Densely populated, transcontinental satires, where half a dozen balls have simultaneously to be kept in the air, require a firm hand, and Patrick Neate’s grasp on his characters is sometimes a bit too relaxed for comfort. Glib, media-savvy Preston, of whom it is suggested that he doesn’t really believe in anything ‘except possibly ‘trends’ — the moral equivalent of believing in the weather’ — probably deserved a novel to himself, but the ersatz diary from 1901 overdoes the pomposity. Back in Zambabwia, the tone ranges from the aggrieved to the exhortatory, the digressive (a three-page ramble on why the petrol has run out) and the explanatory. Thus, when Pinner senior gets annoyed with the African waiters, Neate has an instant mitigating gloss: ‘Of course, had Pinner had the time to think about it, he might have grasped that no attitude of submission or superiority would have worked without his own attitude of superiority or submission in return.’
Where Neate excels is in his talent for the incongruously horrible — a police attack on Zambabwian demonstrators, for example, on a street full of cherry trees (‘the sickening sound of baton on body somehow muted in the sea of pink.’) After Pinner senior’s implication in a post-colonial plot, most of the strands are brought together in an ‘Africa Unite’ concert, artfully stage-managed by Pinner junior. The ‘local gentleman’ is, not unexpectedly, identified as his ancestor. In the end Jerusalem is too chaotic and too tonally at odds with itself to wholly succeed, but there are some excellent jokes along the way.
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