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Howard Jacobson is the author of six novels and four works of non-fiction. His last novel, The Mighty Walzer, won the Everyman Wodehouse Award for comic writing.
Here's more woolly British satire - though this one's set Down Under - from the author of Coming From Behind (1983) and Peeping Tom (1985). The fictional memoir of a self-described reactionary fascist hyena, this comic narrative charts his spiritual conversion - an event hastened by a spider's bite. When a redback arachnid munches on Leon Forelock's much-discussed member, it forces him to reassess his life as a social malcontent. Born in a dismal industrial town, Forelock set out on the road to reaction and priggery when his father took off with another woman shortly before Leon's ninth-birthday party. After a successful career at Cambridge (a double first in Moral Decencies ), this self-righteous twit is recruited by the CIA, posing as the Freedom Academy International, to become a sort of moral tutor to Australian spies. In the country full of gambolling indigenes, where his father now lives as well, Forelock joins the stormtroopers of slow change, a strange group of like-minded Aussies whose right-wing fulminations seldom jibe with their lives as adulterers and drunkards. Forelock's war with the loony left finds him editing Black Sail ( tile only Australian journal of ideas Major-General Idi Amin was said to read from cover to cover ); monitoring campus activism; keeping out unwelcome aliens; decoding the radical press; and leading the Campaign for a Cleaner Australia, an anti-smut group. An admittedly servile priest of the feminine persuasion, he shacks up with the synchronized swimming team of Vernie Redfern and Maroochi Ravesh - an eight-year union sundered when he beds his aging step-mum soon after his dad's death. This slangy catalogue of Forelock's misadventures sends up the past three decades of Australian politics and its peculiar manifestations on the left and right - for, at the end of this overly digressive tale, now-radicalized Forelock is unwanted by all as he trades in one kind of blather for another. There's lots of pointed humor in this otherwise pointless mess - in other words, clever to a fault. (Kirkus Reviews)
