The boring apocalypse: The representation of flat affects in contemporary British pandemic novels

Abstract

In his 2021 opinion article in The New York Times, Adam Grant called the COVID-19 pandemic the ‘boring apocalypse’. Indeed, while pre-pandemic imaginaries of global pandemics tended to focus on spectacular killer viruses, for many people in the Global North, the challenge of the pandemic was, if not boredom, then a sense of recurring routine. Although the pandemic also created strong affects like fear and anger, this article will look at the ‘flat affects’ that grew out of the sense of stasis. The theoretical framework of the article is based on the thinking of Lauren Berlant. My theoretical reflection is followed by an analysis of three British novels written during the pandemic: Sarah Moss’ The Fell, Sarah Hall’s Burntcoat and Clare Pollard’s Delphi. I will, above all, focus on the representations of affective responses to the routines of the pandemic in the often overlooked private sphere.

Introduction

In his 10 December 2021 opinion article in The New York Times, organisational psychologist Adam Grant (2021) called the COVID-19 pandemic the ‘boring apocalypse’. After a year and a half of special measures, the proliferation of new strains was met with a shrug. Rob Nixon (2011) uses the term ‘slow violence’ to describe such crises, which unfold at such a gradual pace as to remain invisible until it is too late to take meaningful action. The same logic can be applied to the COVID-19 pandemic where the virus moved through populations before governments recognised its seriousness. The continuing slow violence of the pandemic, manifested in long COVID or mental health issues, has become visible only now, over 3 years after the beginning of the crisis.

If a crisis lasts for months and years, people enter a state of what Lauren Berlant (2011) termed ‘crisis ordinariness’. Berlant is not the only thinker to realise how we have come to accept the mundane presence of violence. On the basis of her anthropological research, Veena Das (2006) has called attention to how actual violence has come to permeate the ordinary in the form of rumours and sectarian conflict. Das demonstrates how the normalised acceptance of brutality can help incite extraordinary violence. Das’ work, thus, is alert to the very real threat of violence that hides under crisis ordinariness which Berlant discusses in the context of social unravelling in the Global North. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the slowness of the violence brought along ‘the disorder of time’ that ‘vacillates between crisis and the surreal monotony of an endless now’ (Kattago, 2021: 1410). This endlessness now was accompanied by an affective incoherence, as Berlant (2022: x) observed: ‘numbers spiked and dropped; outrage and numbness set in. Imaginations stopped trying or got massively creative’. ¹ The pandemic was an affective event in which many emotions collided: fear, anger and anxiety from different political sides. But there was also something much more mundane.

While pre-pandemic imaginaries of global pandemics tended to focus on spectacular killer viruses (Ebola, the plague or the early days of AIDS), for many people in the developed West, the challenge of COVID-19 was, if not boredom, then a sense of stasis, if they were lucky enough to be spared hospitalisation and death in their families. The pandemic unwound in days that blurred into each other, as a limited number of activities were possible within the confines of people’s homes. The pandemic’s ‘affective atmospheres’ (Anderson, 2014) were not necessarily dramatic, and mostly manifested themselves in anxiety, irritation or boredom. It is these minor flat affects that made up the affective fabric of the pandemic – yet they are not easily representable in a public discourse that requires eventfulness to be considered newsworthy. They thus have remained un- or under-narrated during and after the pandemic.

Fiction, however, grants unique access to this affective archive as it can capture the uneventful and at the same time tense affective atmosphere of crisis ordinariness. The historical importance of the understanding of affects created by crisis ordinariness cannot be understated as we are still surrounded by a permacrisis. This boredom of the crisis is what pre-COVID pandemic novels could not imagine, because stasis defies our traditional crisis scenarios. This is why I analyse novels written during the pandemic.

This article will first draw a parallel with the literary representations of the 1918–1920 influenza pandemic, ² the most famous previous pandemic to be narrated obliquely. It will then build a theoretical framework from Lauren Berlant’s engagement with the flat affects of crisis ordinariness. In the final section, I will focus on three British novels, written during the pandemic, about scenes of intimacy created by the lockdown: Sarah Moss’ The Fell (2021), Sarah Hall’s Burntcoat (2021) and Clare Pollard’s Delphi (2022). I will focus on the representations and representability of minor flat affects in the context of a world changing beyond recognition.

