The world of Carl Hiaasen: not as foreign as it seems

Carl Hiaasen is the Bard of Florida, and his new novel, Star Island, is a terrible disappointment. A disappointment, that is, if you have no sense of irony, no love of the parade of all-too-horribly-credible monstrosities, no joy in the exposure of amorality, greed and self-regard, and no fondness for seeing the bastards get the punishments they deserve.

Do not read this book if you don't see the joy of a fat amoral reeking paparazzo, Bang Abbott, who, having discovered that digital cameras and guns work on the same principle of point and shoot, shoots his own trigger finger off and then claims an iguana attacked him.
 
Of Chemo, a pockmarked fright-wigged 6'9" bodyguard, ex-convict (homicide), ex-Florida mortage broker, with a weed-whacker prosthesis on the stump of his arm.

Of a talentless airheaded popster, Cherry Pie, "a simpleton, shallow as a thimble" who can't sing a note - can't even mime - and who is in repeated drug meltdown, booze meltdown and sex meltdown, with a tattoo of Kurt Cobain's head on a zebra's body, unfinished except for a prodigious erection.

Of a former state governor, now a wild man of the swamps, with a glass eye stolen from a taxidermist and shotgun-shells plaited into his dreadlocks, living of road-kill, naked in the swamps.
   
Or of a supporting cast of property-development scam artists (one gets a sea-urchin duct-taped to his testicles), self-made plastic-surgeried identical twin PR girls, sleazy tip-off men, bent politicians, golfing jerks, Danish wife-swappers, bent editors, luggage arsonists, stolen dogs, hammerhead sharks and all the sleazy exuberant nightmare characters who provoked Randy Newman to sing "I love Miami" with such precise irony that a reliable poll, which I just made up, reveals that 68 per cent of residents believe the song to be a glowing endorsement of the city. Everything. Drugs, guns, burgers, threats, violence, reptiles, cheap sex, private Learjets, bums, out-of-control cars sailing through the night sky into the Everglades...

Hiaasen's genius is that this all seems entirely reasonable. He is a master of multum in parvo: letting the reader spin an entire personality, sometimes an entire industry or civilization, from a single perfect detail. Cherry Pie's body-double Anne, for example, is an actress whose "last gem of an offer was a leg-modeling gig for a depilatory made with Jamaican mango rind".

Any of us could have come up with the depilatory. Some of us could have come up with the Jamaican mango. But it takes genius to come up with the rind. And from that rind we can construct an entire civilization.

But when we've constructed it, when we've spent a bit of time in Hiaasen's world, it not only seems reasonable but oddly - very oddly - familiar.

How can that be? It's not our face in Hiaasen's glass. Not us. Here in Britain we're knackered. Whupped. Everything's little. No need for a Learjet when the other side of the country is not LA or Miami, but Filey or Ilfracombe. Raped by bankers, we apologise. I'm sorry, but we do. This isn't Florida, where they'd either shoot the pigsuckers or join in ourselves, whooping with glee.

We don't do glee. We are emphatically not Florida. So how come Hiaasen rings so many bells, here, under a 200-foot cloudbase?

We don't have young female pop stars whose descent into lunacy is regarded as a spectator sport by ruthless, brain-dead media and rapacious promoters and agents.

We don't have a corrupt electoral system leading to minority government by a cabal of smug, rich twats lushed up by criminal bankers.

We don't have a more or less totally buggered planning system, people proposing to build over historic sites or flog off national wilderness and forest to money-men.

We aren't unravelling our healthcare system to pump more fiscal grease into the sclerotic arteries of non-dom bankers.

We aren't up to our tits in backhanders and chicanery, plundering the public purse for private gain.

Of course we’re not. We are nothing like Florida.

• Star Island by Carl Hiaasen, Sphere Books £12.99 (paperback). ISBN 978 1 84744 335 9. ·