From Publishers Weekly
An off-beat tale with a sardonic edge, Nicholson's brightly lit black comedy takes place in Haden Brothers, a monstrous London department store that is a combination of Harrod's, Kafka's Castle and the Marx Brothers' The Big Store. Arnold Haden, the last surviving Haden brother, has a weakness for nubile shop assistants and, as the novel opens, believes that the brittlely efficient Vita Carlisle, who has been avoiding his attentions, has finally succumbed when she agrees to come to his penthouse apartment (located atop the giant store). But when Arnold finally gets a peek under Vita's skirts, he finds "three sticks of dynamite... and a tangle of electrical wiring that leads to a switch located by her navel." Vita threatens to blow up the store-and she won't, initially, tell Arnold why. So begins a highly literate and bawdy assault on the principle that all things, including people, have exchange values. The book's spirit is epitomized by the third major character, Charlie Mayhew, a lowly furniture porter and failing artist, who not only longs for Vita but also admits, in an early monologue: "So I thought to myself, why not structure a book like a department store?" Arnold, Vita and Charlie proceed to undergo reversals of fortune as though stuck in a revolving door of a plot. Along the way, disquisitions on makeup application, kleptomania and bomb-threat etiquette stock an episodic narrative that makes stops in chapters named after store sections and saddled with double entendres: Yarns, Bedding, First Aid; Toiletries, Accessories, Exhibitions. As, individually, the three main characters discover the great dark secrets of the department store (and they are over-the-top dark), Nicholson (Hunters and Gatherers) maintains enough verbal resourcefulness to rescue his story from its occasional predictability, delivering an exhaustively entertaining farce and one of the better satires of Thatcherite consumerism.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Consumption and sex are among the witty Nicholson's enduring preoccupations:
The Food Chain (1993) poked fun at culinary and sexual excess;
Hunters and Gatherers took on collectors' obsessiveness; lust and gluttony are major motifs here as well. The title is the motto of "London's, and probably the world's most prestigious and most expensive department store," Haden Brothers, a nine-story behemoth modeled on Brueghel's painting of the Tower of Babel. The narrative tours this paradise along two tracks: one traces a confrontation in the store's penthouse between the sole remaining Haden brother--misanthropic, randy Arnold--and Vita Carlisle, a young store employee who's come to their tryst wearing three sticks of dynamite; the other offers flashbacks of the months since the store hired Carlisle and a hapless college-educated furniture porter named Charlie Mayhew. Nicholson's minor characters--slimy personnel manager Derek Snell, paramilitary security chief Ray Chalmers, Anton Heath, the anarchist-wanna-be foreman of the work-averse porters, and Vita's kleptomaniac mother, who worked for the store herself years ago--are small Dickensian gems, and Nicolson's clockwork emporium provides a vivid setting for this very British yet universal comedy of modern manners and morals.
Mary Carroll
