The Harrods of the title of Michael Holman's powerful debut novel about the aid and development industry in Africa is not Mohamed Al-Fayed's large shop in Knightsbridge, rather it is a small bar in the slums of Kireba in the fictional East African state of Kuwisha. The bar is run by Charity Mupanga (it's named after her father), relict of a renowned bishop, and friend to the glue-sniffing, pick-pocketing street urchins around whom the story revolves. The cast of characters is enriched by aid workers, politicians and journalists, each working off their own agenda, and each to a certain degree suffering from what the author calls 'Afroholism'.
It seems that the story was intended to be a gentle comedy about Africa in the manner of, say, Alexander McCall Smith's No1 Ladies Detective Agency series. But, the problem is that the author is so angry about today's Africa that he simply cannot sustain the Swiftian satire. As he crosses the line into polemic, we empathise with him: as the former Africa correspondent of the FT he has seen at first hand more of the corruption, lies, poverty and disease than most.
Uneven in tone it may be, but Harrods is notwithstanding an immensely important book that fearlessly slaughters sacred cows, cuts through the rubbish and tells it as it is. The plot is educated farce, in the way that Tom Sharpe's novels are, but the message is deadly serious, and anyone who has ever felt an inexpressible anger at the Bob Geldof generation of self-appointed spokesmen for the continent will enjoy finding that with Holman, they are not alone.
Furthermore, Holman has caught the holier-than-thou 'aidspeak' vocabulary of the development business in Africa today with such painful and embarrassing accuracy that it is at times as difficult to read Last Orders at Harrods as it is to put down.
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