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Alfred Sant: George Bush f’Malta. SKS, 2013. 324 pp.

Alfred Sant’s latest novel is a detective story-cum-thriller which also gives a satirical picture of today’s Malta. The plot includes the type of events made familiar by a thousand novels, films or television dramas, plus a climax of a near-apocalyptic nature, but its general mode is a comic one.

Events and characters are clearly meant to satirise the way in which top Maltese people can reduce to absurdity matters seriously affecting the country.

Thus, the head of Malta’s security, faced with a serious act of terrorism, is unable to use his special official car, because his wife has borrowed it to meet a hairdressing appointment.

The heavy vehicles of a powerful and absolutely unscrupulous building contractor, while engaged in an illicit activity, bring traffic in much of Malta to a virtual standstill during an important national crisis.

The so-called Deputy Chief Justice, when trying to have his drug-trafficking son saved from arrest abroad, brings along his helper, a dangerous terrorist... although he never suspects this.

Events and characters are clearly meant to satirise the way in which top Maltese people can reduce to absurdity matters seriously affecting the country

And so on and so forth.

The first-person narrator is a private detective who runs what seems to be a pretty small organisation having surprisingly sophisticated know-how in the field of information technology.

Vonnie B’s partner Ġorġ – one of the book’s comical surprises – is a lawyer by training. He is not just an IT expert, but also an active member of the MUSEUM, the religious organisation founded during the last century by San Ġorġ Preca.

Though he can exasperate Vonnie with his childish practical jokes, he is fond of her in a completely asexual way.

His relations with the Maltese Church are at the moment very strained, since the Church is forbidding him to use the parable of the Prodigal Son in the religious preparation of boys being prepared for confirmation, and actually suspends his teaching programme.

His indignant telephone conversations with prelates provide some amusement, and Sant brings the novel to a close with a very satirical account of Vonnie’s intervention on Ġorġ’s behalf at the Archbishop’s Curia.

Here she persuades an important prelate, canny and worldly – clearly modelled on someone surely well known to all the novel’s readers – to accept large funds in return for the full reinstatement of Ġorġ.

Vonnie has been commissioned by the CIA’s Bentley to look into mysterious electronic messages the CIA had intercepted, written in a language only partly understandable.

The messages refer to a forthcoming visit by the former US President George W. Bush on a matter relating to a possible important oil deal between Texan clients of his and people in Libya.

But the Americans have not been taking Maltese security into their confidence. So head of security L.M., knowing that Vonnie will be involved in the protection of Bush in Malta, has her appointed a public official so she can keep him informed.

Vonnie’s investigations lead her to a school for adult foreigners, which she discovers provides students with a whole range of illicit services, including drugs and prostitutes.

Wherever she goes, Vonnie leaves bugs provided by Ġorġ, who helps her open safes both in the school and in a Turkish bank that is also under suspicion.

Amazingly, she plants her bugs with the greatest of ease, and just as amazingly, no one ever discovers their existence.

She has a narrow escape when her car is pursued by would-be killers whose car and motorcycle she manages to destroy by leading them into a section of the road that sports Malta’s ubiquitous roadworks, complete with deep trenches. She has other dangerous experiences, but also a deeply erotic one, with the sexy head of the language school, Laurie Mannie. Vonnie is highly-sexed and bisexual, though she gives the impression that she finds lesbian sex more exciting than sex with men.

Apart from her sexuality, Vonnie seems to be obsessed with fashion, and is able to identify the make of any suit or dress she beholds.

Sant appears to make a comic matter out of this obsession, but some, like this reviewer, may find the thing tedious, as it is repeated again and again.

Finally, Vonnie reveals herself to be horribly keen on making pots of money out of all her clients, and late in the novel makes millions out of blackmail. But then she is totally amoral, and readers will not mind her soaking off a huge amount out of a huge building contractor. Politically, she is very right-wing, a great admirer of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

Sant’s scientific training leads him to bring an abstruse aspect of electronics into the plot.

Vonnie has a young male friend, Boris, whom she fancies. Basing himself on what a global expert in the US is researching, he tells her that today’s digital electronics will probably be overtaken by trigital, and eventually perhaps by quadrigetal electronics.

He suspects that the mysterious messages Vonnie is meant to investigate may be written in trigital. What is worrying is that anyone able to write in trigital may be able to re-write digital material so as to change it radically.

Such fiendishly clever people would be able to access digital documents and re-write them in such a way that they can re-write history in a manner that eminently suits them.

Vonnie discovers later that Boris is right, and I leave it to readers to discover if the plot to re-write history as regards Bush’s visit to Malta succeeds or not.

The most exciting parts of the novel narrate attacks made by an al-Qaeda operative – the Deputy Chief Justice’s ‘innocent’ house help using Scud missiles – on the US embassy at Ta’ Qali.

Then there is the catastrophic climax, where the mouth of a monstrously huge underground tunnel meant to link Malta with Mali (!) is bombed by a US drone to save the life of Bush.

The unscrupulous contractor, il-Boqqu, has temporarily stored a colossal amount of contraband fuel he has bought from Sicily, right in this tunnel.

The explosion has a cataclysmic effect on Malta’s tectonic plate.

Readers will hope that Prime Minister Joseph Muscat’s declared plan to see if Malta can be enlarged will not adopt what happens in this novel as a method of getting there.

The characters in the novel are not particularly vivid. Some of the characterisation is in the theatrical manner Charles Dickens used for a host of minor characters, and a few major ones.

The US ambassador, for instance, is a purely comic figure, a character that I find overdone, who belongs to the Church of Christ of Latter-day Saints and is constantly quoting the Book of Mormon.

His obsessive religious belief will remind readers of a real US ambassador to Malta. A Catholic, he ended up being recalled for being a confessor of the faith much more than a diplomat... just like the ambassador in this novel, in fact.

The Maltese prelate I have referred to is, I must say, a subtler portrait.