Ghostly literary pandemics

Priscilla Wald’s (2008) analysis of ‘outbreak narratives’ and how they are traditionally plotted demonstrates that they tend to be built around similar formulaic tropes: discovery of an infection, global contagion and containment by scientists and doctors. Wald warns that the formula and the expectations it creates can hamper effective crisis response. This formula also emerged during COVID-19 times and may have made people look for confirmation of their expectations, not the unfolding reality.

The way in which diseases are represented and narrated matters, as shown by Susan Sontag (1990 [1989]: 71) who notes ‘the near total historical amnesia about the influenza pandemic of 1918–1919’. The most useful takeaway from Sontag is her conclusion: ‘that even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectations constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity’ (1990 [1989]: 93). By 2020, this type of crisis ordinariness had become normalised, but COVID-19 also destabilised our sense of reality and relationality in unique ways.

I draw a parallel with the Great Flu of 1918 because the flu was unspectacular yet lethal. Considering the flu’s devastation (an estimated 50 million dead across the world, compared to about 20 million who died in WWI), Elizabeth Outka (2020) invites us to ask why we do not have great literary representations of this pandemic, while there are evocative novels and poems about WWI. She believes that disease was probably perceived as less publicly grievable than heroic war death, and that the grief for the pandemic victims probably folded into mourning the war dead (Outka, 2020: 24). Yet the pandemic did not go unmarked in fiction owing to the sheer scope of its violence.

Outka (2020: 21) believes that the ‘absent presence’ of the influenza pandemic can be explained by the depth of trauma, which made memories of the pandemic ‘fragmented, silenced, yet obsessively remembered’. The resulting opaque fragments help us understand the complexity of human emotions and actions. Outka (2020: 2) argues that we should be looking for representations in ‘gaps, silences, atmospheres, fragments, and hidden bodies’, not expecting to find coherence and closure. Often what is not said can be evocative if we want to capture ‘a sensory and affective history of the pandemic’ (Outka, 2020: 7).

Outka analyses the fragmentary and plotless modernist texts that capture the pandemic and its affective costs. Her parallels to Katherine Ann Porter who almost died of the Great Flu are most useful. This experience lends haunting power to Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider. In discussing its hallucinatory scenes, Outka (2020: 53) observes that she ‘unsettles both place and time’, providing her readers with visceral access to a feverish mind. There are two other relevant parallels. First, Porter ‘captures the paradoxical mix of omnipresence and avoidance the pandemic introduced: it’s everywhere and yet it’s unnamed and either ignored or watched in silence’ (Outka, 2020: 60). COVID-19 was also everywhere and nowhere. Second and most relevant for this article is the observation that Porter does not mention the pandemic directly, but provides us with ‘the pandemic’s atmosphere’, part of the eeriness of which is derived from the threat’s ‘invisible, nonhuman, and eerily purposeless nature’ (Outka, 2020: 55). This seems pertinent in the case of COVID-19, which created its own affective atmospheres, but ones that lacked the added guilt and grief of the war period. Rather, the often unnamed, ghostly presence of the pandemic often manifested itself through flat affects.

Impasse and flat affect

For Berlant, one of the effects of being surrounded by permanent and interlocked crises is a sense of stasis. They were especially interested in situations where ‘the ordinary becomes a landfill for overwhelming and impending crises of life-building and expectation’ (Berlant, 2011: 3). This inability to imagine possible futures, however, does not kill, as people learn to ‘tread water’, to adjust and ‘to scramble for modes of living on’ (Berlant, 2011: 10, 8). People maintain their unrealisable fantasies to be able to believe that ‘they and the world “add up to something”’ (Berlant, 2011: 2). This fantasy, in other words, is both false and vital.

