Soundbites of sex, hate and envy

CORPSING by Toby Litt (Hamish Hamilton, 9.99)

TOBY Litt, Malcolm Bradbury's Wunderkind, Generation X adventurer in capitalism, wry and cynical pseudo-beatnik, is a ratpack chronicler of the lifestyle fascism that plagues London and its various media.

The new kings and queens of Lifestyle, Litt tells us, are the sickening Tristrams of satellite TV, producers of modish cack, and the bedhopping supermodel actresses with their advertising revenue and tabloid smiles.

His new novel, Corpsing, takes a grim, sordid view of these creatures, weaving a heavy-handed thriller plot round their hate and envy in order to indulge Litt's own deep-seated hatred and envy of the whole pack of them. But Litt protests too much, we suspect, displaying hysterical sarcasm rather than satirical energy.

The thriller plot begins with a gory shootout in a Soho restaurant. Lily, the ravishing heroine of a series of cereal ads, has invited her ex, the seriously unpleasant Conrad, Discovery Channel producer and our narrator.

Both are shot up by a bike courier. Lily dies, and Conrad, after months of hospitalisation, becomes the detective. Suspicion falls on a luvvy couple, very hammy RSC, Dorothy and Alun, once Conrad discovers Alun's affair with Lily. From then on, the plot thickens with gangland hit men, police snoopers, media feeding frenzies, nasty sexual shenanigans. Litt makes his detective both victim and, nearly, murderer, trapped as he is in dark drives of lust and hate for the dead Lily.

I'd like to say this is a clever book, since it advertises its chic with psychoanalytic theorists of death in its acknowledgments.

And Litt is genuinely good at the fetishistic chapters detailing the bullets' destructive passage through Lily and Conrad's flesh and bone, staging Conrad's descent into revenge psychosis.

It is also a satisfying idea to have a murder victim who victimises the detective through the shock waves of bereavement.

One chapter, darkly visioning Conrad's clinch with his dead ex- partner's mother, is remarkable and truly shocking.

But, frankly, the novel is disappointing.

This is because Litt fails to deal with the technical difficulty that faces any writer who wants to use an offensive narrator: how to avoid insulting one's readers.

Though Litt makes some attempt to signal that he thinks Conrad is a self-regarding, neurotic bastard too, the upshot of this overlong, indulgent thriller is that he secretly enjoys his man's shallow viciousness. And nowhere is he more shallow than in the style. Teeny chapters, paragraphs rarely longer than a sentence, soundbiting straight talk without the wit of a Chandler, the prose poses as burly but reads as patronising. It may be the point that readers should grow to hate Conrad. This reader found him merely grotesquely arrogant.

Copyright 2000
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