'This was a gift-wrapped, throwaway age, Mr Cornelius. Now the gift-wrapping is off, it's being thrown away.' And through the debris stalks Jerry Cornelius: assassin, bon vivant, universal idiot genius, specialist in the resurrection gimmick, protagonist of many novels and stories by several hands and central character of the tetralogy now completed by The Condition of Muzak. His secret, though, is that he has no character at all in the normal sense of the word. He is a nomad of the territories of personality; even his skin colour and gender are as labile as his accomplishments ('Jerry could rarely speak German'). He is a set of co-ordinates: a peg on which to hang the costume of one's choice. A potentially infinite manifold of stylistic gestures—so long as they have style.

So he represents the zero-point of the novel: either its transcendence or its decomposition. Not only...