Purple People by Kate Bulpitt

Eve imagined the iguana
at a gig with the mohican-topped
mandarin duck.

Of the various Unbound publications on my shelves, and there are quite a few (I just counted – 27 of them!), I am pleased and gently embarrassed to say I pledged for a couple of them purely on impulse, because the premise and/or title was too much fun to resist – Crushed Mexican Spiders, Dead Writers in Rehab, Horse Destroys the Universe, I AM NOT A WOLF, and so on. In 90% of the cases, my impulses were not punished, and I trust this is due to the diligence and integrity of the Unbound editors (the same clever people who deftly batted back my own weak service with apologetic grace), in making sure their literary output was as lovely and rewarding as the deliciously tactile books they produce.

But not in this case.

I’ll add a caveat or disclaimer at this point – there’s no accounting for taste, but being a lazy liberal I’m happy enough to allow people to enjoy things I don’t enjoy, so long as they don’t tell me about it.

This was not to my taste. I’m all for whimsy and fluff, I love a good narrative hook, and it’s great to get the feeling an author is enjoying him or herself through the medium of paper and ink. Kate Bulpitt has delivered what is on the surface a decent satire on Big Government; in a near future British dystopia where some sort of government-mandated technological and cultural regression has returned the UK to the sort of nicotine-stained utopia imagined by Nigel ‘Pint and a fag, and no Eurocrat can tell me otherwise, thanks for the €107K a year Brussels’ Farage and Mark ‘How DARE you insult Great British racists, bigots and homophobes, Will Self?’ Francois, and the current (Tory?) government has, by some mysterious and no-doubt nefarious means begun turning anti-social teenagers and minor felons purple, so as to indelibly mark them as outcasts and social pariahs. Into the mix steps intrepid internet-cat-story journalist, freshly returned to ‘Blighty’ (Bulpitt’s awful, contextually accurate but still awful word) from New York because her dad got drunk and punched in the head, to sort it all out.

As the story labours through quite a lot of tired exposition, including her family history, her uni friends (each occupying antipodal points on the circle of the scheme), her lost love, her new love, her hero-worship of a TV news anchor, I lost a lot of interest. This is in part due to her use of earnestly British words like ‘Blighty’, ‘geezers’, ‘telly’, words which signpost some sort of working-class affirmation- or virtue-seeking, and her purple prose both figurative and literal, describing a large pile of newspapers as ‘a pulpy mountain’, and the constant presence of differing terms for purple, used with what I imagine is comedic intent.

But it’s not funny.

I stuck it out, right to the end, to see how they did it. Sorry for the spoiler, but you’d have figured it out anyway - turns out it was not really much of a mystery. All those dog walkers and fag smokers she keeps spotting at the scenes of purpling had been secretly recruited by shady government officials to dart people with a tanning product.

It is fun in parts, with cutting commentary on the State Of Things, but it drags in others, and I wasn’t able to care much about the various characters involved – perhaps the 1970s-esque setting was to blame, or the tired and cliched language, or the incessant purple puns, or something else entirely – so unfortunately, I felt it was very much overdone, a very eggy pudding. It may well be warm and heartfelt, as described on the cover, but it’s not for me.

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