A decade-old novel is worth reconsidering for how it addresses the questions of modernity
Permit me a moment’s caricature: the high modern state’s post-war collapse, a certain story goes, has had wide-ranging and devastating consequences for the public psyche. The disappearance of a state characterised by muscular industrial policy, state investment in infrastructure, and high levels of public participation in political and civic life has resulted in a growing and damaging distance between citizens and their elites, and a population with restricted political imaginations and increasingly fragile and insular identities.
In fact, these socio-political economic convulsions, the story sometimes continues, ultimately gave rise to the most significant political phenomena of 2010s Britain: the rise of national populism, the vote to leave the European Union, and a gradual re-opening of the conversation about the state’s proper role in national life. Often absent from this version of events, however, are the bureaucrats and mandarins making up the shifting network of institutions of a state said to have undergone dramatic convulsions in the last half-century. As a result, when I recently encountered a book attempting, in the form of a novel, to treat the role of the bureaucratic psyche in high modernity’s collapse, I was intrigued.
The book in question is The Planner by Tom Campbell (an aide of Boris Johnson’s during the latter’s tenure as Mayor of London) and tells the story of James, a promising young town planner for Southwark Council. Now, given that The Planner was first published in 2014, and is set at around the same time, this isn’t a straightforward book review. Instead this is an attempt to convince you, gentle reader, that in-spite of its distinctly pre-Brexit feel, The Planner is still well worth your time, even more than a decade later. In particular, through its portrait of James’ professional identity crisis, the book raises — but does not quite answer — questions about the state bureaucracy’s purpose in post-(high)modernity that remain pertinent today.
But first, a little background. James, for all his promise, is in a deep rut. His life, it seems, is a series of petty humiliations, characteristic of London-based local government work: endless, pointless meetings with “public affairs officers” and “known pricks” from TFL in drab, malfunctioning buildings; university friends earning buckets more in the private sector; an ex-girlfriend who has done nothing but clamber the social ladder since they broke up; mid-life roommates; no sex because of said mid-life roommates, etc. Irksome though these vexations are, however, they are all secondary to what is James’s central problem: his lack of purpose. You see, to his mind, James’s greatest misfortune is having been born two or three generations too late, so that he has become a planner in High Modernity’s wake. Long gone are the days when skilled planners were asked to dream big and have grand visions of the good life, that they could then expect to see imposed on others by the machinery of government. Long gone is the era that began with Baron Haussmann’s remolding of Paris and Cerdà’s reticulated imaginings, passed through Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse and the Abercrombie plan, and culminated with Robert Moses’s highways and bridges. By the time James finds his desk in the Southwark Council office, his profession has been reduced to taming and overregulating the visions of others, battling with and perpetuating a jungle of bureaucracy, and — horror of horrors — consulting with members of the public.
All of this has left James at a loss, lacking in purpose and self-respect, and largely watching from the sidelines as his richer, more urbane friends reap the benefits of London’s dynamic economy. Again, the problem is not just that James earns less than them; it is that he finds himself in a city at odds both with his nostalgia for well-planned, forcefully-imposed urban order and with the uninspiring certainties of public sector job progression. This is a London of boundary-defying art, dubious cocaine, easy hedonism, and cheerful profit-seeking; one that boasts no grand plans, but a great melée of little ones, all competing and cross-pollinating with one another. And it is a London deeply antagonistic to those, like contemporary planners, that would see this energy curbed and domesticated. Against this background, the plot’s main driver comes in the form of Felix Selwood, a mannered advertising agent, self-described Marxist, and friend-of-a-friend, who, having understood James’s quandary, dedicates himself to our hero’s model education. Felix, in other words, dedicates himself to teaching a young and frustrated planner how to live in a world that seems to have largely outgrown planning.
The book is interesting for its still relevant underlying political question: what are planners to do in post-(high)modernity?
And herein lies, to use a little nu-London worthy jargon, The Planner’s USP for readers in 2025. Beyond its probing and often funny depiction of a 21st century planning wonk’s struggle for de-castration, the book is interesting for its still relevant underlying political question: what are planners to do in post-(high)modernity? Or, in the broadest terms, what is the state’s proper role in this messy and fast-paced world?
A possible answer is floated during James’s date with Laura, an economist at the Treasury. Laura is sexy, sharp-tongued, but hopelessly trapped by her Cambridge-taught neoclassical lexicon and logic, and so can neither help taking for granted the antagonism between planners and city’s freewheeling dynamism, nor help plumping for the latter (“[you’re one] of those types that likes to go around distorting the market for his own opaque purposes?,” she asks James from across a glass of pub white wine). Her implied solution to his professional crisis, then, is just for him and his ilk to get out of the city’s way. “Just because you’re not pleased with something,” she continues, dismissing malfunctions like congestion, pollution, and urban crime that James cites to justify his profession’s existence, “it doesn’t necessarily follow that the state’s solution will make things any better. And quite often, it ends up making something else much worse.” There are many problems with this cliché, but most glaring is that vanishingly few people — and almost certainly not a Treasury bod like Laura — think that planners or the state have no legitimate role in national life. Everyone except the most hardline ideologues can think of a situation in which state-imposed order is justified (e.g., war, famine, outbreaks of epidemic disease, immigration, etc.), and so it is incumbent on Laura to explain why those listed by James do not count. And in not doing so, Laura (and by extension her worldview) fails to provide compelling answers to both James’s dilemma and to the broader question being posed through it.
Chirpy Felix’s alternative is better. Proudly belonging to some opaque Marxist denomination, Felix sees that in capitalist post-(high)modernity all that is solid melts into air, and he advises James to follow suit: “Stop thinking of yourself as a town planner”, he says, as they stand in a private football box, “and start thinking of yourself as a professional who works in the property sector with specific, highly sought after expertise in public policy.” This is, in a way, is suitably dialectical advice for a Marxist to offer: to flourish, he seems to say, James must transcend the antagonism between 21st century life and planning, by adopting a new identity fluid enough to synthesise the two. The state/market is so last century, and to survive in new London, a young person must learn to surf its shifting network of little plans, of tired bureaucrats, bitchy artistes, rugged property tycoons, and dreary quango employees.
Whether this is a suitable answer to the book’s overarching question is not clear (no spoilers but Campbell’s assessment appears to be “no”), and it is a question that continues to press those who share James’ sense of loss today. What role are planners — is the state — to play in High Modernity’s wake? How are people like James to rediscover a sense of purpose? And, returning to my opening theme, was the Brexit vote to “Take Back Control” merely an expression of fatuous nostalgia for a lost (and possibly imaginary) order? Or was it an opportunity to foster something new, be it along Felix-ish lines or not? These implicit questions, introduced with a light and amusing touch, are why The Planner continues to be worth your time in 2025. The old world passed out and choked on its vomit a while ago but here we still are today, waiting for a new one to be born.
Britain’s wonks and wonkettes still await their Dostoevsky or Flaubert or Joyce. But The Planner, with its acerbic quips, tight pacing, and still pressing questions will more than help them pass the time. Read it!
