Blairland, it’s pronounced Blairland. So reads a promotional posting on the web. The text message title is expanded neither on the cover nor anywhere inside the book. Indeed, the vowel-stripped assemblage can defeat the cataloguing systems of some retailers which instead list the name of Iain Brimswall’s satirical novel as ‘illegible’, while search engines, unaware of the potential irony, ask ‘Did you mean blind?’. The paperback was published September 2006, nominally 01/09/06; a number of internet bookstores take this to mean 9th January. In fact, the idea for the book was conceived on 10th January, 2006. Accidental publication a day before it was first thought of rather typifies the flavour of blrlnd.

The eye-catching image on the book’s front doubtlessly reflects the inspiration for blrlnd. At one point, the main character Janice Annison is told, “You’re not some latter-day Alice in Wonderland, you know. You’re Janice in - well, wherever.” Janice does not, by description, come across as an Alice, being as she is a middle-aged, toothy, bespectacled spinster with a liking for long pale-blue waterproofs. But she does embark on two adventures which have a recognisably Alice-like quality about them.

The cover motif is reinforced in the text. Each time a character uses a mobile communications device called a palmcator (compare with deskcator, flatcator, kidcator, and - for home food management - the catercator), a cartoon girl-child appears on the screen. Credit is paid here to Anwen Williams who was a mere eight years old when she drew the picture.

For the back cover, the usual publisher’s self-congratulatory blurb is cast aside and replaced by some praise but mostly criticism from characters who appear in the story. There is a little joke hidden away in the contributor list, appreciable only after the book has been read.

This is not the Iain Brimswall of The Zoo Keeper or Missed Chapters. To be sure, the wordsmith is one of the same, but the style of blrlnd is a planet away. It is, according to the author, the product of free flow writing: ‘You sit down, you write. That’s all there is to it. The barest storyline floats about in the head. If it’s any good, it trickles down to the fingers and on to the paper.’ Apparently, for those barest storylines in the writing of this book, Brimswall simply switched on the daily news. One or two minor items have dated quickly, but much of the material for this ‘parallel with the late Blair period’ continues to occupy current concern.

The work is presented as a single chapter, though the sequence of scenes makes for easy reading in chunks – as if breaks were needed! Here and there, the writer adds a comment of explanation or intention. (‘Bifurcation is not to be overused as a narrative device in fiction. It can confuse the author. However, in some stories, it is an unavoidable course. As here.’)

Janice is a guide working for Cultexfo, the Cultural Exchange Forum, showing visitors to the Euphoric Kingdom around the permitted sites of Capital. (The disclaimer at the front of the book states that recognition of locales is optional. This is not difficult.) Through her assignee, Mr Wong, we obtain a glimpse of Capital - its excesses, neglect, official xenophobia, and obsession with security. When Mr Wong goes missing, Janice bravely follows a trail which takes her beyond the city’s boundary, to Troddenville, a place only vaguely depicted on the map. She finds her Mr Wong, but the episode ends less than well in so far that: the assignee is deported; Janice breaks both legs in an accident; Cultexfo fires her; and she is evicted from her tiny flat. With plucky resolve and a pair of crutches, the orientationally challenged Janice sets off on the first of her great adventures.

In turn, she observes the marketed paranoia of Commuter Fortress; has a near-terminal brush with some psychopathic aristos at Splatter Hall; escapes across wild moorland in a wheelchair to reach, and stay awhile, in the paradoxical town of Grim-up-North; calls in at nearby Islamic Republic where, during prayers at a mosque, she recovers the use of her legs. With savings from a job, she returns to Capital.

By virtue of the above mentioned bifurcation, we join the character of Arden Keen who, because of his clean-cut looks and assuredly not his intelligence, has risen meteorically to become the national face of his employers, Inflatahome. (He initially appears as an obscure salesman who allows the exhausted travelling Janice to rest the night in a showhome, believing her to be a member of senior management in disguise, come to test his worth.) However, things are to change for Arden when the Primed Minister announces that a country in ME [= Middle East, military engagement, take your pick] has forty-five tools of mass desiccation plugged in and ready to use against EK, and he has no choice but to – in the modified vocabulary of the book – inverse. There is a call-up of non-essential young men. Desperate, Arden tracks down and begs the bemused Janice to use her position in order to stop his being sent to the desert to fight. Of course, she can do no such thing, and he is rounded up for the trenches. Keen is saved the fate of the rest of his unit by being secreted back to Capital where he is made the national face of recruitment.

When Janice sees Arden portrayed against a desert backdrop, she is stricken by a sense of guilt and a bout of motherliness. Thus starts her second adventure, a journey to ME. Arden she does not locate, but a mysterious man of the desert leads her to the presence of Teri al-Tori, commonly known as Terry, leader of Terryists everywhere, and supposedly the most wanted man in the world. In his office behind a cave shopping mall, Terry introduces Janice to a new point of view: “Sometimes our people feel the urge to throw the shit back over the wall.”

Janice once again makes a return to Capital, from which the rest of her story is related in terms of anger, frustration, feistiness, world order catastrophe, and finally poignancy. At just under 80,000 words, this reader at least would have been happy with more.

A futuristic setting, to accommodate a Primed Minister hanging on there in his nineties, is evoked through advances in technology. In addition to the various types of cator, we – and Janice – are sped along in the ubiquitous one-mo, a sort of covered electric scooter guided by tracks in the road, and treated to telesperience, which changes the immediate environment using holograms. A step into the near future also provides for exaggerated projection of some current trends, depicting them as they might one day become were they to continue unchecked by reflective rationality. It is the essential structure of blrlnd: on the surface, a highly readable tale that ranges from funny clever to funny silly; underneath, an often sophisticated sociological or political foundation.

Janice’s first adventure, an escape from oblivious Capitalcentricity, can be seen as a journey through the domestic social landscape, stopping off at distinctly different perspectives. The inference is that we live among a number of quite separate societies which just happen to occupy the same small island. A corollary might be that hopes of broad integration are inherently misplaced: a class-based history repels the idea from one end, with multiculturalism working against it from the opposite end. It is all a long way from the inclusive, classless, hoodie-hugging society we are increasingly being sold.

The second adventure embarked on by Janice thrusts us into the war. Yes, that war – the ‘illegal occupation of another country based on a shoddy lie and a general screwing up of people’s lives there’ war, which will surely be the defining characteristic of the Blair era. In blrlnd, the fighting is organised along the lines of entertainment. (“Daily, at prime time screening, the opposing armies waited for the signal from the mediers [= media], and attacked, breaking off every quarter of an hour to allow product promotion.”) Elements borrowed from two world wars are mixed in. War in general is the larger subject here, but the war which continues in our name is the main focus.

A sole American gets a scene in the book, and Americans in general receive a further brief paragraph – both of these insertions none too flattering, and neither to do with the military. Brimswall is making reference to Hollywood’s readiness to dismiss Britain’s role in WW II and so reverses the distortion to the point of omission. More significantly, he is placing the responsibility for our country’s part in the Middle East mess firmly at the feet of our own leader.

One omission that does stand out is that of a Gordon Brown character. It would seem the author believes Brown was never in the Blair plans for succession, not in the heart of hearts, and a token figure was therefore not included in the book’s character line-up. Maybe that’s him, the little dog looking on in the cover image.

The novel was written in the knowledge that the situation it satirically refers to would, if the political programme were adhered to, change within months – making blrlnd a short-lived though entirely delightful one-off. Well, the change happened. But books that look back on the late Blair period will be many. Let this be one of them.

December 2006 and August 2007