Book review: The Marmalade Files

THE book's blurb says it's a romp through the "dark underbelly of politics" and for once the blurb doesn't lie.

THE book's blurb says it's a romp through the "dark underbelly of politics" and for once the blurb doesn't lie.

Two political journalists, News Limited's Steve Lewis and the ABC's Chris Uhlmann, were ruminating in a coffee shop just up the road from Parliament House in Canberra about writing a novel covering the nasty world they work in.

The result is The Marmalade Files, a banquet of bastardry. There are fixers and spinners, thugs and hypocrites, treachery and hatred.

Lewis and Uhlmann take a swag of cheeky liberties, starting with the background of a barely surviving minority Labor government.

They craft characters who are irresistibly recognisable and then muddy the waters, sometimes through a sex change. Take Cate "Attila the Hen" Bailey. She is fluent in Mandarin, has a work ethic bordering on the demented and is socially autistic. She talks in "wonk-strine" and became Australia's first woman prime minister with, for a while, stratospheric approval ratings. But her fall was swift and cruel.

The main plot centres on journalist Harry Dunkley's search for a Walkley Award-winning story after a mysterious photograph comes into his possession.

Journalists cop almost as big a hiding as the politicians do. The end, after a murder and some steamy sex, is a tease and leaves the door open for a sequel.

VERDICT: Cavalcade of caricatures

The Marmalade Files
Steve Lewis and Chris Uhlmann
HarperCollins, $29.99