Joy, fear and regret in contemporary Britain

For two and a half years, as Britain adjusted from normality to the most disorienting collective trauma of our lifetimes, Will Ashon trawled the country for strangers’ stories. He wrote letters to random addresses, went hitchhiking, talked to the drivers and followed chance connections in pursuit of glimpses into other people’s lives. Once they had consented to speak, he asked some to tell him a secret and others to answer a question from a list. The resulting anonymous confessions, reminiscences, philosophical reflections and anecdotes were obtained via interviews, emails or voice recordings. They form a quietly remarkable study of the state of the nation, in which fragments piece together into a mosaic portrait of Britain’s soul, with all its dreams, regrets, fears, joys and private vulnerabilities.

The Passengers presents 180 of these voices, beginning with a single line from a conversation – ‘I want to stay and stay and never go’ – and expanding gradually to monologues four pages long in the middle of the book, then contracting again until it resolves with a return to that opening line. Some are raucous or ebullient, others fragile and forlorn. Ashon himself barely figures – only the speakers’ occasional use of the second person reminds us they are addressing someone – but anyone who has read his cultural history of Epping Forest, Strange Labyrinth, or his study of the Wu-Tang Clan, Chamber Music, will recognise the characteristic empathy and curiosity that serve here to elicit intimacies from strangers.

Like the anonymous Victorians interviewed by Henry Mayhew, these voices, by turns plaintive and optimistic, ring out from the page. Someone acknowledges that losing their loved mother created space in which they could at last form a relationship with their father. (The speaker’s gender is not always apparent.) A man who has had suicidal thoughts is frustrated by the damaging expectations of ‘masculinity’: ‘Everybody has a poker face on in regards to life, really.’

An Iraqi refugee uses a metal detector on beaches along the south coast to find people’s lost jewellery. A jigsaw-puzzle maker loves his work and is delighted that his son will carry on the family business. Someone, after 40 years, has just remembered being sexually abused as a child. Another, long estranged from their violent, obsessive-compulsive mother, who repeatedly washed her hands for fear of infection, is now forced by the pandemic to think of her again with greater understanding. A devout Muslim woman defies media stereotypes about her community’s insularity: ‘I like people who are different from me because I like to learn from them. If you’re the same as me, there’s no room for growth.’ Belief in determinism and the absence of free will helps someone else to enjoy life, because they’re ‘just a passenger... on this journey, not in the driving seat’, accepting there is nothing to our existence but ‘love, empathy, compassion, the beautiful calmness of being a human being, I suppose’.

The Passengers gains force by increments, until it becomes a momentous assertion of our shared humanity that reminds us how much we have in common with strangers at a time when so much online discourse encourages division and fear of perceived enemies. It is a book that fosters connection, reminding us that most people can relate to the private pains of others, and we are all less alone than we fear. In doing so, the book performs a valuable service; and as a candid document of how it feels to live in Britain today, it could do the same for future historians.