Author Natasha Brown Forces Readers to Question Their Biases

In a literary landscape that often rewards safe storytelling, Natasha Brown – back with her sophomore novel – is once again pushing boundaries. Named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, Brown made a striking debut in 2021 with Assembly, a razor-sharp examination of race, privilege and power that cemented her as one of the most exciting new voices in contemporary fiction. Now, she returns with Universality, a novel that is both stylistically expansive and deeply provocative.

Set against the backdrop of modern Britain, Universality interrogates the narratives we construct – about ourselves, society and those who hold power. Beginning with a New Journalism-style investigative article about an illegal lockdown rave gone wrong, the novel unfolds through shifting perspectives: a journalist, a banker, a columnist and an anarchist collective, each convinced of their own truth. With its layered storytelling and forensic examination of media, privilege and perception, Universality challenges the reader at every turn, forcing them to question where their sympathies lie – and why.

In this conversation, Brown discusses the inspiration behind Universality, the role of fiction in shaping reality and the ever-blurring line between journalism and storytelling.

Universality plays with form, shifting perspectives and narrative styles. How did you approach structuring the novel, and what were the biggest challenges in pulling it off?

NB The structure of the novel was crucial. It’s sort of a mystery-within-a-mystery, and the various layers had to peel back at the right points. The biggest challenge was probably layering the reveals and clues at the right moments throughout the book. I love novels that surprise me, yet feel somehow inevitable, too. That’s the feeling I worked to create.

The novel investigates language as a kind of currency. What drew you to explore this connection between financial and linguistic capital?

NB I think the connection has become difficult to ignore. Many journalists today are paid on a per-word basis. And, on the other side of the transaction, journalism is increasingly funded by an online advertising model that involves multiple high-frequency auctions taking place to bid on our ‘view’ whenever we click on an article. How much a view is worth depends on how long we linger on the article’s content and the profiles advertising networks build about us, based on the other online activities we engage in. News and magazine publishers employ data scientists who measure ‘engagement’—i.e. how long we spend lingering on specific content on their websites—and what kinds of writing lead to higher engagement and revenue.

To me, it’s incredible that there’s so little media, whether non-fiction or fiction, that really engages with the enormous consequences of this fundamental shift in how the news is funded. Anna McAfee’s 2011 novel The Spoiler winks at this looming change, and Alan Rusbridger’s 2018 memoir Breaking News explores the editorial questions raised by increased access to reader data and metrics. But it’s surprising how few depictions exist of the resulting changes to the language we’re actually presented with, now that it’s been monetised in this way.

In Assembly, you examined how language shapes identity and perception. With Universality, you seem to push this even further, interrogating bias in media discourse. Was there a particular moment or event that inspired this shift?

NB I don’t really see it as a shift. To me, both books are interested in the question of neutrality in language, and how one can use a language to assess its own neutrality. I’d say that Assembly is focused on examining specific rhetoric, whereas Universality, true to its name, zooms out to explore the broader context, examining the sorts of people who use language for profit and the narratives they create. 

The novel features a deliberately provocative setup—an attack with a gold ingot, a radical group and a viral news cycle. Were you satirizing the way media sensationalizes certain stories, or did you want readers to take it at face value?

NB Narrative non-fiction is a genre, like any other. But it’s rarely satirised. Most of us would be hard-pressed, I think, to define its quirks and cliches. I think that what Janet Malcolm termed ‘the journalistic “I”’—the enormously credible first-person voice in journalism—is so well-respected that we’re often loath to apply a critical eye to it. But when we take away the trappings of its authority – the masthead, the typeface, the history of the publication etc – what’s left can indeed seem rather thinly-sensationalised.

Ever since Tom Wolfe’s New Journalism movement in the sixties, non-fiction writing has borrowed very deliberately from the techniques of novelists. Paired with the amplifying effect of engagement-driven online content, this has made much of today’s news read like pulpy fiction. With Universality, I wanted to create a clash between what we think of ‘novelistic’ and ‘journalistic’ styles. Because it raises the question: how far has the trend gone? Would ‘journalism’ feel out of place in a novel?

In a novel, of course, we as readers know to be suspicious of the (famously unreliable) first-person narrator. We treat its account with a scepticism that’s completely antithetical to how most approach the journalistic ‘I’. So, pulling a ‘longread exposé’ out of its natural element and putting it into a novel allowed for this difference in trust to be exploited.

Conversely, I was curious about how differently the novel’s opening article would come across when presented in a more typically journalistic context—so I made a website to test that out. So far, I’ve heard from people that when they read the article online (rather than in the book), they find that it feels different.

Your background in financial services seems to inform your writing, particularly in how power and privilege operate. How does your past career continue to influence the way you craft fiction?

NB Precision and brevity are often valued in corporate communication. I certainly try to embrace those goals in my fiction writing. I don’t think that’s a very fashionable style in novels at the moment, but, like bell bottom jeans, I think it’ll come back around again.

Universality makes readers question their own biases as they interpret the shifting narratives. How do you hope readers will engage with the novel? Do you see it as a kind of puzzle for them to unpack?

NB Absolutely. This novel borrows liberally from the mystery and thriller genres. What I love about mystery readers is that they’re some of the most attentive, most suspicious readers you’ll find. They notice everything and trust nothing. As a long-time (if very squeamish) reader of mysteries myself, it was a brilliantly-fun challenge to craft a puzzle for other readers to dive into. It demanded very careful plotting, plus a lot of ‘adversarial’ self-editing. The result, I hope, is a satisfying puzzle—and a book that rewards re-reading, allowing innocuous details to become smoking guns on a second pass.

The characters express views on meritocracy, “wokeism,” and culture wars in a way that feels both unsettling and familiar. How did you approach writing these perspectives without them becoming caricatures?

NB I think it helps to take each character completely seriously. No one considers themselves a ‘bad person.’ Everyone is the protagonist of their own story. So, I really try to get inside the perspective of any character who appears in my books. I spend weeks at a time writing (using a close third-person view) every relevant scene from a specific character’s perspective—even if they’re only a minor presence. This allows me to understand how and why the characters come to the choices they make. If I can’t justify an action to myself from a character’s perspective, that action doesn’t happen in the novel. Then, when I finally revisit the scene from a narrator’s perspective, I can draw from all of those different, thoroughly-considered perspectives. When I hear from different readers that they either loved or hated opposing characters, I know I’ve got the balance right.

The novel has been described as an “observational satire” of modern discourse. How do you balance sharp critique with storytelling, ensuring the novel remains engaging rather than purely polemical?

NB What really interests me is the meta-conversation. Why are some novels lauded as ‘state of the nation’ whereas others are labelled ‘polemical?’ In the literary world, there’s a belief that these designations are based on objective properties. But, approaching these questions from a more analytical perspective, it becomes clear that framing, conventions, and broader cultural contexts massively influence how we interpret a text. I’m fascinated with how we can quantify the effects of these influences. That’s what I think this novel explores. And it’s an engaging question in itself, because, in recent years, more and more people are wondering about it.

The final chapters seem to open up questions about what we should be doing with language, rather than just deconstructing it. Do you see your work evolving beyond social realism in the future? If so, where might you take it next?

NB Setting aside the loaded notion of ‘evolving,’ my current focuses are computational linguistics and graphics programming.