SEVENTY-TWO VIRGINS
By Boris Johnson
HarperCollins, £17.99; 400pp
ISBN 0 007 19590 7
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Boris Johnson is very funny and very peculiar. His parliamentary romp, in which terrorists and traffic wardens, dim MPs and an automaton American President are caught up in a bloody whirlwind in the course of five mad hours, is a satire that sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. As usual with Boris, it’s odd in a warm, benign way.
No one can resist a writer who invents an MP whose bizarre assistant thinks she’s chanced upon “a knuckle of principle in the opaque minestrone of his views” and whose wife ponders the boundless anti-aphrodisiacal powers of his nightwear — a T-shirt with “It’s Time for Hague” on the front and “The Common Sense Revolution” on the back. His characters are a gallimaufry of the mediocre and the deranged, caught in a tornado of politics that seem to have spun out of control until they vacuum everyone up and spit them out. You will laugh.
Just when it seems as if he’s about to let a tidal wave of bad taste overwhelm him, he manages to find a piece of solid ground. His nerve holds. Not since Alan Clark named his dogs after Hitler’s has a Conservative MP managed such an act, able to ridicule the War on Terror, the White House, the police, and the official mind itself, as it searches ceaselessly for “the sock bomber, the pants bomber, the vest bomber, the Biro bomber and — most rare and admirable — the bra bomber”.
Although he can’t resist a joke in every second paragraph, they are good enough to impart a certain energy. But this is a strange book, too. In his denouement there are flashes of a seriousness that never quite manages to get out.
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The danger of applying his wacky, effervescent mind to his place of work is that it reminds his readers that he sits on the front bench. Why? Could he possibly want promotion in this circus of the ludicrous and the banal? His instinct to laugh is admirable, and his giggle infectious, but political satire bites back, in this case, by turning the novelist into a frantic debunker of anything serious, anybody who has the nerve to face the electors, even the worldly burghers of Henley.
Pricking the pomposity of parliamentarians is fine, but dangerous when you grasp the greasy pole with a longing of your own. His next dinner with the Speaker will be a hoot, because this fictitious one is a working-class Glaswegian with rasping vowels whose tasteless gift to the President is a Churchill Toby jug raising two fingers from the mantelpiece.
Johnson is a Wodehousian by instinct and practice. He does explicit homage to the master in giving his MP a dodgy lingerie enterprise called Eulalie, the very same dark secret shared by Bertie Wooster’s old adversary Roderick Spode, later Lord Sidcup. But it’s hard to inhabit your own imagined world of madcap dimwits and earnest fools, even with the cover of a Parliament that’s bound to shelter the aimless as well as the ambitious.
Some day, maybe, we’ll treasure this book as a piece of fine Johnson juvenilia. But perhaps somewhere under that flaxen thatch there’s an insistent, still small voice whispering in his ear: “Boris, you cannot be serious!”