While the lottery seems a harmless way of moving money about, it also reminds us how randomly the stuff is scattered about the world

Syncronicity, man. A fortnight ago, in the secondhand department of the Hereford Bookshop, I bought The Magic Christian, a novella by that man of the Sixties, Terry Southern, whose death was announced a few days later. You will perhaps remember a powerful moment in the book: Guy Grand, the Magic Christian, offers the public huge sums of money, to be obtained from a vat of ordure in Chicago. The idea, presumably, was that Grand amuses himself with the depths of indignity to which people will go to get money without honest work. There is also the idea that the billionaire Grand, a broker, is himself a beneficiary of a whimsical system of economic life. He is doling out wealth in a way which is no madder than the way in which he - or anyone else - acquires it.

I once thought the Southern satire might be taken in a rather different way. Perhaps his vignettes could be parlayed into support for the idea that capitalism is so peculiar that the kindest thing one could do for the poor - at home or abroad - would be to enrich them. Starting little enterprises, or any other improving schemes, might be a waste of time because such pump-priming runs a high risk of misreading the market. Better, perhaps, to give poor people money, and watch the hidden hand work its magic as suppliers leapt forward to satisfy the new demand.

On inspection, Southern's book is not merely about a man who revels in the meanness and folly of poor people (which would undermine his usefulness for my reactionary arguments about how to do good). It explores at random all sorts of perversity, without any clear theme at all.

In this, Southern is curi- ously like Bohumil Hrabal, the memory of whose Closely Observed Trains was more than enough to make me pick up his I Served the King of England with sharp expectation. Hrabal opens the new book as his hero enriches himself by selling frankfurters to the passengers on trains. The teenage salesman takes money from passengers, and hands over frankfurters. As the train moves out, the passenger leans out of the window for his change, only to find that the boy hasn't the right notes. Several passengers "bean" themselves on passing posts as the distance between themselves and their change widens.

There is a fine nuttiness in the Hrabal story. The poor frankfurter salesman cheats, steals and works his way to millions. But then, come the communists (this is Czechoslovakia after the war), he finds that millionaires are being sent to concentration camps. Perversely, he begs to be carted off, too. He is chagrined that his millionaire status is not taken seriously. He wants recognition of his success, even if it's punishment.

We also meet the Magic Christian as he deals with sausages, but in an episode which reverses the ethics of the affair. The Magic Christian hands over large notes to frankfurter salesmen when his train stops at stations. But his pleasure is in watching the discomfiture of an honest salesman as he runs down the platform desperate to retrieve his sausage and return the note of huge denomination for which he obviously couldn't be expected to have change. The salesman loses dignity, but only in the pursuit of his own properly moral reaction to unexpected benison.

These morality tales resonate powerfully because of the National Lottery. I mostly take the view that it's a good thing. It inexpensively makes a little less hypothetical the innocent pleasure of discussing in close detail what we would do if we were overnight millionaires. It puts within the grasp of all of us the chance to get rich without the trouble of having been born rich, or born with the genetic disposition to get rich. While it seems an amusing and harmless way of moving money about, it also reminds us how very imperfectly and randomly the stuff is scattered about the world. It gives us the chance to gloat over the follies of those who have won it, and thus subtly softens the weekly blow of not being among their number. It might have been designed, indeed, by a born-again Magic Christian.