Such a situation fosters a sense of impasse, ‘a stretch of time in which one moves around with a sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic’ (Berlant, 2011: 4). This suspension of ordinary time ‘marks a delay that demands activity’: we can carry on but need not (Berlant, 2011: 199). The glitch in the ordinary shows us that many stable structures of our life are fragile at best: ‘we are compelled to understand that nothing from above or on the outside is holding the world together solidly’ (Berlant, 2022: 24). This in turn forces us to focus less on structures and more on the infrastructures of living, the daily routines that allow us to get by.

Taylor Shey (2020) builds a parallel between the impasse and the intolerable. Paul de Man’s ideas on allegories of reading, ³ Shey (2020: 198) argues, make it possible to introduce figurative distance to our engagement with impasse or the intolerable present. Shey (2020: 200) concludes,

we blame ourselves for tolerating the intolerable and for denying the impasse of the present, even as we can’t see any way of doing so. But denial isn’t really a denial when it’s recognized as such; it’s a figure that enables us to read an impossibility that would otherwise be illegible.

Fiction can create this figurative distance and represent impasses and encourage reflection, if not outright resistance. Berlant characterises living in an impasse to inhabiting ‘a space of time lived without a narrative genre’ (2011: 199). That is, there is no formula to guide our action and we have to develop one ourselves. This is useful in analysing pandemic affects where there was no established genre description of the daily routines and where heroism was expressed by staying at home and avoiding human contact.

One option is to classify our pandemic experiences as what Berlant (2011: 6) defines as ‘situation tragedy’ in which ‘the subject’s world is fragile beyond repair, one gesture away from losing all access to sustaining its fantasies’. This is like what Paul K. Saint-Amour (2015) and E. Ann Kaplan (2020) have called the ‘pre-traumatic stress disorder’. It marks ‘anxieties about what has not yet happened’ (original italics), where at times ‘it may be helpful to acknowledge that, given the situation, panicking may be appropriate’ (Kaplan, 2020: 81). Saint-Amour writes about the shadow of conflict between the two world wars; Kaplan about the anxieties created by the climate crisis, but the concept also describes the affects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Such pandemic atmospheres were often expressed in flat affect. Berlant (2015) adopts this term from psychiatry where it refers to the expressionlessness of psychiatric patients. They use it to characterise the underperformance of emotions that disrupts ‘the presumption that important emotions deserve expression’ (Berlant, 2015: 199). In their usage, Berlant seeks alternatives to the discourse of trauma in connection with which flat affect is often identified. Instead, they are interested in relational and rhetorical possibilities opened up by withheld emotion. ⁴

This is particularly relevant in our emotionalised societies. We expect what is important to leave an unambiguous mark. We just cannot place flat or under-emotional affect in our expected patterns of cultural intelligibility. The failure to show or to perform affect makes the subject illegible, but can also reveal ‘something stuck, neutral or withheld in relationality’ (Berlant, 2015: 193, 195). The flat affects are often contradictory, incoherent low-key affects: ⁵ animatedness, envy, irritation, anxiety, paranoia, disgust and ‘stuplimity’, Sianne Ngai’s coinage that brings together awe and boredom (Ngai, 2005).

Another term introduced by Berlant (2022: x) is useful for discussing the pandemic experience: ‘nonsovereign relationality’ or, more playfully, ‘inconvenience of other people’ to mark the fact that the ‘sensory ordinary of the world’ brings us into contact and conflict with other people. This type of contradictory affective response emerged during the pandemic when contacts with other people were both eagerly awaited and profoundly irritating when they refused to comply with our expectations of the normal (in masking, social distancing etc.). Yet this very ‘pressure of coexistence’ forced us to react and to adjust and thus became a form of attachment (Berlant, 2022: 3, 6). The tension between friction and relationality makes up the fabric of human connection.

