Seventy-Two Virgins: A Comedy of Errors, Boris Johnson’s misguided 2004 stab at comic novel writing, leans heavily on the Tom Sharpe energetic school of farcical satire but lacks Sharpe’s sense of style and ability to produce engaging characters. Full of casual racism and patronising stereotypes, it is astonishing Johnson thought this a good idea, and even worse that members of the Conservative Party still considered him suitable for high office afterwards.
Among a wide cast of characters, the story follows a few hours in the life of Roger Barlow, presumably a thinly disguised self-portrait intended to be self-deprecating in that bogus Johnson way (though there is a hint that Mrs Barlow is unfaithful, which surely Johnson would not tolerate in his own life, one philanderer in the family being enough). If he did use himself as the model, it is a revealing one.
Barlow is a glib, shallow backbench Tory MP who sleeps in a William Hague T-shirt (hopefully that bit isn’t autobiographical) and cycles to work. He is expecting an embarrassing news item about him to appear in the tabloids, linking him financially to a lingerie shop named Eulalie, a reference, for no fathomable reason, to would-be fascist dictator Sir Roderick Spode’s involvement in a lingerie shop called Eulalie in P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories.
Barlow’s assistant is an attractive young American woman called Cameron, presumably a feeble joke at the fellow Bullingdonian and future Prime Minister’s expense. She had high expectations of the British parliamentary system but prolonged contact with Barlow has disillusioned her. As a result of Cameron being used by her boyfriend, who is eventually revealed as a spy for the French with a lapel badge to prove it, Barlow is caught up in an elaborate terrorist plot to seize the president of the United States as he is giving a speech at the Palace of Westminster during a state visit which is being broadcast live on TV.
The terrorists’ plan, if such it can be described, is to milk the resulting coverage by having an international vote on whether the Guantanamo detainees should be put on trial, then assassinate the president and blow up those members of the British establishment gathered to hear his address. Meanwhile, British and American forces desperately try to work out how best to launch a counter-attack. The reader follows the various characters who are involved, and learns their back stories, as Johnson describes the terrorists’ penetration of the Houses of Parliament and the resulting siege, through to its resolution.
It all takes a long time to unfold, and in passing the author tilts at a wide range of targets, among which are politicians, naturally, journalists, health care professionals, feuding neighbours, the West Midlands, the BBC, senior police officers, the military, celebrity chefs, Lymeswold cheese*, Americans a lot (surprisingly, given Johnson’s origins), above all the death cult of Islamic terrorists, notably the sleazy promise of the 72 virgins awaiting jihadists in Paradise which gives the novel its title.
In this world coloured by Johnson’s reactionary politics, foreigners have a tendency to be dodgy (such as the Kosovan Muslim bricklayers working illegally, and the Serb tow-truck driver they encounter). They can be vehicles for humour, some of it in poor taste (the travails of a badly injured black traffic warden) or facile (the French and Dutch ambassadors, the US president). One of the terrorists pretends to be a Welshman called Jones, having studied at a Welsh tech-turned-university, the disjunction between claiming to be Welsh and actually being a Lebanese illegal immigrant supposedly amusing. The attitudes displayed towards foreigners, women and the working class provide unflattering insights into Johnson’s psyche.
As is his approach to life generally, this effort feels dashed off. One senses he became bored, because the plotting is increasingly schematic. It is one thing to take life flippantly, but such an attitude does not work too well in positions of power. Barlow is in crisis to begin with, but a few hours later comes out of his ordeal with a great deal of credit, his peccadillos buried because he is now untouchable by scandal. It could almost be a wish-fulfilment fantasy.
One wonders why Johnson wrote this novel which on the face of it seems a misguided project guaranteed to generate ridicule. Why did he so shamelessly display such a lack of literary talent? Possibly it was for the money; after all he has several families to support. But he made more, with far less effort, from his Daily Telegraph columns than he is ever likely to get in royalties on this product.
He may have looked to his self-avowed role model Sir Winston Churchill and thought of a literary career as an element of his legacy (though one might have assumed he would tackle a topic in a weightier way had that been the case). It could have been an egotistical attempt to demonstrate that there were more strings to his bow than journalist and politician, and inviting us to admire his versatility; again, he would have been more likely to tackle profound themes in a serious manner.
The suspicion therefore arises that he idly decided to spend his holiday banging out a novel for a bit of fun – before realising it was more work than he had anticipated – and frankly did not care what people thought of the result. Hence he will not be losing sleep over bad reviews, just as he is indifferent to political opprobrium. He would have been happy to see his name on the cover in larger type than the title as reflecting what he considers his larger-than-life personality.
As is frequently noted, Johnson is a paradoxical figure, bringing foolishness to public life yet managing to convince large numbers of people that under apparent superficiality there is depth, and the eccentricities (which are in fact carefully studied) can be ignored or laughed off. The most reasonable conclusion to draw from his variety of theatrical performance is that he is an embodiment of the trickster archetype, cunning and foolishness, but not necessarily intelligence, intertwined. Honesty, unfortunately, is not a notable characteristic of the trickster.
The puzzled literary critic, like the political pundit, may wonder whether Johnson is a clever person pretending to be an idiot so people underestimate him, or is really an idiot pretending to be a clever person pretending to be an idiot who has reached his present position through guile and the gullibility of others. Either way he looks like an idiot, and his woeful novel amply supports the suspicion that he is not nearly as clever as he likes to think himself. In 72 Virgins he has extended to literature the attitude he takes towards politics, with similar dispiriting results.
*In a typical aside Johnson refers to ‘…Lymeswold cheese, the Heatho-Walkerian plan to deal with the Milk Surplus. Alas, Lymeswold never caught on. It was likened fatally by Auberon Waugh, the journalist, to banana toothpaste…’ (It is typical of Johnson’s confused style that he expects the reader to understand the reference to Ted Heath and long-forgotten Peter Walker but not know that Auberon Waugh was a journalist.) When I was at British Telecom I worked for a while on the development of something called Custom Local Area Signalling System (CLASS) services, a set of offerings such as caller identification and call waiting. The tediously humourless person in charge of the project had previously been marketing manager for the Lymeswold cheese launch. This I thought he should have kept to himself; Lymeswold was often referred to as Slimesmould, mainly because, whatever the quality of the product, the ye-olde-worlde branding to make it sound authentic was a transparently insulting ploy. Yet this chap seemed quite proud of his involvement. If he had been any good at his job he would have nixed the name and gone with something more honest.
The Joy of Mere Words 