The Memorisers and the language control of the 2020s

Author Rosemary Jenkinson on the problems with the publishing industry’s current obsession with identity and the wider policing of language.

Publishing has always been a vehicle for insurrectionary ideas, political critiques and the cathartic outworkings of the darkness in human nature. However, classics like The Doors of Perception, Lolita, A Clockwork Orange, The Wasp Factory, The Bonfire of the Vanities and American Psycho have long been left behind. These days, ideas in novels have been superseded by the affiliations of the writers themselves. A writer is now a role model for their ‘community’ and expected to speak on its behalf.

I could easily be shoehorned into representing women or the Northern Irish Protestant minority, but I reject those constraints entirely, and with my new dystopian novel, The Memorisers, I tried to make sense of our bellicose and manipulative world. The inspiration came from two trips to Ukraine in 2022 that allowed me to envision a Belfast destroyed by war. Ukraine was also a window into how the West participates in World War III.

It seems that George Orwell got it entirely wrong with his predictive novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. In his vision, Oceania (the West) wages perpetual war against Eurasia and Eastasia. But in our era, the West promulgates the view that we are never at war. In this fake narrative, the UK only ‘assists’ countries like Ukraine with weapons when in fact our special forces and intelligence service are operating there on a daily basis. As we can see, language is key to perpetrating the illusion.

Russia’s close ally is China and my novel imagines them uniting to invade the whole of Europe. In recent months, this has become less fanciful with the capture of Chinese nationals in Donetsk. My prediction of America’s isolationist stance has also been borne out by Trump’s policies.

The restrictive world I’ve portrayed isn’t radically different from our own. It’s been alarming to witness recent public-order laws passed by Westminster making it more difficult to stage protests. Moreover, my conception of ‘WordCrime’ takes its cue from non-criminal hate crime incidents, where people can be arrested for a supposedly seditious tweet. It seems illogical that some words and flags are considered more dangerous than others simply because they reach a larger demographic. For instance, we have the ridiculous scenario in which Mo Chara of the Northern Irish hip-hop group Kneecap was charged with a terrorist offence for flying the Hezbollah flag when the flags of proscribed terrorist groups are flying in the very streets of Belfast where he lives. The reason, of course, for the police turning a blind eye to the Belfast paramilitaries who erect these flags is because they’re afraid of sparking riots. Pursuing a celebrity is a much safer affair.

Language control is all too prevalent in the twenty-first century and it’s not only our tweets that are policed. In our society, they/them pronouns were initially espoused to rebel against sexual norms, but the attempt by some organisations like the NHS to shame those who believe in biological sex into using preferred pronouns has flown in the face of free speech. The Memorisers has let me satirise this imposed non-binarism through an autocratic leader who adopts they/them pronouns in order to seem all things to all people.

Political buzzwords dominate our society – words like accessibility, equity, inclusion. The promotion of DEI culture has paradoxically resulted in less diversity in opinion. The majority of writers I meet are deeply unhappy with the bias towards diversity in publishing where success is predicated on an accident of birth, not talent. Thanks to the elevation of writers from specific backgrounds – whether through disability, colour, gender or class – the field of literature is no more a meritocracy than when male writers ruled the roost. Orwell's quote, 'All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others', still applies to literature.

Narcissistic self-description is the trend of the day, but to be honest, if I had to label myself as a post-youth misophonic androgyne to achieve acclaim, I’d never want to lift a pen again. Labelling isn’t a new phenomenon, but it has been pushed to extremes. Nabokov said back in the Sixties that he refused ‘to find merit in a novel just because it is by a brave black in Africa or a brave white in Russia – or by any representative of any single group’.

My novel was forged by a personal experience that highlights another problem in publishing. Four years ago, a publishing company rescinded their offer to publish my earlier novel due to an article I wrote on writing about The Troubles. They essentially cancelled our agreement because they disapproved of one opinion I expressed and were influenced by social-media posts against me.

This kind of cancel culture is indicative of our authoritarian times. It affects those of all political persuasions, from Graham Linehan to Gary Lineker, although it has to be said that progressive politics has been a particularly egregious culprit in suppressing speech. Powerful organisations keep bowing to public pressure and it’s highly worrying when publishers drop the work of politically engaged writers. Writers are almost ‘disappeared’ for telling the truth, as they are in The Memorisers. My fictional banning of books reflects writers who have had their books or book tours cancelled, such as Kate Clanchy, Gillian Philip, Jeanine Cummins, Julie Burchill, Neil Gaiman… The list is endless and surely it can’t be a coincidence that it contains more women than men.

The best antidote to language control is to have more novels show the censoriousness around us. One rare example, alongside my own, is 2023’s Yellowface, which deals with the hypocrisy of publishers. I fervently hope that new writers will transgress moral boundaries and refuse to be role models for a segment of society. The time to act is now before the rise of AI leads to more prescribed schools of thought. In the words of Bob Dylan:

‘Come writers and critics
Who prophesise with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again.’

Rosemary Jenkinson is a poet, playwright and short story writer. She is currently Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Queen’s University. Her debut novel, The Memorisers, was published in January 2025 by Arlen House and is available from Blackwells and Kennys.ie with free international postage.