Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“When your neighbour is going mad,” writes Fintan O’toole in his new book, “it is only reasonable to want to understand the source of their distress.” In Heroic Failure, the Irish journalist and cultural commentator sets out to anatomise the Brexit mindset. What is it about the English imagination, he asks, that made the idea of leaving the EU seem sensible to so many? For O’toole, the “whole sorry episode” is rooted in self-pity and self-harm, said Philip Collins in The Times. Denied the “spoils” of victory in the Second World War, the English have increasingly taken refuge in a narrative of victimhood – a “strange sense of imaginary oppression”, in which the EU is the sinister invading overlord. This is a “pitilessly brilliant book”, said Jonathan Coe in The Irish Times. O’toole is a “virtuoso” who illuminates “the darkest corners of the English imagination”.

I couldn’t agree less, said Michael Fitzpatrick on Spiked. This book is merely the latest expression of liberal scorn for the “vulgar masses who voted for Brexit”. O’toole’s central thesis is the idea that opposition to the EU is a form of psychosis, rooted in “sadomasochism and imperial nostalgia”. All he offers in support of this strange theory are “cursory” readings of various films and novels, including The Italian Job and Fifty Shades of Grey, along with a few broad comments about British history. The Brexit cause is sneeringly caricatured as an alliance between Sunderland and Gloucestershire, between “people with tattooed arms and golf-club buffers”. Trying to understand Brexit through O’toole’s eyes is “like asking Nigel Farage to outline all the wonderful benefits of the EU”, said Eilis O’hanlon on Reaction. This book represents 200-plus pages of Anglophobic “loathing”, stretched out with “outré analogies”.

Heroic Failure is certainly a “mischievous” and “provocative” book, said Christopher Kissane in the FT. But its arguments are well made. O’toole is very good at analysing the “camp” style of Brexiteers such as Boris Johnson, who wave serious economic objections away with “references to Dunkirk or the Blitz”, while presenting “bans” on bendy bananas as vital “tests of national freedom”. My strongest reservation, said Philip Collins, is that this “is a comforting and luxurious read for people who already agree. O’toole tells you what you think already better than you could say it yourself. Unless, of course, you don’t think it already, in which case he is unlikely to persuade you.”