Pandemic in a flat key

The three British novels analysed below are set in different circumstances. The nameless narrator in Pollard’s (2022) Delphi is a middle-class university instructor of classics who lives in London with her husband and sickly son. Hall’s (2021) Burntcoat focuses on a recognised sculptor, Edith, who spends the pandemic with her new lover, a Turkish immigrant, in her converted warehouse-studio in Scotland. Moss’ (2021) The Fell brings together four narrative points of view during the pandemic lockdown in the Lake District: those of furloughed waitress, Kate, her teenage son Matt, retired cancer survivor Alice and rescue worker Rob. The two first novels focus on the social groups that did not lose their livelihoods, while Kate in The Fell is economically strained. In Moss’ novel, nobody gets sick, while in Hall’s and Pollard’s novels we see infection and even death (although the infection described by Hall is more dramatic than COVID-19). Although Moss is the only author to use multiple narrators, all three show different vulnerabilities exposed by the pandemic. All three also steer away from sensational emotions in their representations and, instead, focus on the minor flat minor affects.

The central tension of Moss’ novel is whether Kate, an avid hiker, will break the strict quarantine. Kate is not a COVID-19 denier, but simply frustrated and decides to go for a hike. The novel conveys the boredom and the human cost of both rules and breaking them. There are no villains and no heroes, just ordinary people making decisions that affect more people than themselves. The claustrophobia of the pandemic isolation is increased by the interior monologues of four characters. These contain memories of conversations, but there are no direct, interpersonal interactions. The setting also remains eerily unpopulated by other characters beyond the four narrators.

In Pollard’s novel, the central crisis is the tension between the narrator’s obsession with divination and her domestic micro-crises, which derive from her son’s fragility and her strained marriage. This novel gives most space to the frictions of the everyday. Yet it also has more human contact and nonsovereign relationality. This leads to a direct representation of COVID-19, missing in The Fell: the virus contracted from a child leads to the death and hospitalisation of the elderly after a misguided Christmas celebration. The narrator also falls ill and self-isolates in the family home. Narrative fragmentation is created less by descriptions of fever than by ancient divination practices. As the narrator puts it, they ‘are a form of daydreaming, of dragging the future a little closer’ (Pollard, 2022: 4). Yet the narrator dreads what is to come, because of the almost apocalyptic atmosphere of uncertainty that characterises today’s crisis ordinariness.

Hall also chooses a fragmented structure. We experience true temporal dislocation, as the narrator, Edith, moves from the narrative present, where she is preparing to die while completing a sculpture to honour the pandemic dead, to her childhood, and to her passionate love affair during a pandemic and to caring for the dying lover. This disjointed narrative reveals Edith’s formative experience of learning to live with her mother after the latter’s stroke, the development of her creative practice and her various experiences of intimacy. Of the three novels, this is the most physical and sensory, as both passion and the disintegration of body and mind are given vivid life. This is the only novel where both the disease’s ravages and the burden of care work are given extensive space.

In the following analysis, I will focus on the affective atmospheres and flat affects of the pandemic. First, I will trace the representation of the pandemic special measures. Second, my analysis will move to the situation tragedies represented and the affects created, with special focus on minor flat affects. My discussion will be attentive to the sense of crisis ordinariness, with its fragile balance of everyday livability and unlivability.

Crisis ordinariness and the new normal

COVID-19 emerged in a world that was accustomed to dystopian thinking and interspersed crises that had already created a stunned numbness of crisis ordinariness. All three novels capture the unreality of the early pandemic and the difficulty of describing it, as it lacked a narrative genre, in Berlant’s (2011: 199) terms. Hall’s narrator Edith reflects on the phrase ‘strange times’, which ‘we would all use, again and again, until it was devoid of meaning’ (2021: 93). Alice, the elderly neighbour in Moss’ novel, muses that ‘nothing feels real any more’ (2021: 19). This affect, the novels suggest, comes from living in times estranged by the constant chatter of the emotion-packed 24/7 news cycle. In Pollard’s novel, in fact, the narrator feels that TV and lived reality have fused: ‘Everything that wasn’t TV is TV now’ (2022: 30).

Yet for a person caught in an anxious daily routine, treading water and fearing to drown any minute, the pandemic comes almost as a sort of relief: ‘But in a way I am also thrilled, actually! We are so bored of our unreal lives it is a change, at least; it is history happening’ (Pollard, 2022: 18). The pandemic is the glitch that promises a temporary break. When the routine sets in, the narrator reverts to calling it, following Zadie Smith, ‘The Great Humbling’ (Pollard, 2022: 144). The expectation that the global crisis would create a meaningful change is crushed, as the Global North, bored, turns on its TVs and goes shopping online. The new normal is quite similar to the old normal, just lacking the attachments created by everyday contact.

