The narrator of Tibor Fischer’s eighth novel, My Bags Are Big, is a walking anachronism. Dan is “an old school crypto geezer” who hails from south London and lives in Dubai, where he drives an old Citroën and wears a Mickey Mouse watch given to him by his father in the 1970s. He’s done well for himself – the bags of the title are a slang term for a cryptocurrency wallet – though it didn’t happen overnight. “Get rich quick? It was very much a get slightly comfortable slowly deal.” His adopted city, he tells us, is “a cross between Las Vegas, an airport departure lounge and a pirate bay”, and a magnet for low-status westerners looking to reinvent themselves: “Assistant masseurs at second division football clubs. Taxi drivers. Linen porters. Nail technicians. Dog groomers. Life coaches. They’re all through the pearly gates, here in Dubai.”
Dan himself is one such individual. Having just turned 60, he relates his journey from Catford to Dubai, via a calamitous career in sports management, a doomed love affair with a quantum physicist, and several brief encounters with David Bowie. In the 80s he won a vindaloo-eating contest and had a Monty Python-esque run-in with some Maoist student revolutionaries. The novel is populated by amusing oddballs, including one character who belongs to an international bollard appreciation society, and another who superstitiously smears caviar on to a lottery ticket in the hope of “giving it a taste of wealth”.
