Briefcase cover

It’s a com­mon griev­ance in 2016 New Zea­l­and that, even with cack-handed dun­der­headry in the ascend­ent and stu­pid­ity neck-and-neck with malice in a race to the bot­tom, nobody’s both­er­ing to sat­ir­ise this out­rageous shit. Prime Min­is­teri­al can­did­ates launch cam­paigns stood atop visu­al props, yet where is our Veep? With­er an Anti­podean Ian­nucci to har­vest all this buf­foon­ery, craft God­zone’s own The Thuck of Ut?

The good news is that Bran­navan Gnan­alingam has been stand­ing right here the whole time. His new nov­el, A Briefcase, Two Pies and a Pent­house, explores blokery, inef­fi­ciency, and leth­al idiocy in the upper ech­el­ons of the organ­isa­tions charged with keep­ing you safe by read­ing your emails.

The book opens with the explan­a­tion that an SIS agent really did mis­place the eponym­ous embar­rass­ments out­side an Aro Val­ley house in 1981 – togeth­er with a Listen­er, three IDs and a note­book. But to lay bare the full extent of the bungle would test the satir­ic ima­gin­a­tion even of read­ers raised on Tom Scott the Whiter and Mark Wright in corn­flake­face. Non­ethe­less, the title’s three tokens – busi­ness, por­no­graphy, and cheaply-ground beef – serve as sig­ni­fi­ers for much of the nov­el’s world.

Gnan­alingam’s 2015 offer­ing Cred­it in the Straight World cast the rise and fall of South Can­ter­bury Fin­ance as a (frankly unbe­liev­ably enter­tain­ing) com­edy of main­land hubris, keenly drawn and shot through with laugh-out-loud obser­va­tions. As the nov­el­ist’s per­spect­ive moves north, the action becomes office-bound, depict­ing the mach­in­a­tions of domest­ic intel­li­gence in the War on Ter­ror.

The set­ting this time round is John Key’s Wel­ling­ton in  – to bor­row anoth­er phrase off the telly – its Dick­ensi­an aspect, from high-rise waste to Hutt hous­ing pro­jects. Here cloak-and-dag­ger ingenu­ity is thin on the ground but inter-office skul­dug­gery gov­erns access to the fax machine. This is the fight against ISIS as fought in a world of Tinker, Tail­or, Sol­dier, Chilled-Out Enter­tain­er.

The com­edy is grip­ping and cringe-indu­cing: one centrepiece fol­lows the intel­li­gence elite as they hit the turps and go home for the worst con­sen­su­al sex ever com­mit­ted to prose. It’s as mor­ti­fy­ing and impossible to look away from as a train-wreck in which all the cas­u­al­ties are drunk­en middle-man­age­ment office-bros. Well-turned and believ­able, this uni­verse of cubicle-drones has a dozen dif­fer­ent words for beige; and there’s real mas­tery in the way Gnan­alingam weaves the story’s tra­gic threads through the sit­com-style office japery.

Its per­spect­ive’s achingly 2016-ready, imme­di­ate and worthy of pos­ter­ity. At time of writ­ing, cer­tain themes – racial pro­fil­ing, intel­li­gence over­reach, gendered inequal­ity – are very much at the fore of the pop­u­lar con­scious­ness, often in ways that don’t read­ily sug­gest rip-snort­ing com­edy. But this is satire on the side of the angels, not your down-punch­ing news­pa­per-car­toon cheap-shots: the tar­gets are puffed-up and ripe for lan­cing, the com­edy pitch-black but for­ward-look­ing. Gnan­alingam has done it again.