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My Little Armalite

This novel examines the crisis of a middle-class liberal-left nexus which has lost its way in the face of the collapse of the pre-Thatcher dispensation: it draws on themes of urgent public and media debate as seen in, for example, the Observer columns and books of Nick Cohen. The double-think is reified when the hero discovers an Armalite rifle in his déclassé London garden. That gun is at once the symbol of the recent US foreign interventions which he claims to loathe, and of the IRA, which he in his radical youth supported. It now becomes the means whereby he can make last attempt to enact his sheer ego – masked as the highly traditional Male Fantasy of “only doing it for my family” - in a world where naked competition has become the norm. In this, it clearly takes part in a debate which has since been taken up in contemporary texts such as the TV series Breaking Bad (AMC, 2008-).

In this, his sixth novel, Hawes thus continues the examination of the morality of the modern male ego, a concern which has underpinned all his work since the 1996 debut in which the Hero claimed that “we are all Thatcher’s children”. The Guardian review of My Little Armalite (5th September 2008) noted this continuing arc, announcing that “Hawes has developed into a prolifically inventive and increasingly subtle satirist”.