Back to Blood

There's a scene towards the end of Back to Blood when we finally get inside the secret studio of the elusive Russian artist Igor Drukovich. In public an arch-devotee of realism, Igor has hidden away in his studio a series of copies of modernist, surrealist, abstract and cubist masterpieces by the likes of Picasso, Matisse, Kandinksy and Braque -- the very artists he sneers at in public. But it turns out they are perfect forgeries Igor has been living off, laughing behind his hand as he deludes the art establishment which has rejected him.It's hard not to suspect this might have something to do with Wolfe's own very public spat with the literary modernists. Like his character Igor, Wolfe is an exponent of realism in an age when it's out of fashion. Like Igor, he has publicly attacked the fashionable . Is he perhaps hinting that, like Igor, he could effortlessly replicate his rivals' works, while they couldn't copy his realism?The thing is, though, that Wolfe hasn't proved all that versatile in his fictional career. After the dazzling success of Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full he decided to turn his hand to something different in I am Charlotte Simmons. He tried to write the sort of novel his rivals excel at, set on the small canvas of a university campus, and focused on the interior life of its characters, but the result fell flat. Robbed of material suited to the satire at which he excels, he fell back on toilet humour -- literally, with a grotesque recital of the gruntings and strainings of a male undergraduate at stool.Thankfully in Back to Blood he is back to what he does best, painting the life of an entire city, and following a wide cast of characters and the intricate ways they're connected. The protagonist is Nestor Camacho, an ambitious young cop. The child of Cuban immigrants, he sees a career in the police as his passport to acceptance by the wider community. The irony, as Wolfe gleefully describes, is that the Cubans already are the wider community of Miami, a city where immigrants are the majority. And Nestor's moment of triumph, as he saves the life of a would-be Cuban immigrant from Cuba live on TV, is also his downfall, as the man is arrested and deported, and Nestor is disowned by his own family.That's the moment which sets everything else off in Back to Blood, which will force Nestor into an uneasy alliance with John Smith, a WASP reporter who is trying to uncover the truth aboutthe mysterious connection between Igor the artist and Sergei Korolyov, a Russian billionaire who has bought his way to the sort of social acceptance Nestor yearns for. Which will force Nestor out of his prestigious job on a police boat and onto a crime beat where he will be accused of brutality towards an African American suspect, and meet a stunning Haitian beauty.And at the same time Nestor's old girlfriend, Magdalena, is on her own quest for acceptance, cut adrift from her Cuban immigrant roots just like Nestor. But while he is fighting to clear his name amid the crack dens of Miami, she seems on a relentless rise, with a rich new boyfriend who can take her to the most glittering parties in town.It's the perfect canvas for Wolfe, who gets to give us a succession of the set pieces he is justly famous for: billionaires fighting like children to get the best paintings at an art sale; a police raid on a crack den; a reality TV show crew trying to start a fight at a high society party; Nestor and John Smith undercover at a lap dancing club.This is a novel about outsiders, and their quest for acceptance. But the joke's on them, because they live in a city where everyone's an outsider, where even the privileged WASP newspaper editor is ill at ease and feels out of place. There's a scene where Nestor and John Smith are tailing Igor out of the city, and they come to a place which Nestor finds disconcerting and unfamiliar. "We've just entered a strange land...called America!" John Smith says, and then, echoing Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, "We're not in Miami anymore".America is, of course, a country founded on immigration, but Wolfe's Miami is still in the crucible, being formed, while the rest of America has stratified around it. The structures of the rest of America don't apply in this Miami, it is the city of the future.For all its zest and fun, this is a big, serious book then, about a big, serious subject, every bit as ambitious as Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full, and to a large extent Wolfe pulls it off. That his conclusions often seem at odds with current fashionable thought doesn't matter a bit. He deserves a hearing.But Back to Blood is not without its faults. The novel starts superbly, hurling the reader in medias res, and ends on an exhilarating high with Nestor and John's newspaper investigation, which proves that even in the days of the