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The narrator of Tibor Fischer’s eighth novel, My Bags Are Big, is a walking anachronism. Dan is “an old school crypto geezer” who hails from south London and lives in Dubai, where he drives an old Citroën and wears a Mickey Mouse watch given to him by his father in the 1970s. He’s done well for himself – the bags of the title are a slang term for a cryptocurrency wallet – though it didn’t happen overnight. “Get rich quick? It was very much a get slightly comfortable slowly deal.” His adopted city, he tells us, is “a cross between Las Vegas, an airport departure lounge and a pirate bay”, and a magnet for low-status westerners looking to reinvent themselves: “Assistant masseurs at second division football clubs. Taxi drivers. Linen porters. Nail technicians. Dog groomers. Life coaches. They’re all through the pearly gates, here in Dubai.”
Dan himself is one such individual. Having just turned 60, he relates his journey from Catford to Dubai, via a calamitous career in sports management, a doomed love affair with a quantum physicist, and several brief encounters with David Bowie. In the 80s he won a vindaloo-eating contest and had a Monty Python-esque run-in with some Maoist student revolutionaries. The novel is populated by amusing oddballs, including one character who belongs to an international bollard appreciation society, and another who superstitiously smears caviar on to a lottery ticket in the hope of “giving it a taste of wealth”.
There’s a thin plot, centring on the shenanigans of expat wheeler-dealers, but it’s the narrative voice that drives the novel. Dan is a sleazy, irreverent raconteur who revels in off-key, sardonic hyperbole, whether exalting the Emirati criminal justice system (“What have human rights actually done for you? Lately?”) or channelling the can-do rhetoric of self-help (“sitting on your backside, waiting for the lobster thermidor to fly into your mouth, doesn’t get you very far”). The blithely abbreviated “and” in a passing reference to “war ’n’ starvation” pretty much sums him up.
Fischer is a companionable storyteller, even if the sheer relentlessness of his shtick evokes the strained jocularity of a cruise ship entertainer. Dan’s yarns are punctuated by catchphrases that feel like world-weary sighs. “It was a different era” – uttered no fewer than 22 times – is one; “You arrive unprepared” is another. Aphoristic pronouncements are backed up with bored citations: “Someone said so, somewhere, sometime.” A sense of incipient apathy comes through in occasional melancholic musings on ageing, the pettiness of divorce and the spectre of death. But these, too, are relatively unsentimental. “Either there’s a big plan, so I’ll be redirected somewhere, or there isn’t.”
Dan takes nothing seriously, least of all crypto: “I’m here for the loot and the laughs. It’s fun to throw a brick through a window. Revolutions don’t turn the world upside down … They change things a little.” We might say that he and his crypto brethren are an avatar for what’s left of social mobility in 21st-century Britain, but so earnest an interpretation would go against the spirit of this novel. More prosaically, Dan is a study in the stubborn immutability of character, best exemplified by his eccentric insistence on calling Jaffa Cakes “Jaffa biscuits”, despite the 1991 court ruling determining that they are indeed cakes.
In an ever-changing world, some people can be relied upon to remain fully themselves. Fischer, who is just a few years older than his narrator, made a literary splash in the 90s with novels including The Thought Gang, a surreal caper about a philosopher turned bank robber. Thirty years on, he has conceived another renegade chancer; the storytelling is zippier here, and the absurdism slightly dialled down, but the jaunty voice and cynical, compulsively wisecracking comic sensibility are unchanged. Perhaps the face on the dial of that Mickey Mouse timepiece is the author’s own. For Dan, at least, the watch holds meaning: “Not sure what entirely, but it says something. Cheap junk, granted. Well battered. But it works. Still in the game.”