Hall’s narrator, Edith, is almost happy in the lockdown, because this happens at the beginning of an intense romantic relationship: ‘to be trapped with a lover is a boon; it has the intensity of a dream’ (2021: 99). But it is not only this. She has lived at a social distance all her life. Living in isolation was nothing new to her and seemed to promise a change, as it did to Pollard’s narrator: ‘I liked it. Part of me enjoyed the crisis, I admit. There was relief, almost, in the promised worst’ (Hall, 2021: 155). To people uneasily expecting the end of the world, a disaster takes away the anxiety of waiting.

Moss’ novel is the most scathing about the crisis measures, because they affect the livelihoods of the characters. Most of the rebellious commentary comes from Kate who is incredulous that simple things like going on a hike would be banned in a democratic country. She is the only character to voice explicitly the strain that isolation puts on mental health: ‘She forgets everything these days, stands to reason that when you deprive people of external stimulus their brains slow down, almost a survival strategy’ (Moss, 2021: 25). Alice also observes,

social distancing, whoever came up with that, there’s not so much that’s less social than acting as if everyone’s unclean and dangerous, though the problem of course is that they are, or at least some of them are and there’s no way of knowing. (Moss, 2021: 18)

This is typical of Moss’ novel, in which the griping of characters is juxtaposed with an awareness of the broader social picture. Although the characters are isolated in their narratives, they cherish the sociality they see fraying because of the special measures. Kate and Matt take groceries to Alice, Alice refuses to report Kate to the authorities, and Rob goes on the rescue mission, despite having to sacrifice her own limited time with her daughter. Although people are isolated in The Fell, they are most willing to make small personal sacrifices for others.

The relative excitement of the beginning of the pandemic wanes as rules become more rigid and erratic. Pollard’s narrator ironically decrees: ‘Thou shalt work from home; thou shalt go back into your office before you bankrupt Pret’ (2022: 145). She captures not just the inconsistency of the messaging, but also the cynical ways in which the needs of businesses were often placed above those of individuals.

Pollard’s narrator reflects on how the pandemic changes attitudes: ‘I used to actively enjoy the feeling of anonymity in a city, when anonymity was an opportunity for rebellion or adventure. It’s the sense of anonymously conforming I find so precisely grotesque, as though I’m consenting to my own erasure’ (2022: 84). What is relevant here are the contradictory affects: acceptance, annoyance, irritation.

The lockdown creates its new normal, as Alice remarks:

There’s nothing she can do, she reminds herself, which could be the motto of the last six months, and the way things are looking also the next six months, and who knows about the six months after that. A person can doubtless live like this indefinitely, the background murmur of dread only a little louder week by week, month by month – well, that’s obvious, isn’t it, people don’t die of dread, not even imprisonment, or at least they do but not directly from being shut away, from lack of access to healthcare and poor diet and suicide and violence and many of the reasons that put them there in the first place, shame on her for comparing her comfy house, mortgage paid off, with her kind neighbours and her garden, to a prison. (Moss, 2021: 99–100)

This extract reveals a series of interspersed affects: boredom, fatalism, anxiety, shame, resignation. These musings are accompanied by a self-awareness about privilege. As Alice acerbically reproaches herself, ‘there’s a reason they don’t write protest anthems about well-off retired people feeling a bit sad’ (Moss, 2021: 20). Hall, too, mentions the underprivileged many but they are absent from the novels. These imagined others help the characters feel lucky and maintain their cruel optimist fantasies.

Hall’s narrator, Edith, observes the appearance of the new normal in a disjointed manner:

Contingency planning. Social tracking. Herd control. The picture of the pathogen – orange and reticulated – has become as recognizable as the moon. Children sketch it in science lessons, the curious arms, proteins and spikes. The civic notices listing symptoms, and the slogans, look vintage. (Hall, 2021: 92–93)

In the early days of the pandemic, the image of the red virus cell came to fill the representational gap, factually correct but conveying nothing about the lived reality. The tedium of the rote announcements gradually acquires a patina of ordinariness. Hall conveys these sensations in a flat affect that expresses the numb monotony of days.

