1991, an alternative Britain you won't remember—.    

Prime Minister, Alan Clark, appoints Enoch Powell and Margaret Thatcher, a pariah since losing the Falklands in 1982, to key cabinet posts, their authoritarianism opposed by militaristic domestic groups.   

Bill Pugh laments past betrayals, a dead-end job and his doomed relationship. Entangled by a shadowy world of a privatized security apparatus and its violent antagonists, Bill’s life seems blighted. Who to trust: a louche and erratic school-friend; a strangely familiar new lover; or, a government thug closely resembling a 1930s film-star?        

In this world of love, greed and brutality, new digital technologies confuse Bill: power resides in both the pixelated screen and the barrel of a gun. Craving salvation, he traverses memories and a most bewildering present.  

When reviewing Tew’s second book, Fragmentary Lives John Wilkins wrote, “We are being invited into Tew’s world and we want more as a result of this invitation.” Clark Gable and His Plastic Duck: A Novel adds yet another layer, but now with an alternate reality. Here are familiar characters and settings, some featured in Tew’s first novel, but with a profound difference, a radical twist. The Falklands War was lost by Thatcher, history diverged and so too have some of the lives of the characters we thought were so familiar. 

Interviewed for Brigand, Tew says of his second novel, “The path to creativity can sometimes be long and arduous, and that was certainly the case with Clark Gable and his Plastic Duck, my latest novel. In 1991 – 1992 I wrote the first draft. The story concerns a male play-leader in his late thirties (which I was at the time, and I’d been a GLC play-leader for a while, alongside writer-to-be Will Self)—.”

“In this earlier version the PM was John Major. People adored my title; if that alone were enough for success! But who could imagine Egg Woman Edwina Currie’s lover John, turning Britain into a quasi-fascist state? Maybe the crazies on the looney left might, but not the sceptics, which included me, the author.”

“Thirty years later in the Covid-19 Lock-down, I found almost unrestricted amounts of time and the urge to revise radically. I altered the protagonist; far more nuanced and dithering, with an expanded past.  Crucially too, Thatcher loses the Falklands War, followed by financial vicissitudes overseen by Michaels Heseltine and Foot respectively. Subsequently, Alan Clark becomes PM, installing his much-admired political hero, Enoch Powell, as Home Secretary and recuperating Thatcher as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.”

“Rebellion follows. And a new privatized security service full of thugs and villains. For me, Clark’s political broadcast ties my narrative together. Suddenly, the rebellion and riots all make full sense, especially after the Falklands (Malvinas) defeat. The narrative started to reflect very different priorities.” 

 “I don’t want to give away too much, but suffice to say finally the novel works really well. In celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of both the Kent State massacre and the Babes in the Wood tragedy in Enfield, Clark Gable and his Plastic Duck has become the book I always dreamed of writing and which I’m sure you will enjoy reading!” 

Clark Gable and His Plastic Duck: A Novel 

Philip Tew

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