When a book is *actually* "important."

[Content warning, this one gets pretty heavy as regards human trafficking, rape, and so on.]

There are few books I hate more than “important” ones. Those usually get forced on you in public school, or they’re pushed around on the daytime talk show circuit, and they’re the first ones you see when you log into Amazon or walk through a Barnes & Noble. Invariably they all suck.

So it’s pretty rare for me to call a book important and actually mean it with no sarcasm. It’s extremely uncommon for a novel to capture a Current Day Problem and handle the subject in a way that is authentic, sincere, and objective until it no longer can be. And it’s beyond rare for a book to be so significant that I’ll debate whether to give it the same status as 1984, Brave New World, or The Camp of the Saints.

Political books often fall on their face. They only reach an audience that already agrees with what they have to say. So one that can take an otherwise “one-sided” subject and present it fairly to a broad audience is worth elevating.

Bothelford’s Gone is the 2026 Edward McLaren novel that dares to tell the story of the ongoing groomer gang crisis in the United Kingdom. And McLaren does not take any easy exits on this highway through hell.

What it’s about:

Jack Grundon, born 2007, is raised primarily by his mother, and his father gets him on the weekends. He lives in the fictional English town of Bothelford, which sent scores of men to die in World War 2, and in the decades since has largely regrown its population through third-world migrants. The last thirty years in particular have marked major demographic changes, and brought problems with them.

Brexit happens when Jack is nine, though he doesn’t understand it beyond the fact that his parents are both agitated by the TV. Covid hits when he’s thirteen. He doesn’t get to go back to school until he’s fifteen, and by then he’s behind, and about a third of his school is full of violent foreigners who don’t like him because of his race. When he meets a girl his age named Agatha, he’s immediately intrigued, but she’s standoffish and he doesn’t understand why.

Come to find, Agatha is being trafficked by her mother to multiple men in the area, including a grown man parading as a teenager in Jack’s class, and Jack’s English teacher. Agatha asks why Jack wasn’t there to save her. A completely unfair question, but these are kids in a most dire state of distress and they have no way of knowing how to properly process this kind of trauma. Agatha says if her father were still alive he would have killed those men, but he, a police officer, died on the job a few years ago, stabbed by a Muslim man in England. Now it’s just Agatha and her mom in Bothelford, a hotbed of migrant crime.

This interaction breaks Jack in a way that, once again, he can’t understand. He spends the whole day walking around Bothelford, seeing it with new eyes, trying to puzzle through the problem and coming to the same solution: he can’t save her. He can’t hurt her attackers. The police know what’s going on—hell, some of them are involved with it—and the growing migrant population views it as right and good to do. Payback for colonialism that happened decades and centuries before any of them were born.

“We can rape you, we can kill you, and you can do nothing about it.” So what does Jack do?

Through increments and over time, he refines and sharpens his thoughts. He eventually confronts the ringleader, Basil, who explains how it works and why Jack can’t do anything to stop it. He even shows Jack proof that Agatha’s mom is an OnlyFans prostitute, and she manages the trafficking of her daughter. This enrages Jack so much that he beats the hell out of Basil, causing him to lose an eye, and Jack is predictably arrested.

While Jack is in prison, Basil arranges for him to be attacked, and he too loses an eye. The problem worsens. It continues. It escalates. It evolves.

The question never goes away: What can you do about it?

I’m going to tell you this: McLaren has an answer.

I will not give it away.

He has written something powerfully unique here, not just with the concept, but with the execution, with the prose, with his willingness to portray an actual problem happening in Britain right now, displaying it with raw honesty that—at the same time—does not downplay or exploit anything just for shock value. The facts are horrific enough, and must like Raspail’s Camp of the Saints, the book asks a question of the reader and demands an answer.

A Skilled Hand

As I burned through this book (it took me 3-4 hours on a Saturday, if that) I just kept telling myself—and texting my friend—that this idea could have been an utter train wreck in the hands of a lesser writer. I’ve established my stance on these things rather aggressively over the years:

I read the first Song of Ice and Fire book and didn’t care for it primarily due to three things: too long, too much purple prose, and too much graphic sexual violence. Those aren’t outright deal breakers for me, but it’s so rare to come across a writer who can use those tools with purpose and meaning that I generally don’t expect to get anything out of a book that relies on them to establish their caliber. Martin talks a lot for someone who has little to say, and he sure do love him some fictional rape. Pass.

