THE KAMIKAZE HARVEST (2019)
The world has changed in 18 months - it's got worse. Imprisoned for expressing an opinion, Max returns to a society redesigned in the image of the Ancient Egyptian Goddess Bastet, one in which he, as a lowly mongrel with a criminal record, has been relegated to the bottom rung. And nobody loves (or trusts) an ex-con on the Speech Offenders' Register. Pedigree gamekeepers have been superseded by feline poachers, and the dogmatic Species Politics of anti-canine felinist activists have become the mainstream. Fear of saying the wrong thing governs the populace and keeps them subservient to the new order. Opposition is allowed in the guise of extremism via the Canine First protest group, whose rabble-rousing activities nevertheless pale next to the genuine extremists of Bastet terrorism and their penchant for bombing non-believers into submission. A dog preaching equality between the species is a dog out of time.
And then Max is written into the victim narrative that deflects attention from cats' own bloodthirsty leanings: he is accused of an historic assault on a feline fantasist fresh out of therapy and indulged in her entitlement by enforcers of the law. The word of a cat is Gospel, so Max is guilty till proven innocent. Against the odds, he persuades Fenella, a prominent feline barrister and poster-girl for the revolution, to switch sides and defend him in a trial seen as a test-case for the consensus.
In this original and thought-provoking novel, Johnny Monroe satirises contemporary mores by subverting the unhinged intransigence of a society incapable of accepting an allegation can be false, and posing several potent questions on the allure of victimhood and the damage it does to the victims it ensnares - both real and imagined.
‘The Kamikaze Harvest is a dark satire on contemporary life set in a dystopian world where the hegemony of the former ruling pedigree dog class over cats and dogs has been displaced by the ascendancy of ideologically fixated cats.
The bloodless revolution is recounted by Max, a black mongrel of a romantic and reflective nature, whose belief in equality and justice has not only been alienated by the tyrannical diktat, reinforced by the worship of a mythical cat-Goddess, Bastet, but made him a prime target of institutionalised injustice fueled by delusions of ‘canine toxicity’ where the absence of evidence is evidence.
This is a remarkable debut novel by the samizdat satirist and filmmaker Johnny Monroe with the absurdity of the conceit making what could be an unbearably bleak apocalypse entertaining and insightful in turn. We meet Fenella the feline celebrity dog-prosecuting barrister whose complacent worldview is upended by her steely defence of an innocent dog; Dr Cheshire the cat trauma therapist who grins incongruously even when discussing the depths of depravity and effects; Alfie the belligerent but loyal canine-rights activist and many more recognisable characters re-presented in alien forms.
Given its counter-cultural subject matter, it may take some time for The Kamikaze Harvest to receive the recognition due within dominant literary circles. But it is, for all that, a gem of a modern classic, which will, I predict, survive the test of time.’
Margaret Jervis, Amazon review
‘Written in the first person, this is a very absorbing and compelling story about Max and Fenella who are occasionally suffering from, perpetrating or resisting the persecutions from a new regime, which in turn is blindly implementing the old regime's forms of repression; albeit under a new name and with much more conviction. I genuinely wanted to know the outcome for the hero and heroine of this story and I was left wondering whether it is an allegory of our future times. Only time will tell..’
Adam Blackie, Amazon review