The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Laugh? I merely sighed
In these interesting times, news and satire move fast. This morning’s tweet is this afternoon’s top story; today’s Trump gaffe is tomorrow’s SNL sketch. Novelists have traditionally travelled more slowly, but even that may now be changing. Last October brought Ali Smith’s Autumn, a novel written or at least substantially revised in the four months following the Brexit vote (“All across the country,” Smith wrote, “people looked up Google: what is EU?”) and now we have Howard Jacobson’s Pussy, prepared according to its author in a sizzle of outraged early-morning keyboardbashing after the US election results in November.
Billed as a fairy tale for adults, this slim volume leaves little doubt about its intentions and approach. The cover is a drawing of a toddler Trump clutching a big-boobed Barbie, one of several illustrations by Chris Riddell that stud the book. The epigraph is a bit of Swiftian grumbling about how impossible it is to expect mankind to take advice “when they will not so much as take Warning”. Jacobson’s opening salvo comes in the form of a cod-Biblical prophecy titled Revelation: “And it shall come to pass that all who dwell upon the earth shall wonder that they worshipped him… And they shall know that the beast came not out of the sea but their own hearts…”
Phew. And it doesn’t get much less phew as we’re introduced to the imaginary republic of UrbsLudus, where the Grand Duke and Grand Duchess spend their time taking selfies, playing “the board game Cashflow” and surfing the internet, home to the “nativist, homophobic, conspirationist” website Brightstar and to Twitter, which here appears unaltered. The Duke and Duchess have a son, Fracassus, who spends his childhood pulling down Lego buildings and tearing up flower beds until he is introduced to television, to Twitter, and, eventually, to politics.
Growing up, he fondles and assaults his female tutors, dismisses the views of his male ones (they have names like Yoni Cobalt and Prof Probrius) and strikes up a homoerotic relationship with the macho dictator Spravchik, kissing him on the mouth “as was the custom”. Eventually he runs against the formidable Sojjourner Hemingway – note her double consonant – for president, or rather for the title of “Prime Mover of All the Republics”. The book wraps up on the morning of the vote.
Subtlety isn’t the strong suit here. But nor is anything else. Stuffed with archly pompous sentences, weird Latinisms,
Howard Jacobson’s satire on Trump feels swiftly written, but not Swiftian. By Tim Martin
relentless Shakespeare quotations (a Jacobson tic) and dinosaurian gags about consumer culture – Urbs-Ludus, for example, reels in the aftermath of the Artisan Bread Riots – this satire never musters the imaginative charge to get off its own misbegotten launch pad.
John Gay’s remark that Gulliver’s Travels was “universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery” had much to say about the comprehensiveness of good piss-taking; works of the satirical imagination from Animal Farm to The Great Dictator have been successful because they did more than beat their audiences over the head and complain. But while Jacobson occasionally titivates the mirror-world of Urbs-Ludus with yet more silly names (a populist adviser called Caleb Hopsack, another called Philander), as well as slow-moving jokes about Fracassus building Roman amphitheatres and appearing on a show called Stoppit!, this pocket polis full of TV stations, private planes, social networks, internet trends and terrorist bombs keeps slipping perilously back across the reality horizon.
The effect is like a dreadfully extended version of those newspaper columns in which journalists try their hands at creative writing – 50 Years After Brexit, A Year Under the Thumb of Corbyn – and it marks a career low for Jacobson’s many talents as a writer and humorist. Moreover, the windy, faux-Rasselas style seems designed to alienate anyone who might possibly need convincing by it. Universally read? Not, I think, in this universe.