NO FUTURE. STILL.

Derek, Tim and “Trol” were going to change the world.

There would be revolution. Justice. Freedom. A better society. Perhaps even public transport that worked after eleven o’clock at night.

Then they got old.

Now they are three ageing punks hitting their fifties, drinking cheap beer in one of London’s dwindling punk pubs and remembering the days when the music seemed dangerous, demonstrations appeared to matter and the future was something you could still reasonably expect to grab by the throat.

The world, inconsiderately, carried on without them.

The hair is thinner, the waistlines are thicker, the knees make noises and the revolution appears to have been indefinitely postponed. The causes have become careers, rebellion has become merchandise and plenty of the people who once promised to tear down the establishment seem to have discovered that it has quite a good pension scheme.

Then the three friends watch another riot unfold on television.

Lots of anger. Lots of police. Lots of broken glass.

Nothing changes.

Something finally snaps, and a conversation which ought to have died harmlessly over another round of beer turns into a plan.

Derek, Tim and Trol are going to assassinate the Prime Minister.

This is not a sensible plan.

Old, Fat Punks is a blackly comic revolutionary caper about ageing, friendship, political disillusionment and the uncomfortable discovery that youthful rebellion does not necessarily mature into wisdom. Sometimes it simply acquires backache, a beer gut and several decades of unresolved resentment.

The original shorthand for the book put it somewhere between The Comic Strip Presents and Guy Ritchie.

That still does the job rather well.

THREE MEN, ONE PUB AND A TERRIBLE IDEA

Derek, Tim and Trol are not professional revolutionaries. They have no secret organisation waiting for coded instructions, no military expertise and no obliging international arms dealer who owes them a favour.

They have old friends, old arguments, old contacts, political convictions of varying structural integrity and enough cheap lager to turn theoretical outrage into practical idiocy.

Most importantly, they have reached the dangerous stage of middle age where doing something catastrophically stupid can begin to seem preferable to spending the remaining decades complaining that somebody ought to do something.

Assassinating a Prime Minister is easy in the pub.

Actually attempting it introduces complications.

Plans require money. Equipment requires finding. People need persuading. Bodies which once survived gigs, fights, protests and questionable recreational chemistry are now capable of being defeated by sleeping in the wrong position.

Then there is the considerably larger problem of what happens when political rhetoric ceases to be rhetoric.

There is a comfortable distance between believing that the system deserves tearing down and finding yourself in a position where you might actually tear something.

Old, Fat Punks lives in that gap.

The conspiracy becomes more real.

So do the consequences.

At some point three men who have spent years performing their own cynicism have to decide whether they still believe any of the things they claim to believe.

THE REVOLUTION GOT A MORTGAGE

Punk was excellent at announcing that there was NO FUTURE.

It was rather less prepared for everybody involved subsequently having to live through one.

Youthful rebellion comes with an implied promise that history is going somewhere. Perhaps you will not win immediately, but the music, demonstrations, arguments and causes appear to be pushing the world in a direction.

Then twenty or thirty years pass.

Politicians change.

Slogans acquire better graphic design.

Radical imagery appears on expensive T-shirts.

Your old neighbourhood becomes desirable.

The cheap pub becomes an expensive pub decorated to resemble the cheap pub it replaced.

Movements split, professionalise, moderate, disappear or acquire communications departments.

Yesterday’s dangerous subculture becomes this year’s retrospective documentary.

Derek, Tim and Trol have lived through that process without ever quite making peace with it.

Their real problem is not simply that the revolution failed. It is that almost everybody else seems to have stopped noticing there was supposed to be one.

The machinery carried on.

That leaves three men approaching fifty wondering whether their youthful convictions were naïve, whether everybody sold out, whether growing up itself is a kind of capitulation, or whether the world simply proved more difficult to shift than they imagined.

Several pints later, they arrive at an answer which should under no circumstances be regarded as political advice.

PEOPLE SEEM TO RECOGNISE THESE BASTARDS

One of the more pleasing things about the response to Old, Fat Punks is that readers have repeatedly recognised the people rather than merely the politics.

One five-star reader review described the book as “full of life, with believable characters and a vivid colourful background”, before adding that the central trio were so familiar that the reviewer felt they knew people just like them.

Another five-star reader called the book “laugh-out-loud funny” and said it “kept me riveted to the end”, particularly praising the characters and the reality of the frustrations underneath the comedy.

That is where the book is supposed to live.

Derek, Tim and Trol are not ideological delivery mechanisms walking around with speeches attached. They are old friends who have accumulated decades of history together.

That means remembering one another at twenty while looking at one another at fifty.

It means ancient humiliations remaining legitimate conversational ammunition.

It means stories which have been repeated so many times that nobody can remember which bits actually happened.

It means knowing precisely when your mate is talking complete bollocks and also knowing that correcting him would spoil the story.

Old friendships accumulate archaeology.

These three have enough to require a trench.

Their friendship is also what makes the plot possible. An absurd suggestion from a stranger can be dismissed. An absurd suggestion shared with the people who remember who you were before life wore the edges off can become a dare.

A challenge.

Perhaps even a last chance to prove that your younger selves were not entirely full of shit.

This is how middle-aged men end up making plans.

A POLITICAL NOVEL WITH NOBODY SAFE IN IT

Old, Fat Punks grew out of frustration with politics rather than loyalty to a party.

The three protagonists come from an older rebellious tradition which does not map particularly neatly onto the increasingly tribal political identities around them.

The populist Right has its resentments, hypocrisies and easy scapegoats. The respectable Left has acquired its own managerial class, orthodoxies and enthusiasm for policing the boundaries of acceptable thought.

