[In the following review, Clee comments on the thematic motifs in Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard.]

Timothy Mo’s literary career has drifted up a creek. He started out with two critically acclaimed novels, The Monkey King (1978) and Sour Sweet (1982); the latter, a fresh and arresting portrait of the Chinese community in London, appeared on the Booker Prize shortlist and was made into a film. An Insular Possession (1986), for which he had changed publisher from Deutsch to Chatto for an advance that was lower than a rival offer, was also a Booker finalist. Next came The Redundancy of Courage, a bloated work for which the author, now represented by a new agent, secured from Chatto a substantial advance. It lost, the publisher reveals, a lot of money. Still, it had its admirers, and it too made the Booker shortlist. A Booker contender three times within ten years: this record, which no other novelist has matched recently, should make valuable an author’s stock.

For Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard, Mo sought, reports suggest, the sum of £200,000. The highest bid he received was £125,000, and this from a house which had serious reservations about the novel and wanted to make editorial changes. His previous publisher, Chatto, commented: “If we had felt passionately about the book we would have found the money. But we didn’t.” Mo, who has stated that he is “fed up relying on others”, decided to bring out the novel himself. His own budget is more modest than he had expected that of his publishers to be: he estimates that if he sells 1,000 hardback copies and 9,000 paperbacks, he will make a profit of about £25,000. He has called his imprint Paddleless.

Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard is preoccupied with the excremental. The novel opens as Detleg Pfeidwengeler, a German professor, is shat on by a Filipina prostitute, to whom he then gives an enema. An adversary, whom he likes to contemplate while playing these games, later offers him a hot chocolate, which she says is just how he likes it, spicy and thick. “Give him a stool, someone”, she commands. The professor is to meet his end in a lavatory cubicle, attempting to flush a hand-grenade down the pan. A firm in Mo’s setting in the Philippines, the fictional city of Gobernador de Leon, has built up its wealth and that of the city on a rare mineral named “Sodomite”. A “brownout” is a power-cut. The local name for breadfruit, one character explains, is “culo”. So Breadfruit Boulevard is the local equivalent of the Hershey Highway, another suggests. “Is it a cul-de-sac?” he inquires wittily.

Mo has cheerfully described his first chapter as “the filthiest of any book ever published”. He has also said that Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard is a comedy. But the comedy is for those who find farts funny. A newspaper office, presented as a place of crackling badinage, has an editor offering the advice: “There are old submariners, there are bold submariners, but there are no old, bold submariners.” This aphorism has the staff “in stitches”. A bar offers a cocktail with the delirious name of Screaming Orgasm. The bartender tells a customer that he’ll give her one, and she replies that he has done it quickly and that it normally takes ages. Those who hear this exchange have “hysterics”. On a visit to a cave, the obese Professor Pfeidwengeler has trouble getting out of the narrow mouth, presenting another member of the party with the opportunity to tickle his feet and jump up and down on his legs. Collapse of all parties; Pfeidwengeler emerges to find his companions “on their knees or on their backs, kicking their legs, some weeping”.

Structure is another problem. The novel contains long passages of arcane business interrupted by moments of vivid violence. In Part One, Mo, having attempted to grab our attention with Professor Pfeidwengeler’s romps, abandons him and introduces us to some of the inhabitants of Gobernador de Leon, among them Victoria Init, the gracefully ruthless wife of a middle-ranking politician; Boyet, a newspaper columnist with a taste for prostitutes; and Crescente, a psychopathic hoodlum. Towards the end of the section, Boyet and his colleagues go on a weekend trip which Crescente brutally interrupts. Part Two introduces more characters, delegates to a conference organized under Mrs Init’s patronage. The event culminates in an act of revenge for Crescente’s crime.

Has any decent work of fiction ever been set at a conference? David Lodge’s Small World, about jet-setting delegates, was one of his weaker novels. A large part of Malcolm Bradbury’s worst novel, Dr Criminale, took place on the international conference circuit. These books, and Mo’s too, are stifled by the insulated atmospheres of their scenarios. The authors seem to take for granted the reader’s interest in their characters’ machinations, and are tempted to adopt a style that is off-puttingly knowing and arch. In Mo’s case, there is an unpleasant vulgarity too: Mrs Init’s expression is that of “a Vestal caught douching”; Boyet does not want to shred an article because he is not the type “who murdered his own offspring and floated the foetuses away”; Boyet believes that his wife, berating him for giving her a venereal disease, is “getting her rocks off on it”. Mo is aware of clichés, and often refers to their use, but does not always resist them: twice, for example, characters are said to be running around “like headless chickens”.

The characters are victims of this vulgarity. Professor Pfeidwengeler is one; another is Gracie Hipkin, who runs an environmental pressure group called Whalewatch and is “big as a beached whale herself”. A virgin, she becomes besotted with Crescente, and is observed masturbating to fantasies about being penetrated by him on a Li-Lo. In a postscript set in the future, Mo kindly invents a drug which enables her to shed half her weight.