A White Merc with Fins

Aided and abetted by a dysfunctionally cool cast of Londoners and a slick, accelerated plot, Hawes's debut crosses British post-Thatcher class warfare with the all-American bank-job crime novel. Our nameless ""Lower M.C."" (Lower Middle Class) narrator is 28, a university graduate and utterly without prospects. His despair over achieving Middle Class Heaven drives him to concoct a baroquely risky scheme (always referred to as the ""Plan"") to rob a film mogul's ""private bank,"" using the titular white Merc for the getaway car. The Plan casts Suzy, a Scot hedonist, as the dame and driver; the Spanish immigrant Chicho as the muscle; and Brady, an Irish Quentin Tarantino groupie, in a diversionary role. In the spaces between send-ups of English class stratification, Reservoir Dogs fans, the ""Friends of Mrs. King"" (gay opera insiders) and the psychopathically patriotic IRA (all of whom play crucial, if diverse roles in the Plan), Hawes makes a small point about disaffected individuals via the hero's mouthing-off monologues. Although also meant partly as hip social satire (with such smart-arsed lines as ""Crime is just Nature's way of rightsizing economic differentials""), the dominant tone is that of an amoral, foul-tongued, intelligent comedy. The novel has a speedy metabolism that is indeed reminiscent-as it no doubt strives to be-of a certain American film director's pulpy pace. (Mar.)