The Monty Python Guide to the British Economy

Tim Orchard, Stickle Island

Residents of poor, agrarian Stickle Island, off England’s Kentish coast, want to continue their way of life. But with Margaret Thatcher’s draconian spending cuts, the local council cannot keep subsidizing the ferry service that connects them to mainland England. Faced with being price-chopped from modernity, villagers see little future… until a freak storm pushes six bales of prime Colombian marijuana ashore. Is the settlement saved?

London tradesman Tim Orchard’s first novel wants to be a comic romp through the lengths ordinary Brits will undertake to survive austerity. By picking on Thatcher’s cuts, so severe they initiated a decade of unprecedented postwar poverty, Orchard probably means to obliquely criticize more recent austerity under Cameron and May. I like the idea. Unfortunately, the product requires more workshopping, because this feels like a half-completed early draft.

DC, a back-to-the-land hippie, and his daughter Petal see the marijuana as an opportunity to make Stickle Island self-sufficient. They need only organize a co-op to turn this flotsam into money. But this requires enlisting Stickle’s two farmers, Henry Stick and John Newman, longstanding rivals, and their children, who hate each other and their fathers alike. This weed could save the island… if the islanders stop bickering for five minutes.

Meanwhile, London gangster Carter, a shakedown man with delusions of grandeur, can’t find the shipment of Colombian weed he’s expecting. With several thousand pounds invested, and his personal future tied to a cartel, he can’t afford to waste anything. Realizing his haul probably washed out to sea, he follows the tide to Stickle Island, so tiny nobody’s ever heard of it. Soon London muscle starts descending on the unsuspecting village.

It’s difficult to discuss this novel without referencing British movies and TV. The island population resembles “quirky villager” vehicles like The Vicar of Dibley or Calendar Girls. They face the common Thatcher-era conundrum of keeping the community alive against faceless, technocratic modernity. But they’re challenged by bungling gangsters pirated directly from a Guy Ritchie heist caper. If you’re into British pop culture, it all feels very familiar.

Tim Orchard

Nothing wrong with that. These story tropes survive because audiences respond positively to them; they reflect the Britain which consumes their content. But Orchard’s prose needs a firm editorial hand, because right now, his jokes are too far apart. He has strong humor which Britcom fans will enjoy (it’ll be dicier for audiences unaccustomed to British humor). But his set-ups are too long and wordy, withholding punchlines until we lose interest.

Not only his jokes, though. One wonders whether Orchard received any editorial guidance, because his very talky exposition unspools so long, subsequent lines of dialog are separated by as much as a page of prose. They aren’t always separated, though, by paragraph breaks. This means we not only lose the thread of conversation, we cannot even confidently know who’s speaking. The result is disorienting and loses momentum.

Which is sad, because when Orchard gets out if his own way, he’s a lively writer, whose historical setting, presumably reflecting his own “London Calling” youth, holds a grimly comedic mirror to contemporary issues. Audiences could read his novel as commentary on a nation repeating mistakes because they refuse to learn from history. Or they could read it as blistering slapstick with a grimly violent edge. Either viewpoint works.

The building conflict between the village, isolated by geography, and brutal unregulated capitalism, has both dramatic tension and comedic byplay. DC, John Newman, and Henry Stick come from backgrounds where everybody leaves everybody else alone, but must unify to preserve their community from malevolent neglect. Carter, the gangster, operates outside the law, but is a massive control freak seeking order. The explosion is downright inevitable.

You could read Orchard’s novel, under 190 pages, in one energetic Saturday. But you probably won’t. Not because he hasn’t written a good book, but because it needs edited, and tends to sprawl where it should sprint. Orchard pinches so much, in style and content, from British sitcoms, I’d recommend he buy a sitcom writer’s guide, just to better grasp what professionals do to compress exposition into timing and dialog.

I enjoyed much about this novel… in germinal form. Tim Orchard has the makings of an engaging novel here. Unfortunately, he needs Maxwell Perkins-style guidance to nurture his story to maturity. A firm editor could turn this into a concise, electrifying novella. What we have, sadly, reads like an outline he plans to finish later. Oh, so much potential here. I hope to see Orchard complete it someday.