Novel of the week

Published 23 July 2001

To Hell in a Handcart Richard Littlejohn HarperCollins, 426pp, £5.99 ISBN 0007106130

There is much to confuse in Richard Littlejohn's satire - our hero, Mickey French, is an ex-cop with a wife, Andi, who is of Greek Cypriot extraction. She is, however, most welcome in our land, because her parents own a restaurant and she has nice tits. Understanding the distinction between a welcome foreigner and an unwelcome one is complex work, of which more later. Mickey's daughter, Katie, is either mentally handicapped or a picture of feminine discretion - from her scant dialogue, it is impossible to tell. His son, Terry, has psychopathic tendencies, but vents them, like the good kid he is, only on brown people or white people with petty criminal records, never on pets. Our setting is Middle England, with odd forays into London's Soho, which Littlejohn clearly hasn't visited since the 1950s. Perhaps he saw a homosexual there, and took fright. The period is utterly opaque. Much of the exchange among the honest working classes smacks of the interwar years. On the other hand, Ilie, our anti-hero bogus asylum-seeker, is receiving "free board and lodging, clothing coupons and £117.50 a week in cash". Given that current benefits amount to £36.50 in coupons each week, of which £10 can be exchanged for cash, and with inflation at roughly 5 per cent, this puts us at somewhere around 2076.

There are occasional attempts at Dickensian wit. "Edward Fromby Senior was nothing if not a pragmatic man. 'I'm nothing if not a pragmatic man,' he said frequently." They are gut-churningly bad. Otherwise, the only language that gives pause is the overwhelming number of derogatory words for gypsy. "Gyppos" is straightforward, but "dids"?

Mickey has been the victim of a number of crimes, all committed by the same two people, who appear to be following him about long before the plot gives them any reason for doing so. Eventually, he has just about had it with these dids, and shoots Ilie stone dead after a solitary night spent cleaning his guns and getting rat-arsed. The British legal system would have seen him right, were it not for the forces of liberalism lined up against him, in the form of Roberta, the deputy police commissioner, and Justin, a big-shot lawyer. Luckily, they are corrupt, so he trounces them with his native wit. They are also slovenly: he is always adjusting his sweaty penis; she is always lighting cigarettes. What's more, they practise pervy sex acts: he spanks young lads with copies of the Evening Standard; she masturbates with improbable objects. (These onanistic incidents are ruined, for me, by Littlejohn's blank unfamiliarity with the shape of both the vagina and a statuette of Marx. It quite defeats his egregious equation of Marxism with liberalism.)

At the risk of ruining your fun, it all ends happily ever after, with the death toll standing at only two dids, one did's dad and 36 luckless asylum-seekers who happen to be staying five to a room in "luxury accommodation" when a gas pipe explodes (rather than a bomb, as originally thought). This last incident is a particular triumph to our hero, as it means not only that he is innocent of stirring up race hatred, but also that the council hasn't wasted any funds checking safety for foreigners when it could be spending the money on new roads.

The thesis of this book is as follows - Russian Jews are fine, genuine refugees from Cyprus are fine, and those involved in road-building programmes, meaning all Irish people, are fine. Black people are fine as long as they have jobs in petrol stations. "Gangs of fucking criminals from eastern Europe and Kurdistan" are not fine. Those who look eastern European, or set up camp in a local cricket pavilion, or beg, or fail to look grateful, are not fine. Those who have the gall to sleep five to a room deserve all the amputation that chance throws at them. Those who act poor when they are actually getting £117 of taxpayers' money every week are not welcome. It's a bizarre premise - like devising a world in which dogs have opposable thumbs, then railing against dogs with ordinary paws for not using a knife and fork. More bizarre still, some dumb thug in Oldham might well end up on a charge of incitement to racial violence sometime this year, while such formless racism disguises itself as satire. And now I must go: I seem to have a copy of Das Kapital wedged up my snatch.

Zoe Williams is a columnist on the London Evening Standard

Post this article to