First, on the Thames-side terrace, he learns from a droning minor-league publisher about a scandal that has engulfed the poet Solomon Wiese. Our nameless narrator, an editor at a mid-sized magazine, steers the story – or rather, acts as the conduit for the confessions he hears – over one, unbroken, 300-page paragraph. These days, “poets were making real money”, while the tote bag bearing the name of a not-so-little magazine or indy bookshop “had replaced the band T-shirt”. A Ukrainian dissident bard will draw a thousand-strong audience to the South Bank. Along with these dystopian touches come some (arguably) more utopian shifts. The gulf between London and its coveted “payzones” and the rest of England has grown into an abyss, and robot-controlled agribusiness makes unpeopled prairies of rural East Anglia. Poetry has turned into big business after a “crisis of confidence” in mass-market publishing genres. Along the river stands the HQ of “MI7”, as fleets of drones hover around the bridges. On the South Bank of the Thames, poets flock to the “King George Hall” for the 26th “Festival of Culture”.

The world of this novel exists at a knight’s-move away from our shared reality. Then it cunningly aligns them into a remix of the dystopian literary satire that both reflects and distorts the way we live (and read) now. Dead Souls – Its Gogol-ian title alone a hubristic act of theft, like calling your fiction debut Tristram Shandy or Moby-Dick – puts all these forces into play again.

Riviere’s poetry collections ( 81 Austerities Kim Kardashian’s Marriage After Fame) have burrowed deep into the digital domains that colonise our outer, and inner, lives into the difference, or kinship, between “real” art and media simulations in a wired culture into the quest for, or dream of, authenticity among the paranoiac mirror-games of cyberspace. Dead Souls belongs to a moment when art, money and technology now tangle in “complex processes of exploitation” that even Amis in his SF guise never foresaw. However, life and literature have moved on a generation.

It was statutory.” Dead Souls, the first (almost) conventional novel by poet Sam Riviere, shares Amis’s engagement both with male literary rivalry and comically topsy-turvy, alternative-world scenarios.

Sam riviere dead souls