A Brexit allegory inspired by CS Lewis

• Published date: 19 December 2020
• Date: 19 December 2020
• Author: Catherine Toal
• Publication title: Irish Times (Dublin, Ireland)

D is aimed at older children and young teenagers, not exactly a niche audience. As an American book-tour organiser reminds the hero who has discovered and published the eyewitness testimony of a fifth Evangelist in Faber's The Fire Gospel: "We got a ways to go yet before we top Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings." D is also billed as marking the 150th anniversary of the death of Charles Dickens and claims to feature Dickens as a protagonist alongside a number of video-game-type multiples or composites who generally bear the names of his more cartoonish minor characters. The tale, inspired by CS Lewis, has been understood as an allegory of Brexit Britain (Faber's home) offering grown-up readers on that landmass the small comfort that, as the export route from Dover to Calais closes, another door to Narnia has opened.

In its political message D reprises the concerns of an essay Faber wrote for a collection to support the Stop the War Coalition in 2006, "Dreams in the Dumpster, Language down the Drain", about the decay of reasoned speech in politics: "Is this the first time we've had a seven-year-old boy as president of the free world?" Whatever the mental age of the current incumbent, Faber aptly counters him with a teenage girl, a refugee from Somaliland, a country not internationally recognised. Dhikilo has been adopted by a white English couple and lives a contented, if somewhat solitary, life in a quintessentially English south-coast town until she wakes up one morning to find that the letter "d" has disappeared from the language.

This leads to lots of excellent silliness that shows Faber's facility for the charm of the children's classic while also enabling potshots at Tory policy: soon there is no local "doctor"or "dentist"; history at school - "always the Egyptians and sometimes a bit of Hitler, Napoleon or the Romans" - is now taught by a " Mr Unstable". Dhikilo, her own name compromised by the change, must go on a quest to retrieve the "d", travelling at the urging of the Dickens character to "The Great Calamity", an alternate world overtaken by environmental disaster which has at its heart a blended Anglo-American makeshift metropolis - containing both Owning Street and a crudely glaring Tower of Light - ruled over by The Gamp (guess who).

Faber is a writer who flaunts a certain shamelessness about devising gambits to catch the reader's attention. The narrator of The Crimson Petal and the White compares himself to the prostitutes who form the...