At dinner parties in Camden, Haringey, Hackney, or Southwark, according to Christina Patterson, the writer for the Independent, you hear people saying things about politics like ‘what we need is a clearer narrative’. I was delighted that she added: ‘I’m still not sure what narrative means.’
I do not go to parties in Haringey or Hackney (not invited), but the demand for narrative has reached even my well padded corner. In the Guardian Madeleine Bunting, from her own family supper table, wrote about the Scottish independence horror, remarking: ‘Scroll through comments on blogs, and what emerges is an unattractive narrative of the English being ignored.’
If narrative just meant ‘telling tales’, I wouldn’t mind. We are used to politicians doing that. But those who use the term assume an air of possessing a conceptual insight that we poor onlookers lack. I had hoped that the vogue for narrative had evaporated.
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