Edinburgh author and poet Jenni Fagan was described by The New York Times as “the patron saint of literary street urchins”.
It’s a cool description by anyone’s standards. Over Zoom, she’s also a fascinating interviewee. Much like her books, her chat is refreshing and unfiltered.
We meet to discuss her excellent new novel, The Delusions. Its main character, Edi, works in administration in a very bureaucratic afterlife, where she processes the newly dead. Whether they pass on to the next stage depends on whether they can admit or confess to the delusion they have hidden behind in this life. Edi has worked in her role for 47 years, and she deals democratically with serial killers, criminals, politicians and celebrities alongside everyday people.
There is something recognisable about her. Jenni Fagan takes a familiar Edinburgh sense of humour and vernacular, using it to cut through even the darkest of characters without hesitation. Not a single soul is granted special status at her desk.
As Fagan suggests, it’s something “we don’t see often enough in literature or culture; people of power having those working-class backgrounds, and having that kind of humour and that steadiness. She has the power to cope, contextualise and respond using humour and intelligence. That is often a very strong attribute that I see in the working class. I think it’s unsteadying to people.”
Fagan admits that some in the media have questioned Edi being in such a role because “she swears” and “is a single mother”. The decision was deliberate, a subversion of who is allowed to hold authority. As she explains, Edi was “originally in Craigmillar, I think she was in the high-rises. She ends up becoming a tattooist and lives in this gorgeous little tattoo parlour with her son. She’s quite alternative, it’s not just like, here’s the box.”
While Edi’s character breaks down the facades people build around themselves, the novel’s deeper impulse was shaped by more recent history. Fagan points to the behaviour of governments during the Covid-19 lockdowns. “It was very interesting for me to see the way that governments were responding to the situation,” she explains, “kind of flexing their muscles in a way and seeing what they could get away with in relation to managing the mass population. It was very excessive to be told you can only leave your house for an hour a day, your child’s not allowed to go to school, the airports are closing down, your children can’t see their friends, people weren’t allowed to see their parents when they were dying, things like that. It resonated with me as somebody who was brought up in the local authority care system essentially by government policy.”
Fagan moved 27 times by the age of 16 while in care. That experience sits in the background of The Delusions, a novel concerned with what happens when power goes unquestioned and the stories used to justify it are accepted without resistance.
It’s a tension that runs through everyday life. Someone we know, a colleague, a friend, a family member, can live within their own private delusions. But what happens when those delusions are held by people with real authority, shaping how others are allowed to live? The Delusions confronts what Fagan calls a “culture of immunity.”
As she puts it, “Stephen Hawking said that the greatest threat to humanity was stupidity. And I think at the moment, one of the greatest threats to humanity is delusion. We need to wake up collectively and individually. “Every person has to be accountable for who they are and what their actions have been; it’s so simple.”
At the same time, the novel is not without hope. Fagan draws on the idea of the “overview effect,” the psychological shift reported by astronauts when they see Earth from space, a perspective that emphasises human connection with the earth over hatred and division. “I think everybody’s so pressurised,” she says, “that I really wanted to create that extraordinary beauty… I wanted to create that moment of perspective whereby when astronauts go into space… they experience such overwhelming awe and this profound understanding of human connection…Look at what we have. Look at how extraordinary this is. Look at how beautiful this is. Look at what potential there is in the human race to do amazing things.”
For Fagan, that sense of perspective is not abstract. It’s about how we decide to live in the here and now. “Life is very short, and infinity is substantially longer… I believe that all of these things add up. I believe that all of these things matter. And we’re consistently told that who we are and what we do doesn’t matter… the individual is irrelevant.”
Readers today are more exposed than ever to the corruption and fragility of authority, from banking systems to the machinery of inherited power. What once presented itself as stable, even respectable, has been repeatedly shown to be something far more compromised, even vulgar or evil, at its core. In The Delusions, that hierarchy is inverted. Power is not located in institutions or titles, but in the overlooked voice doing the accounting on all of them. It is a potent reversal where power, stripped of its performance, looks very different indeed.
The Delusions is out now
