A difference in a sense of humour, so George Eliot wrote, is a great strain on the affections. The first chapter or two of Randall seemed to be some ways derivative and not very promising, and in many ways very irritating. The narrator/main protagonist (the POV changes) could be Richard Papen or Nick Carraway, or Tom Townsend, the partially-assimilated alien in a closed, privileged world.

The milieu upon which Vincent Cartwright, merchant banker, comments is the Young British Artist scene in 1990’s London, which seems – in this representation at least – to have largely been a bunch of self-indulgent, self-aggrandising media whores, intoxicating themselves into greater heights of over-blown inanity in a world where good contacts could turn homeopathic traces of artistic talent into obscene quantities of cash. Even at that, the descriptions were redolent enough to strike chords even for one only ever fleetingly and tangentially a witness on the fringes of the art-student world.

And what a world it recalled: the narcissism that turned every toddler-tantrum into evidence of genius; every sullen, rebarbative flouting of basic good manners evidence of creativity kicking (in quite the wrong direction) against the pricks; the performance and rhetoric of rebellion and rejection of social norms; the god-awful, eye-clawing, pretentiousness that permeated everything.
That Gibbs’ tale was not realistic became a possibility when Damien Hirst is killed in a traffic accident, and in consequence of looking at someone else’s review, the veil was lifted: this is a satire. It remains a question why its satirical identity was not obvious (this reader too accustomed to the unsubtle declarations of S.J. Perleman or Paul Jennings? Too traumatised by abrupt recollections of being stuck in the soul-sucking company of someone still aglow from their piece of awful, sub-(sub)-Joycean performance art? Who knows.) but the realisation increased the appreciation ratio considerably.

Cartwright is a third person character, and, in the sections lifted from a memoir, a first-person narrator, who has been a wealthy friend of a small group of Goldsmiths’ artists in the early Blairite era. He is particularly friendly with Randall (single name only, natch), for whom he makes a couple of valuable connections and for whom he functions as a ‘wealth manager’. Randall married Joanne, after she and Cartwright split up. Joanne and Vincent meet again for the first time in some years, after Randall’s death. The cause for the re-connection is Joanne’s discovery of a large collection of pornographic paintings by Randall, scandalously featuring almost everyone they know.

There is a central difficulty with reading the novel, and it derives from Gibb’s skill in characterisation of people and their milieu. They are so convincing, and in consequence, so repellent and mockable, that it is very difficult to work up any concern about any of them. They are vapid and meaningless, so there is necessarily a lack of any sense of tension if one cannot find a single damn to give about any of them. Their work has aesthetic or creative value only within the context that they have themselves created for themselves (with the exception of two talents, Kevin and Aga, who are primarily remote from the story).

The female artists are caricatures of both the artistic and the wealthy-socialite worlds, even Aga, beyond her talent, is a paper-thin character. The most rounded female character is Joanne, and though she has an art-related profession, her role in the story is primarily defined by her sincere and compassionate relationships with Vincent, then Randall, and finally her son. Randall is, necessarily, the most developed – he can hardly be called complex, under the circumstances – character, and his main charm is that he is openly deeply shallow, and in any case, he is dead by the start of the novel. It may be a necessarily evil in a satire that characters can’t be fully developed. If Randall and the people in his milieu were living beings, if they were the literary equivalent of Lucien Freud’s subjects rather than almost pen-sketches, then Randall’s realisation – that he is full of sound and fury and signifies nothing outside of the toasty echo-chamber of commodified art – would be a tragedy of Medean proportions.

There is a small smack of tragedy in the final scenes. Josh, Randall’s and Joanne’s teenaged son, throws his toys out of the pram over the disposal of his father’s art-work. That it has already been made clear that his father’s death was profoundly shocking and distressing to Josh does not stop the specifics of his spitting out of the soother from being pretty tedious. But the response of his mother strongly suggests that she will transfer her pampering obligations from one male ego to another. Worse still, it seems that Josh’s girlfriend Gaby is destined for the same supporting role.

The external anxieties – what to do with the rude nudes? – are presented as though the cause of anxiety are obvious, and the exact nature of the consequences attendant on the paintings being made public are not articulated. Is the reader to conclude that the artist’s reputation will be damaged if it is known he painted smut? Given the scatological theme of a previous series of works, that hardly seems likely, nor that, where a market has purchased repurposed skid-marks, it could not be persuaded to purchase a little fake fornication.

Will Randall’s main buyers and patrons be offended by seeing themselves thus depicted? But Randall’s whole schtick was shock, and maximum outrage the chief ambition, so why should they clutch their pearls at this logical, if juvenile, extension? Why would their outrage be taken seriously? Without an overweening and specific reason for panic, the reaction of Joanne and Vincent to finding a secret studio full of paintings of people having sex seems to be simple embarrassment. It is an understandable reaction but if the characters are not very interesting, and there is no apparent threat, it is difficult for the reader to enter into the same spirit of upheaval and anxiety.

Many, nearly all, individual bits of Randall are very good, but it does not quite work as a novel. It is more like a series of observant, informed, witty, critical articles about visual art, that have been woven into a narrative, in the way of the musicals Mamma Mia and Killer Queen weave a story (or, 'story') that will provide a reason to display individual songs (there, happily, any similarity ends).
The narrative is told partly in the first person, from Vincent’s point of view, and these sections are part of the novel that Vincent is writing. But this interesting meta aspect is not really explored, and there is only one extended depiction of his attempts to write, which in any case turns into an opportunity for recounting memories, rather than reflecting on the writing process. The switching point-of-view becomes more of a stylistic device than an opportunity to extemporise on the nature of writing.

What is worth reading the novel for even on their own, regardless of the plot, are the artworks and events Gibbs presents (presumably of his own invention) on behalf of Randall, which are quite magnificent in their terrible, pretentious, manipulative way. ( )