Anyone who has lived in a house share will know the feeling of having to creep around your own home as though you aren’t really supposed to be there – the endless micro negotiations, real and imagined, that characterise living situations that are governed by necessity rather than choice.
That sense of unease, the uncanny feeling of being a ghost haunting the edges of your own life, is brilliantly captured by Holly Pester in her new novel, The Lodgers. The book follows a woman returning to her home town, who, while renting a room overlooking her mother’s house, spends her time imagining the lodger who replaced her at her last temporary dwelling. When she arrives at the flat she has sublet, “compact and hot and, like a lot of short-term adult accommodation, kitted out by small acts of shopping for low-cost utensils”, she is struck by its similarity to the packaging for the sandwich she has just eaten. “The triangular box was empty, with an inside that resembled, like sarcasm, the one I was in … It had a window too.”
Pester, an academic and lecturer whose poetry collection Comic Timing also deals with the many petty indignities of precarious living, says she wanted to explore the “eerie psychic state created by perpetual precarious housing ... the ways it changes your voice and self-expression”. Throughout the novel, her protagonist traces the ways in which she has learned “to lodge, I mean, adapt and hide my needs rather than dig down, simply hover without much substance, meekly occupy, as the tenant of the tenant”.
The Lodgers is one of a number of forthcoming novels that deal explicitly with the UK’s housing crisis, the ways in which it shapes and misshapes us. Also out in the next few months are Francesca Reece’s Glass Houses, which explores the impact of gentrification and second homes in north Wales, and Ella Frears’ Goodlord, which takes the form of an extended email to an unscrupulous estate agent. In Michael Magee’s recent novel Close to Home, the housing crisis looms large, the characters always grasping for even the most basic sense of stability, while Guy Ware’s The Peckham Experiment does a deft job of sketching out the broken ideologies that got us here in the first place. And these are just the most recent examples. To read many contemporary novels by young(ish) writers is to be struck time and again by the extent to which our relationship to property has become simultaneously both perverse and perverting.
It didn’t always feel this way. When I think back to my late teens, the period of my life when I first started reading books, part of their appeal, along with the romantic desire to become a writer, was shaped by a naive sense that in the world of novels, people had houses, nice houses even; houses they weren’t constantly afraid of losing, houses that didn’t belong to someone else entirely. Aged 17, living in Shard End, an area of Birmingham where money was often extremely tight, the sprawling piles and country estates I was reading about in Evelyn Waugh seemed pretty appealing. And so did the glamorous glass cityscapes of Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis. Even the garrets of Henry Miller and Virginia Woolf’s famous A Room of One’s Own exerted a deep pull on my teenage psyche, summoning visions of independence, freedom and possibility.
Back then, my ignorance knew few bounds. I wasn’t aware that I was predominantly reading from something called the “canon”, an inherently bourgeois realist tradition that was preoccupied with reproducing the concerns of its class: property, wealth, marriage, propriety. I wasn’t aware that in today’s money Woolf was suggesting all one needed to scrape by as a writer was a servant and a private income of £75k a year. And I certainly wasn’t aware that Britain had spent three decades getting itself into such a structural crisis when it came to housing that it would become arguably the defining economic headwind of not just my adult life, but that of almost everyone I knew. There have been times when it seemed as though it was the only conversation, a generation of Ancient Mariners forced to retell versions of the same story: rents spiralling, wages stagnating, landlords becoming increasingly shameless and exploitative as the dynamics of the market tilt ever more in their favour.
The effects of the crisis are maddening and wide ranging; material, psychological and, inevitably, artistic. Millions now experience the housing market as a type of perpetual Hunger Games, all while being told, explicitly or otherwise, that it can’t be that bad. Let’s be clear, it is that bad. Because this was never supposed to be the deal. Regardless of one’s stance on capitalism, its basic proposal was always something like: give us your labour and time, and in exchange you get a stake in the system. Perhaps not a fair stake, but a stake nonetheless. But these days, even that meagre offer seems like a cruel joke.
Talk to most people under 40, who have spent two decades watching the economy limp from crisis to crisis while asset holders and rentiers cash in on a system designed, maintained and calibrated for their benefit, and the picture is altogether different. For them, in the context of an increasingly fragile social safety net, widening inequality and a retirement that, rather than merely being impoverished will more than likely never happen at all, the question seems to ask itself: why exactly am I giving up most of my waking hours to work, all for the dubious pleasure of handing 75% of my meagre wage to a landlord who happens to own a flat or 10 in east London that they paid five quid for at some point in the mid 1980s?
