Si monumentum requiris, circumspice: if you seek my monument, look around you. That is the inscription for visitors to the tomb of Christopher Wren at St Paul’s Cathedral. It is also the epigraph to James Meek’s new novel, which asks if, and how, we can be incited to look around us.
If we ever did, the characters in Your Life Without Me contend, we would see a country in despair and disrepair. Mr Burman, a “not particularly successful middle-aged small-town English teacher”, regrets how “human endeavour no longer seems able to imbue made things with joy and spirit”. His former student Raf rages against the same degradation. The reader is pointed constantly to cheap new-builds, Poundlands and betting shops. That is the characters’ analysis – but one imagines their author sympathising.
Scotland-raised Meek began his literary career publishing short stories in the New Edinburgh Review. But his name was made reporting from Kyiv and Moscow. For the London Review of Books, he has written about the failures of Thames Water, the dishonesty of TV, and more than 10,000 words on the housing crisis and the Brits “let down by the government and by the speculative builders whose priorities have come to stand in for housing policy”.
For Meek, the question seems to be how to change things, and his book’s title hints at one suggestion: if absence makes the heart grow fonder, then loss might provoke appreciation. It worked for Mr Burman and Raf. They had enjoyed an intellectual affinity in the classroom. But their bond was confirmed by the announcement that a historic, beloved tower in their town was to be demolished; the two protested together.
The Immison Tower fell, though, and flimsy apartments were built in its place. Afterwards, Mr Burman and Raf found that while they had been able to lose together, they could not agree about how they might win. Finding Mr Burman’s approach weak and resigned, Raf took it upon himself to train as a demolition expert and attempt to blow up St Paul’s Cathedral. He was convinced that only destruction would persuade people to protect and create. The detonation failed; Raf was arrested. The present action of the novel is Mr Burman fretting about whether to visit Raf in prison.
He rejects Raf’s radicalism not only because of middle-aged wariness. He has already been stunned by loss, and derived from it no new, redemptive appreciation. His beautiful wife Ada was killed in a car crash. The grief only estranged Mr Burman from his daughter, Leila, with whom he lives and who never speaks to him.
Thus, the story becomes complicated. Meek has to unite a political story with a personal one. The latter does not always seem to have received so much attention. We are more told than shown that Raf and Ada are charismatic to everyone they meet, the type of brilliant friends that appear regularly in great novels. (It’s hard not to miss the rich seduction of The Great Gatsby when Meek describes “the smiling attention [Raf] paid everyone he met”.) Mr Burman’s interiority is related as dialogue between two crude poles of his personality; “Comfort” argues with “Rigour”. Meek makes his job of accommodating ambiguity no easier by choosing a very bare style.
Yet the reader puts down Your Life Without Me stirred. Meek is not a painter – not in this book anyway – but he is a picker. The flourishes lay more in the act of noticing than rendering. The slow accretion of accuracies summons powerful effects. At one point Mr Burman is shaken by the shoulder and told he has been in a daze. You realise that you, too, had been led into a daze with him by the forgoing orderly paragraphs, even though none contained a conspicuous intoxicant. The car-crash scene in particular is observed with fine intelligence. Burman recalls “sitting in the back of the ambulance, wondering why they didn’t switch on the siren”.
But the novel’s real triumph lies in alerting us to a much less shocking trauma. The town’s high street “didn’t exactly look like a bomb had hit it, unless it was a different sort of bomb, a gradual bomb exploding at calendar speed”. Meek is right that our communal life has become “cheaper and meaner and more disposable”, and that it happened without any “sudden thunderclap”. By the end of Your Life Without Me we can hear the silence, and we feel angry about it.
Your Life Without Me
James Meek
Canongate, 256pp, £18.99
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This article appears in the 25 Feb 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The Crumbling Crown
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