Jerusalem, by Patrick Neate, Penguin, £8.99
THIS IS THE third part in a loose trilogy by Patrick Neate, following on from M
usungu Jim and the Great Chief Tuloko
and
Twelve Bar Blues
. Readers unfamiliar with Neate, though, can dive straight into this book without missing too much.
This is an ambitious, expansive novel that follows a number of ducking and weaving character lines and story arcs, pirouetting over two continents and three generations. Neate holds it together with purposeful, fluid writing that rattles off the page with no little elegance.
Neate’s novel follows a British minister, David Pinner, drifting amid an African dictatorship that is threatenting to come apart at the seams; his son, Preston, on the cutting edge of a marketing and money-making behemoth on the look out for the next music star or brand that is ripe for exploitation; and a Boer war veteran trying to hold the British empire together singlehandedly. There is a strong supporting cast, and Neate is never better than on the details: his descriptions of people and place are deft and illuminating. His take on an English inner-city pub, bunker-like and very much a graveyard of ambition, reeks of authenticity; the filth of an African prison is similarly visceral in all its grime, and the descriptions of the not all that fictive country of Zambawi, bumping along a turbulent surf of dictatorship diktats, foreign interference and hyper-inflation, are of a suitably high calibre. Neate is coruscating with his colonial satire, and equally adept at skewering the modern product-marketing machine, reprising an advertorial double speak that is clever and inventive. At times, the book stumbles ever so slightly under the weight of its ideas, but it is thoroughly engaging and loses little of its propulsion on the way.