How to Rule the World

Tibor Fischer

Corsair, £16.99

Review by Nick Major

On page 168 of Tibor Fischer’s fifth novel an indebted filmmaker called Baxter Stone receives a resignation letter from his presenter, Lilianne. He is in Jerusalem, shooting a documentary about the end of the world.

In the letter, Lilianne writes, “I simply cannot abide the shallowness of this meretricious business anymore.” In a strange coincidence, I had the exact same thought on page 50, only I was thinking about Fischer’s book.

It must be said that Fischer is a good writer, which is not the same as being a good novelist. He has lexical dexterity, can create hilarious characters – such as Baxter’s cameraman Semtex, a thuggish vegan whose favourite pastime is changing restaurant menus so the suffering of animals is explicit in dish descriptions – can write short comic scenes and has a command of narratorial voice. This novel, however, is predominantly voice – Baxter’s voice – and it is a smarmy, tasteless and nihilistic one. Baxter also speaks using abbreviations for anything he can, such as “progs” for programmes, creates pointless compound adjectives – a cheap hotel becomes a “not-as-expensive-as-I-would-like hotel” – and meaningless neologisms, such as “unfucktastic”. He also revels in oxymoron: “When you give up, you succeed.”

Ever since Fischer’s first novel Under the Frog in 1992, he has mostly eschewed plot as a formal device. This is commendable. Plot is as overrated as Agatha Christie. But it does have the redeeming quality of holding together a novel. A writer has to be at the top of their game to get along without it. One of the few who can is Martin Amis, whose comic masterpiece Money is a novel entirely predicated on voice. Indeed, Baxter sounds oddly similar to Amis’ protagonist John Self; Baxter, however, is, apart from being unoriginal, less realised, less funny, less hapless and does not possess Self’s moronic wisdom,

In Baxter, Fischer is satirising the modern sensibility that refuses to take any subject seriously. He can only react to even the most horrendous situations with empty irony. For example, he recounts an incident where he was the only person prepared to film a mass grave in Afghanistan. “Who were the dead? Who killed them? We never found out. But the two dozen were surely very dead. There’s nothing like a fresh mass grave in high summer.” The moral message is clear: Baxter has spent his life behind the camera. Reality has become a performance, all in the service of entertainment. Because we all now live out our days through the lens of our own cameras, our lives have become low entertainment. This is fine, up to a point, but it has been done before and it has been done better.

Baxter blames his money woes on a devious insurance company and the internet, which has de-commodified his industry: “The problem is the custard. There isn’t enough to go round, because we are too many. Because technology has betrayed us. Because history has shafted us. Because the universities pour out grads who don’t know shit, but who do know how to switch on a camera. Because now any 12-year-old with a phone can do what we do. Because everything’s up for free on the web.”

Ranting and tiresome passages like this are interspersed with Baxter’s descriptions of other boorish media types and accounts of his trips around the world to make failed television programmes. But despite his travelling, we encounter the same fetid and empty humour we did at the beginning. There are hints that there might be formal cohesion somewhere: although they are passing ghosts, Baxter has a wife and a child, there are allusions to figures of authority – including “The Allower” (God, presumably) – and a disappeared safe that belonged to Baxter’s deceased mentor and which, if found, could save his career. But this never amounts to anything.

One pleasure gained upon reaching the end of this novel is that Fischer does write some smart comedy. He does what too few people have done, which is to convincingly mock radical Islamists, a group of whom kidnap Baxter and Semtex and screw it up so badly they end up getting themselves killed. But is it worth reading on for? Probably not. This book was over after 50 pages.