On completing Moby-Dick, Herman Melville wrote to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne: “I have written a wicked book and feel as spotless as the lamb.” In The Echo Chamber, John Boyne has written an equally wicked book, and if he is now experiencing a Melvillean sense of catharsis, who can blame him?
In 2019 the publication of My Brother’s Name Is Jessica triggered the second battle of the Boyne in which the author was accused of transphobia, and generally undermining the foundations of western civilisation. The firestorm of intimidation that followed forced him off Twitter. His initial reaction was to engage, explain and defend himself. A much better idea would have been to write about it obliquely in a satirical novel. The Echo Chamber is that novel. Like all good satirists, Boyne lines up his targets, shoots, and leaves the reader in no doubt about the villains of the piece.
Foremost in villainy are his three pet hates: smartphone technology; social media; and misdirected “wokeness”. Together they power what The New York Times recently called “an outrage machine” perfectly designed to enable “performative shaming”. Essentially, this is Boyne’s position. To demonstrate how the outrage machine dominates and distorts ordinary lives he assembles a cast of ghouls unmatched since Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm.
George Cleverley is an ageing chat-show host and “national treasure”. George “prides himself on being a free thinker” untainted by “the historical bigotries of the previous generation”.
He attends Pride marches, opposes blood sports, has even named his eldest son Nelson Fidel, and yet George is hopelessly confused: “I try to keep up, I really do, but every day something else has changed and it’s impossible to stay abreast of it all.”
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George is not the only one feeling the heat from modernity’s moronic inferno. His wife Beverley, a bestselling romantic novelist, thinks that the writing process consists of throwing out random “ideas” while hiring a succession of ghostwriters to get the actual words on the page. Her reflections on the artistic process are pure gold. When a new ghost threatens to tart up her clichéd ramblings, she retorts acidly, “I don’t know if you’re mistaking me for the publishing director of Faber & Faber.”
The Cleverley children are no better. Oddball Nelson can only function when dressed up in his collection of professional uniforms. Daughter Elizabeth is a vicious Twitter troll “posting the most outrageous things she could think of”. The baby of the family, teenage gigolo Achilles, runs a nice little earner honey-trapping gay men online before blackmailing them for vast sums. All are in thrall to their phones, and in the end all will face a bitter reckoning.
The crux of the impossibly convoluted plot — permissible in a novel that veers between social satire, Feydeau farce and Shameless levels of family madness — concerns George’s cataclysmic faux pas on discovering that the receptionist in his solicitor’s office has transitioned from Aidan to Nadia. His follow-up tweet, sending “much love to Aidan as he continues his transition”, makes the critical error of dead-naming the receptionist, triggering a Twitter pile-on.
The biographical resonances echo distantly, but Boyne never behaved as badly as his protagonist who wilfully doubles down on his mistakes and delights in using taboo terms like “nancy boys”, “nut jobs”, “cripples” and “coloureds”. Here it might be objected that Boyne is flirting with the boundaries of good taste but he is writing in an essentially comic tradition.
Some will accuse the author of flippancy in the treatment of serious subjects, but the whole point of satire is to rebuke the follies of the age through humour and exaggeration. At a time when we could all use a good belly laugh the book is uproariously funny. The world has never needed satire more urgently and Boyne delivers in spades.
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The Echo Chamber by John Boyne, Doubleday £16.99 420pp