Yet Burntcoat is the only novel of the three that records the fresh awareness of nature that filled the pause created by the cessation of human activity: ‘It’s amazing, all the birdsong. So quickly they’ve taken over’ (Hall, 2021: 100). This was something many people across the world observed: when the mass of people left cities, nature made familiar places newly strange. Edith and her lover Halit try to create their separate peace apart from the woes of the world:

We planted tomatoes in the yard, pretending we were on an island. People our age were sick. . . . It was so hard to believe, when our bodies were flourishing. The city was very quiet, but faintly, in the distance, we could hear sirens on the main road to the hospital. (Hall, 2021: 101–102)

The novel captures the small fleeting pleasures of the pandemic in daily routine and in love, while never allowing us to forget the hum of crisis just out of sight, but inevitably encroaching on the private isolation.

Pollard’s novel, in contrast, conveys the narrator’s ennui. She muses on how the Internet has replaced religion, a panoptic god that surveils us:

Switching on a light, buying a friend a coffee, pulling on a T-shirt, driving to school pick-up, buying raspberries out of season, watching a panel show with no black people – with almost every daily action I contribute to world misery. If good is not to harm others, then I live within a system that has made goodness impossible. (Pollard, 2022: 25)

This is the world of crisis ordinariness that has filled people’s minds with false anxieties. The small acts of kindness of Moss’ novel do not exist here, as most interaction takes place in the synthetic affective public sphere where connection is illusory.

As a writer, Pollard’s (2022: 29–30) narrator comments on the difficulty of writing about the actual boring reality of lockdown experience:

a writer will never be able to truly capture lockdown because they will never be able to truly capture with the right amount of granular detail the sheer number of television shows that people watch. . . . it won’t get anywhere near the full scope of it, what it means to live more than six hours a day in fake worlds in which you can’t touch or smell or intervene, only watch scripted fates happen to people who can’t heed your warnings, before turning over in the evening to watch MPs bullshit their way through a daily briefing in which they try to pretend we don’t have the worst death toll in Europe, before turning back to Netflix.

TV’s fake reality overtakes the real, as the latter has lost its sensory richness and the abrasive attachment that comes from daily interaction. This results in an endless atemporal impasse in which it is hard to distinguish the trivial from the important.

This impasse in the experiential world is also commented on in other novels. In The Fell Matt muses, ‘there is a stillness in the house he hasn’t known for weeks, a sense of space that used to be normal’ (Moss, 2021: 6). Silence has been made strange by the loss of sensory stimuli. Kate, too, re-assesses her previous opinions: ‘she takes it all back now, the boredom, it was human contact, it was real life’ (Moss, 2021: 26). Boredom, the dominant affect in The Fell before Kate’s accident, is now all-encompassing, made more unbearable by the invisibility of the slow violence of the pandemic.

All three novels thus take place in a world that has already been exhausted by crisis ordinariness. The arrival of the disaster disrupts the ordinary and creates an intense, if temporary, feeling of living through history, scary but at the same time exhilarating. This affective peak, though, is quickly replaced by a boring new normal, as the crisis once again becomes ordinary. These affects appear particularly flat against the emotional social media storytelling.

Situation tragedies

Most of the situation tragedies in the three novels concern domestic routines that are profoundly ordinary, yet new when the rest of the world falls away. Pollard’s narrator observes that ‘Tragedy is all about Unity of Place. This year every family gets its own tidy tragedy. A small cast of actors, and special media as the chorus’ (Pollard, 2022: 36). Pollard sets her situation tragedy up on the first page of the novel: ‘So it is that, somehow, one winter night, I find myself standing in my kitchen, hissing shrilly at my husband: I don’t know if my son will even live to the middle age’ (2022: 1). This sentence is set after a longer musing on dystopian imaginaries, before the statement ‘Something can be melodramatic and true at the same time’ (Pollard, 2022: 1). This characterises the pandemic situation tragedy within the novel: fraying marriage, sickly child, hubris about pandemic measures, ingredients of a melodrama that, however, lack the requisite emotional legibility of sentimental storytelling. This situation tragedy is banal, recognisable and real.

