Comic fairytale was written in the weeks since the November presidential election and aims to offer readers the ‘consolation of savage satire’

In reply to Donald Trump’s election victory – and in lightning quick time – novelist Howard Jacobson has delivered a comic fairytale that the Man Booker prize winner hopes not only explains why Trump won, but provides the “consolation of savage satire”.

Pussy is set to be published in April by Jonathan Cape, and was written by The Finkler Question author in what he described as “a fury of disbelief” in the two months after the November result. A departure from his usual contemporary fiction, the 50,000 word novella tells the story of Prince Fracassus, heir to the Duchy of Origen, famed for its golden-gated skyscrapers and casinos, who passes his boyhood watching reality TV shows and fantasising about sex workers.

Idle, boastful and thin-skinned as well as ignorant and egotistical, Fracassus seems the last person capable of leading his country. But what seems impossible becomes reality all too readily.

“Fiction can’t match reality at the moment,” Jacobson said. “The book’s been brewing in me since the beginning of 2016. I was in the US early last year promoting [My Name Is] Shylock and watching this man [Trump] on TV in horror. It was unbelievable.”

After the election, what had been brewing exploded onto the page. “I had to get up at the crack of dawn every morning and write it,” he added, admitting that Pussy was the fastest book he had ever written. “I’m a slow writer normally,” he said. “I believe in slow writing.”

Writing had been “hugely cathartic”, Jacobson said, because he was making himself laugh. In 2010, he became one of only two comic novelists to win the Booker – the other being Kingsley Amis, with The Old Devils, in 1986.

Jacobson said he hoped the new book would offer the “consolation of savage satire” to readers depressed at the year’s events and hit the new inhabitant of the Oval Office where it hurts: the ego. “Satire is an important weapon in the fight against what is happening and Trump looks like a person who is particularly vulnerable to derision,” he explained.

As well as Trump, the story takes pot shots at the president’s enablers and fans on both sides of the Atlantic. Walk-on parts are given to characters not too far removed from British political life. Asked whether leading Brexiters appear, Jacobson said: “Certainly you will be able to recognise some of them.” He added that Hillary Clinton makes a surprising appearance towards the end.

Though written with to make readers laugh, the book is more than a satire, Jacobson said: “I wanted to get over Trump’s moral bankruptcy but also the sheer bankruptcy of a culture that could produce him.” In particular, he wanted to convey the damage done to political discourse by the social networking site Twitter, which Trump has used to bypass traditional media.

Though the novelist regarded Trump as “dumb”, he said the former reality TV star had a sharp instinct for Twitter that had enabled him to address voters without the scrutiny of the press. “Social media thrives on the assertive single point of view, which is what he is able to do,” Jacobson said. Likening what has happened to a coup, he added: “If you have Twitter, you don’t need tanks.”

The Manchester-born writer and broadcaster said he had long hankered to write a fairytale, though he admitted changing his writing style to match the form had been difficult. “I had to write much shorter sentences,” he joked, saying that Jonathan Swift and Voltaire’s Candide had inspired him.

Pussy is not Jacobson’s first venture into fairytale fiction. “One of the first things that I did as a student at Cambridge in 1964 was write a fairytale called The Ogre of Downing Castle about my tutor,” he said. His tutor? The hugely influential literary critic FR Leavis, author of The Great Tradition.