Kill Billionaire
Anders Lustgarten, Chatto & Windus, £16.99

QUOTING a 2020 United Nations Environment Programme report, at the National Emergency Briefing in November Professor Kevin Anderson noted: “Collectively, the top 1 per cent of global emitters have lifestyles that give rise to almost twice the emissions of the bottom half of the world’s population.”

It’s this level of extreme inequality and power that drives Anders Lustgarten’s timely new novel Kill Billionaire, which as the title suggests doesn’t pull any punches about who is most to blame for the climate crisis.

As the precocious and sweary 14-year-old Kayla Connelly, the main protagonist, says about her Australian outback home: “Animals were dying. Trees were on fire. Everything I loved was in peril. And all that was down to a tiny number of incredibly rich bastards fucking everything up for the rest of us.”

With the story told as a confession, Kayla teams up with Mr P, a giant ex-soldier from Tuvalu, to kill some unfortunate (fictional) billionaires.

This may all sound deeply serious but actually the book is a fantastical globetrotting thriller which reminded me of Ben Elton’s pulpy satirical novels of the 1990s.

Lustgarten is a black belt in dark, quirky humour. A British MP is depicted thus: “Up close he’s less bony and more mucilaginous, folded back on himself in loops like an intestinal worm.” Elsewhere the inside of one billionaire’s mansion is described as being “like Miss Havisham and Hannibal Lecter had co-founded an interior design agency with Kim Jong Un.”

I first came across the author when he wrote a brilliant article for the Guardian in 2015 arguing: “In all the rage about migration, one thing is never discussed: what we do to cause it.” He went on to list “funding privatisations, land grabs and dams… backing companies and governments accused of rape, murder and torture,” along with Western military intervention in the Middle East as key drivers of the forced movement of people to Europe.

Reading Kill Billionaire, it feels like Kayla and the book more generally are vehicles for Lustgarten’s more cutting, usually accurate, observations and arguments. So the Republican Party has been “transformed into a planetary death machine,” while liberals and the billionaire press (“which is pretty much all of it one way or another”) both get it in the neck.

There are echoes of recent novels that include climate terrorism (Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future, 2021; Stephen Markley’s The Deluge, 2023), but those looking for an informed discussion about the merits of violent and non-violent resistance will need to look elsewhere. It’s not that kind of book.

Instead, I recommend suspending your belief and joining this madcap, often amusing ride accompanying one of the most memorable characters in contemporary literature — described at one point as “Greta Thunberg with IEDs.”

News update: last month Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire (for 12 days, after which apparently his net worth deflated). Kayla, I’m sure, would have lots to say about this.