Good to be God Tibor Fischer Alma Books, 270pp, £14.99
In the early 1990s, Tibor Fischer’s heavily ironic style earned him a Booker nomination and a place among Granta’s Best Young Novelists. Good to be God offers more of the same. Tired of the “substantial selection from the bad luck catalogue” that constitutes his life, Tyndale Corbett takes the advice of a more successful friend and hightails it to Miami to reinvent himself.
He sets his sights high – on passing himself off as a deity – but decides that the best way into “the God business” is from the bottom up. Volunteering at the Church of the Heavily Armed Christ and staging the occasional false miracle leaves plenty of time for exploring a Miami underworld where every enterprise ends in anticlimax. Huge failed cocaine deals are met with indifferent shrugs and young muscleheads make comically disastrous attempts at running Tyndale’s shadier errands.
Inevitably, Tyndale is as bad at being a religious fraudster as he is at everything else. But he discovers that in a world of double-crossing, being a reliable failure can be as useful as being a success. When he makes this discovery, the novel starts to get more interesting. The cartoonish backdrop is not very engaging, but it has a subtle theme: how bad luck, “the nasty, unscenic sibling of good luck, can shepherd you to your destination, too”.
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