Review: The Fuckit List by John Niven

 

        Just like Charlie Brooker’s Wipe, John Niven’s books have, for the past few years, been an annual highlight for me, an antidote to the ever-increasing global insanity, that sort of comic relief moment your cracking mind is crying for. In an age where satire has been decried as dead and absurdity reigns as normal, Niven still manages to send it up like a rocket of cranking cackling madness while all other satirists just throw up their hands in defeat. If anything, Niven is probably the only one with a sufficient level of guts and spunk to give it a treatment that is adequate.

In the not very distant future of 2026, Trump has finished his second term of presidency, now safely installed his daughter as his successor, abortion is illegal, gun control is almost non-existent and America is even more grotesque as it already is – and I say that a few days after Bleachgate.

         In all this, Frank, a retired small-town newspaper editor, has just received the grave news that he has terminal cancer. While he is no angel himself, his life has been a series of tragedies and losses: a string of failed marriages, his third wife and son lost in a school shooting, his daughter to a backroom abortion. So Frank, who’s got nothing to lose and plenty of bones to pick, sets out across an America that is even more dystopian (but sadly not unrealistic) than we already know it. In Walter White manner, he manages to evade FBI investigations… but an overzealous sheriff with a personal agenda and crooked methods (who reminds me a bit of a nasty cross of Boss Hogg and Buford T Justice) is hot on his heels.

      True to himself, John Niven doesn’t hold back. He carries the fury, frustration and disbelief of a generation and channels it into a rough justice that is entirely therapeutic. The unsavoury, nay revolting characters Frank dispatches deserve everything they’ve got coming, and his ultimate goal is, denied or not, a fantasy of many.

Hell, I’ve been long past the guilty giggles -  now the belly laughs and triumph he elicits, enriched by a vulnerable  humanity amidst  the brutality and obscenity , are as satisfactory as a Sunday carvery.