Many of the routines that surround the situation tragedy are realised through the consumer economy. Pollard’s narrator is aware of the manufactured nature of her desires, but in a Berlantian vein, she hoards hopeful images about how the family’s lives add up to something: ‘like every girl brought up to be a good capitalist, I want to be the protagonist of my own life. I want to make a little plot for myself’ (2022: 45). The plot fails to materialise. Intimations of mortality abound in the prophecies that she fancies and in her constant fears about her son’s allergies, but the pandemic fails to add any deeper significance to the situation tragedy, which is recorded through flat affects.

The situation tragedies of The Fell are more momentous, as Kate is the only character in the three novels who defies the pandemic rules. Yet her decision is not a tragic gesture, rather an impulse. Despite her hiking experience, she has a serious injury. In her injury-induced delirium, she has a lengthy dialogue with a raven, the closest that these COVID-19 novels come to the hallucinatory writing of the Great Flu novels analysed by Outka (2020). The scenes in The Fell, though, are interlaced with situation tragedy, as the raven mocks Kate about the mistakes that she has made in her life. Her fall is not the true tragedy of her crisis ordinary life.

Hall’s narrator comments on the broader social situation tragedy: ‘Creative, restive acts, pastimes run amok, violence. There’d been a rush on pet-buying, and already animals were being dumped as the reality and expense of care became too much’ (2021: 102). The lockdown loneliness created a need for companionship, but pandemic era studies revealed overall stark differences in the care burdens shouldered by men and women (seen also in Pollard’s novel), as well as in the rise of domestic violence, as mounting tensions were released on the first available target.

Hall also observes other behaviours in response to the pandemic restrictions: ‘People flouted the rules and marched, protests were broken up; there were fines, arrests. It did not stop the gatherings’ (2021: 124). These protests, however, also lack heroic grandeur, similar to Kate’s lone act of senseless rebellion. Instead, the situation tragedy is revealed in the changed experience of space: ‘there was a new way of moving in the city, fleet, covered’ (Hall, 2021: 130). This also changed one’s relationship with the inconvenience of other people: ‘People were standing apart, silently, glancing up and checking each other, swaying and adjusting their position, like nervous cattle. The eyes above masks and scarves were tense, avoidant’ (Hall, 2021: 130). The friction of everyday interaction has become too tense to create any sociality.

The sense of the everyday also changed in the private sphere, manifest in changing laundry practices or increased alcohol intake. Anti-mask protests, Trump and Black Lives Matter, are duly noted, but the narrative reverts to the domestic situation tragedy in which making an omelette counts as an activity worth posting about on social media.

Yet because of the precarious economic situation of characters like Kate, there is no illusion of an exciting past, in contrast to the eventless present. The crisis ordinary had been wearing her out before the pandemic:

I have motivation, enough motivation to get out of bed every morning and get Matt off to school and go to work and come home and do the shopping and the cooking and pay the bills, that’s not nothing, that’s actually a whole lot, day after day, year after year. (Moss, 2021: 118)

Kate comes off as the character who has been treading water for years. This previous exhaustion makes Kate use the glitch in the impasse, the possibility of using her agency and asserting her right to roam. The only other character to use her agency for a direct and even violent act is Edith.

These everyday events are contrasted to the persistent question of how the present stasis contrasts with an apocalypse, a topic that is mentioned in all three novels. As Kate reflects,

one of the things we’re learning, we of the end times, is that humanity’s ending appears to be slow, lacking in cliffhangers or indeed any satisfactory narrative shape; characterised, for the lucky, by the gradual vindication of accumulating dread, which is entirely compatible with and sometimes a motive for buying stuff. (Moss, 2021: 117)

In this, she directly evokes pre-traumatic stress disorder, where the clarity of fear is a relief as it gives genre to one’s incoherent affects.

