An outlaw nurse, a racist policeman and a dead refugee – no, this novel is not a joke

I always like to know what else, besides writing, authors have done with their lives. Anders Lustgarten’s debut novel comes with a lengthy and whimsical biography: he’s an award-winning playwright, a DJ, a prison teacher, a carpenter and an anti-corporate activist who has been arrested four times – the last of which sets the stage, unfortunately, for Three Burials.

A refugee, Omar, is murdered in a dinghy on the English Channel by a fringe group called Defenders of the Realm. Cherry, a nurse, finds Omar’s body washed up in a seaside town, and vows to find out who he was and where his family is. Triggered by the memory of the suicide of her own son, she steals the corpse from the morgue, and sets off in a car with Andy, a racist policeman who moonlights as a member of those Defenders and has been blackmailed into coming along. They drive to London through the “badlands” of the Home Counties, corpse in tow, guided by Omar’s only belongings: half a postcode and a photograph of a young woman, whom they hope to track down. Meanwhile, that young woman, Asha, is on a quest to find Omar herself, and Cherry’s semi-estranged ex-police-officer husband and their right-on daughter also head to London, seeking to find Cherry, concerned about what she has done.

Three Burials reads like a hasty novelisation, rather than a novel. It might have worked better on screen. As it is, Lustgarten subjects us to sloppy and confusing writing, full of political rants and a rapid succession of third-person perspectives that all have more or less the same voice. The prose is hopelessly overwrought. Instead of a man falling off a boat, for instance, he takes “a tumble through infinite cold” during which he “beats at the liquid prison”. When Cherry cries, she’s “pouring salt down her face”. Self-threaded eyebrows are described as “like the part of the Amazon the Bolsonaro government gave away to soya conglomerates”, as if the character thinking this were possessed by an omniscient activist.

Any conversation is an opportunity for a tirade against the Government, police, gentrification or climate change. I might agree with some of Lustgarten’s points; it’s just that I had to pick them out of the book like unwanted raisins to follow the story, because I’d signed up to read a novel, not attend a political rally.

If it were a political rally, anyway, I would have left. The compassion given to refugees isn’t extended to Cherry’s female colleagues: one is described as “pretty under all the gold robot contouring”, while another is “colossal, size 34 and rising”, works at the hospital for the “free giant uniforms”, and eats “piles of fries the size of a small scout hut”. (To add insult to misogyny, I had to look up what a “small scout hut” looks like – and I’m still unconvinced the simile works.) A female police officer becomes suddenly attractive after her gastric bypass; Ulster fry-ups and Wetherspoons are mentioned with disdain. And then these characters just disappear, proving they only existed to make points about the evils of make-up and fast food, instead of (say) driving the novel’s events.

Human beings are cruel, yes, and fiction must capture that. But because the narrative perspective of Three Burials is weak, and swings between being character-driven and a mouthpiece for Lustgarten’s opinions, it’s hard to tell which sections are meant to rouse our moral outrage – which this book, on the whole, desperately wants to do – and which a contemptuous sense of humour. The latter effect is something with which better writers, such as Martin Amis or Ottessa Moshfegh, can get away, precisely because they aren’t simultaneously preaching at us.

We’re told that “what [Andy] really wants, yearns for, though he doesn’t know it, is love. A social love, a sense of belonging.” It’s hard to stay interested in characters whose desires are so wantonly spelled out. In the end, he’s predictably swayed to The Good by Cherry and co, as the characters come together in a chaotic few chapters that include Omar’s funeral, an immigration raid and a massive street protest inspired by the 2011 English riots. Everyone’s fate is left unknown – except Omar’s, in a bizarre afterlife sequence – and the legal complications of Cherry and Andy’s actions go unexamined.

Throughout this novel, Lustgarten is his own worst enemy. At least, when I read of a character that “his tongue thickens his next words like flour in stew”, I could relate. Reading Three Burials, I thought, was like tasting a stodgy, over-complicated organic soup. It was meant to be healthy and virtuous, yet I couldn’t swallow it without feeling sick.

Camilla Grudova’s fiction includes The Coiled Serpent and Children of Paradise. Three Burials is published by Hamish Hamilton at £14.99. To order your copy for £14.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books