A White Merc With Fins By James Hawes

A White Merc With Fins

By James Hawes

(Jonathan Cape, £12.99)

James Hawes’ debut novel, A White Merc With Fins, is a hilarious account of the planning and execution of a bank robbery, set in contemporary London. The unnamed hero, pushing 30 and living in a shed in Big Sis’s back garden, is terrified of becoming A Bald Man in a Bedsit (with those horrible orange curtains bedsits always have), and so concocts The Plan to rob Michael Winner’s Private Bank of one million pounds. The other members of The Gang are Suzy the Black Widow, Brady and Chicho, and along the way we met an assortment of other deviant and eccentric characters.

Hawes is great on England’s rigid class structure. You can be underclass (UC), working class (WC), lower middle class (LMC), middle class (MC) or upper class (UC).  (Is the fact that the underclass and the upper class have the same initials a suggestion that they have more in common with each other than anyone caught in between?) The protagonist is LMC with a college education, desperate to escape to MC Heaven. He tells us: ‘There are really only three super-tribes in London: the ones who will never be able to get mortgages, the ones who live and die by the mortgage rate, and the ones who do not need mortgages. Those are the ranks of slavery and freedom, the rest is all just questions of degree.’ The book presents a vivid picture of what a hole London really is.

There’s more than a hint of the smart-arsedness of the early Martin Amis (before he got good), but Hawes is less vicious, aiming more for the belly-laugh. The novel contains the most reasonable attitudes to heroin and to the IRA I have come across in fiction. It also has a couple of really good dirty, happy sex scenes.

It’s not exactly ‘deep’, but it is a laugh a page, and well worth a read. 

First published in The Big Issues