D J-Taylor

Transcontinental satires

Jerusalem, by Patrick Neate

issue 04 July 2009

One could easily get lost in Jerusalem’s myriad compartments. To begin with there is Preston Pinner, CEO of ‘AuthencityTM’, otherwise known as the ‘hip hub’, a ‘contemporary cultural consulting and production house’ deviously at work to manipulate consumer tastes. Then there is Preston’s father, David, a hard-drinking, skirt-chasing junior minister about to depart to ‘Zambabwia’, an African republic deep in post-colonial meltdown. In Zambabwia itself, a variety of characters — from Adini the venal president to Musa Musa the charismatic musungu and Tranter the imprisoned British businessman — compete for our attention. Finally, and most whimsically, there is the ‘diary of a local gentleman’, the record of a mutilated survivor of the Boer War’s Frazer-fuelled journey around South-West England in search of its ancient folklore.

All this comes interspersed with spoof record reviews, leading articles from the Zambabwian press and lavish extracts from The Book of Zamba Mythology (OUP, 2005, in case you wanted to order it from Amazon.)

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