In 1942, in the middle of the Second World War, the British government published Social Insurance and Allied Services. Originally conceived as a White Paper, or policy document, the Beveridge Report (named colloquially after its author, the civil servant William Beveridge) sold more than half-a-million copies upon its release by His Majesty's Stationer's Office, the state's official printer. Looking forward to peacetime, the document proposed a coordinated government response to combat the social ills of Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor, and Idleness, laying out a vision for the five pillars of the welfare state: social insurance, health, education, housing, and full employment. Few policy documents have excited such keen interest among the general public.

In The Promise of Welfare in the Postwar British and Anglophone Novel, Kelly M. Rich takes the Beveridge Report and the wartime imaginative context out of which it was conceived as the starting point for her literary history of the postwar period. Arguing that “the promise of repair,” exemplified by the foundational principles of the welfare state, propels the fictional imagination of the postwar period, Rich suggests that the postwar British novel obsesses over the public good and collective social responsibility (15). How to reconstruct the nation along more equitable lines became a concern shared by writers and policymakers. A wide range of novelists, from midcentury figures Muriel Spark and Sam Selvon to more contemporary writers such as Alan Hollinghurst and Kazuo Ishiguro, measure the utilitarian impulse for social repair against the need to set clear boundaries on the state's powers of social engineering. Postwar fiction, this book reckons, with plots that so often probe the limits of individual freedoms and social responsibilities, used its platform to meditate on the difficulties of reconciling these competing imperatives.

The book's case studies are separated into two halves, riffing on the cradle-to-grave welfare ideal. Part one, “Cradle,” offers a long look at three significant midcentury figures: Elizabeth Bowen, Spark, and Selvon. A chapter primarily on Bowen's The Heat of the Day (1949) helps set the agenda by explaining how the formal techniques of modernist writing—especially the epiphany, the signature technique of James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925)—were requisitioned by postwar novelists to imagine, and also to question, forms of social connection. For Bowen, postwar prospects are grim; she finds it difficult to imagine a more egalitarian plan of reconstruction that would preserve the forms of prewar sociality to which she is attracted. For Selvon, by contrast, the problem is less about preservation of prewar modes of being than about reimagining welfare as the promise of cultural and racial inclusivity. Yet Selvon, in Rich's account, is no more sanguine about the postwar settlement than Bowen. If The Lonely Londoners (1956) and The Housing Lark (1965) put some faith in the idea of welfare as a form of reparation, Moses Ascending (1975) “sardonically punctures that dream,” offering a “thoroughly disenchanted” verdict on multicultural Britain (107). Welfare, in these accounts, is as much a form of disenchantment as a site of collective aspiration.

After a short but pivotal interlude, “Failed Utopias, or the Beginning of the End,” the book's second part, “Grave,” traces the surprising tenacity and duration of fiction's welfare imagination. Despite the aggressive rollback of welfare provisions during the Thatcher era—housing, of the five pillars of the welfare state, was subject to some of the deepest cuts—novelists such as Hollinghurst continue to dwell on the Second World War as “a wound in need of repair” (157). A clever chapter on Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient (1992) reads what some critics have regarded as the novel's banality “as an over-investment in the transformative potential of 1945” (185). A final case study on Ishiguro's dystopian novel, Never Let Me Go (2005), reads the text as a refusal to let go of the dream of repair. In pushing the premise of care to extreme limits, Ishiguro “tests the foundational logic of postwar reconstruction, which promised a more equitable world for all through the establishment of caretaking institutions […] meant to foster community and a greater sense of responsibility to one's fellow neighbor” (209).

Rich is not the first scholar to provide a literary and cultural history of the welfare state, but her innovative new account will challenge readers to recognize the surprisingly long timelines of the welfare imagination. By thinking of the Second World War not only as a revolutionary break in the historical record but also as the site of unfinished business, The Promise of Welfare in the Postwar British and Anglophone Novel scrambles the temporal frames of the postwar period. “[C]haracterized by a peculiar amalgam of belatedness, modernity, and contemporaneity,” the postwar era is marked by a strange blend of anticipatory or aspirational promises of social reconstruction alongside the haunting feeling of intergenerational debt and ongoing injury (31). Welfare propels the social imagination forward and yet locks the British novel into a perpetual backward glance, stretching the damage of the war into the long, uncertain temporalities of our current moment.