In 2004, Boris Johnson was MP for Henley, shadow arts minister, and editor of The Spectator.
The title of his only novel (to date) refers to the pleasures that Islamic terrorists reportedly expect when they enter Jannah, or Heaven.
Wikipedia summarises its plot thus: "The President of the United States plans to visit the Palace of Westminster. A Lebanese–born terrorist aims to assassinate him; Roger Barlow, a hapless, bicycle–riding, tousled–haired MP aims to foil the attack in order to distract from a scandal involving his financial entanglement in a lingerie shop named Eulalie."
Also on Wikipedia we learn that reviews were "mixed to positive" on release. One of the positive reviews was in The Spectator (no, really?), where Douglas Hurd compared it to P. G. Wodehouse and praised the "rollicking pace and continuous outpouring of comic invention". Hurd also suggested however that it had likely been written in three days – "flat out day and night." Spookily, he also described Johnson as "the next prime minister but three."
Mark Lawson, writing in The Grauniad in 2019 (with Johnson poised to win the Conservative Party leadership election and fulfil Douglas Hurd's prophecy), noted an anti–French and anti–American tone, sexist content, and references to "Islamic headcases" and "Islamic nutcases", Arabs casually noted to have "hook noses" and "slanty eyes", a mixed–race Briton described as "coffee–coloured", and mentions of "pikeys" and people who are "half–caste".
More sinister (Wikipedia suggests, quoting Lawson) was that "the suggestion – from both an external observer, and the protagonist's inner voice – that Barlow [the 'author surrogate'] may be a fraud. His assistant worries that, under the jaunty vaudeville act, there are no real core ideals, values or beliefs."
During the 2019 general election campaign, Jon Stone (in The Independent) noted that the novel "depicted Jews as controlling the media and being able to 'fiddle' elections".
Meanwhile, in The Grauniad, Catherine Bennett argued that the novel "amounts to a compelling case for character reappraisal" and that its perceived tendency to evaluate women's worth "according to their fuckability on the – sometimes eccentric – Johnson scale" indicates a lack of "interest in addressing, for instance, sex discrimination, harassment, [or] the gender pay gap".
I first became aware of the existence of this novel in September 2020, when the Grauniad's Saturday quiz (one of the highlights of the week in our house) asked what links Sybil, Savrola and Seventy–Two Virgins. We answered confidently that they were all written by Benjamin Disraeli. How wrong we were; although I did say that I thought the third title sounded like a rather unlikely choice for that particular author.
We should of course have remembered that Savrola was written by Winston Churchill. And the link, equally of course, is that they are all novels written by Prime Ministers.
© Haydn Thompson 2020