For the fourth episode of Bold As Love Ax Preston returns to England to take on the Green President job. It's a challenge.The Green Right "neo-feudalists" who never really lost control of the government have many of the millions who lost everything in the Great Crash rounded up in labour camps. More surplus consumers are effectively neo-serfs in domestic service, sold off to pay their debts. But the ruling junta conceals even uglier secrets, and they're after the vital parts they need to build a Neurobomb, the new weapon of mass destruction the USA accidentally launched, with devasting effect, in episode three.Cue for another hip, slightly skiffy, costly-yet-life-enhancing victory for the peace and love agenda, the formula as before. Be warned,that's not what happens. Everything really does go horribly wrong, after Ax tries to keep faith with a liberal US President who is on the way out, destroyed by his own hell-bent right wingers.The reader watches with nailbiting frustration as the heroes (and heroine) make terrible, doomed, sincere decisions that are absolutely in character, while faint bulletins from the global situation report the inexorable approach of the end.It's hard to guess where the story can go from here, but I'll have to find out, fearing the worst and hoping Jones is not too ruthless with the characters, because no one could put this series down unfinished. Bold as love gets tougher, and much more real this time, but still delivers gripping entertainment. Not so much a rock and roll fantasy, more a biting contemporary satire: anyone who finds the world events, or the state of England, in Band of Gypsys merely 'preposterous' is in deep denial, or has been sleepwalking through the twentyfirst century.
