One Tweet away from disaster

John Boyne skewers the brutalities of social media and the incongruities of wokeness for those who value friendship more than followers. Boyne’s characteristic humour and razor-sharp observations,  follows five members of the Cleverley family  who lived a gilded life, little realising how precarious their privilege is, only one tweet away from disaster, during a week in which their lives are torn apart and their reputations are destroyed, a dizzying downward spiral of action and consequence, poised somewhere between farce, absurdity and oblivion. To err is human, but to really foul things up you only need a mobile phone.

George, the patriarch, is a stalwart of television interviewing, a national treasure, his wife Beverley,  a celebrated novelist, and their children Nelson the oldest,  a sexually confused teacher, confident only when wearing uniforms, who tells his therapists that the one person to whom he’s attracted is Princess Anne, Elizabeth, the middle child who spends her whole life on Twitter trolling her parents, politicians and footballers’ wives and most bizarrely herself, Achilles, the youngest 17-year-old confidence trickster, who preys on lonely middle-aged men, banking on the fact that “ desire took a lead piping to the man’s conscience, beating it senseless and living it on life support, various degrees of catastrophe waiting to happen round the corner.

Beverley’s obsession with Strictly Come Dancing partner, the priapic young Pylyp  leads her into ever more absurd scrapes. Nelson masquerading as a nurse, is obliged to treat a man who had collapsed on the Underground. George is taken to task by the director-general of BBC who, decrying gay visibility, insists that “I make a point of never showing any affection towards my wife in public or in private for that matter.

Beverley who claims to be a friend of Margaret Atwood would assert that “ Leonardo da Vinci’s work is probably lot better than mine”.

George who interviewed Ronald Regan, Pope John Paul II to Barbara Streisand and Justin Bieber would surely be aware that words such as poof, crippled and coloured were liable to cause offence.

Elizabeth symbolises everything that is reprehensible about social media, and refers her boyfriend Wilkes, a man who speculates on the impact that Christ might have had “If he’d Tweeted from the cross”, by his Twitter handle,  releases a sex tape, insults and threatens celebrities  and says “ The Grid is Life”.

Together they will go on  a journey of discovery through the Hogarthian Jungle of modern living where past presumptions count for nothing and carefully curated reputations can be destroyed instantly.  

The Echo Chamber by John Boyne, Double Day £16.99, 432 pages.