If you long for that far-off time when novels were prepared to be hilariously funny, vulgar, caustic, wildly politically incorrect and highly improbable you are going to love My Bags Are Big. Tibor Fischer has always been happy to write against the pieties of the age, whatever they might be. He has often been compared with Martin Amis, but he’s Amis without the pose. If anything, as he ages, he’s more like a very funny, very British Michel Houellebecq. You get the sense he really means it: he feels it; the rage is for real.
His astonishing debut novel Under the Frog (1992) turned postwar Hungary into a carnival of grotesques and established the mode for a lifetime of books that treat plot as scaffolding for his riffs and reflections on life, the universe and everything. They include The Thought Gang (1994), with its philosopher bank robber; The Collector Collector (1997), narrated by a 5,000-year-old Sumerian pot; Voyage to the End of the Room (2003), a kind of hymn to agoraphobia; Good to Be God (2008), in which a man decides to start a religion; and How to Rule the World (2018), a brilliant skewering of media and ambition.
The cast sounds like a Catford pub quiz team assembled by Dickens after a night on the Jägerbombs
So, now, obviously, crypto. My Bags Are Big is a darkly comic satire on wealth, reinvention and regret, staged – where else? – in Dubai’s engineered mirage and powered by our era’s most absurd of secular faiths, cryptocurrency. But to call the book a crypto novel would be like calling Moby-Dick a fishing manual. As with all Fischer’s set-ups, crypto here is less the subject than the solvent: it both connects and dissolves everything in the book, stripping and revealing the skull beneath the skin.
The narrator is Dan, originally from Catford, who after a career working in sports management now lives off his crypto earnings in Dubai. He’s a widower, a realist and pragmatist, and an absolute mess: ‘So much of life is pretence. Pretending you want that job. That you like people. That you’re tough. Clever. Whatever. That you’re not gutted completely by your wife’s death.’
It transpires that years earlier Dan had made plans to kill his friend Jasper because he was in love with Jasper’s wife, Vikki. This is the sort of confession that, in lesser hands, would trigger chapters of dull therapeutic drizzle. In Fischer’s, it becomes the dark engine of farce. Dan hasn’t seen Vikki for 30 years. Then he bumps into her by chance. Various mishaps and encounters ensue, with misunderstandings ruling everything:
Misunderstandings. Misunderstandings. Misunderstandings and events, weather, they run everything. Weather and Misunderstandings. Misjudgments. Missteps. Mishearings. Mistranslations. Misfirings. Mishaps. Mischief. A whole lot of missing going on.
This is both a very funny book, and not funny at all.
Around Dan swirls a cast of characters whose names sound like a Catford pub quiz team assembled by Charles Dickens after a night on the Jägerbombs: Carjack Carlo, for whom his once-and-long-ago carjacking was ‘the only marketable thing he had to say’; Battersea Bill, the drug dealer; Jabs, ‘a very heavy heavyweight’; My Big Cousin, a dodgy special constable; Trev the ‘Ultrabankrupt’; Obligatory Julian; Ming; Math Cat; big fat Bigger; and NotGuilty, who obviously has ‘dozens of charges and court appearances’ and is, naturally, now living in Dubai. The roll call is a comic aria of failure and bravado, with everyone endlessly talking shit – ‘Blockchain. Smart Contracts. Staking. Friedrich Hayek. Metaverse. Layer One. Layer Two’ – and absolutely desperate to make money. It’s quintessential Fischer: grand schemes, male self-mythologising, love, hate and co-dependency. If nothing else, he has always loved men who are half hustlers and half victims of their own sales pitch. He loves a geezer.
Rage bubbles throughout, with Dubai the perfect late-Fischer setting – the built environment as mood board and metaphor for aspiration, greed and stupidity. Everyone in Dubai is attempting to reinvent themselves, and everyone’s failing. Dan fantasises:
How do I get big, superinflating bags and face-melting gains so I can get a private army and tell everyone what I think of them? Safely? How can I unbitch myself? Can I beat the Wheel?
Can you? The answer, delivered with Fischer’s trademark bracing bluntness, is no.
For a novel full of blockchain jargon and skyscrapers shaped like anatomical boasts, the moral is almost shockingly simple. ‘Great to have some gongs, some applause, great to have big bags, plenty of space to park your collection of vintage motorbikes, but all that finally counts is company.’ And: ‘The world isn’t run by geniuses. Wise-cracking gurus. Colourful sages. Inspirational rebels. Wily megabrains. The great aren’t that great.’ Fischer has sometimes been accused of being too quick, too funny, too sour and too clever by half. But if anything this is a book of good old-fashioned common sense smuggled in under the cover of swagger, patter and some mega megabantz.
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