Once upon a time, a Tuscan man in his twenties, the son of a factory worker, landed in an England still untouched by Brexit, leaving home and his familiar Livorno surroundings for the first time. He was encouraged and supported by Francesca, his mother, and Renato, his father. This is the setting of Down and Out in England and Italy, the translated edition of the 2018 Italian novel 108 Metri: The New Working-Class Hero, and the third part of author Alberto Prunetti’s autobiographical ‘working-class trilogy’.

The novel’s title is a take on George Orwell’s fictionalised memoir Down and out in Paris and London, an account of the Tribune literary editor’s days as a penniless dishwasher in Paris and in a workhouse in London, which documented the hardships of workers in two cities whose opulence and wealth generally meant working-class stories were treated as an afterthought.

The two cities in Prunetti’s memoir, though, are Livorno—where the largest communist party in the West, the Italian Communist Party, was founded 101 years ago, and home to the most left-wing football supporters in Italy—and Bristol—one of the most radical cities in Britain, a relative bastion of the Communist Party in the 1920s and 30s, an imaginarium for thirtysomething Italians fascinated by Britain thanks to the TV series Skins, and, today, a city where slavers’ statues are torn down and draconian police bills are challenged in the streets.

The young Prunetti’s days in Bristol are divided between working long hours in a pizzeria and cleaning toilets. The tone is set in the first pages with the fictional oath pronounced after earning the Food and Health Certificate  required of every hospitality worker:

The fearsome Staphylococcus aureus—devious bowl terrorist—will be pushed across the Channel together with the so-called European Bacillus cereus, which causes abdominal pain and spasms as well as nefarious bouts of bloating.

So says the oath, the undertones of which remind readers of Tory immigration rhetoric, with a pinch of New Labour, too.

Prunetti’s prose is sensorial. It is possible to feel the heat and the sweat, to smell the kitchen and the toilets. The posse of Bristol workers on which the book focuses includes the picturesque Silver (inspired by a real individual), who feels like a Robert Louis Stevenson character washed up in Bristol harbor after a shipwreck who learned how to make pizzas. Silver is a man who speaks several languages, a herald of multilingualism in a place many would not expect it (but actually should); he is the first Virgil that Prunetti meets in his hellish journey, ascending through Purgatory via kitchens, canteens, and toilets.

The antagonists are many. The Signora, the owner of the pizzeria, is focused on paying her workers below the minimum wage and providing them with shady accommodation (cost deducted from their pay)—a woman of unpleasant attitudes and views shared by her equally annoying husband and son, and a passive-aggressive supervisor. Prunetti’s inner thoughts speak clearly:

A good chunk of my wages creamed off to pay for a bed in a lousy dorm. Working 24/7. Below minimum wage. No time off. No holiday pay. No sick pay. No National Insurance number. No overtime. Because we’re all one big Italian family, right? Migrant graduates kneading dough like there’s no tomorrow… You’d be a fool to stay, they said. But come to think of it, had I actually left Italy? Because custom dictated that the rules of the motherland still applied in Italian restaurants the world over.

The setting shifts between Livorno and Bristol following the dreams and lively imagination of a working-class kid fascinated by novels, from French classics to Asimov’s science fiction and the humanities, who finds himself as a misfit from both his former secondary school friends, due to his passion for books and his liceo, and his university peers in Siena, due to their middle- and upper-class entitlement. The shift between Italy and England highlights differences between the countries, but there is a common and persistent element, too: class inequality.

Class, a word liberal commentators invoke as an ideological token of the divisions of the twentieth century, but one not considered applicable to the complex reality of our days, still matters for those who find it a constant barrier to their aspirations. As Prunetti narrates his next job, in a shopping mall food court, he engages with the myths of European migrants in the United Kingdom out to take British jobs. But it is in his role as a toilet cleaner that the author starts to learn English.

The author’s maestro in this new setting is the knowledgeable Brian, a cleaner with a passion for opera, his lectures on which are accompanied by the customers’ flatulent passage and the challenge of clogged toilets.

In a recount of both visual and olfactory memory, Brian shows Prunetti his trick of the trade, which involves plunging his arm elbow-deep into the clogged toilet for it to re-emerge clutching a blob of sodden toilet paper that then melts in his hand—which leaves the narrator, and the reader, uncertain whether to laugh or vomit. These toilets are not, however, the most unpleasant feature of the novel; they pale in comparison to the terror that is Maggie the Destroyer, the Wicked Witch of the West, a sight more fearsome than the Eye of Sauron and a presence which fills the heart of the narrator with despair.

The setting shifts again, this time to Dorset—where Prunetti meets the former radio actor Gerald, who worshipped Shakespeare, sang Rossini, and ‘stank like an old goat and wore the same t-shirt for months, adorned with crusty sweaty rings’—and back to the author’s native Tuscany. Despite the changes, Maggie the Destroyer returns constantly to remind the narrator and the reader that ‘society’ is a thing of the past, that it’s all an individual race to the top, and that any form of solidarity is a weakness. However, the great coalition of characters portrayed by Prunetti in his English gallery is always there to extend a helpful hand, and to build a great union of the British precariat—a union that today would nonetheless struggle to make up the ‘Australian-style points’ of which Home Secretary Priti Patel, apprentice Destroyer, is so fond.

In any case, the fact that similar experiences are no longer likely to be a possibility for young Italians and other Europeans makes this memoir of transnational solidarity all the more precious. It is ultimately a book that tries to exorcise the ever returning spirit of Maggie the Destroyer, and cast it away across the Channel.