Nicki's book blog

- January 30, 2019

Cull- Tanvir Bush-Political Satire

Think the future. Think a state where you pretty much have to work whatever your situation.

If not you have to apply for 50 jobs a week otherwise no benefits. Where vulnerable and

elderly are taken away so that their carers can work and add to the efficiency of the

country. Alex is visually impaired and has her guide dog Chris. She stumbles across

something that leads her on an interesting path , one that could put her in danger

and where no one would care. There is truth (albeit it controversial- which is

probably why it is there) amongst the pages “ A patient still staggering, still smoking

still obese, moaning about the medication making them queasy when they were

eating a ghastly diet and drinking litres of cheap vodka”. Think dystopian, think

extremes. A woman journalist wanting to know what is going on in a world where

everything is extreme. I enjoyed this although in parts I felt for the "crips” and

what was being done to them. Not a genre I would usually go for but something

piqued my interest and I am very glad it did. There is the serious side but there

is also a type of humour, one you have to work out for yourself. Perhaps perfectly

timed for the current issues surrounding Britain. If you fancy a different read

then this could well be the one.

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Amazon Top 1000 reviewer

K E Y N O T E A dystopian satire for our times about the deadly dark side of privatisation P R A I S E 'Where is the satirist we need now, with the welfare state in chaos and politics a TV reality show? With a dauntless but sympathetic heroine, one of the best dog characters in literature and a disabled escort service called the Ladies’ Defective Agency, this witty and all too believable novel is an inheritor of the satirical genius of Lindsay Anderson’s Britannia Hospital and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange ' Maggie Gee 'Laugh and weep! With wit, flair and imagination, Tanvir Bush unfolds the secret life of a nation on benefits. Our nation…' Fay Weldon D E S C R I P T I O N In a near-future Britain, the furore over the welfare state has reached fever pitch. A combination of state propaganda and aggressive austerity has divided the nation along poisonous lines: on one side, so-called freeloaders, crips and fakes; on the other, The Hard Working British Taxpayer. The government has introduced the Care and Protect Bill, ostensibly to to relieve the economic burden of the disabled, elderly and vulnerable on society by opening residential care homes where they will be looked after by medical professionals. But Alex – visually impaired and categorised as one of the dole-scrounging underclass – has stumbled across a troubling link between the disappearance of several homeless people and the extension of Grassybanks, her local care home… Helped by her guide dog, Chris, this discovery sets her on a path that leads all the way to the corrupt heart of government. The novel’s dystopia is striking because it seems frighteningly possible, just a few steps removed from the bureaucracy depicted in Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake . It is playful and gripping, comic and biting all at once: Black Mirror meets Leni Zumas’ Red Clocks . The author herself suffers from a degenerative eye condition and is severely sight impaired: she has first-hand experience of the system’s shortcomings.