Here is a novel that is both wondrously prophetic while at the same hopelessly outdated. How can that be? The answer is simple; whilst Wolfe has created a towering novel exposing the social tensions and personal absurdities emanating from the extremes of wealth and power to be found in a city like New York, he has totally underestimated just how far those tensions and absurdities would develop over the succeeding twenty five years. Whereas Wolfe was content to reveal how a single bond trader on Wall Street could, by a single misfortunate circumstance, see his beautiful and insulated life totally unravel before his very eyes, now we are witnessing entire global corporations and indeed whole nations implode into economic ruination and social despair.

Wolfe was certainly prophetic in that he sensed that such massive inequalities and greed would create their own uncontrollable dynamic and he can be forgiven for underestimating just where those inequalities would lead.

Since Wolfe published this ground-breaking novel we have witnessed the near total collapse of the world capitalist banking system including the ruination of Lehman Brothers, Enron and other global finance and real estate companies, not to mention the bankruptcy of AIG and General Motors, saved from extinction only by the massive taxpayer funded, government bailout. Entire countries have been virtually declared bankrupt including, if we are brutally honest, the United States itself. And then of course there was the destruction of the Twin Towers the ultimate symbol of American Capitalism, a scenario that even the most fanciful of novelists would hardly dare to contemplate. Once again, real life has proved to be far more dramatic than any work of fiction.

Reading Tom Wolfe’s work for the first time, I quickly realised that without his Bonfire of the Vanities; there would likely never have been such an all-embracing urban classic such as The Wire. Nearly everything in The Wire could be said to have had its precedents in Tom Wolfe’s classic; police corruption, political manoeuvrings, drug related crime, urban despair and progressive sentiments corrupted. The Wire dealt with all of these in a hitherto, unsurpassed way, weaving a tapestry of American urban capitalist decay that shocked and transfixed a nation. But if The Wire created the masterpiece, Wolfe, with his 1980’s tale of interconnected ambitions and human frailties, constructed the original canvass.

Wolfe is a great novelist. He has that rare ability to allow his characters to tell his story in a fully authentic and convincing manner, and that is certainly the hardest task of any story teller. The reader quickly feels sympathy for each of Wolf’s central characters despite the fact that each is deeply flawed by all the usual human traits of ambition and vanity. Even his most central character, Sherman McCoy, the Wall Street bond dealer, we cannot help but empathise with, when really we should be out on the streets with the citizens of the Bronx screaming for jail not bail. Wolfe makes us love and hate all his characters in equal measure. We want them all to succeed and we want them all to fail. We love and hate the Jews, the Irish, the Blacks and the WASPS in equal measure. That is clever story telling.

Above all, Wolfe doesn’t lecture his readers; he allows the politics to flow naturally from the mouths of the key protagonists. One of my favourite passages of many comes from the lips of the Reverend Reggie Bacon, the deviously opportunist Bronx community leader who has his own great home grown anti-capitalist philosophy, which he is only too pleased to share with anyone who will listen.

You know what capital is? You think it’s something you own, don’t you. You think it’s factories and machines and buildings and land and things you can sell and stocks and money and banks and corporations. You think it’s something you own, because you always owned it. You owned all this land. You owned all the land out there, and out there, out there in Kansas and Oklahoma and everybody just lined up, and they said, On the mark, get set, go! and a whole lot of white people started running, and there was all this land, and all they had to do was to get to it and stand on it, and they owned it, and their white skin was their deed of property. The red man, he was in the way, and he was eliminated. The yellow man, he could lay rails across it, but then he was shut up in Chinatown. And the black man, he was in chains the whole time anyway. And so you owned it all, and you still own it, and you think capital is owning things. But you are mistaken. Capital is controlling things. Controlling things. You want land in Kansas? You want to exercise your white deed of property? First you got to control Kansas. Controlling things. P172

And then there is the Master of the Universe himself, Sherman McCoy, Wolfe’s central protagonist. In the early stages of his story, before his precious life starts to fall apart, McCoy is giving one of his underlings a bollocking for daring to show a hint of complacency. In this passage we learn much of the culture and mentality of global finance capital. McCoy rants:

‘Wrathful! Righteous! Sherman was elated. People were staring. Good! Idleness was not a sin against the self or against God but against Mammon and Pierce & Pierce. If he had to be the one to call this greaseball to accounts, then but he regretted the greaseball, even in his thoughts. He considered himself as part of the new era and the new breed, a Wall Street egalitarian, a Master of the Universe who was a respecter only of performance. No longer did Wall Street mean Protestant Good Family. There were plenty of prominent Jewish investment bankers. There were plenty of Irishmen, Greeks and Slavs. The fact that not one of the eighty members of the bond department was black or female didn’t bother him. Why should it? the bond trading room at Pierce & Pierce was no place for symbolic gestures. P 74

Wolfe doesn’t need to lecture his readers with a Marxist polemic and the inevitability of monopoly capitalism. No, that would be clumsy. But Wolfe is more than capable of creating realistic and convincing prose that sets the parameters of his novel without making it turgid and didactic. There are dozens of such punchy passages, many of which I underlined ready for the blogosphere, but on refection, I think it best to allow the reader to discover them for themselves. I can only repeat that not once did I get the feeling that these were not the thoughts and words of the characters themselves, a tribute to the skills of a great novelist.

I mentioned earlier about the defining work of The Wire. Has there been an equivalent to that television masterpiece in novel form since Wolfe’s Bonfire classic? I have not come across one although Jonathan Franzen, in a more gentle, muted way, has dabbled with the contradictions created by a global corporatism gone feral. This side of the Atlantic, John Lanchester’s Capital also sought to explore the theme of global capitalism’s dehumanising effects, and it might be considered by some to be a worthy successor to Wolfes work.

But the trouble for all novelists is that again and again, real events seem to be more dramatic than fictional ones. Which novelist for example could dream up a scenario more dramatic than the News International saga complete with bent coppers, compromised politicians and a criminal media network spreading its tentacles across the globe? Which novelist would dare put a Rupert Murdoch type character in the dock, risking as they would, ridicule for a totally implausible plot? Yet as we blog, there are still yet more arrests in a global web of intrigue that has no end.

Which novelist would dare to create a scenario where one Russian Oligarch was pitted against another in a legal battle of gigantic financial proportions, and this all taking place in a London courtroom? Unbelievable surely? And yet these gangster titans are regularly at each others financial throats while they live the high life in Londongrad.

And of course, only the cheapest of cheap thrill novelists could conjure up a story-line where a crazed bunch of Islamic terrorists would systematically plan, over a period of years, to highjack some American planes, and fly them into some of America’s most iconic and strategic buildings. Not a single person on the planet is going to believe that sort of fairytale. So it is easy to see that, brilliant as Tom Wolfe’s novel was and is, no novelist can really hope to capture the tumultuous events that are daily unfolding before our eyes. But the Bonfire of the Vanities is as close as any novelist is likely to get. If you haven’t read it, do so if you have read it, consider, in the light of contemporary events, reading it once again. It still has the power to entertain and educate.

PS. Did Tom Wolfe create the term Masters of the Universe which is so widely used today, or did he merely seize upon the term, recognising its fabulously dramatic potential?