Institutions remain institutions.

Businesses sell.

Politicians manage.

Media narrates.

Activists perform.

Everybody explains why the people over there are the reason nothing works.

Derek, Tim and Trol sit in a pub wondering when revolution became a customer-retention strategy.

The book was first published in 2015, after the financial crisis and years of austerity but before Brexit and the subsequent acceleration of Britain’s political nervous breakdown.

Reading it now gives some of the anger a peculiar period flavour.

The pressures were already visible.

People knew something was wrong.

Nobody yet knew quite what the next decade was going to do with it.

In a 2016 interview, the book was described as a “scream into the void”: frustration at an ethical vacuum across the political spectrum, channelled into something intended to be funny, angry and thoughtful at the same time.

The void has subsequently become considerably noisier.

THE CAPER IS THE POINT

Political fiction can become unbearable when everybody stops being a character and waits politely for the author to hand them a lecture.

Fortunately, attempted murder requires logistics.

Once Derek, Tim and Trol decide to turn their frustration into a grand nihilistic gesture, the book becomes a caper.

A spectacularly ill-advised caper conducted by men whose criminal skill set is rather less impressive than their political vocabulary.

They have to work out whether the impossible idea can actually be done.

The more seriously they take it, the funnier and more dangerous the situation becomes.

This gives the politics something solid to repeatedly collide with.

Fine principles meet limited resources.

Grand gestures encounter timetables.

Revolutionary confidence runs into practical incompetence.

Decades of political theory discover that none of them necessarily explain how to get through a locked door.

The comedy comes partly from that collision, but the plot also steadily removes the comfortable protection of fantasy.

Talking about doing something is harmless.

Preparing to do it is different.

Being able to do it is different again.

Eventually the question stops being whether the three old punks can pull off their ridiculous scheme.

The more interesting question is what they will do if they actually get the chance.

OLD PUNKS IN A CHANGING LONDON

London matters too.

This is not the polished London of international thrillers where everybody has an immaculate flat overlooking the Thames and can apparently park wherever they like.

It is a city experienced through pubs, streets, demonstrations, trains, memories and the accumulated geography of people who remember what used to be there.

Ageing in a city means repeatedly watching your own history disappear.

The venue closes.

The shop goes.

The squat becomes luxury accommodation.

The pub changes hands.

The neighbourhood where nobody respectable wanted to live suddenly develops artisan bakeries and a rental market requiring access to inherited wealth.

You can eventually walk through the landscape of your own youth while finding very little evidence that it ever happened.

One of London’s last punk pubs therefore becomes more than somewhere for Derek, Tim and Trol to get drunk.

It is surviving territory.

A place in which they can still briefly inhabit the world they remember.

Naturally, they use this precious sanctuary to plan a serious criminal offence.

BLACK COMEDY WITH SOMETHING UNDERNEATH IT

The assassination plot is absurd.

It is supposed to be.

Three ageing punks deciding that Britain’s political malaise can be resolved through one spectacular act of violence is funny because it is such an enormous escalation from the familiar experience of sitting in the pub declaring the entire country fucked.

The joke works because the despair beneath it is less ridiculous.

What happens to somebody who spends thirty years believing society ought to be better and finally concludes that every conventional route to changing it is theatre?

Most people become cynical.

Some retreat into nostalgia.

Some become unbearable on Facebook.

Some buy a motorbike.

Derek, Tim and Trol take the road considerably less travelled.

The book does not require the reader to think they are right.

It does require understanding why, after enough years of frustration, something so obviously stupid can momentarily feel meaningful.

That is where the comedy becomes uncomfortable.

Perhaps refusing to surrender your ideals is admirable.

Perhaps carrying adolescent certainty into middle age is pathetic.

Perhaps both are true, depending on what day you ask.

The characters have to live inside that contradiction.

EBOOK, PAPERBACK OR AUDIOBOOK

This product is the digital ebook edition of Old, Fat Punks.

The original ebook appeared in 2015 and carries ISBN 9781311727107. The commercial EPUB edition is DRM-free.

For readers who prefer an actual book, the novel remains available in print.

Buy the current print edition directly from Postmortem Studios

The original Lulu paperback edition is also still available. It runs to 334 pages, with a black-and-white interior in a 108 × 175 mm pocket-book format, ISBN 9781326403027.

Buy Old, Fat Punks in paperback from Lulu

There is also an unabridged audiobook edition, running for approximately 6 hours and 46 minutes.

Find Old, Fat Punks on Audible

So you can read the revolution on a screen, hold it in your hands or have the whole sorry business read to you while driving somewhere less politically exciting.

WHAT YOU’RE GETTING

• The complete Old, Fat Punks novel in digital ebook form

• Written by James “Grim” Desborough

• First published in 2015

• English language

• ISBN 9781311727107

• Black comedy, crime caper and political satire

• Three ageing rebels, decades of disappointment and one profoundly inadvisable plan

• Print and unabridged audiobook editions available separately

NO FUTURE?

Derek, Tim and Trol were going to change the world.

Instead, the world changed around them, sold some of their rebellion back to them and carried on regardless.

They got older.

They got heavier.

They became considerably easier to injure.

What they did not quite manage was to stop caring.

That may be their redeeming quality.

It may also be the reason the Prime Minister is about to have a very strange week.

Old, Fat Punks is a blackly comic revolutionary caper about what happens when youthful idealism survives long enough to acquire grey hair, cheap lager, bitterness and one final terrible idea.

No future?

Turns out there was one after all.

Bastards.