Review: Universality by Natasha Brown — An intriguing book, but not for me
A fleeting, articulate piece of literature — but it’s not for me.
Universality by Natasha Brown: The key details
- Publish date: 13th March 2025
- Genre: Literary fiction
- Publisher: Faber & Faber
- Series/standalone: Standalone
- No. of pages: 176
Blurb: Late one night on a Yorkshire farm, a man is brutally bludgeoned with a solid gold bar.
A plucky young journalist sets out to uncover the truth surrounding the attack, connecting the dots between an amoral banker landlord, an iconoclastic columnist, and a radical anarchist movement. She solves the mystery, but her viral longread exposé raises more questions than it answers.
Universality is a twisty, slippery descent into the rhetoric of truth and power. Through a voyeuristic lens, it focuses on words: what we say, how we say it, and what we really mean. The follow-up novel to Natasha Brown’s Assembly is a compellingly nasty celebration of the spectacular force of language. It dares you to look away.
Universality by Natasha Brown: The review
Universality is a good book: I’ll get that out of the way first. It’s well written, it’s articulate, it’s intelligent; Brown is obviously a talented writer. It just wasn’t for me. I went in not really knowing what to expect, and while I stuck with it to the end, I was glad when I hit the last page.
If you’re not familiar with Brown’s work, you might, like me, be fooled by the book’s description. The mention of someone getting bludgeons by a gold bar? A journalist uncovering the truth? A Yorkshire farm? I expected a crime novel, familiar locales and all the thrilling trappings that typically come with the genre. I was solely misled.
The “bludgeoning” itself feels largely glossed over, with Universality instead flicking between multiple characters, all supposedly related to this crime at the centre of the book, but there’s little real direction. Brushing on politics and ideology, most of what Universality promises to delve into is surface level at best. There’s little story here and there’s little room to walk away with a meaningful message, either.
There are glimmers of greatness, however. Some of Brown’s characters are wonderful, and I wish we got to spend more time with them. Lenny is a fantastic and intriguing character, and I’d have loved to learn more about her, warts and all. I really enjoyed reading about Hannah, the down-on-her-luck journalist, too; hers were perhaps the most grounded of all segments of the book.
But everything here feels too fleeting. The first chunk of Universality, which makes up about 50% of the entire book, reads like a journalistic essay about the event on the Yorkshire farm, although details are glossed over in lieu of the people involved. The rest of the book is split into several short chapters, each from the perspective of a key player. But to say that anything cohesive and meaningful comes from it would be a stretch.
I’m still left with questions about that so-called attack; exactly how it played out is largely left to your own imagination. And as for the title of the book, which comes from an ideology of group living, sharing resources without leadership, I’d have liked to have delved more into that too — but beyond the first half of the book, it’s barely mentioned again. I feel like Brown has some great ideas here, that by themselves would make wonderful premises for novels in their own right. But as a complete piece of work, Universality leaves me wanting.
Despite having not enjoyed it as much as I’d hoped, I’m glad I read Universality: it’s nice to step outside of my comfort zone once in a while. But this wasn’t for me; I feel like I’ve read something I shouldn’t have, ventured into forbidden territory. Now, I’ll tiptoe back over to my own familiar, comforting bookshelf where I can get lost in the pages of a thrilling narrative.
⭐️⭐️⭐️
This review is based on an ARC of Universality provided by Netgalley.
