18ck 's review for:

Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain by Fintan O'Toole

5.0

---

Reading books about brexit is a sort of masochistic act for a lot of us now. Britain has thrown itself off a cliff and all we can do as we wait to hit the rocks below is read about why we all did it. Fintan O'Toole does a great job of explaining how brexit came about. He's used to writing about nationalism so he has a pretty nuanced view of the psychodramas of the various national identities in play. English nationalism, of course, is the main driver of brexit. He think of ourselves simultaneously as underdogs and as Top Nation. He has some good points to make about the national stations of the cross: Agincourt, Dunkirk, the Italian Job. He's writing in the age of Theresa May and still has some hope left. At the end, he tries to "imagine a future beyond self-destruction" but even that hope has withered now and all we have left is a giant lorry park and some laughing hedge fund managers.