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.