internet, it's still possible to write classic newsroom high drama.But, surprisingly, it sags in the middle. This is largely down to the Magdalena subplot. While Nestor remains a sympathetic character throughout his tribulations, it's harder to root for Magdalena after she callously ditches him on her very first appearance -- and at his lowest ebb too. Her new lover, Norman the sex doctor, and Maurice his billionaire patron, are deliciously grotesque at first but after a while they just become grating.It's not till Magdalena gets involved with the Russian billionaire Sergei that her subplot picks up -- Wolfe pulls the oligarch off brilliantly, his ruthless exercise of power at once enticing and chilling.The other problem with Back to Blood is, still more surprisingly, with its style. Wolfe is a great prose stylist: he was famous for his style long before he ever turned to fiction, back when he was a pioneer of the New Journalism.But in Back to Blood it all seems a little too overblown, there's too much onomatopoeia, too many arch new phrases for the familiar, too many interjections from - ¡Dios mío! -- the characters' own voices, too much description, too much of everything. There are even two scenes, in the lapdancing club and on a boat, where Wolfe feels impelled to embed the beat of the music in his prose BEAT thung as if for the BEAT thung benefit of BEAT thung readers who BEAT thung have never BEAT thung been in a night club. It all gets a bit tiresome and hard to read.Indeed, in the lapdancing club scene, there's a sentence that's so jarringly out of character for Wolfe that you read it twice: "The smile looked like a mean streak turned up at the corners". It's a great sentence, but it's more like something Raymond Chandler would have written, and it makes you suddenly aware of how, for all his brilliance, Wolfe may have become something of a prisoner of his own dazzling style. And it makes you wonder if he does have a secret studio like Igor's somewhere, after all.

Tom Wolfe returns to the familiar territory of `territory' in his new book, Back to Blood. In his seminal book  The Bonfire of the Vanities , Mr Wolfe eviscerated the city of New York in a dense, multi-layered narrative that was a masterpiece of modern literature. Here, he turns his gimlet eye on Miami. Or, as he would have it, `Mee-AH-mee'.A hum-dinger of a prologue catapults us into the city as two female drivers battle it out for a space in the car park of the swankiest night club in town. And with that we're off and running with a multitude of characters, a series of interlinking, promising plot-lines and Wolfe's trademark high-octane, exuberant, wa-a-a-y over-the-top writing.But. Or as Mr Wolfe would put it BUT, BUT, BUT, BUT. He then proceeds to lose the plot - or rather, plots - big-time. There are a couple of totally gratuitous digressions, one of them a sex orgy at a boating regatta that left, as it were, a nasty taste in the mouth. Rather than gather all the threads together as he did so brilliantly in Bonfire of the Vanities, he wanders off into self-indulgent and tediously repetitive "Wolfe-ness" (I can think of no other word). This tries the reader's patience to such an extent that you feel like shouting "Get back to the story, Tom, just get back to this brilliant story you started to tell us!"And the story, in a nutshell, is this: In a city where Cubans outnumber `americanos' and myriad other ethnic groups, the Cubans hold positions of power but are deemed - even by themselves - to lack class. The only thing all these groups agree on is that they hate eachother. Nestor Comacho, a ripped young Cuban cop achieves an astonishing feat of bravery which pleases his superiors but angers the entire Cuban community from which he is then ostracised. This sets off a chain of events involving a smart WASP journo, an unlikely editor, a Russian oligarch, art malfeasance, a Cuban mayor and a black chief of police both of whom could have come straight from 'The Wire', an ambitious sex therapist and a gorgeous Cuban nurse working her way up in the world. All the story threads are set to collide and eventually they do. Sort of.The characterisation is broad-brush and some of it a little suspect; I did not believe the Editor-in-Chief of the Miami Herald for a minute. Some promising characters sink, rather disappointingly, without trace. But our `mucho macho' cop Nestor is a memorable main man and, faced with some tricky moral dilemmas, he struggles to do the right thing which is engaging.Tom Wolfe's frenetic writing style can become wearing and while reading Back to Blood, its star rating shot up and down in my mind like a yoyo. Some good editing really wouldn't have gone amiss but brave would be the book editor who suggests that to a writer of Tom Wolfe's status, I imagine. At 700 pages, this book could have been wrapped up in half that and been all the better for it.