Natasha Brown’s second novel begins as an exposé written by a journalist unravelling a mystery. A solid gold bar belonging to a banker has gone missing from his farmhouse; it was previously used to knock out the leader of an illegal rave being held there. The episode, the journalist writes, is a ‘modern parable … exposing the fraying fabric of British society’. Brown relishes mocking the overblown tone of the type of investigative article that routinely goes viral on Twitter. It’s immediately apparent that Universality is only superficially concerned with solving the question of what happened that night. Brown’s main purpose is to satirise and skewer the socioeconomic forces that have shaped life in the UK since the late 2010s. It’s all enormous, nasty fun. 

Brown drops the journalistic conceit after the first third of the book. Thereafter, the novel covers the fallout of the dubious article and the destinies of the people whom the crime affected. This is a world populated with delusional, unlikeable idiots who converse about identity, lockdown, crime rates and the perils of diversity. The cast includes Martin, a hideous ‘Serious Critic’ who keeps Martin Amis’s The War Against Cliché in his rucksack, a hippie activist named Indiya and a coterie of upper-middle-class media darlings who make a point of correcting anyone who insinuates that they live in Clapham and not Balham. Infidelity, exploitation and hatred abound. Everybody is an expert at justifying their own actions.

It all hews bitterly close to reality. In fact, the characters are barely characters at all. Money is the thing that links them, both enabling and ruining their lives. Brown is an expert at identifying the way people delude themselves. This is a country of ‘paper millionaires’ – people who