The Buzz Board
Picks from the Inner Circle
Editor of the Times Literary Supplement. |
![]() Multi-millionaire international club-owner James Palumbo writes a novel about excrement and broken body parts, evil Iranians and media barons, evil Russians and silicon breast implants—with Napoleon as the hero's ghostly mentor and the Eiffel Tower turned upside down over a new Paris. Palumbo's first published fiction, Tomas, is as slim and elegant and clothed in black as the male clientele of his Ministry of Sound. London subway travelers have already felt the full thrust of a marketing campaign that could have effortlessly launched a small election campaign. The author is sometimes thought to have political ambitions himelf. He is close to Lord Peter Mandelson, a renowned club dancer and music industry enthusiast who is virtually running Britain right now. Yet neither man's future, for all the attention each attracts, is easy to judge. Among Palumbo's new fictional players is a villain with a vast stomach that can be detached and successfully stands in for him in a business deal. Criminal cronyism is, in Tomas, replaced by kinder, gentler nepotism—part of a better ordered world than that of the present, one in which the Chinese have tidied up Africa for its own good. |