Other books have tried to grapple with heavy subjects like this and come up sorely lacking. Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why actually showcases his skill with storytelling, with a hard concept, and with a strong voice for the male and female lead. His weakness was that there was no point to his story: it was masturbatory in is glorification of misery. “Wow, this girl was so abused that she killed herself, isn’t this sad? Now listen to detailed accounts of the increasingly graphic things that happened to her and drove her to do it!” There was no point to that book. It wanted you to look at something horrible for its own elevation.

And in terms of political books (make no mistake, this is a “right-wing” book but only in the sense that the objective solution to a real problem aligns with rightist philosophy), plenty of authors have missed the mark by trying to tackle Current Day Problems. I really enjoyed Tenure by Pardoe and Baron, because it accomplished something even if it was just a revenge fantasy. The sequel, however, was a huge dropoff in comparison. And I recently got my hands on a similar book (can’t say who or what, it’s not out yet) that dealt with a psychic hunting down pedophiles in Hollywood. The writing was flat and repetitive, the characters were cardboard, and the overall delivery felt like a made-for-daytime-TV movie featuring actors who have all been in commercials but nothing else. Serious ideas can die if the writer bores the reader.

Point is, I know what it feels like to read a book where the writer is “faking gravity,” trying to give weight to something that they—for whatever reason—can’t get a handle on. The subject is important. People need to care about the solution. But if you can’t make them care about your book, they’re never going to care about what you’re saying with it. McLaren, then, accomplishes what scores of other writers have failed to say in this space, and he did it with a sort of honesty that was necessary to make it work.

Jack is not a hero. He’s not an admirable character in the ways that we’re used to—he’s the product of a broken home, a child thrown into a system without the tools to navigate, in the care of parents who are no better off, though they care enough about him to at least try a little. They’re programmed by a cultural machine that tells them what they are allowed to think and say, what they must never think and say, and what they are certainly not allowed to notice about their homeland.

But he changes when no one else will. There was one particularly shocking segment when Jack realizes what screens are doing to him, what his smartphone really is for, and what’s it doing to all young men of his age bracket. He realizes it’s not really a phone, or a calendar, or a gaming portal, or anything of the sort. A smartphone is a porn device—that is mostly what it is used for—and everything else is an appendage to that. There is a cost to its consumption, morally, culturally, and physically, and he realizes the many costs of it through an excruciating epiphany.

To succeed, to really save Agatha, Jack essentially has to shed his skin, to kill off a prior version of himself, to evolve into something else, and even to get his hands a little dirty. No…not his hands. His soul. Throughout this transformation into Mad Jack, he throws aside his old notions of the world and the people in it, so that he can admit what’s really going on around him: the homeland his grandfathers fought and died for is under invasion, its sons are being murdered, its daughters are sold as playthings, and its protectors are compromised.

There is a way out. It will not be easy, and it will not be comfortable, and it will not be cheap. Perhaps the hardest part of all will be realizing that good and evil exist, and you need to be able to say what is evil when you see it.

I've written so much here, perhaps more than I meant to, and I could write significantly more, but to do so would be to undermine the experience of reading Bothelford’s Gone for yourself. Go do it. But I warn you: this is a bumpy road.

Content Warning

F-bombs, and basically every other curse word imaginable. Slurs for everything. Descriptions of pornography, trafficking, and abortion. Drug and alcohol use. A transgender student (and that subplot is handled almost refreshingly well). It just goes on.

This book is not for the soft or the delicate. You know all those high schoolers who try to talk down to me when I tell them Dark Age isn’t a good book? This would shatter their fragile minds.

And yet, McLaren does it all for a reason. He wades into these waters and he comes out the other side of the swamp in a way you’d never expect.

In closing, this is a brutal book, and it’s brutal for a reason, because it’s no less brutal than something that is really happening in Britain today, and has been for decades. The mainstream doesn’t touch on it nearly as much as they should, but they haven’t been able to completely contain it either. The Internet has gotten the leaks out and the lion is waking up. Just look at the response to Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain in the last month.

I hope it’s enough, and I hope—for the sake of Britain’s sons and daughters—it’s quick.

Congratulations to McLaren for sticking the landing on this one. From across the pond: God speed.