Tomas

That Robbie Williams, at the height of his post-Take That fame, visited the bar where I once worked in Manchester wearing a Ministry of Sound bomber jacket demonstrates how pervasive the nightclub brand was in the early nineties. James Palumbo, its co-founder, was probably the rave generation’s most famous businessman, a sort of acid-house Richard Branson. Now the land lies a little differently. While Palumbo’s MSHK Group (which incorporates Ministry as well as Hed Kandi, Euphoria and Global Underground) saw a turnover exceeding £80m last year, the cultural significance of dance culture has waned in the intervening years. Perhaps this is why Palumbo, with an eye on his legacy, has chosen this year to deliver his debut novel, Tomas. Unfortunately, as a prose stylist, the author is very a talented entrepreneur.

Tomas presents a grotesque alternate reality in an effort to satirise the evils of our time. The eponymous antihero is the star of a reality channel Shit TV, presenting a show which sees him defecating at major public events. A wealthy celebrity, he is sickened by the decadence that surrounds him. Playboys with vastly-collared shirts quaffing 20,000 euro bottles of champagne; girls with fake breasts so large they must be supported by Zimmer frames; a corrupt Russian businessman with a detachable stomach; and football players who prey on underage girls. Events fly by. He meets the beautiful prostitute Tereza in a nightclub. With hitherto-undisclosed super-powers, he destroys a decadent hotel in the French Riviera. For this he is sentenced to death and executed on live TV by firing squad. Tereza tortures a banker by encouraging pigs to devour his genitalia before bringing Tomas back from the dead with the aid of a time machine. Resurrected, and feted as ‘the second Messiah’, he becomes an even bigger media sensation than before. With the assistance of a friendly alien and the Emperor Napoleon, who he summons to the present with the time machine, he destroys the mighty Cocksack army, thus blighting Russia’s sinister plan to enslave the West by corrupting it with money.

If this sounds disjointed, you should try reading the book. Palumbo clearly left the creative writing manual on his private jet. The plot is fragmentary, skipping from one scene to the next with little cohesion. Leviathan scenes are despatched in a few words. Characterisation is sparse: Tomas and Tereza feel less like real people than constructs manipulated by the author. It is an angry book punctuated with visceral, unpleasant imagery.

Of course, none of this necessarily matters. Narrative fragmentation is common in classic satires like Candide and Gulliver’s Travels, only the philistine demands characters he can ‘relate to’ and anger is a great starting point for an author. The real problem with Tomas, and it’s a big one, is that it’s not very well written.

Unaccountably, Steven Fry of all people has compared the book to the work of William Burroughs. Regrettably, the only similarity is a certain sketchiness of design, a Tourettes-like inventiveness. As prose writer, Burroughs trumps Palumbo every time. Where Burroughs is poetic, Palumbo is leaden. Where Burroughs, the visionary, soars, Palumbo, hidebound by the grammar of convention, does little more than embellish the headlines of yesterday’s red-tops.

A single example. Tereza is introduced to us as follows: ‘She is beautiful beyond words; brown-blonde hair falling unstyled over a wide face...She has no bra and he can see the outline of her perfect pert breasts.’ This just won’t do. ‘Beautiful beyond words’ is a cliché, but worse, it is literally meaningless. Of course, everyone knows what he’s getting at, but it lacks specificity, and specificity is the writer’s stock-in-trade. ‘Her perfect pert breasts’ could have been lifted from any low-rent lad mag. Now, it may seem churlish to criticise an entire novel on the basis of a few sentences, but this sort of thing is endemic throughout, and anyway, sentences are important: they are a novel’s DNA. I can guarantee that none of the writers to whom Palumbo has been compared, including Brett Easton Ellis, Kurt Vonnegut and Will Self, would ever describe a major character in such a careless and derivative way.

This is disappointing: I wanted to like the book and the material deserves better. If ever there was a time we required literature to take aim at the hypocrisies and injustices of the age it is now. Unfortunately, Tomas is firing blanks.