It's difficult to dislike Clive James, but distressingly easy to dislike his fiction. His fourth novel, a tart look at the Indian film industry which is set in Bombay, has been hailed as hilarious and ironic but strikes this reviewer as a cynical bonkbuster which is about as Indian as a jar of Patak's balti sauce. A plethora of local detail, overlaid with the inevitable layer of wry comment on same in the famously skewed James tradition, only serves to conjure up India as viewed through a travel programme - a Channel Four travel programme, admittedly, but still - and the end is awful enough to have come from one of the Hindi films James so scathingly satirises.
:quality(70)/s3.amazonaws.com/arc-authors/irishtimes/1edacb8f-bf5d-4d8f-936c-071e631c2d80.png)