Terry Pratchett, who is suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, recently sang the praises of his computer's spellchecker. When his memory lets him down, the wiggly red line under simple words gives him the required jolt. Tibor Fischer, in common with Martin Amis (a writer he has publicly admired and mocked, but in whose shadow he seems to operate), must be used to red lines on his screen. His novel is full of words unknown to Bill Gates, or the OED: “summiteer”, “posturese”, “tournamentize”.

Amis's isn't the only lawn on which Fischer breezily parks his tanks. He is a novelist for whom the phrase “anxiety of influence” apparently carries no weight. Good to Be God, with its Miami setting, sidewalk philosophising, pathologically unlucky hero and succession of exaggerated encounters with the city's low life and larger-than-life, cannot help but invite comparison with Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen. It is meant as a compliment that, while the reader never quite extinguishes the glare of those high-wattage forebears, reading by their combined light is exhilarating.

Fischer rescues his book from pastiche by making his hero, Tyndale Corbett, genuinely affecting. Tyndale (the nod to the Reformation scholar is, of course, entirely knowing) is a failed light-bulb salesman whose life in London (“money, marriage, job, home and health”) has been “totalled”. In one of the more unlikely episodes in the novel, he agrees to impersonate his friend at a handcuff sales conference in Miami. With little to return to, Tyndale decides to stay on illegally and hits on the idea of making a killing on the fringes of evangelical Christianity. His USP is not that he will join or even start a church, but that he will pretend to be God.

We might expect a broad satire of that old liberal European target, credulous American Christians, to follow. Instead, and admirably, Fischer leads his protagonist on an apparently doomed mission in which perennial misfortune turns out to have its uses, and Tyndale's own streak of decency keeps poking out from beneath the cynicism. It is all done with if not exactly a light touch (a novel with characters called Dishonest Dave, Napalm, or DJs Muscat and Gamay can hardly be accused of that), than with the total confidence in his material that marks out a born storyteller. Fischer's first and best-known novel, Under the Frog, introduced us to a whimsical comic voice underpinned by political conscience. With each succeeding book, the whimsy, rather than the politics, has taken greater hold. Good to Be God seems no more likely to win the Booker than its author's peculiar vocabulary is to feature in a spelling bee, but it is no less likable for that. Good To Be God by Tibor Fischer

Good To Be God by Tibor Fischer
Alma Books £14.99 pp270

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