“Only mad or dangerous people believe in anything these days; vegans, football fans, suicide bombers…”
Bernard Hawks, a dissolute and disillusioned journalist, is employed by The Indicator primarily because of his ability to annoy. In his satirical column he fantasises about where he’d like to plant a bomb, but when a bomb does go off in an advertising agency, just where he’d suggested, he becomes both a traitor and a hero. He finds a fan in Animal, a crazily attractive young female terrorist, but Dillwyn, his conspiracy obsessed neighbour, reckons it’s all part of a government plot, while the police are convinced Bernard will lead them to the perpetrators. Meanwhile, a mysterious blackmailer claims he has evidence that proves that Bernard himself did indeed plant the bomb.
As Bernard pursues Animal he is convinced he is being used by someone or somebody, but to what end becomes increasingly uncertain. On his way he meets Professor Kepler, promulgator of the Theory of Post-Credibility, and the enigmatic JJ, spin doctor supreme, 'the man who turned baseball caps round', whose philosophies appear throughout the book. Bernard’s paths also cross those of the legendary 70's experimental theatre group, The Human Company, who everybody has heard of but no-one has seen, who are about to create their final work, a show to ignite the entire city. And behind everything lurks the rapidly expanding New Age conglomerate, the Tranquility Foundation. The story culminates in Great Britain Day, which is simultaneously the government’s attempt both to reinstall a sense of national pride and demonstrate their ability to respond to the threat of terrorism, a day of protest by several competing factions and the stage for the Human Company’s apocalyptic final production.
Bernard’s quest is constantly impeded by paranoia, his bad back, a weakness for recreational drugs, irrepressible scepticism, and the constant fear of puppets.
The Beach Beneath The Pavement is a set in a London very close in time and space to our own. It’s an extravagant philosophical satire about how we make sense of a world where no one believes in anything. It’s about the lost or corrupted dreams of the sixties and seventies, dissent, experimental theatre, paranoia, conspiracy theory, drugs, art, new age panaceas, surveillance,therapy, the media, computers, chaos theory, money and the power of fiction.
The style has been compared, with varying degrees of favour, to Thomas Pynchon, Martin Amis, Kingsley Amis, Iain Banks, Evelyn Waugh, Will Self, Tom Sharpe, Tom McCarthy and JohnKennedy Toole. And ‘The Avengers’, circa mid-60’s. Take your pick from those.
Coming soon: