The Truth Will Out (Hilltop Press) Greg Frellis Greg Frellis’ latest novel is both a political thriller and an astute satire of contemporary Britain. The main character, Jerry Jenkins, is a top scientist at a chemistry firm based in Ealing. Two years ago the company was making anti-psychotic drugs for pensioners, but it’s since been commissioned by the Government to develop a top-secret chemical agent to help politicians lie. The ‘Mendacity Serum’ as it is tediously named, is designed to induce mild amnesia allowing ministers to temporarily forget that what they’re saying is untrue. Of course, Frellis portrays a political climate very similar to our own, yet cleverly disguises the setting by changing a few names. Thus Tony Blair becomes Donald Truman, whilst Gordon Brown is given the moniker Cecil Honest. As the Government descends into scandal, both men become ever more anxious to see the serum completed. Cecil ploughs half the national budget into the project, leaving Britain without a health service or an army. Many of the country’s roads are sold off to generate extra funds, and several prestigious Museums are either auctioned or melted down. As far as the cabinet are concerned, the need to lie has never been greater. The work on the serum is in its final phase. During routine tests on priests and advertising directors, however, Jerry realises something is wrong. The serum seems to be having the opposite effect – producing honest replies instead of fibs; sincerity instead of evasion. Jerry, unable to confront his superiors, confides in his wife. Eventually she quaffs some of the potion and ends up spilling the beans about a six-year affair with the dustman. Jerry forces more of it down her throat and she confesses to a twenty-year affair with the man at the tenpin bowling alley. It also turns out she is a Mormon, a reformed badger-baiter and an ex-man. Jerry is heartbroken and terrified. He moves to a bedsit, changes his identity and quits his job, but not before he has stolen a canister of the chemical agent – now tediously renamed the ’Veracity Serum’. For the next thirty pages Jerry goes on a drunken bender round London, putting drops of the serum into people’s drinks and spraying it in the face of everyone he meets. It is an excellent chapter, full of Swiftian observations about modern society and plenty of amusing revelations concerning masturbatory misdemeanour. Like Travis Bickle in the film Taxi Driver, Jerry becomes a reclusive misanthrope, sickened by the adulterous, corrupt world around him. He gives several poignant soliloquies about human failings, meets a drunken beggar who talks cryptically about the Greek river of Lethe, and gets chased by government agents in a hovercraft. Eventually Jerry decides to save society and hatches a plan to spread the truth, starting at the top - with the Government. From his bedsit-laboratory he manufactures more of the serum, instilling them in ingenious air-freshener devices. Jerry then sneaks around the houses of parliament leaving them on top of filing cabinets and behind pot-plants. To ensure his plan works he surreptitiously runs a bath for the Prime Minister, emptying several litres of the serum into the tub. Within days Westminster is overrun by candid confessions, truthful statements and factual accuracy. The media goes crazy. Journalists, desensitized by years of dull verbiage, can barely believe the quotes MPs keep giving them. Jeremy Paxman is made redundant and a host of new papers spring up to cover the sheer wealth of intrigue and scandal coming from Whitehall. One editor of a national daily, unable to deal with the pressure of so many juicy scoops, goes insane and starts walking round in a circle compulsively buying fridges. Nobody notices, though, as the shrill clamour of truth – after centuries of habitual falsehood – has deafened the world to anything but politics. Jerry is rather pleased with his work and fully expects a revolution to erupt at any moment. Several members of the cabinet announce that they sold nuclear weapons to Iraq, and Donald Truman admits that he invented Al Qaeda over a lawn luncheon with the American president, Ralph Bigot. Even after a month of this, however, the British public has spectacularly failed to react in any way. Rather than sparking an uprising, the constant stream of outrageous news merely confirms most people’s cynical assumptions and makes them feel slightly smug at having been proved right. In despair, Jerry tries to commits suicide by downing the rest of the Veracity Serum. In a neat twist, the excessive intake removes all vestiges of falsehood from his being and cleanses his soul, causing Jerry to transcend earthly reality and achieve a kind of Buddhistic immersion in the cosmic godhead.