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Tibor Fischer, The Thought Gang

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By accident (by way of periwigs on the way to the restaurant), The Thought Gang, became one of the book group’s selected novels for reading.

This novel is a good example of how the culture of literary criticism simply does not work .ie. Writer A publishes a book, Writer B – his friend – gives it a glowing review before publishing his own book which Writer A then reviews positively and so on.

As you wil know, the best recommendations are always free.

I was recommended Tibor Fischer’s ‘The Thought Gang’ by the representative of a publisher who was still miffed that a rival company had bought the rights to publish this book. He rated this as the funniest book he’d ever read and ‘definitely better than anything I’m trying to sell you.’ When the equivalent of a car salesman says ‘don’t buy from me, try him’, you know something special is going on.

The trouble with books that are hyped so extravagantly is that they tend to disappoint. In five subsequent re-readings since 1998, Eddie Coffin and Hubert have never failed to get a chuckle. But the point is… this novel isn’t written as a comedy. Hubert is dying, Eddie knows he’s drunk himself out of a liver. Both men are failures and this story is about how we have to try to learn to live with the disappointment of finding that we are not who we first promised to be. No, that’s getting to what the book is about either…

If I described this book as Keystone Kops meets A Year in Provence but with better writing, you might have an idea of where this book is coming from. At the time of publication, Nick Hornby wrote: “The Thought Gang is The Lavender Hill Mob rescripted by Georges Perec and Will Self, and yet Fischer somehow emerges from it all with credit.” Hornby, it should be said, wears his jealousy poorly.

This novel is essentially the interior monologue of a fifty-something, overweight, bald philosophy lecturer who is too clever for his own good and too lazy to care. He absconds from England with his departments funds and promptly loses them when the hire care he is driving comes off the road. In the cheap hotel he retreats to, he is mugged by a one-armed, one-legged ex-con just released from prison. The next morning, with no funds for a breakfast but a pistol, Eddie Coffin – our soon-to-be former philosophy lecturer and specialist in the Ionian philosophers (there’s a sly joke in there for those readers who’ve studied philosophy) – goes to a bank and makes a withdrawal. Hubert, the French ex-con, is inspired and together, they create The Thought Gang.

As a novel, The Thought Gang should fail in many, many ways: the improbable characters; the zany set-pieces; the constant word-play and the sometimes too-abrupt injection of historical fact; the frankly massive and too-obvious word-game contrived by the author but rehearsed by the main character, Eddie, to whit the use of every single instance of a word beginning with ‘z’ in the English language. But this is to miss the point: Tibor Fischer has amply demonstrated that he can write a great novel, he achieved this goal first time around with the Betty Trask Prize-winning ‘Under the Frog’ and then again with the frankly outrageous ‘The Collector Collector’ which is no more than a weekend in London as described by a 5,000 year old Sumerian bowl. The Thought Gang consists of the wry, dry observations of an enormous intelligence fronting the frothy humour of an even bigger mind reflecting on the absurdity of life. The big game in this book is an author at the height of his powers saying: ‘Look how easy it is? Typing with no hands, no feet… Now, how about I entertain you some more while you’re here?’

Too many authors throw their intellectually superior posteriors around as though we as readers could be arsed. No. We sometimes want escapism even as we pretend to want literary and pretentious. Neither do we always want thinly-veiled autobiography from authors who may as well be heard begging: ‘Please, sir, please… Give me The Booker Prize. I want it, I want it now!’ Tibor Fischer is obviously a voracious reader (it shows in the prose) because he understands that readers want to be surprised, humoured, treated as equals and then astonished.

As competent as Amis and others may be at writing novels, they are not truly great and perhaps never will be. True genius, especially in the realm of comedy-drama, wears its talent lightly with no more than a shrug of the shoulders and another look at the menu as the zarps hurry to the latest bank job.