Pollard’s (2022: 71, 113) narrator is also apprehensive about the future and suffers from the pre-traumatic stress disorder, thinking about the end of the world in which Faust does not descend to hell but takes a job at Google. She still tries to muster sufficient cruel optimism to go on:

We have to live with this rising tide of future, leaking and sopping over everything, claiming cities and sectors, until we’re in the future, already – that dystopian future of surveillance, video calls and VR headsets, and viral epidemics spread by globalization, and the 24-hour news saying AI extinction event gene-modification the collapse of civilization. (Pollard, 2022: 1)

Punctuation breaks down at the end of the rant, conveying the narrator’s emotional and verbal exhaustion. Hall’s narrator, as an artist, thinks about representability, but through images broken into fragments.

I’ve looked at those images often, the spontaneous moments – which seem to freeze history, to make it, in a fixed moment, epic, still kinetic. . . . Frame by frame, it is all caught. Now. We are afraid. Now. We are suffering. Now. Our devastation begins. (2021: 105)

This gradual shifting within the everyday eventually leads to the breakdown of sociality: ‘Now. We are no longer human. Now. We fight unambiguously, to save, to survive’ (Hall, 2021: 106). This is epitomised in a long scene in which an upper-middle-class man tries to jump the line for fresh bread and, after failing, attacks a woman. That scene is represented in traditional narrative prose, which makes the sharp punctuation above even more striking.

COVID-19 remains unnamed in the novels and hovers behind them, as in the flu novels described by Outka. Because of her awareness of prophecies, Pollard’s narrator is the only one to comment on the ghostly viral presence, a possibility that might or might not be there. In the car she thinks ‘with each soft breath Xander produces respiratory droplets that Jason and I inhale’ (Pollard, 2022: 162). Only later does she hear that her son’s friend had COVID-19 and Xander takes the infection to Jason’s parents’ Christmas party. It is our narrator, though, who gets seriously ill. Jason’s grandmother dies and one of their friends is intubated. The novel conveys the random and yet potentially lethal effect of the disease. Pollard, however, does not take the reader into the feverish hallucinations or loss of taste experienced by many. The disease remains ghostly even when experienced. It becomes truly visceral and abject only in Hall’s novel in which Edith’s lover dies, slowly and miserably.

This sense that the pandemic is but one of the crises the characters face is also evident in Pollard’s novel. The future is not something to be expected but feared. The situation tragedies provide some temporary respite from thinking about further apocalyptic futures. The domestic space allows the characters to maintain some fantasies, even fantasies of agency, about the world that they are unable to change. This is the true situation tragedy of crisis ordinariness.

Conclusion

All three novels end without clear closure: there are no celebrations of solidarity or calls for heroic defiance of docile acquiescence. Lives just go on. Edith is the one character facing death, but she has survived the pandemic. The Fell encapsulates the situation tragedy of Kate’s life in the last sentence: ‘Life then, to be lived, somehow’ (Moss, 2021: 182). She is rescued, but not from her life, and thus we know that after she recovers, she will be back in her daily crisis ordinariness, hoping that her son will not repeat her mistakes. This, of course, could be a cruel optimist fantasy. Pollard finishes her novel almost where she started, unable to shake her obsession with prophecy and her fear of the future.

The pandemic era novels show the range of flat affects that characterised the pandemic lockdown through different narrative means. They evoke the importance of cherishing the mundane infrastructures of daily life that help us live on, day by day. We should stress not only the impasse, but also the glitches that could open a space for alternatives and attachments, however unheroic. This might be one of the valuable lessons of the pandemic era.

More broadly, the three novels remind us of the importance of the everyday, with its eventlessness and flat affects. Attachments and small acts of kindness help us stay human in the context of ever-increasing slow violence that is but a step away from the actual violence described by Veena Das even in the Global North. ⁶ The everyday is the scene of what Berlant (2011: 263) has called ‘lateral politics’, in which people are ‘inventing life together, when they can’. They can potentially invent life out of the felt but often illegible affective atmospheres, like those of the pandemic. The starting point can be the friction created by the inconvenience of other people, expressed in the ‘biopolitical drama of getting in each other’s way’ (Berlant, 2022: 25). This friction can counter our socialisation in loneliness and political impotence.