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A condemnation of polite British society
Book Review
By Derryll White
Dibdin, Michael (1997). Dirty Tricks.
“In a free and democratic society, law and morality can have nothing whatever to do with each other.” – Michael Dibdin
Michael Dibdin is having fun here. He is most noted for his 11 novels in the Aurelio Zen series, but this is a stand-alone perhaps stemming from his teaching days in Italy. The whole novel is a “send-up” of British society. The author bemoans the class structure in all its complexity while at the same time his main character diddles Karen Parson in the kitchen.
Dibdin is savagely funny in this novel. He takes the reader through the wonderful1960s and ‘70s dope haze and flower power and then abruptly constructs a Maggie Thatcher vision of capitalism and greed gone wild. His main character frequently asks how he missed out on the acquisition of wealth while he was laying in Elysian Fields.
Through it all there is the considerable cruelty of Oxford. The Thames with its crews of rowers flows past murder and mayhem which is also present in those quiet, tree-lined streets. As Michael Dibdin implies, the dead “just piss off” and leave the living with the consequences.
The consequences, above all, are the mute British class system. Still very much alive, Dibdin charts it through the 1990s, exposing its dirty tricks. This is a novel unlike his others, a condemnation of polite British society.
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Excerpts from the novel:
1990s ENGLAND – The moment I got back I realized that things had changed. The demolition crew had been in, the wreckers and blasters, the strippers and refitters. The attitudes and assumptions I’d grown up with had been razed to the ground, and a bold new society had risen in their place, a free-enterprise, demand-driven, flaunt-it-and-fuck-you society, dedicated to excellence and achievement. Something new, unheard-of! Created by this one woman.
LANGUAGE – Someone rightly said that language exists to prevent us communicating, and of no country is that more true than my own. I never made more friends as easily as when I was among people whose language I spoke badly and who barely spoke mine at all. In a land where trendy cafés display neon signs reading SMACK BAR and SNATCH BAR, no one’s going to pick up the linguistic and social markers that pin the native Brit down like so many Lilliputian bonds. Subtle but damning variations of idiolect are unlikely to count for much in a country where people go around wearing tee-shirts inscribed with things like ‘The essence of brave’s aerial adventure: the flight’s academy of the American east club with the traditional gallery of Great Britain diesel’. Do you know what that means? I don’t. But it must means something to someone. You couldn’t just invent something like that.
INNER WORKINGS – This was a Karen I hadn’t seen before and one I didn’t have much time for, to be frank. After my belated conversion from the outworn pieties of my youth what I wanted from Karen was a crash course in greed, voracity, cheap thrills and superficial emotion. What attracted me to her was her animality. The last thing I needed was her going all human on me. Karen was a magnificent bitch, but when she tried to be human she turned into a Disney puppy: trashy, vulgar and sentimental.
WOMEN – That did it. She threw herself at me, shrieking and spitting, battering me with her fists and shoes. Women get a good press these days. It’s become intellectually respectable, even among those who otherwise reject gender-based distinctions, to suggest that they’re somehow intrinsically nicer than men and that the problems of the world would magically resolve themselves if we all became more womanly. In my view this is sexist bullshit. Given the chance, women can be every bit as unpleasant as men.
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org
