Rancid Aluminium by
James Hawes
pbk out January 98
(Vintage)
at £5.99
If you have read Hawes’ fiercely funny debut novel A White Merc With Fins with its calling-card sixteen ‘fucks’ on Page One, (it got much better after that), then you will be aware that if you have aspirations to MC (Middle Class) Heaven, then it helps to be MAF (Mad As Fuck).
In this one, business video firm director Peter Thompson, clearly MAF, is finding MC Heaven something of a nightmare. Wife Sarah is feeling broody, his sperm count is not registering on whatever scale these things are measured on, and the Inland Revenue suddenly want to look at his undoubtedly dodgy books. When therefore Mr Kant, an expansive Russian accompanied by Masha, ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’, wants to invest a considerable sum in his business, he can hardly wait to get his foot in the door (or his sexual organ into Masha).
As it takes about 160 pages to get to this point, you may wonder just what this novel is doing being reviewed under the auspices of the crime fiction pages at Tangled Web. OK, flash forwarding from the start, you guess that something vaguely criminal is going on, as you crouch behind his office filing cabinet with the fat (but not that fat) balding (but not that bald) thirty-five year-old Thompson waiting gun in hand, in classic fashion, for someone to come through the door. But all is (sort of) resolved in a flurry of somewhat unlikely Le Carré-type revelations in the last 50 or so pages.
You won’t worry too much about that, however. As in Merc, Hawes fleshes out a skeletal plot with a stream of freewheeling and entertaining invective covering subjects such as the morality of wanking, the fascist overtones of so much football fever, teeth flossing (a by-product of which gives the book its title), some doubtful philosophical musings on the role of both State and Business in the dawning great free market of the new millennium - as well as a reference to Colgate that will surely halve its share of the toothpaste market. And if some of the other material lacks the originality of Merc, the vigour and pace of the style remain. Recommended.
Rancid Aluminium by
James Hawes
