ABSTRACT
All three of the Anthony Cartwright novels looked at in this chapter are about the impact of deindustrialisation on the West Midlands and, specifically, on the writer’s hometown of Dudley; they explore how such a physical manifestation of neoliberalism is mediated through working-class experience and collective memory. The chapter positions Cartwright’s texts as interventions into debates concerning class, identity, race and racism, political agency, and neoliberal discourse. It provides a reading of how a contemporary British writer has sought to register change through the articulation of a structure of feeling which is captured by engaging with the legacies of deindustrialisation as a defining experience. The chapter, therefore, examines how the dynamics of deindustrialisation are felt, lived, and understood by the contemporary working class. Cartwright’s texts engage with the socio-historical shifts of change and rupture but also, and importantly, continuity and endurance. While they often map political and social defeat onto their working-class characters, this does not equate to a definitive figuration of destruction or disappearance of class and working-class subjectivity. The chapter will explore trauma, the regional novel, realism, race, form and Thatcherism, New Labour, and the presence of the far right within working-class communities; it focuses specifically on Cartwright’s first three novels: The Afterglow (2004), Heartland (2009), and How I Killed Margaret Thatcher (2012).
