Little things mean very little

Press, 9 July 1983, Page 18

Little things mean very little

The Fat Cat Affair. By Keith Hagenbach. W. H. Allen, 1982. 235 pp. $30.25. The “Fat Cat Affair” is a sort of update for adults of the “Sally Jones — Junior Reporter” type of book once beloved of some teen-agers. Chris Flynn is a grown-up, fully fledged reporter who, by fluke and a nose like a ferret, believes he has discovered an intricate high-leve, Right-wing plot which will threaten Britain’s national security. Although the original spoor was pored over in Spain, and the trail followed in Britain, most of the hunt somehow manages, by a stretch of entirely unbelievable imagination, to occur in Hong Kong. Whether or not honest Chris manages to stop the rot in the establishment must not be revealed. It is best not to spoil the ending. But five minutes after finishing the book, I could not remember the ending anyway.

This is a book in which people speak with a note of “casual triumph,” and they shrug, incline their heads, purse and curl their lips, sink into chairs, meet and sometimes catch one another’s eyes while taking their arms. The entire action seems to centre on the little odds and ends of social intercourse (no need to look back, the world was “social”). It begins with: “Bricker slid an onyx cigarette box across the desk” — something which it is unlikely that anyone has ever done. And ends with: “They shook hands, but the man with the cigar didn’t rise. ‘Right then, until next week boyo’.” If all these little bits were removed, “The Fat Cat Affair” would almost disappear. What the ending means, I was unable to work out, unless one was looking for too much. Perhaps it just meant that in the final analysis, cigars triumph over cigarettes.—Ken Strongman.