Tomas – James Palumbo

I finished Tomas 2 days ago and I’m still digesting what I think. I spotted the book advertised on a billboard on London Bridge station and it immediately stood out.

The book’s cover was striking, simple and the poster came with some quotes that made it sound intriguing. Stephen Fry gave it a recommendation, plus I recognised James Palumbo’s name as the man behind the Ministry Of Sound – the centre of clubbing culture in the 90s.

So what’s Tomas about? Well, it’s basically a sharp satire of the rampant consumerism of the early 21st century: highly-paid professional footballers; money-grabbing merchant bankers; desire for plastic surgery; celebrity culture – many of the things that are currently being blamed for the onset of the recession.

Palumbo serves up surreal images and a kind of black comedy that is at turns extraordinarily funny, but also very difficult to read. Tomas is actually quite disturbing and shocking and the humour isn’t often strong enough to save it from becoming simply gruesome.

Many of Palumbo’s images and characters are cleverly drawn – representing Russia as a Great Bear is hardly new, but it works here – but the increasingly bizarre nature of the plot as the novel continues means that the characters become secondary.

By the time the book drew to a close, I was thoroughly confused and had less and less idea what was going on. The twist at the end simply served to baffle me even more.

On the plus side, Palumbo’s writing style is sharp and incisive at times and he has a turn of phrase is, at times, delightful. It will also be interesting to see how accurate a satire Tomas really is once history has its say on the first recession of the 21st century.

But overall, my feeling was that Tomas is a novel that is far too much like the flashy, insubstantial culture it sets out to debunk. Too much artifice and not enough delivery.

On Beauty – Zadie Smith

I’d been meaning to read this for a while. In hardback, sat on our bookshelves, it taunted me. “I’m a Zadie Smith novel – full of intelligence, long sentences and esoteric concepts that you’ll never get round to reading.”

After three years of owning the book, I finally got my head into the right frame of mind to read On Beauty.

So what’s it about? Well, it features two families, who are effectively at war. The Kipps – headed up by Monty, the British Caribbean right-wing, reactionary academic, feted for his strident views – and the Belseys – with Howard at the helm, a white liberal academic who married a black American woman and settled in New England, at a prestigious university.

The families both possess high ideals but low morals and the unravelling of the various feuds and flashpoints make up the meat of the novel.

Zadie Smith doesn’t hide her intelligence and the writing is full of bewilderingly long sentences, packed with intricate clauses and vocabulary that, at times, even the well-read would find dizzying.

The characters are well-rounded and beautifully fleshed out and the descriptions of the settings give the mind little work to do to imagine where they are.

So much for the good points. Unfortunately, while Smith is performing pyrotechnics with her wordplay, she often forgets actually to move the plot along.

Many of the characters also come across as thoroughly unlikeable and don’t encourage you to want to continue reading.

In fact, there were times while reading this, that it felt like wading through treacle. Humour is sparse, plot is patchy and the overall point of the novel felt impossible to grasp.

Compared to White Teeth, which was a wonderfully vibrant exploration of race, internationally, but also very locally, On Beauty feels as if Smith is running out of ideas and on empty.

Alex Barclay – Blood Runs Cold

According to the blurb, Alex Barclay is the rising star in the world of crime fiction. With this being her third novel, you’d have thought that she might have got into her stride by now and be displaying the talent that her agent and publishers saw in her.

Sadly, with Blood Runs Cold, this talent is yet to show itself.

This is a poorly plotted, lumpenly-written novel with about as much verve, sparkle and edge as a damp towel. In a genre filled with the likes of Janet Evanovich, Sara Paretsky, Kathy Reichs and Patricia Cornwell, Alex Barclay needs to do a serious amount of work to do more than make up the numbers.

The protagonist in this novel is totally unsympathetic and the dialogue is at times laughable, often impossible to follow. As a whole, it didn’t feel genuine or believeable.

Another negative was the glut of supporting characters, none of whom felt real or sharply-enough drawn to hold the reader’s attention.

I’m sure somewhere in the book is a semblance of a good plot straining to get out, but it’s mired in clunkiness of the highest order.

Alex Barclay may be a talent, but on the evidence of this, it’s not clear if it will enough to sustain a career.

Try instead: Deja Dead, From Potter’s Field