‘The breath of past ideas’: state-Keynesianism, hauntology and growth in Andrew O’Hagan’s Our Fathers

Despite the existential threat of the climate emergency, the world remains fixated upon exponential economic growth, demonstrating how, in the words of Fredric Jameson, ‘our imaginations are hostages to our own mode of production’. Andrew O’Hagan’s Our Fathers (1999) points to the failure to articulate an ecologically sustainable, post-neoliberal politics and economics. This paper argues that Our Fathers mediates an inability to imagine a post-growth society through the narrator’s ambivalence towards the post-war welfare state. The protagonist’s elegiac depictions of the mid-century position state-Keynesianism as obsolete but also constitute a form of mourning which is symptomatic of a continued attachment to the post-war welfare state despite its ecological unsustainability. Simultaneously, the novel displays a relentless presentism in its uneven treatment of resource nationalism. Whilst Our Fathers is critical of the resource use which underpins Scottish nationalism, the same level of criticality is not applied to the way in which resource use shapes the British union. In doing so, the novel appears to inadvertently accept the devolutionary neoliberalism of the late 1990s. By reading the contradictions and ambivalences of Our Fathers, I aim to shed light on how our continued attachment to growth and fossil fuels has been facilitated in spite of the looming threat of the climate crisis.