An Antisemite

2019 and Bill George, sixty-eight, life-long lover of literature and part-time anarchistic socialist, turns up to his Labour Party Branch meeting to be told he’s suspended. Caught up in the frenzy of false accusations unleashed after Corbyn’s second leadership victory, George is debris in the “bringing the Party into disrepute” sweep: he sent an e-mail pointing out the long history of Zionist anti-Semitism. His lengthy response to the Party’s questions, delivered within the requisite seven days, brings no response, no investigation, merely silence. He has become a non-person: CN-2539. After eighteen months he makes a hopeless Subject Access Request which disappears down the memory hole. Meanwhile, his low-key, retired life rolls along. He visits an old pal in London whose marriage and wife are crumbling; rubs along nicely with his Muslim neighbours, even if their son’s insistence on a trip to the park to sail his yacht on the duck pond ends in sodden farce; meets up with an old radical friend who is diagnosed with prostate cancer. Forced to put his life in review he comes to question what he has taken for granted.
In this tragi-comic, bitter-witty little novel, Dent explores not only the nature of our political system, its self-serving elites and compliant media but a world order founded on conquest, based on racism in pursuit of lucre.