rife with images of separation, objects torn asunder. Yeats writes: