by PATRICK LEJTENYI

For a left-wing activist type, Robert Newman is actually pretty funny. The British comic and author, however, hasn't written a very funny novel. The Fountain at the Center of the World, Newman's third, is a multi-pronged, multi-faceted attack on neoliberalism, ranging from Mexican maquilladoras to high-powered office suites in London to the streets of 1999's Battle of Seattle. But while the novel is at its core political, the depth of the characters, the strength of the narrative and the crucial attention to detail make it immensely readable. The story, revolving around three characters - Chano, an impoverished Mexican, his long-lost brother Evan, raised in England and working as a corporate spin doctor, and Chano's 14-year-old son, long believed dead - is very human, and, while at times verging on the polemic, seethes with frustration and compassion. More enjoyable than the dreary tirades of the overly earnest, The Fountain at the Center of the World is nevertheless at times a bleak read. Given its subject matter, and the author's very public political slant, it could hardly be otherwise.

With that in mind, speaking to Newman is a pleasure. Speaking at the end of his 17-city U.S. book tour from Seattle - added at his insistence, logically - he offers an opinion of his stay in the States that, to Canadians, might seem somewhat unusual. "The impression I got of Americans is that they're all anarcho-syndicalists and have an extraordinary knowledge of international affairs," he says.

Really?

Newman then adds that he's been couch-surfing his way across the continent, crashing with like-minded lefties and community organizers along the way. "American hospitality is a wonderful thing," he says.

Touching a nerve

He may have had a different view of American congeniality in 1999, when he took part in the anti-WTO Battle of Seattle. The four-day running clash between protesters and police, vividly depicted at the novel's climax, is drawn extensively from personal recollections. "I drew a lot on what I saw and what friends saw or told me about what happened to them," he says. "The perspective of extreme cowardice while being caught in a riot [one character experiences] is my own."

Fear, however, is an entirely normal reaction, especially when smoke is thick, truncheons are swinging and the air unbreathable. It is Newman's ability to capture the riots' confusion, noise and incoherence that make the passage so stark yet believable. "The idea of having an overview is impossible," he says. "Anyone who was there would tell that you'd see a horse's ass for a while, then gas, then people running."

The novel's stridency - its depiction of environmental ruin, the cynical duplicity of corporate public relations, the vagaries of the Mexican labour market - was only matched, he says, by the rejection letters he got from publishers.

"Because the subject matter was politics, people go, ‘No, it's too much,'" he says. "The rejection letters I got were extremely strident. It wasn't the usual, ‘Sorry, that's not what we're looking for right now' things. I'd get these eight-page denunciations, accusing me of didacticism, as if I hadn't already thought of that. But I was quite pleased by this kind of rejection; I felt I might be on to something."

Fascinated by contempt

Perhaps the novel's most compelling character is Evan Hatch, the true-believing, ultra-capitalist, ultra-cynical public relations flak forced by illness to seek out his brother in Mexico for his precious bone marrow - a metaphor for the West's sense of entitlement to the global South's raw materials, perhaps. "I based him, initially at least, on Alastair Campbell [Tony Blair's former spin doctor]. I was interested in the self-hate of people who work in the deception industry, these people who have contempt for their audience and for their task and by extension for themselves."

Like Campbell's "dogged devotion and blind loyalty" to Blair, he says, Evan's belief in his own world view, despite seeing first-hand the cost it demands, remains true to the end, bitter as it may be. This is not a novel about epiphanies, revelations or 11th-hour conversions. It is a complex, interweaving and skillful examination of the world we live in but don't see behind the headlines.

The Fountain at the Center of the World, by Robert Newman, Soft Skull, PB, 339PP, $14.99 (U.S.) Robert Newman will read from his novel on Saturday, April 3, at 12:30pm in the Été des indiens room of the Hyatt Regency (1255 Jeanne-Mance), free. He speaks again at 9pm in the Picardie room, also at the Hyatt, $5. For more info, visit www.blue-met-bleu.com