Fronted by a 256-year-old narrator, Matthieu Zela, a man who has had "nineteen wives and nine hundred lovers", The Thief of Time signals from the outset its post-modernist intent. It is a highly self-reflexive work in which issues of representation and fiction-making are very much to the fore. Simultaneously as he attempts to lend his novel the illusion of substance by peppering the text with the names of historical celebrities, he exposes its fictionality through allusions to such novels as Vanity Fair, A Farewell to Arms and The Scarlet Letter, and by references to film.
Like the title character of Woody Allen's 1983 film Zelig, Zela is forever rubbing shoulders with the great and the not greatly good. As he shuttles backwards and forwards between the 1740s and the late 1990s, there are brief encounters with Robespierre, Pope Pius IX, Charlie Chaplin, the Rosenbergs, Marlon Brando, and, perhaps most topically of all, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the man who revived the Olympic Games.
One lesson Matthieu Zela has learnt over the centuries is not to get too attached to people; nor should the reader. Life expectancy for most of his relatives and acquaintances rarely exceeds a chapter or two, and most meet a violent end - axed, stabbed, guillotined, incinerated or over-dosing. From his earliest years as a Dover pickpocket to his most recent incarnation as a satellite television executive, he is constantly encountering death, and called on to tidy away the bodies. Although a certain momentum is achieved by this device, the downside is that catastrophe becomes predictable.
Two characters do endure, and retain the narrator's interest through much of the memoir; Dominique, the enigmatic 19-year-old with whom he first falls in love, and Tommy, his cocaine-sniffing nephew, a "soap" star and darling of the tabloid press. His and his uncle's involvement in television is the source of the novel's strongest feature by far, its satire on the late 20th-century media scene. One thinks, for example, of the sinister moment when Tommy is reprimanded by his executive producer for off-screen misdemeanours, and told that:
" . . .they would have no qualms about involving him in a car crash, or having him shot, or giving him AIDS if he stepped out of line again. `You mean my character, of course,' said Tommy. `You'd do those things to my character.' `Yes, whatever,' they muttered."
When, in line with his earliest predictions, Tommy finally does o.d., Zela overhears a group of nurses speculating in all seriousness on how his on-screen girlfriend and brother, Tina and Carl, will receive the news. Though age may not have withered him - he still only looks 50 - longevity has not done much for the narrator's prose style, which often creaks alarmingly. Leaving his small room in Dover "delivered a curiously melancholy sensation to me" (p.54), while visiting Hollywood in 1921 "afforded me an opportunity to plan my assault on what I had already perceived would be a fast-growing art form" (p.23). He is particularly prone to unnecessary elaboration - "Eighty people were in attendance" at his wedding, "mostly socialite friends of ours from the circles in which we moved" (p.36) - and repeatedly succumbs to cliche, such as when he speaks of the "all-consuming desire which racked me from morning till night" (p.252) or of how "My heart skipped a beat because I knew from the look on his face that all was lost" (p.227).
Another fundamental flaw undermining the book is the precariousness of its hold on historical actualities. In one chapter, set in the 18th century, we are informed of a stable-boy who has amassed £300 in savings. Chapter 20 provides a decidedly upbeat account of the Industrial Revolution, which by 1850 had supposedly resulted in "a better quality of food and improved standards of living". Far more reprehensible than such naiveties, however, is Zela's comment on entering his nephew's untidy flat, when he refers to "the Vietnam which surrounded me" (p.238) - this from a man who has personally experienced any number of brutal acts, and witnessed the effects of the Reign of Terror and two World Wars.
Salman Rushdie's witty, highly episodic, migrant fictions have clearly influenced Boyne and his concept of what the novel might do. On the evidence of The Thief of Time, however, the latter is a long way from Rushdie's adeptness in evoking character, place and historical period; nor does it match the acuteness of his political satire. Nevertheless, Boyne is to be commended for the scale of his ambition, for structuring and managing such an intricate narrative, and for representing so convincingly the shallowness within much contemporary "culture".
Michael Parker is co-editor of Contemporary Irish Fiction, recently published by Macmillan and reviewed on page 8 of this week's book pages