Chapter One: God Knows what the Neighbours Think!

It was a dark and stormy night, the prophetic Edward Bulwer-Lytton remarked triumphalistically to his servant, whom he was sure must have been born with a full set of teeth. The man was obviously lacking in elan vital and vril. He screwed up his chimpanzee-like visage and bounded about the dining room, bottom lip extended, going “Uh uh uh! I am the Prime Minister. I’m little Johnny Howard. Uh uh uh! Eeek!” (This is an historical novel.) The penniless servant, of Pictish height, of Rwandan width and a voracious reader at the circulating libraries (he heard them coursing through the streets outside), looked on in disgust through his French-made pince-nez. Was his nihilistic Master Irish or, worse, an Australian? Bah, humbug, and damn the Longobard succession. He flicked an ant from his specs and it landed on the table to glare insolently up at the bizarre aristocrat, who at least hadn’t managed to turn himself into a globetrotting billionaire like the renowned and hated ‘Dr’ Francis J. Savage (PhD, Hog Bottom U, Idaho). Mr P. Piper, who had buttled for the biggest sharks and the nouveau-riche pilot fish which swam with them, people who really counted (they were capable of little else), couldn’t abide the oppressive, though hardly bulletproof, World Market, currently in his opinion spiralling down the toilet. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian …
The working-class ant lowered its compound eyes, misguidedly turned to the left, and was devoured by a fundamentalist praying-mantis.

It was 1899 and poverty and misery were endemic. Mr Karl Marx had spun in his grave at Highgate for sixteen years (generating much-needed electricity for starving aluminium manufacturers), Bolshevists from Moses to Lenin were on the rise, the British Labour Party had not yet betrayed its constituency (but then it wasn’t founded till 27 February 1900), and the point was to change the world. Truly, he imagined, staring in horror at the chiselling Baron who employed him, the Global Proletarian Revolution could not be far off. Surely, a hundred years hence, the lap of social labour would give birth to more wealth than ever before, there would be no masters and servants, and all humanity would be living in an earthly paradise on sixty pounds a year.
The praying-mantis angled its head and began a disquisition, in a voice like that from Mr Edison’s American phonograph, on the duty of a good Employé. Piper, stomach growling, surreptitiously squashed it. Perhaps he should have eaten it.
“On such a night”, panted Lord Lytton, who’d expired in 1893 and most of his many novels shortly thereafter, “a great White Saviour shall erupt from beneath the earth, clad in a white sheet because we know they all love dressing up.”
Now motionless and dwelling on Mr H.G. Wells’s portentous story The Time Machine, Piper strove to suppress a snort of laughter, suspecting that by the Millennium such a ‘saviour’ would instantly be replaced by a machine. His Master sat again, wiped his dripping brow with a pale, well-bred hand, and began to open his many letters of rejection from the great White publishing houses.
(The telephone rang; it was Mr Alexander Graham Bell, quite drunk, blustering about working class revolutionaries using goddamned party lines to organise strikes. Lytton left him to the mercy of the answering machine, a tweeny.)
“Of course, my Lord.” Piper thought of all those layers of policy formation and decision-making that loomed above him, and for a second was almost relieved that he was only a butler.
Lytton left his chair again, and went down on one knee. Piper backed away, thinking his employer about to propose. (To be on the safe side, he took up the diamond-encrusted letter-opener and dubbed him Sir Edward.) The humorless literary aristocrat parried that, and, while humming a popular snatch of The Ring cycle — the version by Offenpiszt — in counterpoint with the groans of the starving homeless and the slosh of the circulating libraries outside, devoured a sterling silver ice-bucket of locusts and wild honey (he had strong teeth himself). He then turned three increasingly deeper shades of blue and fulminated in copperplate:

After that mouth-frothing effort which caused his false teeth to be ejected at supersonic speeds, rather like bits of Canberra Hospital circa 1997, he lapsed into a laudanum stupor reminiscent of St John the Divine’s. (St John’s solicitor has contacted me for bringing ‘hatred, ridicule and contempt’ to bear on him. I assured him that Bob Ellis wrote the offending sentence.)
Irish-Australian, decided his servant. And a right bloody fascist. He sighed and dusted the man’s fragmented dentures. The Master Problem (with its vile maxim ) was getting serious.