Any Human Power

Manda Scott (September, £18.99)

Any Human Power has the feel of a book that’s landed at just the right moment, before the story it tells is overtaken by real-world events. As in the novel, MPs are crossing the floor of the House. Looking up from a chapter in which the Prime Minister announces a general election, one finds that Rishi Sunak has done the same. The sentence “There is no universe in which any party dumps its leader five weeks before going to the polls” appears almost verbatim in the next day’s papers.

As prescient as all this is, Scott isn’t writing about the 2024 general election. Any Human Power is about nothing less than a revolution: how an intergenerational coalition, with Gen-Z in the driving seat, goes about making a concerted bid for political power, and the huge cultural clash that follows.

Sparked into existence by a viral social media post from Sussex teenager Kaitlyn, and spearheaded by her family, the movement galvanises a generation who are passionate about the environment, sustainability, fairness and ethical living and fed up with the system that is wrecking their world and stealing their futures.

These are people who learned how to form communities through online gaming and have developed their own ideas about representative democracy. They’ve also grown up with concepts like bots and doxing and can hold their own against the Establishment on the battleground of the Internet. Scott’s antennae are finely attuned to their concerns and their priorities, depicting with intelligence and insight the kind of decision-making processes they might go through when translating their ethical stances into real-world politics.

Strangely, Scott initially seemed to be setting up a very different kind of story. The actual central character is grand-matriarch Alanna, or Lan, who has died but is barred from passing over to the other side by a promise she made to her grandson, Finn, always to look out for him.

From the realm of the Between, and advised by a crow-spirit, Lan watches over the extended family she has left behind. It’s only when 14-year-old granddaughter Kaitlyn inadvertently kicks off a #metoo-style controversy that we start to get an idea of where Scott is going with this. Kaitlyn, Finn and their family are at the epicentre of a social and political shift, and when Lan sees disaster looming ahead she has to use what little incorporeal influence she has to try to avert it. But without knowing what effect her interventions will have, how can she know the right thing to do?

Much as the novel’s politics are humanised by centring them on a family, the campaign run by these digitally-savvy but inexperienced young people is being grounded and assisted by ancient wisdom. From the afterlife, Lan is helping to nudge things along through dream-conversations or strategically placed crows. Although only a handful of people at the top realise it, at times the revolution is being guided by vision-quests.

Scott’s imagination has brought forth a radical manifesto, a holistic ideal in which seeing oneself in relation to eternity matters just as much as housing or transport policies, and she’s done it in a way that makes it seem as though it’s only five minutes in the future. In a novel that explores how we live, our roles in a rapidly changing society and our responsibilities to the planet and each other, this fusion of the ancient and the very young is key. It’s the ones in the middle, who have clung on so long to power and done so little with it, the author seems less impressed with.

 

ALASTAIR MABBOTT