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It’s in these stagnating tributaries of society, away from the flow of money and political discourse, that the hardest impact of Brexit is to be found. That’s no great surprise given that British literary fiction is dominated by middle class readers, writers and publishers, but it means that contemporary fiction related to Brexit can lack the viscerality at the heart of the issue, the knock-on effects on the vulnerable and impoverished whom society was already leaving behind long before the safety net of EU regeneration grants and employment protections is removed. The literary response to Brexit has focused mostly on – and been written by – the middle class.

The same west Walian mountains overlook Griffiths’ own Aberystwyth home, making him a writer drenched in the same landscape as the characters he draws so vividly from the community in which he lives. The vision is only there for a moment but it’s long enough for the trio, who barely know each other, to absorb it and for the experience to influence the paths of their lives profoundly.

Three people witness it as they make their way down the side of a Welsh mountain after an all-night rave: The figure of a woman floating in the air at the top of a ridge, surrounded by a glow in the dawn light. Not yet, anyway (but do check those pork pies).Ī miraculous vision is at the heart of Broken Ghost, the eighth novel by Liverpool-born, Wales-based writer Niall Griffiths. Not since the English Civil Wars has there been such an entrenched binary divide on the island of Britain and the country has rarely been more febrile and simmering outside actual wars than it is now, yet there don’t seem to have been any reports of a Gove-in-the-clouds, a shimmering Julia Hartley-Brewer gazing benevolently from the skies upon Letchworth Garden City or the face of Mark Francois appearing in a pork pie. Yet if anything was going to inspire some kind of divine apparition here then the national schism of Brexit would surely be it. In the more secular Ireland of the 21st century the moving statues were conspicuous by their absence – the stump of a newly-felled tree with a vaguely Marian outline caused a bit of a stir and prompted a minor bout of pilgrimage in Rathkeale, County Limerick, for a couple of weeks in 2009 but that was about as close as it got – but they’ve never really been much of a thing in largely Protestant Britain.įor a start most of our religious statuary was removed by the combined forces of Henry VIII and Oliver Cromwell and it’s hard to imagine any crisis, however great, prompting Greyfriars Bobby to scratch behind his ear or evoking a quick column-top twerk from Nelson.

Miraculous visions always increase during times of Irish hardship: in the 1980s barely a week seemed to go by without a statue of the Virgin Mary waving its hand, bowing its head or shedding a tear somewhere.