BFD writer for Insight Politics John Black has published his debut novel. Lushington Brady was sent an early copy and this is his review.
It retails for $35 and is available from all good bookshops or directly from the publisher www.trosspublishing.co.nz or via e-mail [email protected]
**If you order directly from the publisher, postage will be included in the price.
Through the 1970s and 80s, English novelist Tom Sharpe published more than a dozen wickedly funny satires. Most followed a familiar plot arc: in milieus of sanctimony and cant, a concatenation of innocent events and misadventures reach a riotous culmination. The self-righteous, censorious and hypocritical all get their just comeuppance in the mayhem.
John Black’s Man Down is a novel that does for “Aotearoa-New Zealand” what Riotous Assembly did for South Africa, and Wilt for Guardian-reading, furrow-browed middle-Britons.
Martin King is a failed writer and failing assistant librarian in a New Zealand town that excels only in its ordinariness. There’s more than a touch of a middle-aged Adrian Mole about balding, awkward Martin, who fancies himself as an unrequited intellectual, while being crippled by his own realisation that he is, in a phrase that has haunted his life, “disappointing up close”.
Then the library where he passes his days in growing frustration faces a restructure into a “learning hub” while at the same time the local council grapples with what to do about the statue of the town’s colonial founder. With the abettance of a hopeless romance, a weird flatmate given to seeking “adventure” in all the wrong places, injudicious use of cheap whisky and email errors, a series of events are set in motion that set Martin on his rise, fall, and… well, who knows? The story ends on a nicely ambiguous note.
Man Down is very much a story for the times, and not just in New Zealand. While Kiwi readers will appreciate its local touches — the pompous dipping into Te Reo by certain characters, for instance — all of us in the Western world can enjoy its sharp barbs at bien pensant, middle-brow left-intellectualism, the obsessions with statues and “decolonisation”, the decline of book-reading.
But books written for their times run the grave risk of being left behind with the times for which they were written. Man Down, like all the best satires, is saved from such a fate by its sparkling, savage wit. There were times I startled my video-game-playing sons by guffawing out loud at certain passages. It’s not very often that I get to use a word like “guffaw” unironically, as it happens, but it describes all-too-accurately my reaction to several passages, especially when the newly-Macchiavellian Martin sets about sabotaging his colleagues’ performance reviews.
Suffice to say, Man Down is a joy to read and, at just over 200 pages, over far too soon.
Oh, as it happened, Tom Sharpe was arrested by the South African government for sedition and deported, as a result of his satirical criticisms of Apartheid. With the way New Zealand is going, John Black might want to beware a similar fate.
Man Down retails for $35 and is available from all good bookshops or directly from the publisher www.trosspublishing.co.nz or via e-mail [email protected]
**If you order directly from the publisher, postage will be included in the price.