King Of The Badgers by Philip Hensher
Fourth Estate $36.99
While checking some details for this review I stumbled across a memorandum submitted in October 1998, to the British House of Commons select committee on education and employment. It was from a Dr Philip Hensher, arguing against special educational treatment for gifted children and it was opinionated, witty, well-argued and unpretentious. A typical blast, then, from the man known better as a novelist, with such successes as The Mulberry Empire and Booker-Man Prize nominated The Northern Clemency, and as a columnist and critic.
His latest novel once more submits contemporary Britain to a lashing with the surveillance society, symbolised by the obsession for CCTV cameras, strapped most firmly to the punishment triangle.
But plenty of other targets come within the range of Hensher's clear, cold vision.
The setting is a fictional but characteristic small estuary town in Devon, with its picturesque centre inhabited by the more affluent and with grimmer estates on the periphery for the less fortunate. A child goes missing from a family on the outer fringes but the whole town becomes, in one way or another, involved in the drama, providing the platform for bracing assaults on the crassness of the media, middle class education angst, dud universities, management gobbledegook, fast food, creative writing groups and many, many more.
The setting and subjects are inescapably British but there are allusions with a very familiar ring for a New Zealand audience.
The seaside town with its birdwatching hide devoted to "a small, dull bird with a ringed collar" and its streets full of works by potters who call themselves ceramicists and "lady merchants undertaking miniature shopkeeping endeavours" could be transplanted here with very little mental effort.
And the central themes of the manipulation of the surveillance mantra "if you've nothing to hide you've nothing to fear" and of the place of the police in society are compelling concerns far away from pretty Hanmouth.
But Hensher is not merely an analyst of society. He has the true novelist's acute and unsparing eye for individual human foibles and has assembled in this book a large and disparate cast on which to exercise his gift.
The townsfolk, most of whom originally come from somewhere else, include the dysfunctional family whose child vanishes, a ferocious university lecturer, an amoral Italian waiter, a writer of slogans for Japanese T-shirts, a love besotted eccentric teenage girl and a memorable villain, John Calvin of the local Neighbourhood Watch.
With such a cast it is not surprising that some of the characters are one-dimensional, almost caricatures, with their satiric use detracting from their humanity, a significant flaw in a book devoted to the supremacy of private lives. The Brigadier's wife, for example, while sympathetically portrayed, comes perilously close to behaving like someone from Midsomer Murders and the most fully realised characters are his gay "bears".
The changes of tone when Hensher returns from his knockabout jokes to the chilling crime at the centre of the book are awkward and the narrative threads are strained. But despite its shortcomings this is a much more rewarding novel than most you are likely to encounter.
Although permeated with black humour, its conclusions about the ant standing up to defy the steamroller, as his superscription from Gavin Ewart says, are not without hope.
John Gardner is an Auckland reviewer.
