BOOK REVIEW / Fatwa in South London: 'East of Wimbledon' - Nigel Williams: Faber, 14.99

I TRIED hard not to laugh. There's something too easy about Nigel Williams's wisecracking routine. Moreover, hasn't East of Wimbledon, which seems to be a facetious skit on multiculturalism, strayed into very dangerous terrain? The butt of many jokes in this novel is Islam, and we all know what happens to novelists who take a less than holy approach to that particular religion.

But Williams has savvy. When his dunderhead hero Robert Wilson repudiates his 'conversion' to Islam, and begins 'to make wildly inaccurate and distorted remarks about the Prophet', we're told that 'it is not necessary here to mention even the general drift of his remarks, except to say they were offensive in the extreme.' Williams is careful not to take too many risks. In fact, East of Wimbledon - the third of his 'Wimbledon' novels - takes few risks with anything, confining itself to an unexotic corner of South-west London, weaving improbable plots out of paper-thin material, and rarely reaching more depth than a cartoon. All the same, as a comedy of manners, the Wimbledon trilogy can be screamingly funny.

In East of Wimbledon, Wilson, a rather thick young man who might actually be retarded, poses as a Muslim to get a job in a local independent Islamic boys' school. The manic headmaster, Mr Malik, an expertly drawn Asian impresario who would be at home in Wimbledon or Wichita, is prepared to be gulled by any number of crass deceptions to get his school up and running. One of the press-ganged pupils is Hasan, blind and facially birthmarked, who has to be protected from the 'Twenty-fourthers', an insane sect of Muslims who believe him to be the incarnation of an imam. They also consider Malik, Wilson and all their doings blasphemous, and vow to destroy them. Wilson, meanwhile, floundering hopelessly in Islamic doctrine, has a death sentence passed on him by the maths master.

That's a good joke, and there are plenty of others. The best is what happens to Wilson's seemingly liberal girlfriend, Maisie. Attracted to the ideals of Islam, she dons the garb of a Muslim woman. 'You've got an erection]' shouts Maisie at Robert as they sit very publicly on a bench on Wimbledon Common, she dressed in her all-

concealing shift, veil and cloak, thinking of higher things, he of lower. Forty pages later, just when one might be tiring of Wilson's overstated idiocy, there appears 'Fatimah Bankhead, the chain- smoking Islamic feminist'. In Williams's prose, the sillier, the funnier.

East of Wimbledon perhaps lacks the cutting edge of its predecessor, They Came from SW19, which had a scene of horrible but believable violence which this book lacks. Even so, it might have stood comparison with Decline and Fall - Robert Wilson a dead-ringer for Paul Pennyfeather? - had someone got his head sawn off. Alas, in East of Wimbledon, no one does.