Davies, Pete
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1959- ) UK advertising copywriter (until the mid 1980s) and author whose first novel, The Last Election (1986), depicts with singular ferocity a Near-Future Dystopian UK ruled by the Money Party and its senile Nanny, a savage portrait of the 1980s British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher; Overpopulation and the total loss of a manufacturing base lead to the government's dissemination of a painkiller which causes initial Rejuvenation but then extremely premature ageing in the poor to whom it has been given free. The final election, won by Nanny with the aid of a powerful advertising agency, soon marks the end of any revolt. In Dollarville (1989), refocusing his rage – at his best he generates a terribilita reminiscent of both Jonathan Swift and the early Evelyn Waugh – on less local targets, Davies constructs an impressively surreal though unspecific venue, a world polluted beyond redemption in which the rich are inconceivably corrupt; in this environment, a decent-hearted advertising man attempts to save a woman ecologist from a porno king; but the world ends. [JC]
Pete Davies
born 1959
works
- The Last Election (London: André Deutsch, 1986) [hb/]
- Dollarville (New York: Random House, 1989) [hb/Daniel Craig]
links
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