Carole Hayman’s novel Hard Choices was initially turned down by a number of publishers, and then talked up by a number of high-profile commentators: its packaging trades on the suggestion that political cowardice lay behind its earlier rejections. The novel is a satire on New Labour, but set in a dystopian future, with a quasi-totalitarian government in thrall to GM food manufacturers and press magnates. In the wake of terrorist bombings and financial meltdown, “Albion” is virtually a police state, sustained by surveillance, curfews and a combination of PC and religiose state interference. Grace Fry, Minister for Women, with the help of an independent journalist who, unsurprisingly, becomes her lover, sets about unmasking a terrible conspiracy which goes, as they say, right to the heart of government.
Hard Choices fails as satire because of the extreme nature of its caricature and the inconsistency of its political critique. It is impossible even to read it as an allegorical reductio ad absurdum. For all the author’s touted access to the early years of the New Labour administration, her obvious targets (and they could not be more obvious) are familiar to anyone who takes even the gentlest interest in politics. Merely to make two-dimensional monsters of all the figures involved is to diminish rather than accent the truth in the satire. Hayman cannot make up her mind, for instance, if New Labour represents unfettered free-market villainy, Maoist or Stalinist oppression, Handmaid’s Tale-style theocracy, or fragile democracy. (The homophobia of her fictional regime is in sharp contrast to the significant liberalization of gay rights achieved under Blair.)
Hard Choices is essentially a standard thriller, faithful to every generic convention: the writing is consistently clichéd, its characters merely Manichean emblems. Could this be why it was turned down? The failure to distinguish between “its” and “it’s”, the poor spelling (“wimpole” for “wimple”), language (“dilemma” for “predicament”) and punctuation (vast numbers of errors, of several kinds) and the atrocious typesetting, make this by far the worst-edited book I have ever read.