If you have been an asset holder during this period, when it has been common for the average home to “earn” more than the average person, then it is difficult to imagine quite how brutal the rental market currently is. But for everyone else, the damage looms large. Is it any surprise, then, that as well as living through it and despairing about it in pubs, we are also writing about it? Because we’re certainly doing that. In many contemporary novels, it is commonplace for protagonists to live lives characterised by scarcity and insecurity, where the notion of the home has become definitively divorced from any associations it might have historically had with stability, security, comfort or permanence. I’m no different in this regard. In my latest novel, I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning, the symbolic centre of gravity is a newbuild estate, looming over the lives of the characters.
Read enough books by this new generation of writers and the cumulative effect becomes overwhelming; the atmosphere is one of anxiety, a peripatetic type of extended adolescence, in which protagonists are locked out of the future and waiting for life to begin in earnest.
In Jessica Andrews’ Milk Teeth, the novel’s romantic claustrophobia is to a large extent driven by the protagonist’s desire to escape the merry-go-round of grim box rooms. And there is a sense that even in novels where the issue of housing is not an explicit concern, it still hovers in the background as an ambient force, shaping and distorting. Take Susannah Dickey’s Common Decency, on the surface a classic odd couple story, but also one in which the mentality of both main characters, who live in the same apartment building in Belfast, is revealed to be a result of the same deadening economic logic, driving us towards lives of isolation and individualism. In fact, if a character isn’t legibly stressed about their living situation, then, as contemporary readers, we begin to wonder why. Are we reading about a secret aristocrat, or perhaps the ostensibly naturalistic novel in our hands is actually a piece of magic realism, set in a world that is broadly recognisable but in which Thatcher didn’t sell off all the housing stock?
There’s often a class antagonism at play in these novels. Much of the mainstream political discourse around the housing crisis, driven by those least impacted by it, self-servingly occludes a basic moral assertion, which is that there is no such thing as a “good” landlord any more than there is such a thing as a “good” mugger. The fact that some muggers might be more polite than others doesn’t make them good, it just makes them marginally preferable to the ones that decide to punch you in the face for good measure.
The idea that landlords are engaged in a fundamentally extractive and immoral practice never used to be a particularly controversial claim, and it certainly wasn’t an idea held only by those on the nominal left. Whether it be Churchill, Adam Smith or David Ricardo, any number of conservative and free-market icons thought it common sense – if someone is hoarding an essential asset, especially in a time of scarcity, and using that excess to extract unearned profits, then they cannot, in any meaningful sense, be regarded as “good”. Most people I know would agree with this, even those who consider themselves broadly apolitical, but if it were ever uttered by an MP or on prime time TV, it would be framed as an extreme and marginal point of view.
It is a depressingly relevant fact that the publishing industry also reproduces and exacerbates these inequities; underpaying and exploiting its workforce, writers included, and expecting those without independent means to pay their rent using the dubious currencies of gratitude, enthusiasm and social cache. Increasingly consolidated, large publishing houses will more often than not allocate disproportionate financial resources to a handful of writers, while the vast majority are left to fight over the crumbs. With average earnings for an author falling to just £7,000 a year, and junior salaries within publishing houses prohibitively low, all while shareholders celebrate record-breaking profits, it is hard not to get the sense that something has to give.
There are formal implications too. A couple of years ago, Joyce Carol Oates riled up literary Twitter when she referred to the wave of contemporary autofiction as consisting of “wan little husks”. There have been many insightful essays written on that particular issue, but I have often wondered if there might also be something more basic going on. Almost all novelists now have day jobs to pay the rent, snatching time to write here and there on commutes and in the stolen hours before or after work. If they manage to actually find enough time to finish writing a novel, they then submit it to an overstretched and under-remunerated editor who will have to read it at the weekend. Is it entirely wild to suggest that such a state of affairs might yield shorter books, more fragmentary books, books that are more inclined to reproduce rather than transform the immediate context of their production?
This is not a case of special pleading. Rather, it is an attempt to demonstrate that when one of life’s basic necessities is co-opted in the service of generating outsized profits for the few, the impact will be felt everywhere. Shareholders and celebrity memoirists aside, it is to the benefit of nobody that we perpetuate an economic system in which writing and publishing become (even more so) the preserve of affluent hobbyists or beleaguered and exhausted obsessives.
In the present moment, novels like The Lodgers are vital, capturing the humiliations and psychospiritual damage being wrought by the current state of things. As Pester’s protagonist puts it, “Why not once and for all just climb inside the sandwich box?” But over the longer term, mass artistic representation of a failing system should serve as a stark warning. We can and must write about the conditions under which we live. But we must also fight for an economic settlement in which the basic dignities of life, including access to secure and affordable housing, are provided as a matter of course, rather than remaining, as they do for so many, merely the stuff of fiction.
• Keiran Goddard’s new novel, I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning, is published by Abacus on 8 February (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
